Party Government: American Government in Action 2003048419, 0765805588, 9780765805584

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Transaction Introduction: E. E. Schattschneider and the Quarrel Over Parties in American Democracy
Preface
I. In Defense of Political Parties
II. The Raw Materials of Politics
III. What is a Political Party?
IV. The Special Character of the American Parties: The Two-Party System
V. Other Special Characteristics of the American Party
VI. Decentralization
VII. The Local Bosses: The Politicians versus the Public
VIII. The Pressure Groups
IX. Conclusions
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

PARTY GOVERNMENT

Aesthetic Benedetto Croce translated by Douglas Ainslie Changing Disciplines John A. Ryle Congressional Government Woodrow Wilson with a new introduction by William F Connelly, Jr. Constitutional Government in the United States Woodrow Wilson with a new introduction by Sidney A. Pearson, Jr. The Correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte Oscar A. Haac, editor Dominations and Powers George Santayana Henry Adams Elizabeth Stevenson New Deal Days: 1933-1934 Eli Ginzberg Peace and War Robert A. Rubinstein and Mary LeCron Foster, editors Politics and Administration Frank J. Goodnow with a new introduction by John A. Rohr Politics and Religious Consciousness in America George Armstrong Kelly Quest for Equality in Freedom Francis M. Wilhoit Thomas Jefferson Max Lerner Tocqueville and American Civilization Max Lerner Toward a New Enlightenment Paul Kurtz The Transatlantic Persuasion Robert Kelley True Tolerance Jay Budziszewski

AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IN ACTION

PARTY GOVERNMENT E.E.SCHATTSCHNEIDER W I T H A N E W INTRODUCTION B Y

SIDNEY A . P E A R S O N , JR. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

Originally published in 1942 by Rinehart & Company. Published 2004 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business New material this edition copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2003048419 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Schattschneider, E. E. (Elmer Eric), 1892-1971 Party government : American government in action / E. E. Schattschneider ; with a new introduction by Sidney A. Pearson, Jr. p. cm.—(Library of liberal thought) Originally published: New York : Farrar and Rinehart, c1942. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0558-8 (pbk. : alk paper) 1. Political parties—United States. 2. United States—Politics and government. I. Title. II. Series. III. American government in action series. JK2265.S35 2003 324.273—dc21 ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0558-4 (pbk)

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Contents

List of Figures

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Transaction Introduction: E. E. Schattschneider and the Quarrel Over Parties in American Democracy

ix

Preface

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I.

In Defense of Political Parties

1

II.

The Raw Materials of Politics

17

III.

What is a Political Party?

35

IV.

The Special Character of the American Parties: The Two-Party System

65

Other Special Characteristics of the American Party

99

V.

VI.

Decentralization

129

VII.

The Local Bosses: The Politicians versus the Public

170

VIII. The Pressure Groups

187

IX.

206

Conclusions

Selected Bibliography

211

Index

215

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List of Figures

1. A n Imaginary Election

71

2. A n Imaginary Election

72

3. A Real Election

73

4. Percentage of the Major Party Vote Cast for Demo­ cratic Candidate for President, 1904 and 1920

113

5. Percentage of the Major Party Vote Cast for Demo­ cratic Candidate for President, 1852

115

6. Public and Private Personalities of the Party

135

7. The Presidential Election as the Pulse of Politics

151

8.

164

The Pyramid of Authority in the American Party

Transaction Introduction E. E. Schattschneider and the Quarrel Over Parties in American Democracy*

I

T IS altogether appropriate to introduce E. E. Schattschneider’s Party Government to a new generation of students of American politics by referring to it as a “classic.” It is certainly the most oft cited, easily the most controversial, and probably the single most influential study of American political parties ever written. But it is more than simply a study of political parties. If it were only about political parties its influence would have faded with time, as new research and inevitable political change would make it outdated. Works in American political science that we refer to as classics, if they truly deserve that title, are designated as such because they raise regime level questions: questions about the purpose of government, who rules, and how government should be organized consistent with its fundamental purpose. These are the enduring fault lines in the theory and practice of American democracy. And the theory and practice of modern democracy is at the heart of Schattschneider’s work.

*

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues Matt Franck and Margaret Hrezo for reading and rereading several drafts of this introduction and for making helpful suggestions. The final product is immeasurably better than it would otherwise be, although the defects remain entirely my own.

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Any inquiry into the nature of modern democracy confronts a subject at once both practical and philosophic: what sort of regime are we, and is that regime in reality to be defended or critiqued, and by what theory of democracy? The two sides of this coin, facts and values, theory and practice, are mutually dependent upon each other and are particularly the work of a science of politics. Indeed, the task of political science properly understood is to explain in fact the nature of politics, in this case democratic politics, and to articulate or prescribe, where appropriate, principled changes that will take us in the direction we should want to go in light of the facts.1 In the American regime, the political compass has almost always pointed in the direction of greater democracy—a problem of definition and analysis uniquely dependent on the inseparability of facts from values. Anyone who would try to restrain democracy, at least in theory, is on the defensive at the outset. And because the American founders explicitly tried to limit democratic majorities through constitutional design, what we might call the more pure democrats have tended to view their political science with suspicion. Schattschneider’s Party Government should be read as the work of a more pure democrat. Party Government derives much of its influence from its place within the larger corpus of work by E. E. Schattschneider known as “the responsible party” school of American political reform. Like all of the great works in the American science of politics, beginning with The Federalist, it includes both a factual analysis of a popular regime in reality as well as thoughts on the meaning of democracy in theory. Schattschneider also prescribes changes for the practice of American democracy designed, in the view of the author, to make the regime more democratic. The basic thesis of the responsible party school is that parties ought to present the electorate with policy choices that would be the basis of issue-driven elections. At the apex of the responsible party is the presidential nominee, as the leader of the national party, who

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would then be the focal point for a reformed party system. After the election the majority policy would then become the basis for public law, very much along the lines of the British parliamentary system. The parties would be advocates for specific public policy that would be national, rather than merely local, in scope.2 The majority party would then “form a government” in the sense of enacting its policies and having them supported by the entire apparatus of the modern democratic state, again very much along the lines of parliamentary democracies. The basic premise of the responsible party school is that majorities ought to prevail consistently, and if they do not, then the fault lies with the system that prevents it: the political system is, by definition, undemocratic. But of course, the basic thesis carried with it a host of subtle implications about the nature of modern democracy that have not always been made explicit. The works we would regard as classics of the responsible party tradition of American political science have generally made the implications of the basic argument more explicit. And in the case of Schattschneider, Party Government explicitly connected the general argument of responsible parties to a broad understanding of the nature of modern democracy in theory and practice. In this sense the study of parties in Schattschneider’s work is a mask for the study of democracy. It is because the implications of Schattschneider’s arguments are so far reaching that the first task of analyzing his argument is to place it within the context of American political thought. The Progressive Background of Responsible Party Reform Schattschneider was not the first modern reformer who advocated a responsible party model for American politics. Woodrow Wilson is commonly interpreted as laying the groundwork for this school in his Congressional Government (1885).3

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Wilson had concluded his last work, Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), with an appeal to reform the founders’ political science by adopting a responsible party system.4 The theme was repeated, but developed independently, in James Bryce’s influential American Commonwealth, which went through numerous editions after its first appearance in 1888. Frank Goodnow, the first president of the American Political Science Association, further expanded the doctrine of responsible party government in his extremely influential Politics and Administration (1900), and the argument quickly became a staple of progressive political reform.5 Schattschneider embraced the outlines of the original argument and refined it in a number of books and articles he authored from the 1930s through the 1960s. Party Government became the springboard for his chairmanship in 1947 of the American Political Science Association “Committee on Political Parties” that resulted three years later in the controversial report, “Toward a More Responsible Two-party System.”6 His identification with the political science of party government helped to get him elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1957. Shortly before his death in 1971, Schattschneider described his contributions to American political science by reference to his work on political parties. He said, “I suppose the most important thing I have done in my field is that I have talked longer and harder and more persistently and enthusiastically about political parties than anyone else alive.”7 This remains a fair estimate of his influence that can be measured, in part, by the difficulty of engaging in any prolonged discussion about the place of political parties in American democracy without taking Schattschneider into account, if only to refute him. It is also important to note in this same context that the quarrels surrounding the responsible party school have never completely gone away. There seems to be no definitive response to Schattschneider that silences his defenders or

