The Politics of Herding Cats: When Congressional Leaders Fail (Review)

Review of The Politics of Herding Cats: When Congressional Leaders Fail by John Lovett (2021; University of Michigan Press) in Congress and the Presidency (50:3): 371-373.

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Mike Tyson’s provocative observation is a reminder that anything can happen when people interact with one another. And anything can happen in politics, even in a place like Congress, where influential leaders appear to decide policy outcomes regularly. Take, for example, the months-long effort to increase the federal government’s debt limit in 2023. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) carefully managed that process as he negotiated a deal with President Joe Biden that could become law. Those negotiations occurred in private. Rank-and-file lawmakers learned about what happened there later from McCarthy, the White House,or the press (at the very end of the debate). McCarthy did not unveil the compromised agreement until the last minute to make it harder for lawmakers who opposed the legislation to derail it.

The debt limit debate’s centralized and opaque decision-making process was by design. Leaders like McCarthy structure debates this way to make a specific outcome – in this case, Congress raising the debt limit – appear inevitable. By keeping rank-and- file lawmakers in the dark until the very end of the debate, leaders give them the impression that they cannot shape its outcome. That, in turn, makes it more likely that rank-and-file lawmakers will eventually support their leaders’ plans.

However, rank-and-file lawmakers do not always support their leaders. On occasion, lawmakers will attempt to disrupt their leaders’ plans. This is because rank-and- file lawmakers and leaders may prefer different policy outcomes in a debate. Alternatively, they may disagree on how best to structure a debate to realize the out- come that they all prefer. But it is hard for rank-and-file lawmakers to thwart their leaders.

A new book on legislative politics aims to explain why it is hard for rank-and-file lawmakers to disrupt their leaders’ plans and whathappens when they do. In The Politics of Herding Cats: When Congressional Leaders Fail, John Lovett considers why leaders are usually more powerful than other lawmakers – non-leaders – and the conditions under which they are not more powerful. He argues that leaders (i.e., committee chairmen and party leaders) have institutional powers that give them greater influence over policy outcomes than non-leaders. Leaders’ powers enable them to control Congress’s agenda by limiting the number of people involved in a debate and the information available to non-leaders. According to Lovett, leaders will succeed more often than not because they can use their power to structure legislativedebates in such a way as to make winning them easier. For example, leaders often use their institu- tional powers to keep divisive issues off the agenda for as long as possible (6). When that is no longer an option, leaders craft what they consider must-pass legislation in privatewith little or no input from non-leaders. They then wait until the last minute to unveil the legislation to confront non-leaders with a fait accompli, thus increasing the chances that Congress will pass it.

Lovett’s analysis demonstrates that leaders cannot always control the legislative process. His research suggests that leaders’ ability to shape policy outcomes is inversely related to the salience of that policy and the number of non-leaders participating in the debate. Leaders can structure debates to achieve their preferred outcome when the underlying issue is of little interest to people outside of Congress, and non-leaders are not involved. However, leaders lose that ability as more people outside of Congress are interested in its debates, and as the number of non-leaders participating in the legislative process increases (157). When that happens, leaders must compete with non-lead- ers to shape policyoutcomes.

Lovett tests his theoretical claim empirically using a two-pronged methodological approach. He first examines a forty-year period (1977–2016) in Congress’s history using media mentions in the Washington Post as a proxy for issue salience to determine if general trends in congressional decision-making support his theory. He then employs a case-study approach to detail how the causal relationship that he hypothesizes operates in practice (5).

The Politics of Herding Cats uses concepts from the literature on public policy to explain changes in the power of legislative leaders toshape policy outcomes. The book’s central claim that the power of leaders to control a debate is inversely related to the salience of theunderlying issue and the number of non-leaders involved affirms earlier work on closed and open policymaking systems (e.g., Thurber 1996). Furthermore, its analysis of the tactics that successful non-leaders employ in a debate to overcome leaders’ institutional powers underscores the importance of Congress’s permeability to power relations inside the House and Senate (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 2009; Jones and Baumgartner 2005). These concepts enhance the book’s readability by highlighting the stakes in important debates. They also give readers the tools to understand what happens as those debates unfold.

Nevertheless, The Politics of Herding Cats remains moored to the politics-as-production understanding of Congress prevalent in theliterature on legislative politics. That view assumes that leaders can “control” the legislative process. Theories based on it modelleaders as factory supervisors overseeing the assembly of legislative widgets according to a blueprint that they support (e.g., Weingast and Marshall 1988).

While leaders have powers that non-leaders do not –especially in the House – those powers do not make it possible for leaders to “control the policy process by determining what can and cannot happen in the halls of Congress” (11), as Lovett suggests. This is because non-leaders give leaders their position and, by extension, their power. Therefore, accounting for changes in leaders’ power should start by explaining why non-leaders defer to them, even when doing so negatively impacts their goals.

The Politics of Herding Cats continues the recent literature’s approach of underestimating the importance of an individual’s skill in shaping the power dynamics between leaders and non-leaders. All leaders may have the same institutional powers by virtue of their position. However, some leaders are more effective than others at using those powers to shape policy outcomes. This variance in effectiveness is based on a simple observation – a leader’s characteristics do influence how they lead (e.g., Green 2010; Strahan 2007). Likewise, not all non-leaders have the skill needed to leverage forces outside of Congress to disrupt leaders’ plans inside it.

Overall, The Politics of Herding Cats is an important contribution to the literature on legislative politics. Lovett’s theoretical claims encourage us to think about what happens inside Congress in new ways. Furthermore, his methodological approach – analyzing the ups and downs of important legislative debates –reminds us that anything can happen when it comes to Congress.