Constitutional design and contemporary dysfunction (and timidity): The APSA Presidential Address

Sandy Levinson

For obvious reasons, I was extremely interested in the title of the Presidential Address delivered by John H. Aldrich at the 2014 meetings of the American Political Science Association:  “Did Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison ‘Cause’ the  U.S. Government Shutdown?  The Institutional Path from an Eighteenth Century Republic to a Twenty-first Century Democracy,” just published in the March 2015 issue of Perspectives on Politics, one of the two major journals published by the APSA.  Aldrich offers an overview of American political history designed to explain the consequences for governance of the particular form of party polarization that we have today.  Part of his analysis emphasizes the demise of strong parties in favor of candidate-centered elections; this is helped along, of course, by the rise in the early 20^th century of party primaries and the secret ballot.  Like Rick Pildes (himself borrowing from earlier political scientists), Aldrich also emphasizes the collapse of the schizoid Democratic Party following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when the “big tent” of Northern liberals and Southern white racists disappeared, with many of the latter, of course, migrating to the Republican Party in the aftermath of Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, more importantly, Richard Nixon’s  “Southern Strategy” in 1968.  

Aldrich also pays attention to the importance of veto points created by the political system set down in 1787, with its emphasis on separate and autonomous "branches" that can "check and balance" one another and thus, among other things, prevent any legislation from passing.   He begins his “conclusions” as follows:

My central argument is that what many are calling the ‘dysfunctional’ government of today is the consequence, in part, of a stream of institutional design decisions made throughout  American political history.  In many respects, the Constitution was designed for a different place and time, designed to solve a different set of problems than our own. …

Aldrich concludes his “conclusions” by suggesting some “strateg[ies] for reform,” which depend, of course, on the diagnosis of the problem.  If, for example, we view representatives as motivated primarily by a desire to be re-elected (as David Mayhew famously suggested, then “we must find a way to reshape districts such that they are more likely to be mixtures of partisanship and ideology” rather than self-consciously designed to be controlled by the median voter within a given political party instead of the electorate in general.  But if we are persuaded by some interesting evidence that “Congress is filled with those committed personally to the expression of ideology” (and who are selected because they are viewed as reliable adherents to the ideology), “then we must find a way to recruit and elect sufficient moderates.” He also suggests that perhaps the Supreme Court needs to rethink its views about money being “speech” and try to move closer to a “one voice, one vote” standard in place of the electorate’s de facto choice of choosing among candidates who have been able to survive the money primary and onslaught of “independent ads” purchased by ideological groups. 

All of these, of course, are worth discussing.  But, as one can imagine, I strongly regret that Prof. Aldrich (whom I do not know), given the title of his presidential address and the beginning of his “conclusions,” didn’t even address the possibility that perhaps we should think about reforming the Constitution itself.  I will confess to some narcissistic disappointment that he did not cite either of my two books on the subject, which I suppose simply underscores the view that I’m not thought to be a “real political scientist” by denizens of the discipline.  But I take this also as evidence of the fact that even someone as astute as Prof. Aldrich clearly is—not to mention someone who seems to express some worry about the contemporary “dysfunctionality” of our political system—seems incapable of moving beyond basically anodyne suggestions into more radical suggestions that perhaps a Constitution that was designed (and perhaps designed well) to confront a “somewhat different set of problems from our own” needs to be rethought every now and then.  

Robert Dahl, perhaps the greatest political scientist of my lifetime, moved over the course of his career from a quite complacent defender of what was called “interest group pluralism” (especially as found in New Haven, Connecticut) to a vigorous critic of our political system for its patently undemocratic aspects.  Interestingly enough, Aldrich doesn’t cite any of Dahl’s work, including his 2002  book How Democratic Is the United States Constitution?, though he does cite (and discuss) Thomas Mann’s and Norman Ornstein’s It’s even worse than it looks:  How the American constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism.”   But one vital difference between Dahl (and myself), on the one hand, and Mann and Ornstein, on the other, is that for all of the bite of their critique, they carefully avoid any suggestion that we need to think of constitutional reform. That simply isn't thinkable within the Beltway.

It is easy enough to say that Prof. Aldrich is simply being prudent.  The worst feature of the  Constitution is Article V itself, which not only makes significant amendment near impossible, but, perhaps as importantly, infantilizes our discourse by making any suggestion of constitutional reform sound utopian and quixotic, not the kind of thing that persons who want to be thought “reasonable” would ever suggest.  I wish that Prof. Aldrich, who I am sure is a fine representative of contemporary American political science, were less “reasonable.”