Partisan Infighting Among House Republicans: Leaders, Factions, and Networks of Interests

Abstract

Although congressional parties are commonly regarded as legislative teams composed of likeminded members, the defiance of the Tea Party Caucus has challenged this view. We thus ask two questions. First, how can we detect multiple factions within the congressional parties? Second, what strategies do leaders of the House majority use to manage conflicting factions within their party? Using annual ratings from more than 100 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican House members to map the factional structure of their party over the last decade. Specifically, we project a bipartite network of annual scores to relate interest groups by the similarity of their ratings and legislators by the similarity in which they have been rated. Cluster analysis identifies a set of moderate and extreme Republican factions. We then see whether Republican leaders withhold legislative rewards from members of both subgroups. We find that they primarily block moderates’ bills.