Frances E. Lee

In today's episode, we're shifting gears and moving to a new zone of storytelling, namely the United States Congress, to talk about the functionality and dysfunctionality of congressional storytelling.

In early August 2026, I sat down with my friend and colleague, Casey Burgett, Casey is the director of the Legislative Affairs Program at the George Washington University and host of its Mastering the Room podcast, which poses the question, is there any common ground left in our hyper-politicized world? In addressing the question of why Congress is so broken and what might be done to fix it, Cayce often starts by talking about a concept that his dissertation advisor, the political scientist Frances Lee, proposed in her book Insecure Majorities, Congress and the Perpetual Campaign.

I asked Casey to start by telling us a little bit about how this idea of insecure majorities has shaped his thinking about the operations of Congress in the contemporary world.

It was really a very simple concept that ended up being an incredibly insightful concept explaining the incentive structure within Congress.

I guess, yeah, I'm thinking maybe it makes sense also to connect this.

Frances Lee's argument has a similar flavor.

It's not the same exact argument, but it has a similar flavor where she's saying...

there are a bunch of, you know, good moderate policies that aren't getting passed and the parties in Congress are behaving in these really partisan extreme ways, partly because they want to lead the voters to think that no compromise is possible.