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enables his critics to simply ignore him evermore. Such is the mark of a classic. Schattschneider’s work stands as a link between the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, articulated in the work of political writers such as Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, and the later work of political scientists identified with the “behavioral revolution” in the social sciences—names like Robert Dahl and Walter Dean Burnham.8 Further, the party reforms of the 1960s and 70s need to be discussed in the context of Schattschneider’s thesis if only because the reforms seemed to have so little in common with the responsible party proposals. Schattschneider’s advocacy of responsible party government is one of the mileposts in the modern revolt against the founders’ constitution.9 One of the primary goals of the behavioral revolution was to separate facts from values in an effort to make political science truly “scientific.” The behaviorists generally thought that theory would and should follow facts rather than preceding them. Political science would begin with the collection and analysis of facts and theory would follow. But the general result was all too often to make the compilation of facts incomprehensible and to disguise the values that are always implicit. What makes Schattschneider significant in this context is that he was a pioneer behaviorist who took both facts and values seriously and attempted consciously to marry them in a comprehensive overview of American politics that embodied both diagnosis and prescription. But unlike many behaviorists who came later, he never tried to disguise the normative implications of his analysis. This quality has helped to strengthen his reputation among those behaviorists who still want to advocate and defend values, albeit scientifically. And because Schattschneider’s work is such an explicit critique of the American founders, he has forced his critics to reacquaint themselves with the founding order to rebut him. It is no small accomplishment for such a deceptively slender volume.

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The comprehensive study of American government and politics necessarily begins with what the founding generation referred to as the “new science of politics.” For Americans, the new science was articulated most especially in the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and the various arguments, pro and con, over ratification of the Constitution. More broadly, it also includes the legislative quarrels during the formative period immediately following ratification when the basic institutions of government began to take shape—when previous theory became practice. In the particular case of political parties we also need to consider briefly how and where parties fit into the “new science” generally. These documents and debates defined the purpose of government, who should govern, and how the government should operate. Future debates about the theory and practice of democracy would necessarily take place in the shadow of the “new science.” It is in these debates that the nature of the regime was first defined and expounded, first in theory and later in practice. The great arguments in the theory and practice of American democracy, sooner or later, find their way back to these founding debates and take sides over how to interpret the founders, most especially The Federalist. This is the appropriate starting point not because The Federalist is either the first or last word on the new science of politics, but because of its unique place in defining the American science of politics. It is the common reference point for the liberal-progressive critique of the founders’ political science. Schattschneider was no exception to this rule. But The Federalist is not the whole of the founding argument defining the nature of the regime. It is not even the beginning. The proper place to begin is with the Declaration of Independence, because it is in the Declaration that we find the founders’

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understanding of the purpose of government—in Jefferson’s memorable rendering that that purpose was the protection of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Federalist, on the other hand, may be described as the place where popular government is defined and defended in light of the purpose of government since the Declaration is silent on the question of which form of government is best able to secure these noble ends. The Federalist addresses the questions of who should rule and, most importantly for advocates of responsible parties, how the people should rule through the institutions of government. The full complexity of the founders’ science of politics cannot and need not be explored here. Several points, however, stand out because they bear directly upon the liberal-progressive critique in general and Schattschneider in particular. To reread the founding debates is to be reminded of the fact that modern liberalism and liberal democracy were first articulated as political science before either became political reality in the form of a specific government. If we use The Federalist as a reference point for these debates it is clear that liberal democracy was both a political philosophy and the subject of a political polemic for the founders. Liberal democracy was first articulated and presented to Americans in its eighty-five essays. And it was to be defended philosophically, as Hamilton said in the opening paragraph of Federalist 1, “from reflection and choice.” He went on to note, in a more polemical fashion, that the purpose of the essays was to persuade ordinary citizens that it was also in their best interest to adopt the proposed constitution. But since the proposed constitution had not yet become a political reality no one could say for certain just how liberal politics in a popular form of government would work. Before the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton pointed out that popular government was not especially popular because its defects outweighed its merits. Experience with historical examples of popular government, such as “the petty republics of Greece and Italy,” was

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not encouraging. “From the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics, the advocates of despotism have drawn arguments…against the very principles of civil liberty…. Happily for mankind, stupendous fabrics reared on the basis of liberty, which have flourished for ages, have in a few glorious instances refuted their gloomy sophisms.” (Fed. 9) But while Hamilton could give examples of republics that turned out badly, he evidently could think of no contrary historical examples of “stupendous fabrics” based on the new science of politics. Successful popular government remained a theory rather than a practice. The purpose of the proposed government found in the Declaration of Independence is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and this limited purpose of government implies a distinctly limited choice of means to accomplish these ends. It is doubtful that many of the founders would have disagreed with this, however much they may have disputed among themselves the implication of these lines. We should note, however, that that purpose in this context did not necessarily require a popular form of government, even as all of the founders agreed that a popular form was most likely to secure these ends. Further, the place of parties in a popular form was very much open to debate. Jefferson himself was no friend of political parties, at least in the abstract. In one of his most pointed remarks on parties, he defiantly asserted, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”10 The evidence is unclear on this point as to whether Jefferson’s party opponent Hamilton thought they would, on this basis, ever meet again in the hereafter. Popular government generally meant a democracy or a republic, and although the two terms were often used interchangeably Madison made an explicit distinction in The Federalist that has bedeviled would-be political reformers ever since. More than terminology is involved. The form of government as a means to these ends was not incidental to the ends, but some means created more problems

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than they solved. Hobbes, for example, in his Leviathan (1651), had argued for monarchy because only a monarchical form could concentrate sufficient power to protect fundamental rights. But the Hobbesian argument created the classic paradox of the liberal science of politics. In order to protect civil liberties, it seemed that the form of government required was a concentration of political power strong enough to provide absolute security for rights. But any government strong enough to protect liberties so absolutely was also strong enough to take them away absolutely. It is wholly within the liberal tradition that both the concentration of power and the fear of concentrated power exist together. The founders opted for the latter argument and the Constitution reflects this fact. At the same time, both sides of the liberal coin carry with them very different arguments about the proper science of politics for a liberal regime. The Federalist stated the problem as the tyranny to be avoided if the declared ends of a liberal regime were to be secured. “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” (Fed. 47) The concentration of power in a democracy potentially posed the same problem as a monarchy. Before democracy could be defended in theory, a way had to be found to minimize the danger of democratic tyranny. This meant that the constitutional design of the founders emphasized the dangers of concentrated power. We can see this in the distrust of pure democracy, that is, power concentrated in a simple majority, but it was also a distrust of concentrated power in any form of government. The Federalist presents a complex argument, but the reason is the diversity of principles that need to be balanced against one another. The danger of a pure democracy is the danger of democratic tyranny. Simple majorities were viewed as a problem. The founding science of popular government, taken as a whole, tried to create

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incentives for majority coalitions to be formed out of a multiplicity of minority factions. Majorities coalesce in shifting and temporary forms, congealing here and now, melting away there and then, as the issues change and factions find their interests served by different and often strange bedfellows. The founding arguments on the nature of democracy tried to strike a balance between openness to change and the stability necessary for any regime to survive over a long period of time. Simple majority rule does not necessarily admit, either in theory or in practice, any limitation on the exercise of its power after the majority has been formed. James Madison summed up the dilemma: “To secure the public good, and private rights, against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed: Let me add that it is the great desideratum, by which alone this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.” (Fed. 10) The concentration of power was the heart of the problem because any form of government, even a popular form, always carried with it the seeds of corruption. “This tendency is not difficult to be accounted for,” Hamilton wrote. “It has its origin in the love of power. Power controuled or abridged is almost always the rival and enemy of that power by which it is controuled or abridged.” (Fed. 15) All forms of government needed controls on power but the controls would always reflect the specific danger to a particular regime. In a popular form of government the danger was majority tyranny and therefore controls had to be placed on the majority. A popular form of government could not be founded on majority rule alone because majority rule by itself recognized no theoretical limits to its own power. It was critical that the distinction between ends and means be made in a science of politics that aspired to be both popular and decent.

