A history of norm violations

Their definition is in the eye of the beholder

Rep. John Lewis leads a sit-in on the House floor to demand gun control regulation in 2016 — this was seen as a norm violation

In an attempt to understand how the parties have behaved and changed in recent year, my thoughts inevitably turned to the subject of norm violations. Which party has engaged in more norm violations in recent years, and what has been the nature of those? It turns out to be a tricky question.

To be clear, “norms” are the largely-unwritten rules that keep a government, even a society, running. Particularly in a governmental system where the Constitution is brief, vague, and more than two centuries old, norms evolve over the years to enable government to run smoothly and to prevent extreme or unpredictable outcomes. The violation of a norm often comes with some kind of punishment.

Importantly, just because something is a norm does not make it inherently good. The peaceful transfer of presidential power is a good (pro-democratic) norm, helping build legitimacy for an incoming administration and minimizing factional violence. Racial segregation in schools, or the idea that only men should serve in Congress, were also norms; we welcome their violation. But generally, we hold some value in the existing norms that keep Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court running, and when norms are repeatedly violated in this area, it can create instability and even danger in a democracy.

To try to get a sense of patterns of norm violations, I did a search of the terms “norm” and “violate/violation” as it applied to the major political parties in two major publications: The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. I specifically focused on events where one party or party leader was being blamed for a norm violation. I did not include events that were described as norm violations in the media but where a party wasn’t being assigned blame. e.g.: the quashing of campus pro-Palestine encampments, or the leaking of the Dobbs decision.

I focused my search on events from 2010 to the present day, just recording the violation itself, rather than the number of stories it generated. So this definitely flattens the data to a considerable extent. “Trump weighs in on AT&T / Time-Warner deal” is a datapoint, as is “Trump organizes violent rally on Mall to thwart Biden’s inauguration.” But I was really interested in the number of events rather than an estimation of their importance.

You can view the data here. It doesn’t lend itself well to a detailed graphic, but below I have summarized the number of violations by year.

A couple of key lessons here stand out:

• The period after 2016 is very different from that before. Indeed, almost every norm violation after 2016 has some reference to Donald Trump.

• Unsurprisingly, The Wall Street Journal reports almost solely Democrats norm violations, while the Post reports almost solely Republican ones.

• Nearly every Democratic violation after 2016 is about the Democrats’ response to a Republican violation. For example, investigations of Trump’s norm violations in the wake of the 2020 election are portrayed in the Journal as violations of their own, examples of Democratic overreach in Congress and the Biden White House. And yes, in the abstract, indicting a former president was an unprecedented act, and could fairly be called the violation of some norm, although that conveniently leaves out just what Trump did to invite that indictment.

• The term “norm violation” is definitely a Trump-era phrase. It was occasionally used to refer to a few things earlier than that, such as Senate Republicans quashing a vote on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, or the 2013 budget shutdown, but it wasn’t really in common usage. Those things were sometimes referred to as “hardball” or some other term.

Anyway, this is just one approach to tracking this. I’m definitely open to suggestions, but please feel free to peruse the dataset.