he is going to bed picture of how senate election a change over time and what the state of the electrode and senate elections look like today. and, finally, i will reintroduce burdett loomis, a professor here at the university of kansas. is the author or editor of 14 books on american politics, expert on congress and the senate, including an edited volume called esteemed colleagues, severely and a liberation in the united states senate. this was written a while ago. [laughter] >> and then his curly working on a book about looking at the culture wars and the role of the senate and elections. so with that introduction i turn it over to eric and remind you that we have 15 to 20 minutes more or less per speaker. was no good way for me to stop you.

>> first i'd like to thank burd for organizing this. it's a great honor to be here, and thank the dole institute. it's a great opportunity to talk about the senate, both today and from a historical perspective. and no more appropriate place than the kind of home of bob dole. i think one thing that would likely emerge from this two-day conference is the idea that today's senate is something of a mess. and i think that's a widespread probably not universal view but a widespread view among both scholars and journalists and political observers. kind of combination of individualism, obstructionism and kind of intense nasty partisan warfare that together puts them together and makes it very difficult institution to govern. and a policy. now i think about what's wrong with today's senate, a lot of times, and especially journalists and political scientists look back to made century senate as a better time. the scent of the 1940s and

50s is institution that in some ways work well. got to be sure there are plenty of things wrong with the made century senate, so for example, people who often the southern democrats were filibustering and killing civil rights bills region in the 1940s and '50s. so distasteful aspects, but a lot of people point to the mid century senate, lyndon johnson is often referred to, as a health or institution than today's. and i think one of the things interesting about this senate is it's really the first era for which we have both kind of journalistic and popular histories written, and modern political scientist who studied it in person, observing what was going on. and as a result of both of those things we have a pretty rich information base. know a lot about the sin of the 1940s and '50s. and i think from all of that observation that kind of consensus or conventional view of what that senate was has emerged from the. that literature. sans what i'm going to do today

is talk about that kind of stylized portrait, the conventional portrait. then those talk a little bit about things that i think conventional mrs. or under emphasizes and then wrap up with a couple quick reflections about what those maybe i'm to emphasize points but tell us about today's senate. >> that's my game plan. now in terms of the sort of mean things about the mid century senate, i think of several things that emerge from these studies and from the popular to pick the first is the idea of that members of the senate generally observed a set of widely shared norms of behavior. these norms are regulated what it means to be a good senator, and these were shared across party come across ideological groupings. so ideas like apprenticeship, when you get to the senate you're supposed to sort of keep your head down, learn the ropes and then only after learning the ropes you start talking a lot on the floor, sponsored a lot of amendments. specialization, the idea that you focus in on a couple of

areas, typically where your committee, your committee assignments relate to. and focus on those and not interfere all lot in other policy areas, not speak but every single issue that comes up. another nor was the idea of legislative work that you should be a workhorse, not a show horse did you get to the senate and you are a legislative first and a public figure second. another nor would the courtesy, the idea that you're not supposed to attack your colleagues in a personal ad. and finally reciprocity, the idea you should show restraint and how you use your prerogatives, and try to make bargains are deals with your fellow colleagues. again, across party lines. so what this does it really add up to an institution where senators are understood to show a lot of individual restraint. so even if you might benefit at home by going out in sponsoring hundreds of for a menace to embarrass the other party, or talking constantly about every

bill that comes up, there's a sense that that's not an appropriate so not going to do that. and i guess as it is probably a thought that wouldn't occur to a contemporary senator. [laughter] >> it's worth noting, it's hard to show norm is a theft of behavior but there have been important work by political scientist at the show that some of these norms had a lease summer of zero to some extent. so some of the over in this room, steve smith will you be hearing from tomorrow, document the extent to which apprenticeship seems to hold the junior dinners really used to sponsor fewer enemies and be less active. that really faith in the 1960s and 70s. a specialization the idea of really focusing on committee work with something that you can see evidence for back then and really fades away as you get a new breed of senators again entered in the late '50s and '60s. so that's one primary theme that emerges. another is in terms of the

filibuster, it's really very different institution that it is today. today the understanding is you oppose the bill, you filibuster it. and the result is the majority will need 60 votes to defeat that filibuster. if you look at it on the use of the filibuster in the spirit it was quite rare. the filibuster. fewer filibusters that are in the 20th century, and far fewer than what we have today. and this was entirely due to self-restraint that it had to do with a kind of political settlement at the time, where basically there's a conservative majority in the senate for much of this period, and so liberals couldn't push the programs to enactment. conservative did need to filibuster them because they had the votes. so by the same token conservatives didn't have as broad a policy agenda so there wasn't that much for liberals to filibuster. again this is something shown in a book by steve smith and sarah bender on the filibuster. so that the second thing is this restraint and the use or lack of use of filibustering.

