The United States House of Representatives removed Kevin McCarthy as Speaker on Tuesday, something that had never happened before in American history. Eight Republicans joined all Democrats who voted to support a motion introduced by Republican Matt Gaetz, producing a 216–210 majority to remove McCarthy. The immediate dispute concerned McCarthy’s decision days earlier to pass a temporary government-funding measure with substantial Democratic support, avoiding a shutdown hours before federal funding expired. The result creates a strange political incentive: one of the actions most recognisably associated with governing, constructing enough compromise to keep the government functioning, contributed directly to the Speaker losing his job.
McCarthy’s removal cannot be understood entirely through that funding vote. His position had been fragile from the moment he became Speaker in January, when it took 15 rounds of voting for Republicans to elect him despite controlling the House. To obtain enough support from the party’s right flank, McCarthy accepted several concessions, including making it considerably easier for an individual member to initiate a vote attempting to remove the Speaker. The procedural concession helped him obtain power in January and ultimately helped destroy that power nine months later.
This is an unusually clear example of how institutional rules change political incentives. Political personalities matter, and Gaetz’s hostility towards McCarthy was clearly important. But the conflict became capable of removing a Speaker because rules gave a very small faction substantial leverage over leadership. A narrow congressional majority amplified that leverage further because McCarthy could lose only a handful of Republicans before requiring Democratic support.
This makes the House resemble a coalition government more than America’s two-party system usually suggests. Republicans formally constitute one party, but the conference contains factions with substantially different preferences over spending, Ukraine, institutional compromise and how aggressively congressional power should be used against the Biden administration. The party label compresses those differences without eliminating them.
In a proportional parliamentary system such as the Netherlands, some of these factions might exist as separate parties and negotiate a coalition agreement openly. The American electoral system places them inside one organisation and then expects the organisation to behave like a coherent majority.
Fragmentation therefore occurs within the party rather than between parties.
The difference matters because internal coalitions have fewer formal mechanisms for resolving disagreement. A Dutch party can leave government and trigger coalition negotiations. A Republican faction dissatisfied with its leadership cannot easily leave the Republican Party without making Democratic electoral victories more likely. Instead, it exercises leverage through congressional procedures, leadership contests and threats to block legislation.
McCarthy’s speakership became dependent on managing that internal coalition.
The government-funding dispute exposed the limits of the arrangement. Hard-line Republicans wanted deeper spending reductions and objected to passing another short-term measure maintaining government funding. McCarthy faced a basic arithmetic problem: the House Republican conference did not contain enough agreement to pass a funding package capable of surviving the Democratic-controlled Senate and receiving President Biden’s signature.
He therefore had two broad options. Refuse compromise and allow much of the federal government to shut down, or use Democratic votes to pass legislation that could actually become law.
He chose the second.
That decision illustrates the difference between position-taking and governing. Position-taking means demonstrating what you prefer. Governing means producing an outcome through institutions containing actors who disagree with you. In a divided political system, those are fundamentally different activities.
A Republican representative can demand a spending level knowing Democrats will never accept it. That demand communicates ideological commitment to voters without needing to solve the bargaining problem. A Speaker needs enough votes to produce legislation acceptable to the House, Senate and president.
The closer a politician gets to institutional responsibility, the harder ideological purity becomes.
This should create incentives for moderation.
Increasingly, American politics can create the opposite.
Politicians receive attention, fundraising and media visibility by demonstrating confrontation with the opposing party and sometimes with their own leadership. Compromise produces fewer dramatic clips because the final legislation usually contains provisions nobody loves enough to celebrate.
The politician refusing compromise can say, “I fought.”
The politician constructing compromise has to say, “I accepted something I disliked because the alternative was worse.”
The first message is easier to campaign on.
This creates what might be called a governance penalty. Politicians responsible for making institutions function must internalise the costs of failure, while politicians primarily rewarded for ideological signalling can externalise those costs onto leadership and the wider public.
If the government shuts down, millions of citizens and federal workers bear consequences.
An individual representative can still tell supporters they refused to surrender.
The national cost is dispersed.
The political benefit can be concentrated.
That is a classic externality.
Primary elections intensify the mechanism. Many congressional districts are sufficiently partisan that the incumbent’s greatest electoral risk comes not from the opposing party in November but from a more ideological challenger during the party primary.
A Republican representing a heavily Republican district therefore may gain little electorally from appealing to centrist Democrats while risking substantial support if conservative voters believe they compromised excessively. Democratic politicians in heavily Democratic districts can face an equivalent incentive from the left.
The electoral system can therefore reward polarisation even when national voters prefer compromise.
