Political Parties

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POLITICAL PARTIES

POLITICAL PARTIES, along with other political organizations (such as Political Action Committees, or PACs) have the ability to increase the political effectiveness of individuals by bringing them into an aggregate. The importance and distinctiveness of parties as political

organizations spring from their domination of electoral politics. Candidates are identified solely by party affiliation on the ballots and, although many candidates in the United States now use television advertisements that omit this information, the party label is still the principal cue for the voter at the polls.

The relationship of the parties to mass electoral politics is apparent in their evolution. Originally, political parties were legislative caucuses and elite nominating organizations. They assumed their modern form with the expansion of the male suffrage in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the parties first gained broad support in the electorate and a network of constituency-based local parties. Thus, they became instruments for organizing and representing the expanding electorates. By the latter half of the century, in fact, they had become instruments by which the new masses of voters wrested control of cities from old patrician and economic elites.

Origin and Development of American Political Parties

The origin and development of the American political parties stand entirely apart from the U.S. Constitution. Nowhere in it are they mentioned or even anticipated. Throughout American history they have been instruments of the democratization of the Constitution as well as a result of that process. The parties and their system of loyalty transformed the electoral college and the entire process of electing an American president into something approaching a majoritarian decision.

Scholars have identified five party systems that arose out of what political scientist V. O. Key called "critical elections," or periods of political realignment. Political participation rose suddenly, after a decline, and key components of a national coalition rearranged themselves. For example, the realignment of 1896 ushered in a generation of Republican dominance of politics in all areas except the South. Newly arrived immigrants affiliated for the first time with the GOP ("Grand Old Party," as the Republican Party is known), because the Republicans addressed themselves to the interests of urban workers by sponsoring protectionism. The Democrats, under William Jennings Bryan, addressed themselves to agrarian issues at the expense of urban interests.

The first party system, of Federalists and Democratic Republicans, took on the character of a mass-based party system after the election of 1800 which featured a dramatic rise in turnout that eventually included the majority of adult white males in most states. This "Revolution of 1800," as well as the first party system collapsed in the 1820s; the Jacksonian, or second party system, followed the critical election of 1828, with two parties that were competitive in every state of the Union, the Whigs and the Democrats. The third party system followed the 1860 election and continued for a generation after the Civil War. In this period, Democrats and Republicans achieved the highest rates of turnout ever recorded in American elections. This party system was driven by deep sectional, religious, ethnic, and racial antagonism. The election of 1896 promoted Republican dominance of American politics until 1932. With the exception of the Wilson years in the White House (1913–1921), the Democrats spent most of this time deeply divided between the agrarian and the urban wings of the party. The fifth party system, following the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, was the model by which Key developed his notion of critical elections. Republicans and Democrats, while retaining some of their sectional and religious differences, primarily appealed to different voters on the basis of their socioeconomic classes rather than their regional or religious backgrounds. Thus for the first time, African Americans, who had always voted for the party of Lincoln, now found their economic interests better addressed by the New Deal Democrats and they altered their party loyalties accordingly. The fifth party system endured until the 1960s, when the Democratic coalition, forged in the New Deal, of labor, immigrants, small farmers, Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and white southerners began to break down. In the chaotic politics of the 1960s, southern whites, Catholics, and labor felt increasingly alienated from what they saw as the "cultural" politics of the 1970s: inclusive politics emphasizing the interests of women, African Americans, and Latinos. During this period, these groups became a swing coalition altering their partisan preferences from election to election, becoming Democrats for Nixon, Democrats for Carter, Reagan Democrats, and Clinton Democrats. The result of this large swing component in the electorate has been what some political scientists call "de-alignment," or the detachment of voter identification from consistent party loyalty.

American parties are also marked by a distinctive, three-part character that sets them apart from other political organizations. They are composed of an identifiable set of committees and activists (the party organization), a group of public officeholders and would-be officeholders (the party in the government), and a large contingent of loyalists who consider themselves to be members of the party (the party in the electorate). Ordinary usage recognizes any of the three sectors as the party, and, as in parties elsewhere, American party organizations and parties in government have contested for supremacy in the party and for control of its symbols and decisions. It is peculiar to the American party system that party organizations have rarely subjected the party's officeholders to even the mildest forms of direction or sanctions.