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Classical political science, following Plato, had generally sought to control the raw exercise of power through moral education. In Plato’s language, governments would be just when men were just—when they had rightly ordered their souls. All regimes and all forms of government were a reflection of the souls of the rulers. At one level of analysis this point is undoubtedly true, but the founders believed moral education alone to be insufficient. The natural inclination of human nature was to form different opinions about government and the proper objects of government. Morality needed what Madison called “auxiliary precautions.” (Fed. 51) In a sense both the classical and new science of politics agreed that all forms of government required restraint on the exercise of power by the rulers. Both the classical and the new science saw all forms of government as problematic and all forms had to be evaluated in terms of the ends they were established to achieve. In neither case was the form of government an end in itself. But whereas the ancients made moral education the basis for restraint, the new science added institutional arrangements to the equation. Part of the reason was in the shift that occurred in the basis of government in the new science. Justice in the classical tradition was total in that it did not philosophically recognize any theoretical limits on how the power to implement justice would be exercised in the polis. The new science made “rights” rather than transcendent justice the basis of government. In classical political science the opposite of tyranny is justice; in the new science of politics the opposite of tyranny is freedom. In a free form of government, different opinions would be formed and could only be suppressed by the elimination of freedom itself. In such a case, the cure for the disease of factional conflict would be worse than the disease itself. The American founders were in conscious revolt against the classical science of politics, and a close reading of the Declaration and The Federalist draws us into the debate between ancients and moderns on the nature of government. From the

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perspective of the American founders, a regime based on rights rather than abstract justice alone, by its very nature, is more likely to be suspicious of concentrated power. The reason for this is not because the founders were hostile to justice, which Madison explicitly regarded as the only legitimate end of government, but because justice without freedom was inconsistent with human nature as he understood it and was therefore not likely to result in justice in practice.11 The American founders thought they had found a solution to the problem in the separation of powers and federalism as the basis for popular government. The solution was in turn rooted in the distinction they made between republican and democratic forms of popular government. This distinction between republican and democratic government, and the difference it makes, are not as commonly appreciated by later students of American government as they ought to be. But the point needs to be emphasized here because the confusion surrounding the founders’ arguments over the differences between these two forms has tainted the liberal-progressive critique of the founders’ new science. It is the basis of the charge that the founders were undemocratic in principle and the constitution they authored was too often undemocratic in practice. There is, of course, a sense in which this is true. But there is also a sense in which this critique misses the point. The difference for the founders was more than merely semantic, but it does not mean that the founders were opposed to democratic government in the modern sense. Both democratic and republican forms of government were understood to be popular forms, as opposed to monarchical and aristocratic forms. The terms “popular,” “democratic,” and “republican” were often used interchangeably, and it is not always easy to sort them out in late eighteenth-century discourse. What is significant in the terms is that the founders understood the difference between a “pure democracy” and a “republic.” A pure democracy was based on participation, majority

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rule, and, because it required participation, it was necessarily confined to a relatively small territory, such as the Greek polis or a Renaissance Italian city. But whatever the polis may have been in theory, or the Italian city in art and culture, they were a political disaster in practice. The new science of politics would make popular government both decent and popular. But it could not be based on majority rule alone because in principle majority rule knew no limits on its own power. This is why the founders drew such a sharp distinction between a democracy and a republic in theory; the practice of politics in a pure democracy was demonstrably hostile to minority rights. The founders’ use of the term “republic” was very much what later generations would think of as a “representative democracy.” In this instance, the term used is probably less important than the principles that differentiate the two types of a popular form of government. Democracy could never be an end in itself but, at best, a means to an end. Popular government was the best means available, but it was always problematic in the sense that it could be corrupted by its own principle of majority rule. It meant that both forms of popular government needed to be restrained if the end was to be secured. But only republican government, because it was built on the constraint of power through institutional arrangements, recognized in principle a limitation on power. The principles of liberal governance in the republican tradition were the heart of The Federalist. “The science of politics…,” Hamilton noted, “like most other sciences has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular distribution of power into distinct departments—the introduction of legislative balances and checks—the institution of courts composed of judges, holding their offices during good behavior—the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election—these are either wholly new discoveries or have made their principal

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progress toward perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided.” (Fed. 9) The “imperfections,” of course, refer to the concentration of unbridled power in pure majority rule. Institutional arrangements meant primarily two things: (1) the separation of powers among legislative, executive, and judicial departments, and (2) state governments, as part of the federal system, which would also be a check on the concentration of federal powers. The purpose of this separation of powers and federalism was not to paralyze government, prevent democracy, or permit the rule of elites, as has been alleged by the general thrust of progressive political science. Rather, the purpose is to preserve majority rule and minority rights in freedom—principles that have not traditionally meshed and, according to “Publius,” have been responsible for the generally low esteem accorded to popular forms of government. Nor was the separation of powers intended necessarily to diminish the powers of one branch of government in relation to the others. It was intended, for example, to make the legislative branch more effective than it would be in a parliamentary system where the legislature creates executive power and then largely disappears as a policymaking organ of government.12 In other words, the founders saw the separation of powers not as an impediment to popular government, but as a prerequisite for it. Until the problem of majority tyranny was reasonably resolved, popular government was unlikely to be able to recommend itself to the esteem and confidence of mankind as both a free and a just form of government. In Federalist 10, Madison clearly identified parties as one source of factional conflict in civil society. And since “the mischiefs of faction” were the source of repeated failures of popular governments, controlling the effects of faction was the chief problem to be solved by the new science. Institutionally, the problem of factions could be seen in the clearest light in the selection of

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public officials through the election process. The Electoral College, for example, was designed for a non-partisan selection of the president as one way to lessen appeals to the “popular arts,” or demagoguer y. The separation of powers, the extended size of the republic, and representation were the primary institutional devices utilized by the new science. The argument as a whole is complex and need not be discussed in great detail here.13 What is important for an understanding of Schattschneider is Madison’s identification of parties as one of the sources of the violence of faction. Madison’s apparent treatment of parties as the bane of popular government in Federalist 10 is in turn the bane of the responsible party government school. Finding a cure for the mischiefs of Madison may be said to be the Holy Grail for the responsible party critique of the founders. Party Government and the Founders’ Political Science The liberal-progressive tradition in American political science has almost uniformly read Madison’s arguments in Federalist 10 as hostile to democracy and hostile to political parties, and has drawn the logical inference that the Constitution must therefore be read as an anti-party document. This is certainly the way Schattschneider read The Federalist. He wrote, “Nearly the whole of the constitutional theory on the subject of political parties can be studied in capsule form in Number 10 of the Federalist Papers.” 14 But is this an accurate reading of the whole of the founders’ political science? Hamilton in Federalist 70, for example, attributes to parties the beneficial effect of restraining illconceived legislation. It is one example of one of the subtle differences between Hamilton and Madison that surfaced later in the party debates of the 1790s. It is also a reminder that The Federalist contains within it sometimes seemingly minor inconsistencies of means within a larger agreement on ends that have proven to be the basis for later quarrels over interpretation.

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Schattschneider’s error in reading The Federalist as if there are no tensions between the authors is a common one among students of political parties and we are obliged to ask, what difference does it make? If the founders were opposed to parties, what sort of parties were they opposed to and why?15 Political parties are not new and have meant different things at different times. The Apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, counted political parties to be among the things persons concerned with their immortal souls should avoid at all costs.16 If Paul’s analysis of parties is correct, many of the American founders may be conspicuous in Heaven by their absence. It certainly appears that the party quarrel between Hamilton on the one side and Jefferson and Madison on the other points to the force of political parties at the outset of the American regime.17 That each may have misinterpreted the other in terms of republican principles is not the major question here.18 At this point it is appropriate to consult Alexis de Tocqueville on political parties because he fully understood the problem of parties in democracy and the new science. Tocqueville drew a distinction between what he called “small parties” and “great parties.” It is a distinction not commonly made by advocates of responsible parties. Parties were, Tocqueville said, “an evil inherent in free governments; but they do not have the same characteristics and instincts at all times.” Small parties he characterized as motivated by baser instincts and intrigue. They roughly correspond to what Madison referred to as the “violence of faction” in Federalist 10. “What I call great parties are those that are attached more to principles than to their consequences; to generalities and not to particular causes; to ideas and not to men.”19 The great debates over the ratification of the Constitution, between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, could fairly be described as “great party debates” in the sense in which Tocqueville used the term. Madison clearly understood the great party debate that animated The Federalist in these terms: “Among those who

