Time and Intensity in the Senate: Thinking About Institutional Functionality

[Image from the filibuster related Capra classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.] 


Over at The Monkey Cage, which anyone interested in political science (and here I really mean political science, not politics) should read every day, Koger discusses an interesting proposal that "in lieu of the filibuster as a defense against tyranny of the majority, the Senate should allocate each senator a 'budget' of votes which they can allocate across proposals as they like, so each senator can 'spend' a lot of votes on proposals that s/he considers very important." 


Here's Koger's interesting turn: 

As a practical matter, the Senate already has something like this system in the form of legislators’ time. Each member of the Senate starts out with the same amount of time before the next election and similar legislative staff allocations (plus bonuses for committee chairs). Then each senator makes two allocation decisions: first, how much time will s/he spend legislating instead of fundraising, visiting the home state, or hanging out with the family? Second, how much legislative time will s/he allocate to each issue? If senators’ time & staff resources are limited and senators’ efforts influence whether a proposal succeeds or fails, then the allocation of time is an indirect form of measuring and incorporating preference intensity into the legislative process. 

A few take-aways here. First, as Koger goes on to note in the rest of the post, the filibuster (as currently instituted) undermines this system by requiring a relatively low threshold of interest to prevent legislative action while requiring a slightly higher threshold to advance the same legislative action. The "classic" filibuster, while superficially quite similar, functioned differently because it required large time outlays from individual Senators to be maintained.

The broader takeaway is that the informal, cultural characteristics of institutions matter just as much as their more formal rules and structures. But we naturally tend to give a lot more weight to the superficial structure of institutions than the less obvious norms which define how institutions actually operate.

I'm not sure how global this tendency happens to be, but I suspect it's worse in the US. Here, the average person is probably exposed to about 5 days of political science in their life: the week spent on the Constitution in high school American history. A week, in other words, discussing the formal structure of checks and balances embedded in our founding institutional order. But no high school history class I've ever heard of goes further and examines how our structure of checks and balances actually functions. Do our checks successfully protect political minorities? Or do they simply act as governance choke-points easily manipulated by special interests with narrow but intense policy preferences?

And does a system with a bicameral legislature, a Presidential veto, a judiciary empowered with judicial review, and relatively robust local governance really need an additional minority protection embedded in the Senate rules?

Here's one thing we don't consider in high school civics: if one institutional checkpoint becomes tighter than the rest, the institution that controls it will only benefit. A check which curtails the Senate's ability to act (like the filibuster or the hold) ensures, ironically, that the Senate will be at the center of any major federal policy initiative.

For a Senator more interested in personal influence than efficient governance, the status quo looks just fine.