This is why gerrymandering is relevant but not a complete explanation. Geographic sorting means Americans increasingly live around people with similar political preferences even without manipulated district boundaries. Primaries then allow a relatively small and politically engaged electorate to influence which candidates reach general elections.
The median primary voter can be more ideological than the median national voter.
Politicians respond rationally to the electorate capable of removing them.
McCarthy faced another problem because congressional politics has become increasingly personalised. Historically, party leaders possessed tools for disciplining members through committee assignments, fundraising and control over legislative opportunities. Those mechanisms have weakened as individual politicians build independent fundraising networks and national audiences through social media and partisan media.
A backbench representative can now possess millions of followers and raise substantial money by attacking their own leadership.
Political entrepreneurs therefore need parties less than parties once needed them.
This changes the balance of power between leadership and factions.
A stronger decentralised Congress might sound democratically attractive because leadership possesses less control. But decentralisation can create coordination problems when individual members gain the ability to block collective action without acquiring responsibility for producing an alternative.
Veto power and governing responsibility become separated.
This is one of the most dangerous institutional combinations. If I can stop your proposal but do not need to construct one capable of replacing it, obstruction becomes relatively cheap.
The US Senate demonstrates a similar problem through the filibuster, although through different procedures. Political systems often create veto points to prevent majorities from exercising power too easily. Those vetoes protect minorities and encourage deliberation.
Too many veto points can make ordinary government extraordinarily difficult.
Again, democratic institutional design balances constraint and governability.
A system with no constraints can become majoritarian authoritarianism.
A system containing too many independent veto players can become incapable of making decisions citizens elected it to make.
The United States deliberately contains many veto points: House, Senate, presidency, courts, federalism and internal congressional procedures. That architecture was designed partly around suspicion of concentrated power.
The modern party system has layered intense polarisation on top of it.
Institutions designed under assumptions of bargaining become harder to operate when political actors increasingly treat compromise as betrayal.
The debt-ceiling confrontation earlier this year demonstrated the same mechanism. Republicans used the possibility of default to create leverage over spending. Eventually McCarthy and Biden negotiated a compromise because neither side wanted the economic consequences of failing to act.
That compromise angered parts of McCarthy’s conference.
Now another compromise has contributed to his removal.
The repeated signal to future Speakers is potentially dangerous: solving crises through bipartisan bargaining can threaten your political survival.
Institutions learn through incentives.
If McCarthy’s successor observes what happened and concludes that relying on Democratic votes is personally dangerous, they may be less willing to compromise during the next funding deadline or debt confrontation.
One leadership removal can therefore change future bargaining behaviour even if the formal rules remain unchanged.
This is why political instability can become self-reinforcing.
A fragile leader makes concessions to factions to obtain office.
Those concessions make leadership more fragile.
Fragility increases factional leverage.
Greater factional leverage makes compromise harder.
Failure to compromise increases institutional instability.
The solution cannot simply be finding a stronger personality.
The incentive structure matters.
Democrats also had a choice this week. They could theoretically have supplied enough votes to save McCarthy. Instead, they voted overwhelmingly for his removal, arguing that McCarthy had repeatedly broken agreements and could not be trusted.
That decision was politically rational. Democrats had little obligation to preserve a Republican Speaker whose agenda they opposed, particularly after months of conflict.
But it reveals another collective-action problem.
Democrats may prefer a functioning House to institutional chaos.
They may also reasonably conclude that maintaining Republican internal stability is the Republican Party’s responsibility.
Every actor can therefore behave rationally while the institution collectively becomes less functional.
This is why assigning responsibility in polarised systems becomes difficult. Republicans control the House and therefore bear primary responsibility for constructing a governing majority. Democrats remain participants in the institution and can influence whether that majority functions.
Opposition parties are not required to rescue governments.
Yet political systems sometimes require cross-party cooperation precisely because governing coalitions cannot solve problems internally.
There is no rule guaranteeing the opposition will provide that cooperation.
Trust becomes crucial.
McCarthy’s relationship with Democrats had deteriorated partly because Democrats believed he repeatedly made agreements and then retreated under pressure from his own conference. A leader asking opponents to rescue him therefore needed credibility accumulated through previous bargaining.
He did not possess enough.
Again, political trust behaves like capital.
It accumulates slowly and becomes valuable during crisis.
A politician who repeatedly maximises short-term advantage can discover during an emergency that nobody believes their promises.
The cost appears only when cooperation becomes necessary.
