The Argument for More Responsible Parties
I think that a certain degree of polarization is healthy in a democracy. It clarifies choices people have in elections, and it helps voters to hold the parties accountable for their performance.
(Alan Abramowitz, cited in Rettig 2010)
For two centuries, thoughtful observers of American politics have debated the virtues vs. the drawbacks of political parties for representative governance. In the earliest days, even before the development of the first true party organizations, such important figures as George Washington and James Madison argued that parties would serve only to emphasize special interests to the detriment of the common good. Washington, for instance, warned in his farewell address that parties āserve to Organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary forceāto put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprizing minority of the Community.ā Madison, in Federalist Number 10, equated āpartyā with āfaction,ā which he defined as āa number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.ā To Washington, the effect of parties was ābaneful;ā to Madison, factions caused āmischief.ā
Despite their concerns, however, such leaders recognized at the same time the inevitability of factionalism (or as they sometimes called it, āparty spiritā). Washington wrote that the spirit of party āis inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mindā and Madison that āthe latent causes of faction are ā¦ sewn in the nature of man.ā And thus, the project would be not so much how to keep parties from forming, but rather how to control their bad effects. Indeed, the framers witnessedāand to significant degrees participated ināthe formation of the first modern political parties, the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans, during the first few decades under the current Constitution.
The Legacy of the Framers
The parties that grew up on American soil, though, would continue to bear certain attributes that not only reflected the anti-party environment in which they were born, but also would set them apart from parties formed later in European democracies, including the United Kingdom. The first American parties were not, after all, the work of national-level political architects attempting to form well-oiled machines to spite the concerns of Washington and others. As noted by Joseph Charles in his treatise on the development of the American party system: āWhen we see the way in which the first popular party in the United States came into being, with its roots in Committees of Correspondence like those of Revolutionary times and its forms shaped by the local institutions of the middle states, we ā¦ see that it was a product of adjustment and growth, that it did not spring fullblown from the forehead of Jefferson or of anyone else.ā Having been formed initially from preexisting electoral committees at more local levels,1 the American national parties would never be given the degree of control over their local organizations or even their elected officials that has traditionally been exercised by many parties (especially those on the left) of European democracies.
Although Washington was particularly concerned about āgeographicalā parties tearing the new country apart, and Madison was particularly concerned about the possible development of class-based parties, the reality is that the first American parties were in effect doing battle over a set of sometimes crosscutting interests (including religious, geographical, economic, and class-based). Unlike European āideologicalā parties that developed later from social classes and movements, the American parties were and would remain more concerned over forging a successful electoral coalition than promoting a particular philosophy.
Washington and Madison and their peers were seemingly concerned over parties that would be so strong and cohesive internallyāand so different from one another in their special interestsāthat good, fair, reasonable governance would be impossible to maintain without thoughtful vigilance and structural safeguards. That the parties that eventually developed here could ultimately be described as weak, incohesive, and non-programmatic might well have lessened the framersā concerns. But those very features would serve later to fuel a different set of concerns for another group of party thinkers: those who would actually come to favor stronger parties of the āEuropean type.ā
The Argument for Stronger Parties
In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of American partiesā scholars were commissioned by the American Political Science Association to take a thoughtful look at the American parties, assess their strengths and weaknesses in serving their countryās democracy and citizenry, and prescribe solutions for the weaknesses. Upon concluding that the American parties were ill-equipped to serve either democracy or citizenry, the Committee on Political Parties looked to the British system, in particular, for solutions. Whereas the two major British parties offered clear programmatic choices to their voters, and could promise to discipline their elected officials who failed to live up to the partyās promises, the American parties seemed ill-equipped to do either. How, the Committee wondered, could voters use party labels to hold officials accountable if (1) the parties failed to provide clear differences on the issues and (2) they lacked the tools for disciplining elected officials who ignored whatever promises their party did make? Those observations and arguments are found in one of the most oft-cited documents on the American parties: what is commonly referred to as the āResponsible Parties Report,ā first circulated in 1950.
In the Report, the Committee made a number of specific recommendations (see Table 1.1). Those that were most clearly and directly associated with the āresponsible parties modelā were: (1) build more effective party organization; (2) strengthen the national level of the party vis-Ć -vis its more local levels of organization; (3) clarify the programmatic differences between the two major parties; and (4) develop means of discipline so as to assure greater behavioral cohesion within each party.
With the end goal of providing voters with party labels that would be meaningful guides to how candidates would actually behave if elected into government, it seems obvious enough why it would be necessary to have (1) clear programmatic differences between the parties and (2) elected government officials who would stick with the partiesā positions and not wander off on their own.
Less clear is why better organization and more centralized party power would be seen as so important. Indeed, those are better thought of as ānecessary requisitesā for the more obvious objectives. How, the Committee wondered, could party unity be accomplished without the threat of disciplineābe it in removal of important committee assignments or in disfavor toward pet projects or whateverāand how could discipline be accomplished without significantly more power resting at the national level of the party? And how could the national level be powerful in the absence of substantially greater organization? After all, what they believed they saw in the American national parties was organizational weakness and lack of resources with which to effectively control their own business, much less control candidates and even state and local parties with the same name. The consequence of these weaknesses, it seemed to them, would be elected officials and local branches free to promote their own causes regardless of inconsistency with āthe partyāsā wishes, with the end results of muddied messages and labels that signaled little about actual behavior in government.
Though the Committee never actually presented it in this way themselves, we might see in their prescriptions something of a road map for getting the parties from āwhere they wereā to āwhere they would like them to be.ā Greater organizational complexity would be necessary for greater nationalization of party power, and the latter would be necessary for the discipline required to force greater cohesion, whichāalong with greater clarity of issue positions within each party and greater clarity of differences between themāwould be necessary in order to make the party label a more useful tool for voters in deciding whom to support and in holding elected officials accountable.
Table 1.1 Detailed Recommendations of the APSA Committee*
Ideology |
ā¢ Create Party Council to adopt and interpret platforms ā¢ Platforms adopted every two years |
Organization |
ā¢ National Conventions held every two years ā¢ Fewer delegates and alternates at national conventions ā¢ Convention delegates apportioned by party strength in states ā¢ National Committee maintains national party headquarters ā¢ National Committee raises adequate funding ā¢ Larger permanent professional staffs for national committees ā¢ Candidate nominations made in closed primaries ā¢ More pre-primary conventions |
Decentralization |
ā¢ National Convention more active in selection of National Committee members ā¢ National Committee members reflect party strength of areas they represent ā¢ Create Party Council to make recommendations about Congressional candidates ā¢ Create Party Council to discipline state/local parties deserting national platform ā¢ Require state platforms to be adopted after national platform ā¢ State and local platforms made to conform to the national platform ā¢ Adopt a national presidential primary |
Cohesion |
ā¢ Make platforms binding on all party officeholders at all levels ā¢ Members of Congress to participate more actively in platform-writing ā¢ Consolidate all House and Senate leadership positions into one committee ā¢ Parties hold more frequent Congressional caucus/conference meetings ā¢ Caucus/conference decisions on legislative policy are binding on Members of Congress ā¢ No Committee Chairmanships by seniority for opponents of party programs ā¢ Replace Rules Committee control of the legislative calendar with leadership control |
Assuming the parties took the road map seriously, we might expect them to look quite different today from what the APSA Committee saw (or at least thought it saw) more than six decades ago.
The American Parties Today
In certain respects, the American parties do look quite different today from what the APSA Committee observed (or at least thought they observed) in the middle of the twen...