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embraced the constitution, the great body were unquestionably friends of republican liberty…”20 It is probably also true that the great body of opponents to the Constitution—George Mason, Patrick Henry, and the Anti-Federalists for example—were also friends of republican liberty. The party conflicts during the first decades of the Constitution were more concerned with the proper republican means to the end of republican liberty than with the meaning of republican liberty itself.21 In Tocqueville’s terminology, small parties were what emerged after the ratification. Before the end of the Washington administration, Madison’s conflicts with Hamilton over the direction of national politics had already opened the door to the first political parties. At issue here is not whether Madison accurately portrayed his policy arguments with Hamilton as a great party debate. There is much to argue against Madison on this score. But Madison accepted the quarrel as a “great party” debate and historians have tended to side with Madison against Hamilton.22 Madison accepted the reality of small parties after the ratification of the Constitution. Small parties he accepted as a permanent feature of the constitutional system. But after the ratification, he thought the great party debates would, or at least should, be over. He summed up his views in a letter to Henry Lee: “Besides the occasional and transient subjects on which parties are formed, they seem to have a permanent foundation in the variance of political opinions in free States, and of occupations and interests of all civilized States. The Constitution itself, whether written or prescriptive, influenced as its exposition and administration will be, by those causes, must be an unfailing source of party distinction. And the very peculiarity which gives pre-eminent value to that of the United States, the partition of power between the different governments, opens a new door for controversies and parties.”23 Future great party debates, such as the issue of slavery prior to the Civil War, would necessarily involve regime analysis ques-

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tions about the meaning of modern democracy and popular government. It is a fair assessment of the liberal-progressive tradition of responsible party government to note that it has consistently misread Madison and The Federalist on the question of political parties. They are not alone in this regard. Madison’s party essays are less well known generally than his other writing. What is most unfortunate in this regard is that the influence of the liberal-progressive tradition on twentieth-century American scholarship has contributed to the all too ready acceptance of this particular reading of Madison. Many scholars have accepted the anti-party bias of the founders as if Federalist 10 is a summary of the whole of the new science. But on top of this scholarly failure there is a more deep-rooted cause, which is only partly tied to the well-understood critique of the separation of powers. It has its origins in the concept of democracy that is usually implicit in the liberal-progressive tradition and one that is at odds with the theory and practice of popular government as the founders understood that term. It is an understanding of modern democracy so deeply rooted that rediscovering Madison’s party essays is not likely to alter it. Schattschneider is valuable in this regard because he holds many of the clues to the critique of the founders’ political science that has become a commonplace feature of the liberal-progressive tradition. The Defense of Political Parties and Responsible Party Government Schattschneider begins Party Government with his assertion that the rise of political parties is “one of the principal distinguishing marks of modern government.” It is parties that make majority rule possible. On the face of it this seems a commonplace and common-sense observation. But he goes on to underline the point that parties “have been the makers of democratic

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government...that the political parties created democracy and that modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties. As a matter of fact, the condition of the parties is the best possible evidence of the nature of any regime…. The parties are not therefore merely appendages of modern government; they are in the center of it and play a determinative and creative role in it.”24 While Schattschneider never makes it entirely clear why parties created democracy, the implications of his analysis are clear. The American regime is not democratic because of its Constitution, for example, but because the parties have made it democratic. Democracy is a stage in a process of progressive developments that begins with the founders but, in the final analysis, is not really dependent on the founding principles. He goes on rhetorically to ask, “How does it happen that the Constitution rather than the parties is described in the schoolbooks as the bulwark of American democracy?”25 The sequence of first the Constitution, next party development, and finally democracy is intended implicitly to undermine the claim that the Constitution should be understood as a document establishing popular democratic government. As a theory of democracy, responsible party government most often, though not always, meant the primacy of party government over constitutional government. It also explicitly advocated the concentration of power in pursuit of ends defined almost exclusively in terms of majority opinion. It needs to be understood as a model of democracy in competition with that of the American founders. In Schattschneider’s view, parties have transformed the American regime beyond anything the founders could have imagined. “They have substantially abolished the electoral college, created a plebiscitary presidency, and contributed powerfully to the extraconstitutional growth of the office.”26 We should perhaps note here that the presidential election of 2000 between George Bush and Al Gore is a reminder that the Electoral College is still relevant in the electoral process. And it is not clear that the

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presidency has yet become an office that derives its major powers from a plebiscite. But the extra-constitutional growth of the office does sound an important note. Indeed, one of the primary goals of Schattschneider’s responsible party argument was to strengthen the presidency against the other institutions of government. This could only be done, he thought, if a way around the separation of powers could be found. Responsible parties seemed to be the solution to the mischiefs of Madison. “Alongside Madison’s statement that differences in wealth are the most durable cause of faction there should be placed the corollary that the common possessions of the people are the most durable cause of unity. To assume that the people have merely conflicting interests and nothing else is to invent a political nightmare that has only superficial relation to reality.”27 Interestingly, and uniquely within the liberal-progressive tradition, Schattschneider did not regard the separation of powers as an obstacle to responsible parties even as he also thought it weakened the presidency as an institution. Unlike Woodrow Wilson, for example, Schattschneider did not advocate a British-style cabinet government. Not because he thought Madison was correct in structuring majority rule and minority rights around the separation of powers. Federalism and the separation of powers, he thought, had combined to make parties ineffective. But he also regarded both of these constitutional features as ultimately irrelevant to party government. “The greatest difficulties in the way of the development of party government in the United States have been intellectual, not legal.”28 Madison thought the separation of powers essential for the protection of minorities; Schattschneider disagreed. He accepted unequivocally the importance of liberty as a prerequisite for democracy, but at the same time thought that the separation of powers made parties ineffective and thus limited the freedom of democracies to form a government.29 But since parties, not the Constitution, made democracy work, in the final

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analysis he viewed the separation of powers more as an excuse for intellectual failure than the institutional cause of why political parties developed in the United States the way they did. But this merely serves as a backdrop to the questions, why did parties develop outside of the tradition of responsible parties in the British mold, and what is the nature of the intellectual failure? An institutional interpretation of American politics would point to the constitutional ordering of elective offices. But Schattschneider does not accept the institutional explanation. And because the problem is one of democratic theory and practice, Schattschneider is forced to spell out a different view of democracy and its discontents than did the founders. It is not surprising that he works within a different science of politics to develop and expound that view. At the outset we should note that the liberal-progressive tradition generally accepted the idea that democracy is more of an end in itself than a means to secure the purposes set forth in the Declaration of Independence. Schattschneider is no exception to this particular science of politics. Democracy is less problematical as a form of government in the responsible party school than it was for the founders. The dilemma Schattschneider faces, however, is trying to work out his theory within a constitutional framework built on very different suppositions than his own. In order to understand Schattschneider’s view of democracy and how he arrived at it, we need to look beyond Party Government because his argument here is implicit rather than explicit. Schattschneider approached the problem of defining democracy by first concentrating on the details of government as a policymaking organization.30 He then moved on to the study of political parties where he is best known and has exerted the strongest influence. Democratic theory came late in his life in two largely overlooked works, The Semi-Sovereign People (1960) and Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of Government (1969),31 the latter appearing just two years before his death.

