In a new book titled "Divided Parties, Strong Leaders," University of Chicago Associate Professor Ruth Bloch Rubin examines how congressional leaders can sometimes maintain significant influence even when their parties are internally divided. The research covers nearly a century of legislative history and challenges established theories about party unity and leadership strength.
Bloch Rubin's analysis suggests that the traditional view—strong leaders emerge from unified parties, while division leads to weak leadership—does not always hold true. “The conventional wisdom is that you'll have strong leaders when a party is unified—that is, when members are in line ideologically—and weak leaders when a party is divided,” Bloch Rubin said. “But what I find is that this just does not fit the empirical reality.”
She argues that party divisions are not solely about ideological differences but also involve a collaborative dimension. This refers to whether members pursue their goals independently or join forces with like-minded colleagues. The way factions within parties choose to collaborate, or not, shapes the power available to party leaders.
“The big idea is that we can describe parties in terms of collaborative configurations,” Bloch Rubin said. “Sometimes leaders are going to govern parties that are asymmetrically divided—that is a party where only one faction is working together. But leaders can also confront a symmetrically divided party, where all factions are collaborating on roughly equal terms.”
As an example, she points to the current Republican conference as being asymmetrically divided: conservative Republicans work closely together while moderates do not. According to her findings, party leaders generally have more control in situations where collaboration among factions is balanced.
Bloch Rubin explains that this perspective helps account for differences in how recent congressional leaders have performed under similar conditions of polarization and division. “Nancy Pelosi governed her party for almost 20 years, and as speaker, racked up a ton of legislative accomplishments,” Bloch Rubin said. “But it is notable that her Republican counterparts, from John Boehner to Mike Johnson, have really struggled. The challenge for political scientists is that we can’t just blame polarization or party divisions for their trouble, because Pelosi dealt with a polarized Congress and her House Democrats were divided too.”
She attributes Pelosi’s success partly to increasing symmetry within the Democratic Party over time as both moderate and progressive members collaborated more extensively. In contrast, Republican moderates have been less likely to coordinate effectively with each other.
Bloch Rubin believes these patterns reflect enduring organizational dynamics in Congress rather than new developments unique to contemporary politics. “It is really tempting to think that everything about our present politics is new or a major break from the past, but these collaborative dynamics are timeless,” she said. “Different periods in time present their own governance challenges, but the core organizational logics that structure legislative life matter for leaders across time in ways that are unchanging.”
The book also looks at historical figures such as Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill to illustrate how collaborative dynamics affected their leadership during different eras.
“By revisiting these important leaders and showing that we can understand their performance on the basis of their parties’ collaborative dynamics, I think it provides additional evidence that there are real analytic payoffs to thinking about legislative politics in the ways that I'm encouraging readers to do,” Bloch Rubin said.
She hopes her work will inform not only scholars but also citizens interested in improving congressional effectiveness by encouraging more collaboration among moderates. “One lesson from this book is that voters shouldn’t assume that the lawmakers chosen to lead divided parties can’t govern their members well,” she said, “as leaders have some agency in moving an asymmetrically divided party into a party that has greater symmetry.”
This article was originally published on the Department of Political Science website.