Consequences of Electoral and Institutional Change: The Evolution of Conditional Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives1
The U.S. Congress has changed in many ways over the last fifty years, but perhaps the most dramatic has been the changing role of the political parties. David Mayhew’s study of the Congress (published in 1974) argued that political parties were weak institutions in the Congress, and that they were weak because the members wanted it that way.2 Virtually as he was writing, the Democratic Party (in the midst of its forty-year reign as majority party), began revising its own rules to strengthen its party organization and its leadership in the House. These changing electoral and legislative circumstances resulted, in time, in the passage of more partisan legislation. That is, many of the most important pieces of legislation, aft er these changes were fully in place, passed with a greater degree of party-line voting and with policy content that was closer to the views of a now more consensual majority in the Democratic Party than was true in the House Mayhew examined (see chapter 1 for a discussion of changes in party unity). This trend continued, indeed even expanded, when the Republican Party won majority control in the 1994 elections, and has persisted with the return of Democrats to power.
