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Essay on the importance of Political Parties in US Congress
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An A* essay evaluating the importance of political parties in US Congress for the Comparative (US) Politics paper of Government and Politics A level.
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Analyse, evaluate and compare the arguments in the passage below for and against theview that political parties play an important role in Congress.
The first half of the extract holds the view that political parties do play an important role in
Congress primarily because of the increasing partisanship over the past two decades which
means Senators and Congressmen/Congresswomen may identify more strongly with party
ideology. Conversely, the second half of the extract follows the line of argument that
political parties do not play an important role in Congress because within the two parties
there are distinct groups and divisions leading to contrasting views within the party
regarding certain bills and wedge issues. In my opinion, the former line of argument proves
to be more true, taking into consideration the current polarisation in American politics.
Firstly, the extract argues that political parties do still have a significant role in Congress. The
author justifies this argument with the evident “increasing partisanship and the growing
ideological separation between Republicans and Democrats.” This is reflected in Senators’
and Congressmen/Congresswomen’s tendency to often vote along ideological lines, as the
“number of party unity votes increased from just over 40% in both houses of Congress in
2002 to more than 69% in both houses in 2015.” This was evidently true in 2011, when
Congress recorded its highest ever level of ‘party votes,’ in which the majority of voting
Republicans oppose the majority of voting Democrats. Party votes have been seen in
relation to wedge issues such as abortion and taxation, for example the Tax Cuts and Jobs
Bill (2017) in which no Democrats in either the House or Senate voted in favour and only
one Republican senator voted against the bill. Unlike the 1970s-1980s in which there was a
period of considerable ideological overlap, the decline of both centrist wings has led to the
two congressional parties being so ideologically distinct to the extent that ideological
overlap in the Senate has completely disappeared; the most liberal Republican senator still
has a more conservative voting record than the most conservative Democrat senator.
In addition, the author also puts forward the view that political parties do still play an
important role in Congress due to the “clear difference between divided government and
united government. In the former scenario, gridlock is more likely than in the latter, when
the executive finds it easier to pass bills and receives less oversight from Congress.”
Throughout the 19th and 20th Century unified government has been the norm as the
President and both houses of Congress have typically been of the same party, but divided
government has been the case since 2013 and occurs when either both houses of Congress
are of a different party than the President, or the houses of Congress are of different parties
to each other. This is seen to be true in the current divided government; the Senate is
dominated by the Republican Party whilst the House of Representatives are dominated by
the Democrat Party as of the November 2018 midterm elections. It could be argued that this
is a positive thing because in divided government, the opposition will provide stronger
oversight on the Executive’s bills and actions, which was evidenced when Congress refused
to fund Republican President Trump’s wall on the Mexican border in January 2019 because
of the scrutiny from the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives – although this did
lead to a government shut down. Divided government can also result in gridlock which
causes Congress to be inefficient in passing legislation, which is the primary function of the
legislative branch, but currently the Houses of Congress being dominated by opposing
parties makes it hard for them to agree on legislation. Overall, the argument held by this
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