Special Characteristics of American Parties

While the development of American parties was similar to that of parties in other Western democracies and for most of the same reasons, the American party system has always had special characteristics. In form it has long been marked by considerable decentralization, by nonbureaucratic, skeletal organizations, and by the persistence of only two competitive parties. That is to say, the American parties have always been loose confederations of state and

local party organizations. Never have they developed the strong national executives or committees that parties elsewhere have. Nor have they developed the membership organizations common in the twentieth century in other countries. Largely without formal memberships or career bureaucracies, they have been staffed at most levels—except perhaps within the classic urban machine—by only a few party functionaries investing only limited time and energy in the business of the party. Along with the British parties and few others, the American parties have remained two in number. The parliamentary systems in English-speaking democracies have opted for a first-past the-post system of elections, except in Ireland. This kind of system creates strong incentives for a two-party system to maximize the vote.

Related to these formal organizational characteristics has been the parties' chief functional trait: the pragmatic, almost issueless majoritarianism through which they piece together electoral majorities through strategies of compromise and accommodation. They have been much less involved in the business of doctrine or ideology than similar parties elsewhere. Platforms have revealed only modest differences between the two parties. Periodically one finds movements and candidates within the parties who have been intensely programmatic, but, until the presidency of Ronald Reagan, their records of success, even when they have captured their party's presidential nominations, have not been good.

The American parties have found their major role as nominators and electors of candidates for public office. They waxed in the nineteenth century in their ability to confer the party label on candidates, first in party caucuses and then in the more widely consultative conventions that Jacksonian Democracy favored. Especially during the prevailing one-partyism of so much of American politics at the end of the nineteenth century, the excesses of party power in those nominations led to the advent of the direct primary in the years between 1900 and World War I. By the 1970s, party control of nominations was limited to some degree by primary laws in every state. In several states, to be sure, the primary law left some nominations to party conventions; in others in which it did not, the parties devised ways (especially in preprimary endorsements) of affecting the primary-election outcomes. The quadrennial national conventions at which the parties choose their presidential candidates remain an important but increasingly vestigial remnant of the party's once unchallenged control of nominations.

Control of nominations has shifted away from the party organization to the party in government; the same is true of the control of election campaigns. The vigorous political organizations of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century controlled, even monopolized, the major election resources. Its army of workers publicized the candidates, raised their own campaign funds, and recruited their own workers. And they have been able to find sources of campaign experience other than the party organization—the opinion pollsters, the political public relations firms, the mass media. Just as the primary ended the party organization's monopoly of nominations, the rise of the new campaign expertise threatens its control of the election campaign.

Nonetheless, most American officeholders reach office on the ticket of one of the major American parties. American presidents and governors are party leaders, and in the early part of the twentieth century all state legislatures (except the nonpartisan legislature of Nebraska) were organized along party lines. Beginning in the 1990s, moreover, Congress and, to a lesser extent, the state legislatures began to adopt a more assertive form of partisanship. Beginning with the Republican Party's Contract with America in the 1990s, the House and Senate leadership put into effect an ideologically oriented public policy. In the Contract with America, in budget negotiations with the White House, and with the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, "party votes" roll calls—in which the majority of one party opposed a majority of the other—began to increase, after a decline that had lasted for almost all of the twentieth century.

American presidents, on the other hand, have found it necessary to be less partisan than their congressional colleagues. Building majority support for a president's program, to be successful, has in recent years required votes from the opposition party. Ronald Reagan achieved his legislative successes with the help of the Boll Weevils, the conservative Democrats from the Deep South and Texas who supported his tax-cutting policy. Bill Clinton relied on moderate Republicans not only for assistance in getting his budget bills passed, but also for his very survival in the Senate trial after his impeachment. Despite the president's less partisan approach, it is the president's record that most reflects on the party. The power of the political party has been joined to the power of the presidency. As coalitions led by the executive, American parties find their governing role conditioned above all by the American separation of powers. That role contrasts sharply with the role of the cohesive parties that support cabinets in the parliaments of most other Western democracies.