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Civic responsibility looks good on us 🇺🇸 #floridavotes (at Weston Library)

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Honored to be photographed by up-and-coming artist and one of my best friends, the incomparable Celine Calpo. Remember her name -- it’ll be on everybody’s lips one day.

Georgetown Dichotomy / Washington, DC 

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The McCourt School of Public Policy and the Lugar Center unveiled the latest addition to their Bipartisan Index on Dec. 15 with the incorporation of lifetime scores for individual Senators from 1993 to 2014. The data revealed escalating levels of partisanship in the Senate over the past two decades, as well as sub-par bipartisan performance among all six presidential contenders who previously served in the Senate.

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McCourt, Lugar Center Publish Bipartisan Index

An abridged version was originally published in The Hoya on Jan. 22, 2016.

By Lisa Burgoa Hoya Staff Writer

The McCourt School of Public Policy and the Lugar Center unveiled the latest addition to their Bipartisan Index on Dec. 15 with the incorporation of lifetime scores for individual Senators from 1993-2014. The data revealed escalating levels of partisanship in the Senate over the past two decades, as well as sub-par bipartisan performance among all six presidential contenders who previously served in the Senate, among other findings.

The Bipartisan Index, originally launched in May 2015, calculates a score for each Senator based on a complex algorithm which take into account how frequently they cosponsor a bill with a member of the opposite party and, inversely, how often their own bills are cosponsored by members of the opposite party. Other metrics, including whether a Senator belonged to the majority or minority party, the volume of bills and their relative importance, were also computed within the formula.

The resulting scores reflect how a Senator behaved compared to a similarly-situated cohort of Congressmen over the past 20 years, with a score of 0 indicating an exactly average performance in terms of bipartisan cooperation. Positive and negative scores indicate above and below average performance, respectively.

Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) topped the list with a score of 2.222913, while Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) brought up the rear at no. 227 with a score of -1.85589.  

Founded by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) after he retired from Congress in 2013, the non-profit Lugar Center counts bipartisan work among its chief commitments. Director of Policy Dan Diller said the creation of the Bipartisan Index stemmed from the Lugar Center’s desire to quantifiably measure the paucity of cooperation in Congress today.

“We live in a time of great contention,” Diller said. “Problems do not get solved because there is a level of combat inherent in American politics today that is just unhealthy, and we believe there is actually a lot of common ground on many issues and that norms and practices that used to support bipartisanship have eroded. From a political science view, you want some confirmation that there are measurable tendencies to say, yes, indeed, we have a problem.”

After developing the idea of the Bipartisan Index, the Lugar Center approached the McCourt School in Oct. 2014 to assure the soundness of their formula and establish a legitimizing academic partnership for the project.

Diller said that although the chasm among Democrats and Republican continued to expand, the updated index did not indicate one party was more belligerent than the other. In fact, of the 60 top-scoring Senators, the results were evenly split among 30 Democrats and 30 Republicans. Within the 100 top-scoring Senators, there were 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans.

However, the evidence pointed to a generational shift among parties. With the 112th and 113th Congresses recorded as the most partisan in the last 20 years, Diller said politicians from both sides are veering toward more radical and less reconciliatory stances.

“The older members, members even from 10, 12, 14 years ago, who to the naked eye would seem to be as extremely liberal or conservative members today, score much better than some of their counterparts in Congress today,” Diller said. “For example, we identified a group of 10 progressive Democrats – Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, Tom Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, John Kerry, and others – people who no one would mistake as centrists, and their scores were much better than similarly situated progressive democrats of the last few congresses in the last six years.”

There are three main culprits behind the current polarization of the political field, Diller explained. One is the rampant gerrymandering that occurs when districting areas of electoral constituencies, which results in manipulated boundaries that favor a certain party and place less pressure on politicians to remain moderate.

Another is the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling in 2010, which essentially prohibited the government from restricting political expenditures by nonprofit corporations. Diller said some argue this has resulted in candidates who were less dependent on contributions from their constituents and thus more likely to be influenced by major donors.

And, finally, Diller said that echo chambers created with the evolution of information technology are also to blame.

