The Political Structure of the U.S. Policy-Making Process

THE POLITICAL STRUCTURE OF THE U.S. POLICY-MAKING PROCESS Lloyd N. Cutler his issue of the SAIS Review takes up the subject of "American Foreign Policy at the Crossroads." To have a foreign policy, or a domestic policy for that matter, a nation must have an effective process for making the decisions that add up to a coherent policy. I would submit that the American decision-making process, suitable as it may have been in 1787 and for more than a century and a half thereafter, is no longer able to make the decisions that the American government faces today. Several years ago, in a happy example of serendipity, Douglas Dillon and I independently wrote papers setting forth this same hypothesis.1 Others with direct experience in trying to make the process work urged us to form a group to analyze the weaknesses of the present system and what might be done to correct them. More than 250 members now participate in the Committee on the Constitutional System. They include many present and former members of Congress; present and former members of the cabinet and the White House staff, officials of the national and state political parties; present and former state governors; professors of law, history, and political science; university and college presidents; journalists, lawyers, labor officials; and business and financial leaders. They represent a broad range of the political, social, and economic spectrum. Senator Nancy L. 1 . Dillon's remarks at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, 30 May 1982, and Cutler, "To Form A Government," Foreign Affairs 59 (Fall 1980). Lloyd N. Cutler is a member of the Washington, D.C, bar and was counsel to President Carter from 1979 to 1980. 65 66 SAIS REVIEW Kassebaum (R.-Kans.) has joined Mr. Dillon and me as a cochairman. Our research activities are guided by some of the nation's leading political scientists and constitutional scholars, includingJames McGregor Burns, James Sundquist, and Donald Robinson. As the Constitution nears its 200th anniversary in 1987, the Committee on the Constitutional System is examining the thesis that while the system has served us remarkably well for two centuries, it has some characteristics that impair the ability of our elected officials to make coherent policy choices and diffuse their public accountability for the choices that are made. The committee is also studying the extent to which these characteristics derive from the constitutional distribution of power between the executive and legislative branches, and to what extent they are traceable to other causes. The committee has identified two major trends that weaken the ability of our elected officials to formulate and execute coherent policies and that limit their accountability to the rest of us. One is the growing phenomenon of divided government—periods in which the political party in the White House faces opposition majorities in one or both houses of Congress. We have had a divided government during eleven of the last twenty Congresses since 1945 and during seven of the last nine Congresses since 1968. In contrast, divided government existed only 27 percent of the time from 1855 to 1944, and 15 percent of the time from 1789 to 1854. The second trend is the decline in the level of party cohesion among the legislators of each party and between the president and the members of his party in Congress. According to David Price, the percentage of House ballots in which 90 percent of one party's members voted against 90 percent of the other party's members on an issue declined from 40 percent in 1900 to 5 percent by 1950.2 The figure is probably even lower today. If the measure of party cohesion is lowered from 90 percent to a mere majority, the percentage has declined from 70 percent in 1900 to 40 percent today. The percentage of votes loyal to presidentially supported measures cast by members of the president's own party has also dropped from over 75 percent in the first half of this century to about 66 percent during the second half to date. Both of these phenomena probably stem from the parallel decline in party loyalty among the voting public. Fully a...