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Reading his works as a whole and in chronological order, it seems clear that his first works pointed toward a theory of democracy that he only made explicit toward the end of his life. Reading the last works first it is equally clear that the early works contained the unspoken, sometimes contradictory, but typically thoughtful, attempt to flesh out a theory of democracy using a behavioral methodology in which facts precede theory. His working model of modern democracy, however, was his maxim “Democracy is not to be found in the parties but between the parties.”32 That is, as an electoral choice fashioned by competing party elites. Responsible parties were Schattschneider’s answer to interest-group liberalism that was the dominant model of parties among political scientists. Schattschneider described democracy as both a “moral system” and a “form of government.” Conceptually, the moral system preceded the political system. As a moral system, he wrote, “Democracy is not something that can be enacted by Congress or something that can be created by a governmental fiat or established by a constitutional amendment. That is not the way democracies are made…democracy is first a state of mind.”33 This state of mind, in turn, Schattschneider ascribes to the cumulative and progressive development of Western political thought. It begins with the ancient Greeks, and is derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition, the common law, and the growth of autonomous political communities. Democracy, he says, is “an attitude toward people.”34 Indeed, he thought that it was much easier to speak of democracy as an attitude toward people than as a form of government because people tended to disagree about the latter more than the former. “Without this moral basis democracy as a form of government may be a dangerous instrument for generating destructive conflict.”35 In a very real sense the implicit charge Schattschneider levels against the new science of The Federalist is that it froze certain attitudes about human nature into a political system that has since evolved past

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that era. “Anyone who imagines that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution established a democracy in the United States in the eighteenth century ought to consider the language of the time.”36 Here Schattschneider is following a conception of American political and constitutional development that is closely linked to that of Woodrow Wilson in the latter’s Constitutional Government. This does not necessarily mean that all of the founders’ science of politics is wrong, however. Curiously, Schattschneider endorses Federalist 10 in part: “In it are to be found the elements of a working theory of politics, as valid today as it was in 1788, for it has the merit of being on all fours with the facts, an operating explanation of things as they are.”37 What is wrong with Federalist 10, and by implication with the entire constitutional design and the science of politics behind it, is that it is republican and therefore undemocratic. There is, of course, a sense in which this observation is absolutely true: Madison acknowledged it in his sharp distinction between a republic and what he called a “pure democracy.” But this only begs the larger question of democracy’s definition. Admittedly democracy has had more than one legitimate definition, but we are concerned here with the nature of the American regime. For Madison democracy meant direct participation in a necessarily small territory: a large territory could not be democratic by definition and therefore required another form of popular government, in this case what the new science called a “republic.” The missing link in modern liberal democracy was the idea of the political party. Parties were understood as the “violence of faction” and therefore the bane of popular government in any form. But Schattschneider made parties synonymous with democracy. Modern democracy, he repeated often, is not possible save in party terms. A science of political parties linked to modern democracy will be a science that emphasizes stages of political development.

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It is in this context that we can begin to understand Schattschneider’s remark in Party Government that it is not the separation of powers that prevents the formation of a responsible party government but rather an intellectual failure: a failure to realize that the founders had only begun the development of democracy. They had not given later generations a full-scale model of what a liberal democracy is or ought to be; that is the challenge of the liberal-progressive science of politics. Unfortunately, the new science of the founders imparted to Americans a view of democracy that did not include women, slaves, and the like. They inherited a suspicion of democracy drawn from their reading of the classics. The Greek definition of democracy handed down from Aristotle—a form of government confined to small territories—was, as Schattschneider described it, a “mangled definition,” but it became the axiomatic definition for the American founders.38 What the American founders referred to as an “extended republic” in Federalist 10 had the potential to become a democracy, but was thwarted by the fragmentation of power in federalism and the separation of powers. The promise of party government was that it could empower the people in a way the founders could not have imagined. The error of the founders can be seen as a failure to understand the moral dimension of democracy. That moral dimension is, in Schattschneider’s view, the end product of the historical development of liberal-progressivism out of a myriad of sources, both classical and modern. The failure of the United States to become a full-blown democracy has produced a rift between the reality of democracy thwarted and the aspiration of majority rule among the people at large. Here we note that for Schattschneider the most pernicious effect of the founders’ science of politics has been to cause the people to think they live in a democracy when the reality is very different.

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The Hidden Crisis of American Democracy and Party Government One of the most common themes in Schattschneider’s writing on parties is the idea that there is a silent crisis in American democracy that responsible party government is intended to resolve. The crisis stems from Schattschneider’s implicit theory of democracy as simply majoritarian and the purpose of government defined as enacting the policy preferences of the majority. His specific examples do not always seem consistent, but in each case it is the majoritarian principle that animates his judgment. Schattschneider’s critique is one of both results and procedures: the constitutional system does not consistently produce majoritarian policies, and the procedural process is dominated by local bosses rather than by a national agenda. Always implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, it represented a view of politics rooted in the liberal-progressive interpretation of the New Deal: that the majority was on their side and simple majority rule would support the liberal-progressive view of responsible parties and policy preferences. The crisis therefore is twofold: a policy crisis that existing and traditional ways of conducting public affairs in the United States cannot resolve, and a theoretical crisis that has its roots in how we understand democracy. But the roots of the crisis are to be found in the rupture between the theory and practice of American government: policy is but the tip of the iceberg. In his The Str uggle for Par ty Gover nment (1948) Schattschneider began a defense of the idea of party government with an almost apocalyptic warning to his readers: “Recent changes in the nature of public policy have imposed on the government of the United States burdens of such proportions as to invite speculation concerning the future of the whole governmental system. As a consequence we find ourselves in the middle of an invisible governmental crisis, less publicized but probably

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no less dangerous than the economic and diplomatic emergencies of recent years…. The requirements are unprecedented, so new that the institutions and procedures to cope with them are not easily imagined.”39 The implication is clear: the political science of the founders is of no practical use and may be a hindrance if we think of it as a prescription for democracy’s discontents. The notion that the primary purpose of parties in a democracy is to make policy necessarily implies the concentration of power. The fragmentation of power makes policy government almost impossible. And, following the Roosevelt experience of the first hundred days of the New Deal, the concentration of power in the executive branch seemed to be a logical and natural extension of democratic theory and practice. Roosevelt clearly enjoyed overwhelming popular support, which suggested to Schattschneider and the liberal-progressive school that democracy was fully compatible with policy government. One of the consistent threads in the progressive critique of the founders’ political science was how to restructure the executive branch. The presidency is the one institution in the American constitutional system that can presume to speak for the nation as a whole. Legislative gridlock thus emerges as the bête noir of democratic government. For Schattschneider, as well as other political scientists who were committed to New Deal liberalism, the practice of American democracy meant the institutionalization of the liberal-progressive agenda. Two basic avenues of approach seemed to be possible. The first approach was the creation of an administrative state in which New Deal programs would be treated as entitlements and thus beyond the reach of democratic majorities that might coalesce in Congress. In Roosevelt’s words, the New Deal Democratic Party would be a “party to end parties.”40 A second approach would be to continue the progressive commitment to participation by the electorate. Both arguments were part of the larger liberal-progressive understanding of democracy. While Roosevelt and much of the Democratic

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Party tried to follow the first course of action, Schattschneider followed the latter. Responsible “party government” was another way of saying “presidential government” and we need to follow Schattschneider’s analysis of the New Deal on this point if we are to understand his thesis and the long-lasting appeal of Party Government. We cannot follow here every nuance of Party Government: to do so would make this an exercise covering virtually the whole of American democratic thought. But we can follow his analysis with regard to how he thinks party government would alter the presidency and in the process gain a better understanding of why Schattschneider remains such a pivotal figure in the American science of politics. The political theory of responsible party government begins with the notion that the purpose of democratic government is to enact the policy preferences of a democratic majority into law as expeditiously as possible but within the constraints of a liberal theory of governance; that is, with appropriate deference to the rights of minorities and due respect for an individualistic conception of civil liberties. It will require disciplined political parties to articulate, promote, and enact clearly defined policies. Strong democracy requires the concentration of power, not its fragmentation. As an example of the successful concentration of power in a more democratic system he favorably compares the parliamentar y British system to the American system. 41 Schattschneider saw his work on parties as having solved the riddle of heretofore-unsuccessful efforts to combine liberalism with democracy: “Party government is the democratic and liberal solution to the problem of reconciling authority with liberty; they can manage interests without becoming oppressive. When the parties are strong it is unnecessary to destroy the right of free association; the natural advantages of freely organized majorities over freely organized minorities are sufficient to make government possible in a libertarian political system.”42 In other words, Schattschneider assumes that neither moral education in

