I assume we’re talking about the House here (the Senate is a little different)?
Definitionally the average member of the House is going to have 1⁄435 of the legislative influence, which is just not a lot. Back in the Congressional good old days, there was a lot of specialization. Legislation was mostly delegated to committees (and often by committees to subcommittees) where an individual voice matters numerically. So, an individual member could specialize in a particular issue area and end up having quite a bit of influence on that area, even if very little outside it. But, committees are effectively dead now, so the legislative power is concentrated in the leadership.
There’s a lot of other stuff that members do, though. Legislation has never been the majority of the job. Congress also does oversight of executive agencies and constituent service. Individual members also spend a great deal of time engaging in politicking directed at outside audiences, fundraising and retail politics. I’ve worked in a couple of different Congressional offices, and the members were always extremely busy (there’s a conventional wisdom that nowadays a lot of new members just don’t do that stuff and are instead totally focused on social media; in at least some cases, that’s true).
Over the last few decades, power has flowed out of Congress entirely and into the executive branch and the courts. Because Congress barely legislates anymore, the field is open for executive action on major policy questions, checked mostly by whether or not the courts will let the president do it. A huge amount of power has also built up in the ways that the courts interpret old statutes. Back in the good old days, Congress would pass a law, the courts would interpret it, and if Congress didn’t like that interpretation, they’d rewrite the law. Now, they don’t do that, and so the judicial interpretation just becomes the law indefinitely. The Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha also killed off Congress’s most important method for restraining the executive branch.
So, what changed in Congress?
Democrats held a continuous majority in the House for 40 years (1955-1995) and a Senate majority for that period save for an interlude in the early 80s. Partisan control of the White House alternated, but Republicans controlled the White House for the majority of that era, including an unbroken 12 year stretch under Reagan and Bush I. Everyone settled into an equilibrium based on bipartisanship. It didn’t make much sense to wait around for unified government to enact your agenda because it might never come. Because of their dominance, Congressional Democrats were also strongly incentivized not to let too much power flow to the executive. Specialization through committees and horse trading thrived in this environment.
In this millennium, we’ve settled into a new equilibrium where the parties alternate in power, and every newly elected president (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again) has entered power with control of Congress, and it’s well-understood that unified control of the government is on the table every four years. That means the incentive to engage in compromise legislation is basically gone (and with it the influence of rank-and-file members). Why compromise now, when you’re never more than a couple of years away from an opportunity to take power and get what you want without compromising? That puts the president in the driver’s seat as well—it’s the presidential candidate’s agenda that dominates the election every four years when you might be able to seize (or hold) power. Voters are, more or less, expecting Congress to enact that when they get there. So, there’s not a lot of room for Congressional creativity.
The other big factor here is death of local media. Back in the good old days, an individual member of Congress could maintain a meaningful local reputation because voters largely learned about politics from the local newspaper, and the local newspaper had correspondents in DC covering the behavior of the local representative(s). A politically informed voter had a pretty good basis for understanding how their representative was different from the average member of the same party, which created the environment for ticket splitting. With the nationalization of media over the past couple decades, informed voters are instead mostly consuming political news from nationally focused outlets that have no interest in covering the role of your local Congressperson (uninformed voters aren’t consuming much either way). Save for a few people that establish a nationally salient brand (e.g., AOC), that means everyone in Congress really just blends into an undifferentiated D or R (most people can’t actually name their representative in Congress but can identify their party). If voters are just going to respond to you as a D or an R, your interests become the same as the overall interests of that party, which increasingly just reduces to a stance for or against the incumbent president. Everyone has an opinion on Donald Trump. Nobody has an opinion on your local representative. In the House, if you’re new, they’re also essentially no time to establish a specific brand, even if it were possible, because the primary for your next election will happen barely more than a year after you take office.
Circling back around, that means that members of Congress in “swing” districts live or die in the general election with their party’s presidential candidate. So, if it’s the same party, you do whatever you can to support them which mostly just means deference to presidential wishes. If it’s the other party, you do whatever you can to oppose them, but everything just comes down to the president either way. In “safe” districts, as noted, the real election is the primary. The dynamics are slightly different there (and vary across the two parties) but never tilt in the direction of picking people who are interested in going to Congress and engaging in bipartisan compromise.
The independent reputation issue works a little better for senators than representatives (though the other problems plague the Senate). As a senator, you have a fighting chance at establishing an independent reputation because there’s still some room for state-level media coverage, though that’s dying off too, and there are sufficiently few senators that they may be able to break through to their own voters via the national media (ask yourself how many senators you can say something distinctive about vs. how many representatives you can say something about). Having 5 years rather than 1 to engage in reputation building is also helpful.
Save for a few people that establish a nationally salient brand (e.g., AOC), that means everyone in Congress really just blends into an undifferentiated D or R (most people can’t actually name their representative in Congress but can identify their party).
This suggests to me that local money should compose a smaller percentage of campaign funds over time. This is me pre-registering that I’m going to check this and publish results. If it’s false I will downgrade this hypothesis in my mind but not consider it disproven.
