The Partisanship of Bipartisanship: How Representatives Use Bipartisan Assertions to Cultivate Support

How do representatives reconcile public expectations of bipartisan lawmaking with the lack of compromise in recent congresses? Representatives—constrained by the actual content of legislation—position partisan legislation to increase public support. Because constituents reward this behavior, representatives reap the rewards associated with bipartisanship through rhetoric alone, providing little incentive to engage in actual substantive compromise. With 434,266 floor speeches I show that bipartisanship is evoked uniformly across the ideological spectrum and that there is no relationship between a legislator's propensity for bipartisan rhetoric and her propensity for bipartisan action. Instead marginal legislators who need to secure support from opposition voters are most likely to make bipartisan appeals. With experiments I show that bipartisan appeals increase support and decrease perceived ideological extremity even for overtly partisan legislation with trivial opposition support. Bipartisan assertions influence public opinion far more than actual evidence of opposition support.