diesel books in the hornbeck library mark and andrew.

>> the conventional wisdom is that the reason why we have so much conflict today is that the parties are ideologically polarized with democrats having moved left and republicans having moved right. the expedition you typically encounter when you read political journalism and it's what you typically encounter when you read about the rise of partisan conflict in academic work. what i saw to do in the book was to investigate to what extent the rise in partisanship can actually be chalked up to a widening disagreement on the types of issues that we think of is ideologically divisive in american politics. issues like the size of government, the government share of the economy, the tax code, redistributed social welfare programs, regulations of private economic activity. the social issues like abortion and gay rights, all the types of issues we normally think of is the fighting left from right.

to what extent those can account for the rise of partisanship. >> go ahead. >> what i find is those issues are of course centrally important to understanding partisan conflict in congress, but they cannot begin to account for the extent of partisan conflict. conflict. partisan conflict curse on all types of issues regardless of whether they have anything to do with what we think of is left versus right. >> did those issues that you just mentioned, did they just come about in the last 30 years or had they been around for a long time? >> they've been around for a long time. interestingly, we have been described american as ideological and orientation throughout american history. sort of conventional wisdom of earlier eras of scholarships and back in politics is that american politics is nonideological. since the new deal, since the

1940s, journalism and academic works has pointed to the importance of ideology and understanding partisan conflict. >> how would you define a political party? >> political party is politicians aligned under a common label seeking to win control of governing institutions. so they are, they are more than just groups of like-minded people. they have a stake in power and their efforts to win power lead them to collaborate on many matters that don't have anything particularly to do with philosophical disagreement in american politics. >> you have a hypothesis in your book, and it is that presidential leadership exacerbates partisanship. >> right. >> why so? >> because members of congress have a partisan stake and how the president is perceived, whether the present is perceived as successful or unsuccessful. this leads members of the

president's party to get the president the benefit of the doubt on matters that he champions. and it leads the opposition party, the president opposition, to impose higher burdens of proof before willing to go alon 3th the president's proposal.3 >> what have you found when the senate and the p3resident are  the same party of the senate33 majority and the present are of the same party, is there a difference as opposed to the president and the sin of being a different party? >> i see the same dynamics in the senate with the president's fellow partisans working with the president to push his agenda. and the opposition party resisting. i think it's important to pay attention to the opposition party. the president opposition. regardless of whether they're in control of the sin or not. one thing that is important to keep in mind with respect to the sin is the majority party in this and has great difficulty controlling the floor. meaning that the minority party

has many opportunities to raise its issues and they get its message out. very different than the house in that respect. the minority, the president opposition party, regardless of minority or majority, seeks to push debate in ways that are disadvantageous to the president. after all, they do have a stake in a change of party control in the white house. >> so mitch mcconnell, current republican leader in the senate, and harry reid, who is more powerful in the senate? is mitch mcconnell in many ways more powerful than harry reid? >> given the cooperation that mitch mcconnell has been able to engineer a month republican colleagues in the senate they do have a veto with a majority party would like to do. this can lead to universal gridlocked meaning that not much is getting done. in fact, very little has emerged from the sand over the past year. but it's hard to say who is more

powerful. most legislation that passes innocent has to clear both parties. clear the process by which they discover that there is sufficient support to move forward on the floor without running into problems spent mitch mcconnell got a lot of press when he said a couple years ago that his job was to make sure that barack obama was a one-term president. it isn't that his job? >> it is. the president opposition's job to do that. they see that as their roles just like the presidents fellow partisans, their job is to champion the president's agenda. these institutions do not work in isolation from one another. >> dr. lee, is a safety say that the senate is dysfunctional? >> when we consider the role of legislative institutions, they are too deliberate, to give

voice to many different perspectives. they are also charged with responsibility of making loss, processing the changes that need to be made in the nation's laws. those two goals are in conflict with one another. efficient processing of the legislative agenda stands at odds with giving full voice to different perspective. the senate tends to err on the side of giving full voice, ands the house tends to air on the side ofsw efficiency.ssswss >> do you think that the super majority rule should be done away with in the senate? or if you talk about the super majority rule. >> i don't really take a stand in the context of this book. it's existed for very long time but it works in very different ways. today at the context of the high level of partisan unity that we see today. so that the super majority,