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the classical sense nor institutional restraints in the founders’ sense will be necessary to make majority rule both popular and decent. The moral foundation of democracy is already present in the community that has grown out of the historical progress from the founders to the present. It is an intellectual challenge to understand the implications of this development. A “new” new science of politics is required to address the hidden crisis: one that concentrated democratic power in the presidency. In one sense, the Constitution is the villain in Schattschneider’s morality play because “it has been found at the scene of the crime.”43 It is important to note this point because Schattschneider’s work stands at the cusp of the behavioral revolution in political science. Later, behavioral research often proceeded without clear reference to the principles that originally animated it. In the case of Schattschneider those principles are more obvious and more forcefully stated. In some respects the crisis may well be that the founders succeeded only too well: the practice of modern politics is a faithful likeness of their political science. “The Aristotelian classification of government on the basis of the number of persons participating in power has been made meaningless by Robert Michael’s iron law of oligarchy. What good does it do us to examine the role of parties in modern government if we continue to state our political philosophy in a way that ignores their existence?… What is now needed is a politician’s theory of politics.” 44 But by a politician’s theory of politics Schattschneider does not appear to mean an ordinary elected official. What he seems to have in mind is more of a statesman, one who sees through the complexity of the working system to understand the core issue of majority rule. For the statesman who would form a democratic majority, the problem with the present system is its institutional as well as social complexity. “The pattern of these differences has increased enormously in complexity since The Federalist Papers were written.”45 Roosevelt thus emerges in Party Govern-

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ment as the ideal statesman who understands the core issue of the crisis of American government. When the founders’ constitutional system is viewed from the behavioral perspective, simplicity is precisely what is lacking in the practice of American politics. Change is difficult because the constitutional architecture of the polity is fixed, and while interpretation can change many of the original assumptions, it can only go so far. Here the methodology of the behavioral persuasion in political science reinforces the theory of democracy in the responsible party school. The quantitative analysis of social data, with all of its variables and nuances, is the very model of complexity. Schattschneider’s very perceptive analysis of the actual workings of the process of nominating persons for public office reveals the evils of complexity. When he examines the voter confusion on the complexity of the American ballot, for example, he blames the confusion not on the voter but on the complexity itself; a complexity that is a natural consequence of federalism and the separation of powers. “Both the federal system and the system of separation of powers create burdens for the electorate…. As long as these conditions continue it will be difficult to get simple nominating procedures in the United States.”46 Complexity that frustrates national party unity makes responsible parties a difficult enterprise to construct. It is a unity further jeopardized by local party bosses whose principal concern is local rather than national. “The party bosses in some instances seem to multiply the nomination contests deliberately.”47 Complexity thus turns out to be the Gordian knot of the founders’ polity. It cannot be untied so it must be cut. The government and society may be increasingly complex, but the solution is not. And we are not entirely bound to the founders’ political science for a solution. The solution requires intellectual effort to conceptualize both the present practice and alternative theories of political practice. The present two-party system simplifies alternatives to the constitutional complexity of the founders. The

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goal is majority rule and a responsible party system is the only means by which this breakthrough can be accomplished consistent with fundamental liberal principles. This is what seems to lie behind Schattschneider’s frequently implied notion that his science of democracy is a pioneer work of political science. He has solved the riddle of the separation of powers that had frustrated earlier progressive reformers. The solution begins with the way in which parties should structure the nomination process in order to promote the public interest. The presidency and, by implication, the way presidents are chosen prior to elections, are crucial for defining the nature of the party system. Indeed, some scholars have attempted to define distinct periods of American political history in terms of the presidential nominating system.48 Whereas the practice of American politics in the immediate aftermath of the ratification of the Constitution led Madison to accept political parties, he did so for the purpose of limiting what he saw as the pernicious effects of Hamilton’s schemes to strengthen central administration. Schattschneider’s idea of responsible parties is intended to strengthen national government. But the strength of the national government would be centered on the presidency, not Congress. Institutionally, Congress stands to be the major loser in a responsible party system. “The vote in Congress on critical issues is the acid test of the locus of power in the parties.”49 Participation in a responsible party system concentrates on presidential electoral politics. The character of the constitutional system can effectively be changed by a concentration on the nature of presidency. The present system rewards local bosses because they control the patronage system upon which present party organizations are built. “The attempt to create and exploit issues of public policy involves leadership, discipline, and centralization. For this reason the party must magnify the presidency…. If this tendency of the parties were to become dominant, the other tendency, i.e., the tendency of the party toward decentralization and an excessive

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preoccupation with the private interests of the party bosses, would necessarily become recessive and the party would perforce change its character.” 50 Again, what we see in this remark by Schattschneider is his belief that responsible parties will counter the tendency of American parties toward interest-group liberalism. Although he does not specifically use the term, Schattschneider may fairly be described as a proponent of democratic-liberalism. The majority will tend to vote liberal and true majority rule, in the form of responsible parties, will typically produce liberal results. Schattschneider reiterates that American society is democratic, but it is the republican organization of the government that is the problem, not society and the electorate. Free association is the most important of American civil liberties, he notes, and the vigor of that right “is one of the most reliable evidences of the proposition that American government is democratic.”51 Moreover, there is ample evidence that the government is responsive to these diverse interests. But in normal times the government is more responsive to pressure groups than to democratic majorities due to the lack of party discipline, especially in Congress. It is only in times of crisis that we see most clearly how a government responding to majority policies should work. Crisis forces government to distinguish among competing demands for scarce resources and to establish priorities. Sooner or later it becomes necessary in any political system to discriminate among the demands. And the common interests of the community cannot be merely the sum of the special interests. Absent strong parties, it is virtually impossible under the present system to establish priorities except under unusual circumstances, such as the Great Depression or war. The place of responsible party government is framed in terms of the larger question of democratic theory, “On what grounds can it be argued that democratic government may retain its freedom of movement in spite of the pressures of organized minorities?”52

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The nominating process is critical to Schattschneider because, in his definition, “A political party is first of all an organized attempt to get power. Power is here defined as control of the government. That is the objective of party organization.”53 Parties control the government and it is impossible to define them in terms of other objectives: “Power is the common denominator of all their ambitions.”54 If they do not aim at control of government they are pressure groups or some similar association. What simplifies the nominating process for the voter in Schattschneider’s analysis is the fact that “the two-party system is the most conspicuous feature of American political organization.”55 The nature of the regime is reflected in the elected officials it produces.56 This fact alone simplifies the selection process by narrowing the choices down to two candidates. Schattschneider is no friend of the Electoral College. He recognizes that the two-party system is built on single-member districts in a winner-take-all system. But he also thinks that the abolition of the Electoral College would help to produce a stronger two-party system rather than create incentives for a proliferation of parties that would, in turn, make the American polity a multi-party system. “If, however, the president were elected by the people directly on the basis of the national total of popular votes the whole situation would undergo a transformation…the special emphasis on the doubtful states would cease. The intensity of party activity would tend to become uniform throughout the country.”57 And the uniformity, in turn, would concentrate on the presidency. The decentralized nature of the electoral system, which is reflected in the Electoral College, makes it virtually impossible to have a national boss who controls the party. Local bosses, “like the feudal lords, cannot endure centralization.”58 While the Democratic Party under Roosevelt made significant strides toward revealing how a centralized party structure might work, Schattschneider regards the actual practice as a failure. In his

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opinion, Roosevelt sought an unprecedented third term because he lacked the power to choose his successor.59 In a parliamentary system the party structure would have made this a routine rather than a precedent breaking strategy. The parties try to control government by winning elections. “The party becomes, therefore, a process formed about the elections.”60 But the decentralized nature of the American electoral system fragments the nomination process and, with it, the ability of parties to project a coherent set of policy preferences. When “all is said, it remains true that the roll calls demonstrate that the parties are unable to hold their lines in a controversial public issue when the pressure is on…[this condition] constitutes the most important single fact concerning the American parties. He who knows this fact, and knows nothing else, knows more about American parties than he who knows everything except this fact.”61 Parties are, in practice, limited in purpose to what the party oligarchs can agree upon. And the concerns of the party oligarchs are entirely parochial. The problem is not that parties are never interested in policy; they most certainly are interested in policy if only as an issue appeal during elections. But American parties have developed what Schattschneider calls a “split-personality.” The attempt to create and exploit policy issues requires “leadership, discipline, and centralization. For this reason the party must magnify the presidency.”62 But the demands of local bosses works at crosspurposes with parties organized to promote policy government. The local bosses are not interested in public affairs; “they read no books, have vague ideas on public business, and are indifferent to conflicts of policy as far as personal prejudice is concerned.”63 And to compound the problem, Congress, exercising its wholly legitimate powers under the Constitution, aids and abets the decentralization of the policymaking process by supporting the patronage system. “The character of American legislation as a whole shows the lack of centralized party control…. American legislation, in spite

