Although “gridlock” is said to have entered the political lexicon after the 1980 elections, stalemate is not a modern legislative invention. Indeed, in the very first Federalist, Alexander Hamilton complained about the “unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government” under the Articles of Confederation. Although stalemate may be endemic to American politics, no definitive account of its proportions or causes yet exists. In this article, I survey recent work, propose a new measure of gridlock, and test several alternative accounts of variation in gridlock over the last half-century.

There is no shortage of scholarship on the politics of gridlock. Most prominent is the work of Mayhew, who rejects the conventional wisdom that divided party control of Congress and the presidency dampens the legislative output of government. Subsequent work takes Mayhew as the point of departure, revisiting the questions he raised and researched. This project returns as well to Mayhew's work, probing in a new fashion the contours of gridlock in American national politics.