Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
You have to recognize the different scope? Research doesn't have to be about what's good or bad in life or the dialectic of What Is and What Should Be, it can just dig up patterns on how things work in practice, and about different aspects of the whole.

The specific study I posted is relevant now as applied in the context of Republican struggles to get much done while controlling the government, and isn't designed to consider why parties do the things they do or how representative of their constituents they are. Those are different subjects that need separate research.
Yes, absolutely, it might just be that your post gave me the wrong idea about what you wanted to say. To me it looked a lot like "see, bipartisanship isn't dead since politicians get a lot done in a bipartisan way". And my response was meant to be that it may be a useless or incomplete study if the things that do get done in a particular way are the "wrong" things or the things that are not of particular public interest. Because then the important big issues may not fall into the relevant category of things that can (only) get done in a bipartisan way. That's why the nature of the legislation that makes up this bipartisan majority of legislature might also be important. Perhaps the reason they don't get anything done is exactly the nature of what they're trying to get done.
I also didn't post the other study to say why parties do what they do, but to show what kind of issues do get done (tendentially of course).

Take the ACA for example: https://www.healthreformvotes.org/co.../h165-111.2010

Your study says that most bills only get through with both a government and opposition majority, but for the ACA for example that doesn't seem to have been true, in fact I can't find a single Republican under the Yes votes. So a lot may simply depend on how devisive the issue is. On issues like health care and aimmigration, the two parties are more or less polar opposites whereas on other issues like corporate tax cuts they may actually agree (or did agree until recently).

Therefore the issue of the bill may be just as important in whether the findings of the study apply to it or not. Of course when the majority is not very large, a few stray voters can ruin the vote for the majority like we see now, but even that may simply be due to the nature of the issue at hand. When lives are at stake, an individual congressman may be more likely to stray from the party line than when the vote is about whether the bluebird will become the next animal of the month or whether the tax rate for the coal industry will be cut from 22% to 21.5%.

So just to make things more clear, how do you interprete the study and what can the GOP learn from it or how can they use it to their advantage?