I assume we’re talking about the House here (the Senate is a little different)?
Definitionally the average member of the House is going to have 1⁄435 of the legislative influence, which is just not a lot. Back in the Congressional good old days, there was a lot of specialization. Legislation was mostly delegated to committees (and often by committees to subcommittees) where an individual voice matters numerically. So, an individual member could specialize in a particular issue area and end up having quite a bit of influence on that area, even if very little outside it. But, committees are effectively dead now, so the legislative power is concentrated in the leadership.
There’s a lot of other stuff that members do, though. Legislation has never been the majority of the job. Congress also does oversight of executive agencies and constituent service. Individual members also spend a great deal of time engaging in politicking directed at outside audiences, fundraising and retail politics. I’ve worked in a couple of different Congressional offices, and the members were always extremely busy (there’s a conventional wisdom that nowadays a lot of new members just don’t do that stuff and are instead totally focused on social media; in at least some cases, that’s true).
Over the last few decades, power has flowed out of Congress entirely and into the executive branch and the courts. Because Congress barely legislates anymore, the field is open for executive action on major policy questions, checked mostly by whether or not the courts will let the president do it. A huge amount of power has also built up in the ways that the courts interpret old statutes. Back in the good old days, Congress would pass a law, the courts would interpret it, and if Congress didn’t like that interpretation, they’d rewrite the law. Now, they don’t do that, and so the judicial interpretation just becomes the law indefinitely. The Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha also killed off Congress’s most important method for restraining the executive branch.
So, what changed in Congress?
Democrats held a continuous majority in the House for 40 years (1955-1995) and a Senate majority for that period save for an interlude in the early 80s. Partisan control of the White House alternated, but Republicans controlled the White House for the majority of that era, including an unbroken 12 year stretch under Reagan and Bush I. Everyone settled into an equilibrium based on bipartisanship. It didn’t make much sense to wait around for unified government to enact your agenda because it might never come. Because of their dominance, Congressional Democrats were also strongly incentivized not to let too much power flow to the executive. Specialization through committees and horse trading thrived in this environment.
In this millennium, we’ve settled into a new equilibrium where the parties alternate in power, and every newly elected president (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again) has entered power with control of Congress, and it’s well-understood that unified control of the government is on the table every four years. That means the incentive to engage in compromise legislation is basically gone (and with it the influence of rank-and-file members). Why compromise now, when you’re never more than a couple of years away from an opportunity to take power and get what you want without compromising? That puts the president in the driver’s seat as well—it’s the presidential candidate’s agenda that dominates the election every four years when you might be able to seize (or hold) power. Voters are, more or less, expecting Congress to enact that when they get there. So, there’s not a lot of room for Congressional creativity.
The other big factor here is death of local media. Back in the good old days, an individual member of Congress could maintain a meaningful local reputation because voters largely learned about politics from the local newspaper, and the local newspaper had correspondents in DC covering the behavior of the local representative(s). A politically informed voter had a pretty good basis for understanding how their representative was different from the average member of the same party, which created the environment for ticket splitting. With the nationalization of media over the past couple decades, informed voters are instead mostly consuming political news from nationally focused outlets that have no interest in covering the role of your local Congressperson (uninformed voters aren’t consuming much either way). Save for a few people that establish a nationally salient brand (e.g., AOC), that means everyone in Congress really just blends into an undifferentiated D or R (most people can’t actually name their representative in Congress but can identify their party). If voters are just going to respond to you as a D or an R, your interests become the same as the overall interests of that party, which increasingly just reduces to a stance for or against the incumbent president. Everyone has an opinion on Donald Trump. Nobody has an opinion on your local representative. In the House, if you’re new, they’re also essentially no time to establish a specific brand, even if it were possible, because the primary for your next election will happen barely more than a year after you take office.
Circling back around, that means that members of Congress in “swing” districts live or die in the general election with their party’s presidential candidate. So, if it’s the same party, you do whatever you can to support them which mostly just means deference to presidential wishes. If it’s the other party, you do whatever you can to oppose them, but everything just comes down to the president either way. In “safe” districts, as noted, the real election is the primary. The dynamics are slightly different there (and vary across the two parties) but never tilt in the direction of picking people who are interested in going to Congress and engaging in bipartisan compromise.
The independent reputation issue works a little better for senators than representatives (though the other problems plague the Senate). As a senator, you have a fighting chance at establishing an independent reputation because there’s still some room for state-level media coverage, though that’s dying off too, and there are sufficiently few senators that they may be able to break through to their own voters via the national media (ask yourself how many senators you can say something distinctive about vs. how many representatives you can say something about). Having 5 years rather than 1 to engage in reputation building is also helpful.
This is a great comment! IMO would be good as a top-level shortform (or maybe even post).
agreed- I’d be especially interested in expansion or links on how the loss of local media affects things.
This suggests to me that local money should compose a smaller percentage of campaign funds over time. This is me pre-registering that I’m going to check this and publish results. If it’s false I will downgrade this hypothesis in my mind but not consider it disproven.
EDIT: prediction verified