a third thing is the idea that the senate in this period is run by what was called the interclub. this is a term made famous by a journalist for the new times, william s. boyd wrote a book called at the citadel in 1957. the interclub where those members whose primary allegiance is to the senate first. they are career centers. and shun personal publicity and really work the insider game. if people like richard russell of georgia as an example, lyndon johnson got overly work the levers of power internally and bargained with their fellow club members. and those who don't abide by those cards don't amount to much in the senate according to white. just a guess as to how much is a part of the war of the day, lyndon johnson as leader of the democrats would give a copy of this book to teach new senator, and it would be signed by both william as white and lyndon

johnson. so they were really cultivated this image of recently johnson believed that senators who believe this interclub story will often be more likely to defer to his leadership because that's how you get ahead, according to william white. and in the flipside of this interclub here is the idea by handful of mavericks. these independent-minded members, people like paul douglas of illinois, who don't abide by the storms but i very much according to this conventional portrait, senators as a result that they don't amount to that much. in the institution. all right. a related aspect of this theme is the idea that the sin is dominated by conservative coalition. a bipartisan coalition of southern democrats are conservative, and midwestern and and republicans, and often some eastern republicans are conservatives. and if you look at the senate in that period, the big committee

chairs most powerful committee chairs tend to be conservatives southern democrats. they often work very closely with senior republicans on legislation. it's a very different world from today where the thought of, you know, senior democrats and senior republicans having the same, very similar policy views and working as a team, which is foreign to today's senate. the final element of this conventional portrait is, i guess i would call it the johnson center. the idea of lyndon johnson is a uniquely important figure in the senate of the 1950s. it's a kind of amazing story when you think about. he enters the senate genuine 1949. two years later he is assistant leader. four years later he is democratic leader. six years later when democrats win back the majority he is the majority leader. and a, portrait is that this an israeli dominated by johnson. and so there is a great quote in a book by evans and novak on

johnson about the johnson to become how he would persuade senators to go along with them. just to give you a flavor gum his term could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, complaint and the hint of threat. it ran the gamut of human emotions. it is breathtaking. interjections from the target rare, he moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target. his eyes wide and narrow. his eyebrows rising and falling. far from his pockets were clippings memos, statistics, then it becomes humor and the genius of analogy made it an almost hypnotic experience and render the victim stunned and helpless. [laughter] >> when people talk about harry reid -- [laughter] >> that's what they are imagining, right? scholars of the 1950s in six understood that that sort of johnson dominated was really overdrawn. it wasn't a sort of johnson imposing his will. i love his endless drive from

the fact that he had an extensive communication network. he could talk to liberal democrats, conservative southern democrats, republicans, and find out what it was that each number wanted and needed and does broker compromises and deals rather than just bossing them around. it's also the case that johnson helped out a lot by the fact that this was a period of divided government as majority leader. so he is leading the democrats, moderate public and dwight eisenhower is in the white house. and as a result of that, johnson was a really expected to pass a program while he was leader. and instead he would kind of pick a spot in decide when to fight and win not. so really what he does is kind of cultivate this image of invincibility by avoiding those like that he was going to lose, and so again, the portrait that emerges is an important influential leader but not a single-handed kind of dominance. now you can think of johnson in

many ways personified this conventional portrait of the mid century senate. the consummate insider, seven democrats to articulate the view that you need to work with the interclub and abide by these dogs to get ahead. so that raises the question, what is missing from this portrait? and i'd like to point to a couple of things. one is i think this idea of the interclub where you get ahead by keeping her head down and waiting it's kind of contradicted both by johnson's own story where he comes in and quickly rises to power, becoming leader after four years, and you might say he was so skilled this is an exception. but if you think about the most important republican of the era, bob taft, he has a somewhat parallel story. taft is the thin in 1939. his first year he gets 44 speeches on the senate floor. so hard at keeping his mouth shut. he announces his first and he launches his first presidential run in august 1939. his first year in the senate.

he becomes acknowledged as the leading republican senator after about two or three years within the senate. becomes de facto leader of the party. and so both of these comedies leaders are both outward looking to they both want to be president. kind of public figures, quickly rises power. it doesn't fit this you of this kind of interclub that is so hard to break into. it's also worth noting that taft leadership is approaches him he was the opposite of johnson. johnson is all about personal connection and understanding each center. taft was much more about policy, ideology, we'll conservative i logical vision and policy program that he want to put forward and is much less concerned with the kind of personal niceties and getting along with people. it would be rude to people, but he was also brilliant and effective party leader and other ways. so again this is just that their