The Speaker’s removal also matters because the House cannot conduct ordinary legislative business normally until it chooses another Speaker. At a time when Congress faces another government-funding deadline, debates over aid to Ukraine and numerous domestic priorities, the chamber has effectively interrupted its own governing capacity because its majority cannot agree on who should lead it.
This is political opportunity cost.
Every day spent resolving internal leadership conflict is a day not spent legislating.
The United States is wealthy and institutionally strong enough to absorb considerable political inefficiency.
That should not make inefficiency irrelevant.
State capacity depends partly on political institutions being capable of authorising what administrative institutions need to do.
A professional civil service cannot compensate indefinitely for a legislature unable to pass budgets.
The Ukraine question makes the timing especially consequential. American support remains central to Ukraine’s military capacity, but opposition to additional aid has grown among parts of the Republican Party. McCarthy had been attempting to manage that divide while preserving enough support for government funding.
His removal gives the anti-aid faction additional leverage because choosing a new Speaker may require concessions on future Ukraine legislation.
This connects directly to Slovakia last week.
Ukraine’s long-term vulnerability lies partly in the domestic political systems of countries supporting it.
Russia does not need to influence every American voter directly.
It benefits whenever Western political fragmentation makes long-term assistance harder to sustain.
That does not mean politicians opposing additional Ukraine aid are Russian agents or acting illegitimately. American representatives have every right to question expenditure abroad and demand clearer objectives.
The relevant point is institutional: foreign-policy commitments depend on domestic coalition management.
A superpower can possess enormous military resources while struggling politically to authorise their use.
Material capacity and political capacity are different variables.
The United States possesses more than enough economic resources to keep its government operating.
It nearly shut down anyway.
It possesses enough representatives to elect a Speaker.
It currently does not have one.
These are not resource constraints.
They are coordination constraints.
That distinction may be increasingly important for understanding American power. Analysts often measure national strength through GDP, military expenditure, population and technology. Those indicators describe resources.
Political institutions determine whether resources can be mobilised coherently.
A country can therefore become weaker strategically without becoming poorer if its political system becomes less capable of making collective decisions.
Polarisation imposes an institutional tax.
Every negotiation takes longer.
Every compromise requires more political capital.
Every election threatens larger policy reversals.
Businesses face more regulatory uncertainty.
Allies become less certain that commitments will survive changes in government.
Adversaries gain incentives to wait for domestic politics to change.
None of these costs appears directly in GDP.
They still affect national power.
This is why American political dysfunction matters internationally. The Speaker of the House is technically a domestic legislative office. Removing one affects expectations in Kyiv, Brussels, Beijing and Moscow because foreign governments need to estimate whether the United States can sustain policies across electoral cycles.
Institutional credibility is therefore a component of geopolitical credibility.
The irony is that American constitutional fragmentation is also one reason the system has remained resilient. Presidents cannot easily dominate Congress. Opposition parties possess substantial power. Courts can constrain government. States retain independent authority.
The same veto points that prevent concentrated power can obstruct collective action.
There is no institutional design that maximises both constraint and decisiveness simultaneously.
The challenge is maintaining enough political norms that actors use vetoes selectively rather than treating every available procedural weapon as ordinary politics.
Norms matter because constitutions cannot specify how aggressively every power should be used.
A member may legally possess the ability to initiate a motion removing the Speaker.
The institution still depends on expectations about when doing so is appropriate.
Once exceptional procedures become normalised, future politicians inherit a wider set of accepted tactics.
This is institutional escalation.
One party breaks a norm because the stakes feel exceptional.
The other responds later.
The precedent remains.
Political competition gradually moves towards the maximum behaviour formally permitted by the rules.
The constitution does not change.
The political system operating inside it does.
McCarthy’s removal may therefore matter less because one politician lost an office than because it expands the range of tactics congressional factions now know can succeed.
Future Speakers will negotiate with that precedent in mind.
That could make leadership more accountable to ordinary members.
It could also make leadership almost impossible under narrow majorities.
We do not know yet.
What we can already see is the incentive.
Kevin McCarthy made several compromises to become Speaker.
He made another compromise to prevent a shutdown.
The first made him vulnerable.
The second helped trigger the revolt that removed him.
That sequence should concern anyone who wants American government to function regardless of whether they particularly like McCarthy.
Democracy requires disagreement.
It requires opposition.
It requires politicians willing to fight over genuinely important differences.
But eventually somebody has to convert those differences into budgets, laws and institutions capable of operating.
If the political system increasingly punishes whoever performs that conversion, compromise becomes irrational for the people whose careers depend on avoiding it.
Then dysfunction stops being an accident.
It becomes the equilibrium.
