As expected, the Republicans will be the majority in the House of Representatives and have the power of filibuster in the Senate for at least the next two years.

Conventional wisdom holds that this is more of a very bad thing, at least for those who would like to get anything done. The Republican Party spent the last two years almost monolithically opposed to anything proposed by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, all during a time when Democrats held a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

It paid off: the Republicans were rewarded for standing athwart history, yelling “stop” with six more seats in the Senate and over 60 in the House of Representatives. If this strategy of opposing the president’s every move worked so well to ensure victory in the midterms, why shouldn’t the Republicans exploit it for another two years to gain the presidency as well?

Luckily for us, if recent history is an accurate guide, the outlook will not be so bleak.

For the past 40 years, our greatest examples of efficient government have been accomplished during periods of divided government, while failure tends to accompany one-party dominance. Both houses were under Democratic control during Jimmy Carter’s lackluster presidency, while the Democrats held the House of Representatives during both of Ronald Reagan’s presidential terms. Republicans controlled both houses during Bill Clinton’s popular and effective last six years, but also between 2003 and 2007, the most disastrous years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Most recently, the Democrats have held huge Congressional majorities for the last two years, which have seen a failed push for environmental reform, a convoluted, concession-diluted health care law that will not reduce premiums and a popular backlash bigger than the Republican Revolution of 1994.

Why is it easier to pass meaningful reforms and remain popular when your own party isn’t the majority? The answer lies in the incentives for the members of both parties to derail the political process.

The party in the minority has every reason to gum up legislation that they deem partisan ­— which is what legislation becomes in practice when no minority votes to support it. At this point, the majority needs to scrape together almost all the votes in their own party to pass legislation, so any bills considered will need to appeal to the center of the majority party, which in the modern era means quite a ways left or right of the public. Centrist party members use their new status as the swing votes to demand goodies for their pet special interests or constituencies. As a result, any final piece of legislation will be condemned by the minority as extreme and corrupt, the best reasons to throw the bums out. Rinse, wash, repeat, and watch the votes roll in.

We observed this process at work last year, when not one Republican joined the majority in either house to vote for health care reform, while Democrats in the Senate like Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, Arkansas’ Blanche Lincoln, and Michigan’s Bart Stupak demanded concessions to be the swing votes that pushed the legislation past the post. Conservatives, who were not going to vote Democrat regardless, got angry and took to the polls in record numbers, while Obama’s support among independents dropped from 62 percent when he took office to 41 percent this month, according Gallup.

With the beginning of the 112th U.S. Congress in January comes the chance to do things differently. If Republicans in the House refuse to contribute meaningful ideas and vote for compromises, they will not be able to claim that the Democrats are being too extreme when they have no other choice than to include Republicans in their coalition. Democrats will lose the means to continue running this country from the left and will be forced to reach out to the Republicans.

Unfortunately, while it’s still unlikely that Congress will suddenly start planning for the long-term future and enact policies like the Bowles-Simpson budget plan, at the very least the parties will have to listen to each other and propose policies that appeal to more than just one ideology.

In a country where independents now outnumber both Republicans and Democrats and the cores of both parties have shrunk to more shrill and partisan cores, this is exactly what we need.

— Patrick O’Bryan, economics and letters sophomore