Divided government and gridlock in the United States | Khan Academy

We have this diagram here, party divisions of the United States Congress. What this helps us visualize is which parties controlled the various houses of Congress, as well as which party was in control of the White House. For example, during Lyndon Johnson's administration, he was a Democrat; that's why it is colored in blue. Then we see in this light blue color that the Senate leaned towards the Democrats, and the House in this dark blue color leaned towards the Democrats as well.

But then, when you get to Richard Nixon, you have one party, the Republicans, controlling the White House, while the other party, the Democrats, controlled Congress. This situation right over here is known as a divided government. As we look down this diagram, we see that it is not that unusual. Gerald Ford had a divided government. Ronald Reagan had a somewhat divided government, where the House significantly leaned towards the Democrats, although the Senate started to lean a little bit towards the Republicans.

If we go further down in time, we see more and more divided governments. If we go all the way down to at least the present when this video was created, we see that George H.W. Bush faced a divided government. He was a Republican; you had the House and the Senate lean towards the Democrats. Bill Clinton at the beginning wasn't divided, but most of his administration had a divided government. George W. Bush had a divided government near the end of his administration, and Obama dealt with a divided government during the second half of his first term and his second term.

One question is, why does it matter if you have a divided government, like we had let's say in this time period right over here? Well, one negative of it that some people will often cite is that you might have some form of extreme partisanship. Partisanship is just a word that says that the various political actors will think more about their party and their political ideology than maybe what is in their best interest for the people. They would try to do things in order to get political points as opposed to just good governance.

One byproduct of partisanship would be a phenomenon known as gridlock. You might have heard the word gridlock before when it comes to traffic. Gridlock is when there's just so much traffic that nothing is moving; people just can't get around. It essentially means the same thing in a political context. If you have a divided government and one party isn't allowing if everything that Congress passes, the president vetoes, or if everything that the president wants to do, Congress doesn't want to work along with them, then nothing might happen, and you might get to a gridlock situation. For a lot of people, that's a significant negative.

However, there are some viewpoints that maybe a divided government isn't as bad as it sometimes looks. Some people would argue that you don't want the government always doing exactly what they want. When you have a non-divided government, in fact, if you have a divided government, they'll only do things that really, really, really, really matter, where there is more of a broad consensus.

There's also this view from Mitch McConnell, who's the current leader of the U.S. Senate, that it's actually easier to get things done during a divided government. This is a part of an article from the New York Times written in 2011. It says, "Divided government is the