“The increase in communications technology has allowed or even encouraged the creation of many different sources of information, from social media and websites. In times past, even as recently as the mid-1990s, there were only a few networks and they served as centralized news sources. Now, for better or for worse, Americans are getting news from vast variety of sources, many of which are not attempting to serve mass audiences but rather a small fraction of society, who in turn demand for more liberal or more conservative representatives.”

The rankings also catalogued the records of six presidential candidates who previously served on the Senate, all of whom scored in the negative range: Sens. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) at no. 145, Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) at 156, Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) at 170, Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) at 217, Rand Paul (R-Ky.) at 222, and Ted Cruz (R-Tx) at 224.

McCourt Dean of Academic Affairs Mark Rom said these results may be of little surprise to the public. Senators who hail from divided states, such as Santorum from Pennsylvania, have greater incentives to be moderate than those from more polarized states, such as Sanders from Vermont and Cruz from Texas. Of the six former senators now running for presidential office, Rom said he found Clinton’s score to be the most unexpected.

“Clinton is surprising to find in the lower third of pack,” Rom said. “She paints herself as a centrist and she comes from a state with a tradition governors like George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, which shows New York is accepting of conservatives the way Texas is not very supportive of liberals.”

Alex Coopersmith (COL ’19), who volunteers for the Clinton campaign and is traveling to New Hampshire in February to help during the primary, said regardless of the rankings, he remains staunchly supportive of her.

“It’s interesting that Hillary Clinton is that low because I remember when I was reading her book Hard Choices about her time in the Senate, she touted her bipartisan efforts,” Coopersmith said. “She’s a progressive, but also very pragmatic, and that is the kind of leader I want: someone who runs for president because they want to govern, not because they want to fire up a base. Barring Republican gridlock, she would make an amazing government.”

Former Chair of the Georgetown University College Republicans Amber Athey (COL ’16), who is gravitating toward either Rubio or Cruz as her preferred GOP nominee, said ultimately bipartisanship is not necessarily a virtue in a politician. She said Republicans often stand for values, such as pro-life policy, which cannot ever really be compromised.

“If you believe abortion is murder, then how could you possibly ever compromise?” Athey said. “For me, I think spending is a big one, because just look at the size of the national debt right now. Continuing to increase deficit spending is just a big mistake, but I know a lot of people would disagree with me on that. That’s why I kind of appreciate that Cruz is more fringe, more anti-establishment, because it’s nice to see that someone is actively battling against the tricks that some senators use to deceive the public.”

Similarly, Caleb Weaver (SFS ’16), who is one of the three co-founders of the Georgetown chapter of College Students for Bernie Sanders, said his admiration of Sanders stemmed largely from the Senator’s steadfast devotion to his vision.

“My model is not a candidate who says everyone can get along, everyone can agree on things, we can all work together all the time,” Weaver said. “My model is someone like FDR who said ‘I know that there are sectors out there who hate me, I know there are opponents of mine who hate the minimum wage, hate child labor laws, hate collective bargaining. I know that they hate me, and I welcome their hatred.’ When it comes to certain key issues, I admire someone who says not everyone will like me, but if you like me, you should support me.”

Rom said that while the ranking provide a useful resource for the electorate, they will likely not have a major influence on voters.

“I had discussion with the Lugar Center, and they believed posting these rankings would help the cause of bipartisanship, and I was concerned that it might hurt the cause,” Rom said. “Constituents might look at this and say ‘You’re too moderate. You’re too bipartisan. I want somebody who is more ideologically pure.’ Ultimately, I think these kind of rankings provide only a kind of marginal impact on people’s decisions.”

Athey said that although she tends to focus more on a candidate’s platform than personality traits such as bipartisan cooperation, she acknowledges the value of the Bipartisan Index for certain voters.

“Just to have a data point on bipartisanship is very important,” she said. “It’s something that is very arbitrarily perceived, and to have an actual number that you can pinpoint on a person is great if that’s something that you care about when selecting a candidate, rather than just looking at a candidate and saying, ‘Oh, they look nice. They probably work with the other side.’ This is a hard line. They either do or they don’t.”