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Job-Market Paper

Fractured Parties and the Separation of Powers

In recent years, scholars have identified political parties as central actors in the separation of powers, suggesting that they ensure competition between the president and Congress and between the states and federal government. Although their accounts often acknowledge that a shared party label does not necessarily reflect shared political commitments, they tend to cast parties as unified, cohesive teams, relegating the internal dynamics of political parties in Congress and elsewhere to the periphery. This Article, by contrast, puts intraparty conflict front and center. Looking within our fractured parties, it examines the mechanisms that may be used to bind partisan actors together and evaluates their consequences for constitutional government. 

The reality that parties are often fractured matters deeply for constitutional law, casting familiar constitutional principles—including separation of powers and federalism doctrines—in new light. Conventional wisdom holds that the legislative and executive branches will vigorously defend their institutional turf when each is controlled by a different party. But this assumes that the majority party in Congress is capable of holding together. In practice, doing so is often difficult. By the same token, fears that unified government will lead to consolidated power in the executive branch may be unwarranted. Even with an ally in the White House, a fragmented congressional majority is unlikely to rubber-stamp presidential initiatives. As a result, the rules and procedures that enable party leaders to quell or disguise intraparty fragmentation—and those that dissidents use to fight back—are crucial to maintaining (or eroding) the separation of powers.    

The institutions that broker accord among co-partisan officeholders at the state level are equally important. Just as formal cameral rules and informal caucus procedures help members of the same party work together in Congress, institutions like partisan associations of state attorneys general serve a similar function for state officials. These venues, however, are meaningfully different from their national counterparts. As para-governmental institutions insulated from regular public scrutiny, their activities are less traceable by the electorate and more permeable to influence by well-resourced, concentrated interests. This suggests that traditional interest-group pluralism—not partisan conflict—may be most responsible for state resistance to federal edicts.  

The Article concludes with a series of reform proposals intended to exploit fragmentation’s generative capacity—the potential to unsettle existing political arrangements and reveal new political possibilities by empowering partisan dissidents. These include liberalizing requirements for bringing legislation directly to the floor without the consent of party leaders, increasing the transparency of internal caucus proceedings through recorded votes, and restructuring party steering committees to include dissident voices.

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Peer-Reviewed Publications 
​& Book Chapters

"Anatomy of Judicial Backlash: Southern Leaders, Massive Resistance and the Supreme Court, 1954-1958” (with Ruth Bloch Rubin). 2018. Law & Social Inquiry 43:944-980 | Link

​​"Judicial Partisanship and the Slaughterhouse Cases: Investigating the Relationship Between Courts and Parties." 2017. Studies in American Political Development 31:24-46 | Link

"Constitutional Litigation in the United States," in Constitutional Courts in Comparison, eds. Ralf Rogowski and Thomas Gawron (with Robert A. Kagan, Berghahn Books, 2016)
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