The U.S. Government Shutdown of 2013:The Role of Tea Party

This paper tries to explore the role of the Tea Party in the U.S. government shutdown in 2013. As a unique phenomenon in the world, only the U.S. government has experienced several shutdowns and the emergence of the Tea Party movement added a new dimension to the political narrative of the U.S. domestic politics in 2009. Hence, simultaneous study of both phenomena as two very controversial cases in the American political system is sought in this paper. To do so, both phenomena are needed to be examined through their historical contexts. Therefore, the theory of “historical consciousness” introduced by Theodor Schieder (1978) is applied as the theoretical framework and, “historical analysis” is assumed as the proper methodology for data analysis. By referring to Boston Tea Party as an iconic event in the American history that gave birth to the idea of the Tea Party in the American political mind, this thesis identifies the core principles of the Tea Party as the same throughout the history. Tea Partiers regard big governments as threats to individual’s liberty. Therefore, the notion of limited government is placed at the center of Tea Party ideology. This research investigates the means by which the Tea Party succeeded to mobilize and unify all potentialities to form a resistance force for defunding ObamaCare and succeed to prevent passing every appropriations including provisions for funding ObamaCare in the House of Representatives. Therefore, the lack of needed appropriations for funding the government, finally led to the government shutdown of 2013.