Forest Law Enforcement and Governance Program

• Much of the news coverage of the discussions and negotiations aimed at averting a government shutdown on Nov. 17, 2023, relies on pundits and their unnamed sources, on leaks, speculation, wishful thinking and maybe even the reading of tea leaves.
• Harbridge-Yong is a specialist in partisan conflict and the lack of bipartisan agreement in American politics, so her expertise is tailor-made for the moment.

What do the repeated and difficult debt limit and budget negotiations in Congress look like to you?

• The problems that Congress and the White House are having in reaching compromises highlight two aspects of contemporary politics.
• The first: Since the 1970s, both the House and Senate have become much more polarized.
• Members of the two parties are more unified internally and further apart from the opposing party.

• So you now have many Republicans who are more willing to fight quite hard against the Democrats because they don’t want to give a win to Biden.
• This is most evident among the most conservative wing of the party, which has both individual and collective reasons to oppose a compromise.
• These dynamics, layered on top of policy interests, all contribute to the problems that we’re seeing now.

What has been the role of brinkmanship in these conflicts?

• During the May 2023 version of these negotiations, that meant coming to the edge of potential default on the debt.
• This fall, Congress passed a short-term funding bill with only hours to spare before the government shut down.

Does brinkmanship work?

• In some instances, concessions by the other side were granted, so brinkmanship paid off.
• Brinkmanship and gridlock are disproportionately consequential for Democrats, who generally want to expand government programs, versus for Republicans, who tend to want to constrict government programs.
• It may be part of why we see Republicans, especially on the far right, going harder on this kind of brinkmanship.

How does the public see brinkmanship?

• My own work has shown that the public does not like gridlock on issues in which people agree on the end goal.
• The public, on average, even prefers a victory for the other side over policy gridlock.
• So on the one hand, the public doesn’t like gridlock – especially gridlock when the consequences are so bad, as default or a shutdown would be.

Democracy is about representation. As they conduct negotiations, do lawmakers see themselves as representing voters?

• However, even if individual members think they’re representing their constituents, representation at the aggregate level can be poor.
• What the public as a whole – which tends to be more moderate – wants is compromise and resolution.

Laurel Harbridge-Yong receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, Unite America, and the Social Science Research Council.