ABSTRACT
Since the end of the Cold War and the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992, the United States has experienced an era of highly competitive and close national elections between increasingly ideologically polarized national political parties (Theriault and Moeller 2013). This development is based on post–New Deal electoral alignments along racial-ethnic/cultural/religious lines (Layman 2001) and reinforced by clusters of “policy demanding” interests around each of the major parties (Cohen et al. 2008); by ideological networks of campaign contributors, grassroots activists, media, and think tanks (Fiorina 2006, 2009); and by the advent of new political media—cable news, talk radio, the Internet/blogs—that encourage political “narrowcasting” (Sunstein 2007). All of this has increased the costs of crossing party lines in Washington, DC, on any issue and has made the compromises needed to advance legislation in America’s separated system of government much harder to achieve (except, perhaps, in the few months following the election of a new president). One result is wider public exasperation with “gridlock” and “political dysfunction” in the U.S. federal government (Brownstein 2008).
