American Parties in Context

Comparative and Historical Analysis

Robert Harmel, Matthew Giebert, Kenneth Janda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781135015428
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Roughly sixty-five years ago, a group of political scientists operating as the "Committee on Political Parties" of the American Political Association thought long and hard about whether the American parties were adequately serving their democracy, and made specific recommendations for improvements. Comparing the parties of this country to those of Great Britain, the Committee found the American parties to be lacking in such fundamentals as clear policy differences, strong and effective organization, and unity of purpose among each party's representatives in public offices.

Starting from that background, this book is intended to significantly enhance students' understanding of the American parties today by putting them in broader context. How do the twenty-first century Democrats and Republicans compare to the APSA Committee's "responsible parties model" of the mid-twentieth? And how do the American parties compare to parties of other democracies around the world, including especially the British parties?

Harmel, Giebert, and Janda answer those questions and, in the process, demonstrate that the American parties have moved significantly in the direction of the responsible parties model, but while showing little inclination for implementing the greater discipline the Committee thought essential. Already having provided as much ideological choice as the British parties, the US parties have now edged closer on the other critical requirement of legislative cohesion. The authors show that the latter has resulted "naturally" from the greater homogenization of the meaning of "Democrat" and "Republican" across the country, both within the electorate and now within Congress as well. The dramatic increase in cohesion is not the product of greater party discipline, but rather of sectoral realignments.

1 Introduction

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 “serve to Organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to 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.” Madison, in Federalist Number 10, equated “party” with “faction,” which he defined as “a 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.” To Washington, the effect of parties was “baneful;” to Madison, factions caused “mischief.”

Despite their concerns, however, such leaders recognized at the same time the inevitability of factionalism (or as they sometimes called it, “party spirit”). Washington wrote that the spirit of party “is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind” and Madison that “the latent causes of faction are … sewn in the nature of man.” 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 witnessed—and to significant degrees participated in—the 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: “When 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 … 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.” 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 “geographical” 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 “ideological” 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 internally—and so different from one another in their special interests—that 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 framers’ 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 “European type.”

The Argument for Stronger Parties

In the middle of the twentieth century, a group of American parties’ 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 country’s 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 party’s 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 “Responsible Parties Report,” 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 “responsible parties model” were: (1) build more effective party organization; (2) strengthen the national level of the party vis-à-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 parties’ 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 “necessary requisites” for the more obvious objectives. How, the Committee wondered, could party unity be accomplished without the threat of discipline—be it in removal of important committee assignments or in disfavor toward pet projects or whatever—and 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 “the party’s” 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 “where they were” to “where they would like them to be.” 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, which—along with greater clarity of issue positions within each party and greater clarity of differences between them—would 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

• Create Party Council to adopt and interpret platforms • Platforms adopted every two years

Organization

• National Conventions held every two years • Fewer delegates and alternates at national conventions • Convention delegates apportioned by party strength in states • National Committee maintains national party headquarters • National Committee raises adequate funding • Larger permanent professional staffs for national committees • Candidate nominations made in closed primaries • More pre-primary conventions

Decentralization

• National Convention more active in selection of National Committee members • National Committee members reflect party strength of areas they represent • Create Party Council to make recommendations about Congressional candidates • Create Party Council to discipline state/local parties deserting national platform • Require state platforms to be adopted after national platform • State and local platforms made to conform to the national platform • Adopt a national presidential primary

Cohesion

• Make platforms binding on all party officeholders at all levels • Members of Congress to participate more actively in platform-writing • Consolidate all House and Senate leadership positions into one committee • Parties hold more frequent Congressional caucus/conference meetings • Caucus/conference decisions on legislative policy are binding on Members of Congress • No Committee Chairmanships by seniority for opponents of party programs • Replace Rules Committee control of the legislative calendar with leadership control

* Table entries adopted/adapted from Ranney (1973) and Green and Herrnson (2002).

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Argument for More Responsible Parties
• 2 Ideology: How Different Are the Parties?
• 3 Organization: How Well Organized Are the Parties?
• 4 Decentralization: Where Does the Power Lie?
• 5 Cohesion: How Unified Are the Parties?
• 6 Conclusion: Voting and Governing with More “Responsible” Parties
• Appendix A: Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System: Summary and Conclusions
• Appendix B: Data for Exercises 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 5.2
• Appendix C: Information for Exercise 5.1
• References
• Index