​Divided Parties, Strong Leaders 

It is often said that the more divided a party the weaker its leaders will be.  Divided Parties, Strong Leaders challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that party divisions and strong leaders are not incompatible.  In fact, the past century is marked by congressional leaders who have leveraged intraparty divisions to durably reshape national politics and policy.
 
Recognizing that party divisions reflect more than just an underlying distribution of preferences about policy is crucial to understanding how leaders manage this feat.  Regardless of how policy preferences are distributed, every legislator has a choice about whether to join forces with likeminded colleagues or go it alone.  For this reason, party divisions have an organizational dimension — one that is distinct from, but related to, the ideological one that is central to most legislative scholarship.  Indeed, competing party factions organize in different ways and at different times, with some eschewing collective action altogether.  

​As this book argues, this variation shapes the contours of party divisions and thus matters deeply for how leaders of divided parties exercise power.  It is the degree of symmetry in a party’s underlying factional configuration — that is, the extent to which its rival factions’ collaborative efforts are evenly matched — that most conditions leaders’ pursuit of independent forceful action.  To make this case, Divided Parties, Strong Leaders turns to congressional history, traversing nearly a century’s worth of intraparty battles.  Profiling leaders of both symmetric and asymmetric parties, it demonstrates the range of interests that leaders seek to pursue and the variety of strategies they adopt to make the most of the factional configurations they encounter.  

Yet this book aims to do more than just get history right.  As citizens, we often dismiss leaders of divided parties as weak and expect little of them as a result.  But this is a mistake.  Party divisions are not inherently limiting.  Americans have a right — perhaps, even an obligation — to demand more from those who lead the first branch.