“As the government does more and more, policies increasingly overlap, bump into one another, and, all too frequently, begin to contradict one another.” “Gridlock,” in contrast, refers to the difficulty of managing and coordinating the extensive welfare and regulatory state that we have somehow managed to build. The “stalemate” argument focused on the obstacles to creating an extensive regulatory and welfare state. Similar contradictions are rife in welfare policy, health care policy, and what we now call budget policy - which includes virtually everything our enormous national government does. For example, “energy policy,” born in the 1970s, has grown into a motley collection of hundreds of conflicting policies and programs, some of which seek to subsidize or otherwise promote various forms of energy use and production that others tax and discourage. It was at about that time that the United States began to feel the effects of what political scientist Hugh Heclo has aptly called “policy congestion.” As the government does more and more, policies increasingly overlap, bump into one another, and, all too frequently, begin to contradict one another. It quickly became the leading metaphor used to describe congressional politics after President Ronald Reagan’s initial legislative victories in 1981. The term “gridlock” caught on in 1980 as a way to describe traffic congestion so severe that cars block multiple intersections, preventing movement in any direction. It reveals how criticism of our institutional arrangements has subtly shifted as government has expanded. The triumph of this neologism over the more conventional descriptors “stalemate” and “deadlock” is not an accident. “Gridlock” is the new term favored by critics who are frustrated with Washington, and it is used by people across the political spectrum, not just liberals. The result, they charged, was the “deadlock of democracy,” which in effect meant that an unholy alliance of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress could block the initiatives of liberal Democratic presidents.
From the turn of the century through the 1960s, progressives and New Dealers insisted that our “horse and buggy” institutions were incompatible with the demands of modern government. Our current discontents, particularly on budget issues, give new urgency to a critique of our constitutional arrangements that dates back to Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era. Our unusually complex structure of government - one that combines separation of powers, bicameralism, and federalism - not only embeds numerous “veto points” in the legislative process, but frustrates accountability by making it nearly impossible for voters to know whom to blame or reward for public policy. This pattern has led some scholars to conclude that the heart of our current problems lies in our institutional arrangements. Voters routinely reward individual legislators for engaging in behavior that regularly produces the collective action they abhor. Consequently, most members run for Congress by running against it. As the political scientist Richard Fenno has pointed out, voters may hate Congress, but they love their own member of Congress. The most common public response to these developments has been to blame our elected representatives for engaging in petty partisanship, to charge that they are beholden to “special interests,” and to insist that all would be fine if our leaders would only listen to “the people.” But “the people” are really a fractious and increasingly partisan lot, and in 2012 they sent back to Washington nearly all of the hyper-partisan politicians who had achieved such stunningly low approval ratings during the previous two years. Meanwhile, its approval rating has slipped below 10 percent, to the lowest levels ever recorded. Most important, almost everyone recognizes that in coming years we must both raise taxes and cut entitlements in order to avert fiscal disaster, yet Congress has taken no significant steps in that direction. But Congress after Congress has done nothing. Everyone knows that Social Security is headed toward insolvency, and that the longer we wait, the harder it will be to fix the problem. The legislative branch has yet to revise a national immigration policy that pleases no one, or even to pass a stripped-down version of pathway-to-citizenship legislation that enjoys widespread popular support. After months of tense negotiations, Congress and President Barack Obama barely avoided going over the “fiscal cliff” in January, and their last-minute agreement leaves many more months of inconclusive bargaining to come. It is hard to find a news article on Congress these days in which the word “gridlock” does not figure prominently.
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