multiple avenues for gaining influence in the senate. another second thing that is missing is that these matters that are so dismissed by people like william s. white and lyndon johnson actually were just isolated individuals. if you think about it, and put them all together, they are often, these are people are often reelected many times and often have a big impact on public debate. they are really public figures working with national liberal interest groups among the democrats at about conservative causes such as those concerned about domestic comedies and among the republicans, and really using the same as a platform to become important figures in the country. so i think this notion of the mavericks is just lacking influences is wrong. you can see that at go today in greater frequency with some of the maverick senators today. >> and then the final point i would make about this conventional portrait is that

one aspect of the johnson senate that people think about is if institution were kind of ideological and partisan warfare has receded and to have this norm governing cooperative institution. my sense is that actually captures to the extent that captures anything, cash is only about three years or four years. from 1955 to 1958. so people tend to read back into history, assuming there is this coherent whole, if he think about what came right before johnson begins majority leader, you have this real bitter ideological warfare going on in the country in the 1940s and early 1950s. between liberal democrats who want to create a kind of social democratic cradle to grave welfare state, and republicans and seven democrats who view that as creeping socialism and undermining their core body. and they fight it out. they find out with nasty investigations of domestic communism and labor, labor unions alleged wrongdoings. they fight it out over

legislation. efforts to pass national health insurance, for full implode, new labour policies that rein in unions. and they fight it out in public with people like joe mccarthy, part at a much wider set of investigations and try to highlight domestic common isn't and link the two new deal liberalism. and these are all parts of his mid century senate that can to get shunted aside as we look back on it today. all right. so in other words, senate politics in i.t. for are infused with broad ideological and policy disagreements that are at battles of the role of government. so this is very different from the senate that we get in this conventional portrait. all right, so just to wrap up. you know, what are the implications that we are think about today's senate? i think in with these revisions i suggested, i think it's fair to say the senate of today is a very different beast from the senate of the 1950s. i think of the bob taft or

richard russell came back today and look at the senate, there are a lot of things that they really wouldn't recognize. they would find very distant from the expected present is also wrong to view it as this kind of stable coherent system that was this well smoothly running kind of machine. and i think that johnson himself want us to think of the senate that way because that was consistent with his own goals. but really the partisan warfare of today's senate differs a little bit less that we might think from what was going on in say the 1940s and '50s. it wasn't defined by party but kind of nasty ideological warfare, long been a part of our politics. and i think the one thing that one thing that is different now is when you take that nasty ideological warfare and combined it with the ability to block action to the filibuster routinely, that is what generates the question of whether you can still govern in that context, which i suspect will be a theme picked up by several of my colleagues over

the next day. >> thank you. alan? >> okay, there's a great lead-in to what i'm going to talk about. which is how senate elections have changed. and how some of the changes and senate elections have in turn affected the way the senate operates today compared with the way it operated back in the 1950s and '60s when bob dole first entered the united states senate. so i think it's fair to say to start off, i think eric is absolutely correct that some of a few of the mid century partisan conflict was minimal and does a great deal of cooperation, adherent is overstated. there's no question that the senate in the 20 center was a very big different legislative body from the senate that we see today. and i would argue that the most important different at this event and the senate down

because her legs has been the rise of party polarization prevented the increasing ideological divide between the political parties. so while there were ideological battles and senate back in the 1940s and 1950s, they didn't coincide nearly the same extent as they do today with party lines. now what we see today is that the party divide is much sharper than it was back in the 1950s and '60s. there is a handout that has some figures and tables that illustrate this point that if you look at, figure one shows the distribution of ideology in the current senate. estimated location of senators based on locations in the 110th previous senate, and estimating where the new senators would be. based on the state that they represent and their party. and if you look at that, that

graph commuters a couple of interesting things about. first of all, that shows a high degree of polarization that there's a big divide there. there is a bimodal distribution, and the democrats are all to the left, republicans are all to the right. there is no overlap at all between the parties. very different from what does it look like in terms of ideology back in the 1950s and '60s. in table one, i summarize what the difference between two senate's, the nice person at the 100 elevenths and that the 91st and it was the 1969 to 70's going back 40 years. and you can see their there is a dramatic difference between the two bodies in that in the 91st senate you have a very large percentage of moderates. and that was to in both, came from both parties. and far fewer strong euros and conservatives.