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of the enactment of a substantial number of great statutes, exhibits a strong tendency to go to pieces.” Correcting this tendency “involves the necessity of a fundamental redistribution of power within the parties, a transfer of power from the local machines to the central leadership.…”64 Here Schattschneider again seems to follow and echo the lament of Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government (1885) regarding the superiority of the English parliamentary system. He turns to the English system of parties for instruction. It is the localism of the American system that sheds light on the weakness of the central party organization. Unlike the English system, for example, the House of Representatives’ custom of requiring local residence for representatives from single-member districts deprives representation of a national perspective. “In fact the whole political system, on the side of appointive and elective personnel, is organized about a universal rule of local residence.”65 In the final analysis, it is the whole system that is “feudal,” and not just the local bosses.66 All of this means that the “game as well as the players must be changed.”67 To some extent Schattschneider believes this may already be happening. The New Deal has focused attention on the presidency, as has no other crisis in American politics since the Civil War. As “far as the presidency is magnified by the parties (making the president an effective national leader) the parties become centralized. A long succession of able and popular men in the White House would probably produce a substantial transformation of party institutions.”68 Presidential-centered politics would, in Schattschneider’s view, quickly become partycentered politics. In particular, Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented third term may reflect a substantial, though perhaps temporar y, shift of power within the Democratic Par ty. Schattschneider qualifies this point by observing that it may merely reflect party weakness as an organization and Roosevelt may have made this move because he was unable to dictate the nomi-

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nation of his own successor.69 Roosevelt was unable to “purge” the Democratic Party of dissident elements in 1938, in what Schattschneider describes as “one of the greatest experimental tests on the nature of the American party system ever made.” “If the President is able to make party disloyalty in Congress hazardous, the center of power within the party will return to the capital, and the whole character of the party system and the nature of American government itself may be transformed.” At the time Schattschneider wrote these lines the struggle was an intra-party struggle that continued, “and the conclusion is not yet in sight.”70 What Went Wrong? Responsible Party Government in Perspective It has been commonplace to critique Schattschneider and the responsible party school of democratic theory on two grounds. First, the idea that parties ought to present diametrically contrasting public policies to an engaged electorate runs counter to the notion that parties ought to act as intermediaries between the public and their government. Second, as a broad theory of modern democracy, the responsible party school stands in sharp contrast with the political science of the founding: the Constitution is flexible when necessary, but it is not infinitely plastic, to be molded anew every four years. But in addition to these two critiques it is appropriate to add a third: party reform from the Progressive Era throughout the twentieth century has been decisively anti-party at virtually every critical step. From the introduction of preferential primaries in presidential selection in 1912 through more recent campaign spending limitations in 2002, the bulk of political reform has sought to break the control of parties over the political process rather than strengthen it. Thus the practice of American politics during this period has run away from precisely the reform proposals Schattschneider advocated

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so forcefully and with such sustained effort of analysis.71 We are forced to ask both why this has been so and why Schattschneider’s thesis should be so enduring in the face of this evident rift between his theory and the actual practice of American government. The two questions are related but take different tacks to the same end. Actual party reforms, we might note at the outset, do not necessarily assume that modern democracy is unthinkable save in party terms. Further, it is important to keep party reform within the broader context of the liberal progressive science of politics. Party reform in the 1960s, especially the McGovernFraser Commission that reformed the Democratic Party, made participation rather than stronger parties the key element in change. The intent of the changes was to open the selection process to outsiders and end what many reformers saw as “corruption” by party insiders. The result has been a selection process that is more candidate-centered than party centered. 72 Participation, in turn, was closely tied to the civil rights movement at the time and tended to see participation in terms of basic civil rights. And the center of the rights revolution was the judiciary. Modern democratic government is built on a science of rights rather than the classic science of justice. And as Hobbes should remind us, the beginning arguments for a modern rightsbased regime do not necessarily require democracy.73 The general tendency of the liberal-progressive understanding of rights has been to see them as “entitlements” and therefore not subject to majority rule at all. And once rights become entitlements, it is probably more appropriate for the judicial branch of government to defend rights than organized majorities. Indeed, majorities may be feared precisely because majority rule in a popular form of government can overwhelm individual rights. The expansion of rights by the judiciary, unaccompanied by majoritarian consensus building, can be hostile to the very idea of majority rule.74

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Schattschneider promoted his thesis on responsible party government when the New Deal still looked to many like a glass that was only half-full: an as yet unfulfilled promise of the modern welfare state. In this context it is appropriate to read Party Government as a very insightful description of the strengths and weaknesses of the party politics during that era. In particular we may read between the lines and see Schattschneider’s own frustration with the inability of the Democratic Party to fully implement the whole of the New Deal agenda as it emerged in Roosevelt’s first two administrations. In this sense his analysis of party politics during the New Deal era has held, but better and longer than his prescription for change. If students of American politics want to understand the impact of the New Deal on the subsequent theory and practice of American democracy they should consider E. E. Schattschneider to be essential reading. In a limited sense then, the idea of responsible party government is a fair reading of Roosevelt’s first term. Roosevelt came to office with a vague plan to do something about the economic catastrophe that was the Great Depression. When he took office in 1933 the separation of powers effectively ceased to function for the first time in a major domestic crisis other than civil war. The first hundred days of Roosevelt’s administration saw the executive branch write laws in the White House, send them to Capitol Hill where they were rubber-stamped without debate, and enacted into law. For a brief period the American people saw how a parliamentary system would function. For many serious students of the American political system this was the way a democracy ought to work. It is the seminal domestic political event of the twentieth century, its only rival being the civil rights movement of mid-century. It made Roosevelt the model modern president and the standard by which subsequent presidents were judged and, typically, found wanting.75 And as we have seen, it profoundly affected Schattschneider’s analysis of both the theory and practice of American democracy.

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The problem with this perspective is the unique character of Roosevelt’s “hundred days.” That first defining period in Roosevelt’s administration is not the way the presidency and Congress interact during normal conditions. It is inappropriate to make a unique historical event the normative basis for judging institutional arrangements over an extended period. Schattschneider was correct, however, in seeing in the New Deal a “critical realignment” of partisan politics in the United States. But the realignment did not follow the script of the responsible party school. The responsible party school assumed that fundamental issues would, more or less, be up for debate in each election. A majority consensus would be built by parties for each election and some great party issues would no doubt cease to be an active part of American politics: there would be no majority calling for repeal of the Bill of Rights, for example, although interpretation would still be open. No policy proposal could be assumed to be permanent. Theoretically it would always be possible to reverse any policy if a majority coalition could be formed for any particular election. It is also one of the paradoxes of modern party reform that as anti-party reforms have weakened already weak American parties, the parties have also become more ideological at both extremes of the political spectrum.76 It could be argued on the basis of this development that the voters’ choices in elections are pushing the parties toward the practice of a more responsible model of representation along the lines envisioned by Schattschneider.77 The reasons for this are much disputed and it is not entirely clear why this is so. But the evidence seems to point to rule changes that undermined party discipline and favored candidate-centered campaigns.78 In addition, while it is a hallmark of the liberal-progressive tradition of political science that divided party control of Congress and the presidency results in deadlock and stalemate, it is far from clear that this is in fact the case. David Mayhew, for example, has concluded that party

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division is not typically the most important factor in explaining either the passage or failure of legislation. And when unified party control does occur it does not necessarily result in carefully considered legislation. The normal partisanship displayed in the overwhelming Democratic control of both branches of government between 1964-66 may have slowed down the normally deliberative function of Congress and hastened the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program without the debate we would normally expect from such a sweeping social experiment.79 On the surface it would appear that Schattschneider’s argument for party government is an argument for simple democracy; majority rule as an end in itself and made possible by party government. But beneath Schattschneider’s argument for parties as the efficient cause of democracy is the assumption that the primary function of government is to make policy, specifically the liberal-progressive policy agenda that emerged out of the late nineteenth century and which he saw come to a partly realized fruition in the New Deal. Underneath his advocacy of democracy as democracy of the two-party system was his belief that party democracy would be the means to another end—the modern, liberal welfare state. This end is both a strength and weakness of Schattschneider’s analysis of political parties. The strength is in Schattschneider’s commitment to citizen participation, even if only in the somewhat truncated form of voting for responsible political parties. Citizen participation in government was one of the strains of the liberal-progressive science of politics that Schattschneider never forgot. But most voting studies have been ambivalent about the effects of voter participation. On the one hand, no one wants to defend nonvoting. On the other hand, there is a strong argument to be made that since non-voters do not have significantly different policy preferences than voters, the random recruitment or mobilization of non-voters would be unlikely to alter the outcome

