It is often asserted that bipartisanship in the U.S. Congress has been replaced with highly partisan policies, which are not reflective of the public will. This, in turn, implies that electoral responsiveness has gone by the wayside. This research reconsiders the claim that congressional polarization has increased at the expense of bipartisanship, and that electoral responsiveness has declined. I argue that despite what has traditionally been seen as party polarization over the last few decades, members have continued to find ways to engage in bipartisanship and, thus, to show responsiveness to their districts. Because of members' electoral incentives, there exists an equilibrium level of bipartisanship in Congress. The form that bipartisan cooperation has taken, however, has changed over time, moving from roll call votes to bill cosponsorship coalitions.;To assess the extent to which polarization and bipartisanship can co-exist, I develop new measures of bipartisanship in the United States Congress for the period from 1973 to 2004 drawing on bill cosponsorship coalitions, and I compare these to existing measures using roll call votes. I test the relationship between bipartisanship and polarization across different stages of policy making and across different policy areas, showing that bipartisanship continues at reasonably high levels in cosponsorship coalitions even as polarization has increased.;Consistent with political pundits and many academics, traditional approaches to measuring legislative behavior from roll call votes reveal a relatively neat mapping between increased polarization and decreased bipartisanship. I show that roll call votes, however, are problematic for measuring bipartisanship. The strategic incentive of the leadership not to allow roll call votes on issues that internally divide the party can lead to an underestimate of bipartisanship. Additionally, I show that the likelihood that bipartisan legislation receives a roll call vote has changed over time; a change that artificially increases the perception of polarization at the expense of bipartisanship. In contrast, by analyzing bipartisanship in bill cosponsorship coalitions, I find a strong persistence of bipartisanship despite increased divisions in roll call voting.;To explain the persistence of bipartisanship in cosponsorship coalitions, my dissertation focuses on electoral incentives by examining the behavior of individual members and by utilizing survey data on public opinion. I examine how electoral competition influences the bipartisan behavior of each member. I argue that members from districts with greater two-party competition are more likely to engage in bipartisanship than are members from heavily single-party districts. To understand the role of public opinion in electoral incentives, I use survey data to show how bipartisan cooperation can help members gain the support of independents and partisan leaners, but may damage their standing among strong partisans. The work on public opinion, chapter 7, is part of a joint work with Neil Malhotra. These findings illustrate that representation is two-sided; for members in highly partisan districts, representation involves partisanship whereas for members in weakly partisan or competitive districts, representation involves bipartisanship.
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