women get to the 111th you can see there are almost none and a much larger proportion of what i call strong liberals and conservatives. so this of course has profound consequences for everything about the way the senate works. for foreboding, for the committee system, for confirmation process, for just about everything that goes on. of course, this is true of the house of representatives as well. but i would argue the rise of polarization has had even greater consequences for the senate that it has had for the house, and that the house is sort of designed to operate along party lines. there has been a very partisan line. it's been that way for a long time. so what is different today, it can function. i would argue that the rise of partisanship has really made it very difficult for the senate to operate because it really undermines the traditional decision making processes, are

based on norms of reciprocity. and those norms are in fact pretty much broken down completely under the pressure of this kind of partisan, what i call partisan ideological polarization. so the senate as i senate as i say the house of representatives. i want to argue that the rise of polarization has not been confined to political elites. that as congress has become more polarized, so has the american electorate. and this is that important consequences for senate elections and for the senate itself. one cannot, in my view, understand polarization in congress without taking into account the rise of polarization in the american electorate. first of all, we can look at evidence from the american national election study that shows that in a very fundamental way the composition of the democratic and republican

electoral whole election have been diverging. both in terms of two freight important characteristic, race and ideologic. figure two shows the growing disparity between the racial composition of the democratic and republican electoral coalitions. over the past 50 years, of course, the racial composition of the american electorate has changed quite a bit. back in the 1950s, the american electorate was overwhelmingly white. nonwhites made up about 4% of the voters in the united states. in the 2008 presidential election, not may the 26% of the voters. so there's been a rather dramatic change. a lot of that has occurred in about the last 16 years. but was happy with the change is nonwhites, both african-american and latino's and to some extent other non, have come to comprise a very substantial share of the democratic electoral coalition, about 40% of democratic voters,

but their share of the republican electoral coalition has not increased in much about. there are less than 10% of republican. so we have seen a big disparity in terms of race, and at the same time a growing disparity in terms of ideology as well. if you look at figure three you can see how, over time, the average position of a democratic and republican senate voter has diverged, this is on a seven-point identification scheme but you can see the same thing when you look at specific issues. the parties have been moving apart. democratic voters becoming more liberal. republican voters becoming more conservative. and so we're looking at two parties now to a much greater extent than 30 or 40 or 50 years ago are really representing very, very different electoral coalitions.

another important point to keep in mind here is that this ideological polarization is actually great is when we look at the electorate among the public that it's chris among those interested, informed and active members of the public. that when you look at the american public today, the more interested in politics people are, the more informed that aren't about politics and more active they are in politics, the more polarized our. that is, the more divided they are. and the more divergent gc between democrats and republicans. so it is in essence those americans who fulfill the ideal of citizenship who are the most polarized. and it is in contrast among those who are relatively uninterested, uninformed, uninvolved in the political process that moderation and political independence floors. this runs contrary to a lot of a lot of people's miss about the american public and the american

electorate. we think that what is a good citizen. but the fact is that you just don't find very many independents and moderates who are really engaged in the political process. so this is very significant for representation or behavior of elected officials. there's a number of consequences for senate elections. first of all, there's been with this ideological divergence, we have seen a marked increase in party loyalty and decrease in ticket splitting since the 1970s. more voting along party lines out of the ticket splitting between presidential and senate elections as was between presidential and house election. figure four in the handout illustrates that. in addition we've also seen an increase in geographic polarization. more states dominate by one party, fewer battleground states. table two illustrates and is

really quite dramatic. this is based looking at the margins of victory at the state level in presidential elections over time. when you go back and look at the presidential election of the '60s and cities, particularly the ones that were competitive like the 1960 election and the 1976 election, you find that there were far more battlegrounds, including every one of the biggest states. state like new york and california and illinois, texas, where all the hotly contested, closely contested in those elections. what we see more recently and especially in 2008, is that there are very few highly contested state ago six days in 2008 were decided by a margin of five points or less. in contrast, over half of the states were decided on a margin of 15 points or more. more blowouts state. this, of course, has important consequences for senators as

well and senate election because it means that more senators that represent states that strongly favor their own party. to represent states that are competitive or favor the opposing party. it also results in, that assure table three, and, of course, the other consequences of this is declining competition in the senate seat. table five shows the trend over time in terms of the numbers of senate contests in proportion to highly competitive versus those that were blowouts. and you can see that in the most recent period we have more blowouts and we have fewer close contest. now, interestingly, at the same time this is going on, and despite that decreasing competitiveness of the individual races, we are seeing an increase in the size of the party seats when and increase competition for control of the senate. how is that possible? the reason it's possible is first of all we had narrow majority in the senate and the

more recent period. the average majority size in recent senate is quite a bit smaller than it was back in the earlier time period. of course, the current senate is an exception with 59 seat majority. that is a very large majority. but as i was going in a moment i think that is an exceptional and is not likely to last very long. in addition to those smaller majorities, we also see how large is seedlings. larger seedlings in elections. and i think it's a reflection of the greater influence of national issues in these elections which leads to increased consistency and party turnover. the seats that are switching are switching in one direction. to a much greater extent than was true of 30 or 40 years ago. so what that means is that you don't have offsetting seats which is as you did for examining