Lacking a crystal ball, I think an assessment of what the Congress is going to be like during the next decade should focus on the underlying forces that have systematically affected the institution over time. Given the limited space available, I will concentrate on two of those forces: partisanship and electoral ambition. The easiest way to illustrate my expectations is to contrast the present and near future with the way things used to be. Before and during the reform era of the 1970s, the Congress operated with a lot of bipartisan interaction among the senior members. This was, I believe, due in large part to the distribution of preferences within and across parties, and to members' perceptions about party prospects in the next election.

Regarding preferences, the roll-call analyses done by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal show that in those earlier years, the responses of Democrats and Republicans stretched from the liberal end of the spectrum to the conservative end. Thus in both the parties, members at virtually any point on the spectrum had allies in the other party with similar preferences. This fostered bipartisan alliances and served as the basis for the "conservative coalition" that dominated policymaking and institutional power in many policy areas. Regarding elections, by the late1960s the Democrats had maintained uninterrupted control of both chambers for two decades. As a result, members of both parties had strong expectations that Democratic control would continue in the next election. Thus the legislative strategies of the two parties were only minimally affected by maneuvering designed to influence who would have majority status after the next election. So this relative electoral certainty was another factor that fostered frequent cooperative efforts across party lines.

During the 1980s and 1990s - and especially since 1994 - these conditions changed. Poole-Rosenthal data show that by the 104th Congress the overlap in preferences between the parties had become almost nonexistent. Democrats and Republicans had both become more internally homogeneous, and the median positions of the parties had moved farther apart. Moreover, since the 1970s both parties have invested their leaderships with greater powers to manage and advance the parties' agendas. The result has been intense disagreements over most major policies, and a bitter personalization of interparty conflicts. With regard to electoral competition, the election of 1994 had shifted majority control to the GOP, but it was by a narrow margin and the margins have gotten narrower since. In the wake of every election since 1994, which party would control both the House and Senate after the next election was put in doubt. As a consequence, each party's choices regarding policy during each Congress have been strongly shaped by calculations about how their behavior would affect party fortunes in the next election. Uncertainty about who would have majority status has undermined cross-party cooperation and compromise.

So my view is that increasing preference conflict and intensified electoral competition have led to greater policy deadlock and have reduced bipartisanship. Thus the prospects for the next decade in Congress depend (at least in significant part) on what is likely to happen with regard to these two independent variables. First, there seems to be no prospect in the near future for a significant change in the preference patterns of the two parties. The differences between Democrats and Republicans spring from sharp differences over policy among rank-and-file voters, and particularly among activists. Disagreements over abortion and other cultural issues, over tax cuts, over the scope of the federal government, and a host of other issues are not likely to disappear or even to be significantly muted. These disagreements are not merely positions taken for electoral purposes. Rather they reflect in most instances real and principled differences about desirable policy. Moreover, the disagreements continue to be reinforced by events and actions that intensify the personalization of partisan conflict and lead members to mistrust the motives of those from the opposite party. The conflict over Clinton's impeachment was one such event, and it appears that the fight over the results of the 2000 presidential election is another.

Similarly, for the immediate future, the close electoral competition will remain as well. Indeed, the results of the 2000 elections have intensified the situation further. With a fifty-fifty split in the 107th Senate, control for the108th would be affected by the net shift of only one seat in the 2002 elections (as well as, possibly, by the intervention of the grim reaper during the next two years). In the House, the GOP margin is razor thin, and that certainly presages another intense battle over majority control in 2002. The prospects there will, of course, be significantly affected by the results of the battles over redistricting in many states during the next two years. Thus even more than in the recent past, the legislative choices of members - and especially of party leaders - will have significant potential for effects on the next election.

Unlike the matter of the distribution of preferences, however, there is some real chance for a shift in the electoral balance. It is well known that the historical pattern is for losses by the president's party in midterm elections, particularly in the House. This pattern may well be reinforced given unified Republican control, because the public may hold the controlling party responsible if little were accomplished. (This is likely even if the people think both parties are at fault, as was true in 1994.) Thus if there were a major shift in the balance of seats in both chambers in the 2002 elections, the continuous battle over majority control might be removed as an important influence. Short of that, the ambition for majority status and intense preference disagreement will likely continue to interact and shape the politics of Congress over the next decade. I am not saying that nothing can get done. There are always many pieces of legislation that are not conflictual, and some of those are consequential. Moreover, at least at the beginning of 2001, President Bush is likely to make a special effort to reach across party lines. However, as the 107th Congress proceeds, the strong underlying forces I have discussed will almost certainly reassert themselves, and that is also likely to be true of subsequent Congresses as long as these conditions continue.