which has been around, you know, ever since the early 19th century. that they have been there but it didn't present the same obstacles but, in fact, up until 1917 there was no procedure by which even a super majority could achieve cloture. there wasn't any cloture process, and yet the senate was able to process legislation. sometimes very controversial legislation. it's an evolution practicesss rather than a question just per se of the rule.ssssssws >> could ysou foresee ansss evolution where thesw super majority is done away with at a super majority becomes the norm? >> absolutely. in some ways the debate over the so-called nuclear option or the constitutional option of the george w. bush years, points to way by which a simple majority can impose majority rule and the senate can be done. historically those more of a

problem with obstruction and house of representatives. it was a change in the rules in the 1890s in the house that allowed the majority effectively ruled there. the same thing could happen in the senate, but it would require a willingness of the majority party to give up a lot of the individual prerogatives the snators have by virtue of thes fact that extended debate is an open option for the. >> dr. lee, why did you look -- why did you choose to look at the senate rather than how? >> the senate struck me as a tougher test for my thesis. conventional wisdom is it is less partisan, it's more info institution, that runs of the base of personal relationships. senators serve longer terms. they're seen as more free of their party than house members are. so if i find the parties are capable of structuring conflict on non-ideological questions in the senate, then that's a higher bar for the thesis than to find

that in the house where the majority party would take so much more control over everything that happens on the floor. >> we should be clear. what is your thesis? what is your general thesis in your book? >> my thesis is to understand partisan conflict in american politics went to go beyond left versus right, liberal versus conservative. in fact, it's harder to get republicans and democrats to agree on policy issues than it would be just to get liberals and conservatives to agree on issues. republicans and democrats have more stake in disagreement, more reasons to preserve disagreements than the principles question that would divide liberals and conservatives from one another. >> is that a surprise? >> well, it runs against the conventional way that academics and journalists tend to write about partisan conflict. it doesn't really run counter to the way the american public sees partisan conflict. they see it as a much about

bickering, about reflected disagreement. the other guys propose we have to be against it. i find the american public sort of full wisdom about congress deserves more respect. >> what's the importance of personal relationships in the senate? can they overtake partisanship? >> well, it's not really the focus of the book. in fact, i don't really look at individuals per se. i look at how the parties behave on different types of issues. so i don't investigate those kinds of personal relationships. i can tell you that there's a great deal of arts and structure in behavior. despite the usual sketches about personal relationships. i find these patterns of intense partisan conflict and issues that the president champions, on what i call good government

issues. these are scandals and investigations produce this kind of partisan response. procedural vote produce these partisan response. ??d that's been true since the?? '80s, which is when my time????? start.?????????????? ?? frances lee, is there a?????? reason that the mavericks in the senate get so much attention, joe lieberman, john mccain is sometime their way from party ideology? >> they are behaving in ways that make them stand out from the general patterns, the kind of general patterns the book focuses on. so that makes them interesting. >> do we pay too much attention to those? >> to the extent it obscures what's really going on in the senate, then yes, we do. one thing that you find in the book is that would probably pay too much attention to social issues, abortion and gay-rights and affirmative action, as a window into understanding partisan conflict in congress. partisan conflict is much more

about economic issues. and, in fact, the social issues produce less reliable partisan cleavages than economic issues, and then the good government issues that i just mentioned, you know, the scandals and investigations produce more reliable partisan ships than the social issues do. it to the extent we explain party polarization by reference to the hot button questions, we are missing the boat. it's so much more about differences in ideological views on the role of the government and economy, and so much more about partisan interest in protecting party reputation tha? it is about abortion and gay???? rights. >> do you and ??debug trenton, ? role that regions play, the westerns there's a post a northeastern center as opposed to a southern senator? >> it's not in this book. again, that goes to other patterns of behavior that the question is on what explains

partisan, windows partisanship arise and what types of issues can account for it? i do find, however, that when investigating the role of the president in sparking partisan conflict i find that he does so across most issues. but there's one exception. issues that have that distributed component that is very much about who gets what, regionally, north versus south or east versus west, agriculture issues, water, water resources, those types of issues don't exhibit that part response to the president. you don't see the party lining up in ways to either support or oppose on transportation policy. those issues are much more abou? regional is?? an in a way that ? pointed. >> you were the co-author of another book, "sizing up the senate." what's the