Chapter 4 examines how collaboration varies across issue area and policy substance. Dear Colleague letters are classified into one of twenty issue areas based on the comparative agendas project coding scheme, and for each issue area, the proportions of letters that are noncollaborative, bipartisan, and partisan are identified. Examining why some issues are more collaborative than others reveals that collaboration – particularly bipartisan collaboration – is more common on issues that do not fall neatly onto a liberal–conservative scale, where compromise and common ground are easier to find, and on issues that are on the majority party agenda, where there are more opportunities to create policy by incorporating an idea into a larger, moving bill. The second part of the chapter considers the significance of collaborative policy and establishes that members of Congress routinely coauthor substantive policy proposals, and this is not a phenomenon limited to naming of post offices. These findings support the social exchange theory of collaboration by providing evidence of how expected costs and benefits shape the likelihood of collaboration.

While the policy preferences of the masses are purely expressive, the political elite actually make public policy, so the preferences they act on do have instrumental effects. If the masses adopt the policy preferences of the elite, that points to the question of what public policies the elite advocate to the masses. In the same way that economists simplify the motivations of firms to say that firms are profit maximizers, the political elite are power maximizers. That motivation starts with the recognition that politics is adversarial. In elections, some people win while others lose. The same is true in public policy issues. Some win while others lose. The motivation of the political elite is to keep the power they have, and to gain more. In most societies, the political elite is not a monolithic entity. Rather, there are competing members of the elite, with competing public policy ideas. Thus, the masses have a choice of anchors, but once they choose an anchor, most of their policy preferences are derivative of their anchors.