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of most elections.80 The case for participation is more typically made on the basis that participation is important for the development of citizenship. Schattschneider, on the other hand, made the argument for participation because of the inherent tendency of conflicts among elites to trickle down to the general public. As one scholar has pointed out, “The logic behind this proposition is rooted in the advantage that each minority faction gains by drawing additional groups of people into its coalition, a logic that is repeated by the contending parties until everyone is included in the conflict.”81 The weakness is on several levels. First, voters seldom vote for parties alone, even in the British system. Issues and the personalities of the candidates also figure into the equation. Schattschneider believed that responsible parties would link parties with issues as a reason why voters would vote the way they do. But the personal qualities of the candidates, such as integrity, political skill, organizational capacity, and the ability to communicate effectively with the American people, for example, can never be completely separated from voting behavior in practice and ought not to be separated in theory since they can never be taken for granted.82 Publius went so far as to make the probable absence of what he called “enlightened statesmen” one of the primary reasons for what he also called “auxiliary precautions,” the separation of powers and federalism, in the formation of a government. Schattschneider’s proposals would place the burden for maintaining majority rule and minority rights on the shoulders of the parties alone, and with the added recognition that the party role in this regard would depend on enlightened public opinion defined as the “state of mind’ of the American public. Perhaps most importantly, the weakness of Schattschneider’s conception of party government is at the very point where it ought to be most powerful: policy as reflective of the public interest. The idea of the public interest, broadly defined, is at the heart of any discussion of the purpose of government. The

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founders elevated this idea in the Declaration of Independence and went on to defend it in their arguments for the Constitution. But Schattschneider never really develops a concept of the public interest as something apart from parties as like-minded individuals seeking power. The result is to leave open the question of whether policy is merely the sum total of various groups in an electoral coalition or something more. The modern idea of policy government tends to muddy the ambiguity of the fundamental concept of a public interest. The idea of policy government assumes that the public interest can be authoritatively determined, most clearly by a centralized party leadership at odds with local interests. Without a clear concept of the public interest, Schattschneider’s scheme would likely result in elite preferences masquerading as policy proposals. Elite ideologies would likely drive policy debates rather than the type of pragmatic compromises that have come to characterize congressional legislation. Would we really be better off if every piece of legislation were to be debated in strictly ideological terms and decided, in the final analysis, on ideology rather than the messy business of pork barrel politics? It is the sort of debate that might appeal to college professors, journalists, and the like, but it is doubtful that it would really serve the public interest to make every question a great party debate that struck at the very heart of the constitutional edifice. Paradoxically, perhaps, Schattschneider’s responsible party government points in the same direction that the anti-party reforms have traveled. To be sure, the reforms have undermined disciplined parties in favor of candidate-centered politics, of which Schattschneider would disapprove. But the effect of these reforms, owing chiefly to the higher turn-out in the primaries of the party faithful, have made the GOP more conservative and the Democratic party more liberal. The effect, if not the cause, is something that Schattschneider implicitly favors. To the extent that this development presents the voters with reasonably clear

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policy choices, this would appear on the face of it to be a development Schattschneider might support. He might bemoan the disappearance of what used to be called “the vital center” in American politics, but, then again, maybe not. The center would be wherever the dominant party was located and then policy choices could be presented as “centrist” by whatever party could win fifty percent plus one of the vote in a winner-take-all election. The idea of a public interest independent of majority opinion would likely be one of the first casualties of responsible party government. The parties that emerged during the formative years of the republic, the period between the ratification of the Constitution and the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, were messy organizations because they required compromises with multiple factions that were not natural political allies. Slavery broke apart the idea of parties as moderating the extremes of politics. Some issues could not be contained within a system designed for compromise, and slavery was what Tocqueville described as a “great party” debate: the New Deal may have been another such great party debate. Certainly Schattschneider saw the New Deal in these terms. The problem is that while it is appropriate to see some issues, such as slavery, within a great party framework, it is not helpful to see ordinary politics within such a perspective. To the extent that Schattschneider viewed ordinary politics through the prism of the New Deal, where a case could be made that policy government did represent a great party debate, it must be said that his analysis, while insightful at the time, is less useful in more tranquil times. Schattschneider’s conception of responsible parties would have the effect of casting virtually every policy debate into a great party debate in which compromise and coalition building would take a backseat to the fundamental principles being contested. The result would be a political system that would always appear to be on the verge of some sort of irreconcilable conflict with no way out for the

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losers. It might satisfy college professors, who think they know the correct answer to every question, to have a once-and-for-all solution to how a regime should be ordered, but every regime is a composed of accumulated layers of reason, tradition, and accident that cannot be reduced to abstract reasoning alone. Public policy, as with all political action, requires prudence. And prudence, which is, after all, one of the cardinal virtues, is at least as much a part of the tradition of American political parties as is reasoning about the foundational questions of political science. This was no less true during the New Deal than it was when Hamilton dueled Jefferson and Madison over the course of the new republic.83 Coalition building in a democracy that aims to protect the natural diversity of factions in the sense Madison intended in The Federalist is necessarily an affair that does not lend itself to ideological purity. The cement that holds the coalitions together is too often what Schattschneider and other reformers consider “pork barrel” legislation that has little or nothing to do with serious policy debates, even in “little party” terms. As a partial consequence of the messiness characteristic of traditional American parties when they have tried to assemble majority coalitions, it is not surprising that party reformers have tried to “clean up” party politics. As a hygienic virtue cleanliness may be next to Godliness, but as a prescription for improving the political process it may be an inappropriate metaphor when applied to politics. Would it really be preferable if the cement of political parties turned on arcane philosophical disputes rather than less exalted pork-barrel questions? Would we really want ordinary politics to look like academic politics, where the most esoteric issues become the raison d’être of ferocious ideological conflict between intellectuals? Participation, however noble it may be in the abstract, cannot be an end in itself. It needs to be linked to a larger argument about justice, virtue, and citizenship in a popular form of government. It is a linkage Schattschneider seems to have implied,

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but the absence of a specific link that explores the advantages and disadvantages leaves the responsible party school open to the charge that it merely wants to institutionalize a liberal policy agenda. The founders were wary of participation for its own sake because they feared that it could, among other things, undermine prudence and statesmanship if it were allowed to operate directly on government. That is why they found the separation of powers to be such a wise “auxiliary precaution” to control the abuses of government as well as direct democracy. Schattschneider was right to see political parties as the engines of policy change and innovation. Whether he was right to see modern democracy as unthinkable save in party terms is a more debatable subject. He was certainly right to see in the development of the modern party system a fundamentally different conception of popular government that was a challenge to the founding principles of the American constitutional system. That is surely one of the reasons why political scientists return again and again to his thesis on party principles. What he bequeathed to political science is a forceful argument that ideas about political parties are a serious part of how we understand and analyze the politics of modern liberal democracy. The importance of parties is not always readily obvious in philosophical debates about democracy. But the fact that almost everyone who spends much time on the subject in American political science is, sooner or later, forced to come to grips with responsible parties and E. E. Schattschneider is testimony to the enduring importance of his work: parties and democracy are somehow linked by an umbilical cord that we dare not cut. And for a new generation of students who read his work for the first time, there is an additional benefit: Schattschneider is both a witty and graceful writer. For the student of American political science who may have spent too much time reading academic writing, it may seem that a new age of barbarism has befallen the English language. Schattschneider should serve as a reminder that “good writing,”

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“academic writing,” and “seriousness of purpose” are not mutually exclusive terms. SIDNEY A. PEARSON, JR. Notes 1 James W. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Ceaser’s obser vation, “Political science is knowledge that establishes its worth, not by how much of reality it explains, but by how well it would serve us if we chose to apply it,” applies to political science in general as well as specific works such as Schattschneider’s Party Government. P. 66. See also Martin Diamond, “The Dependence of Fact Upon Value,” in William A. Schambra (ed.), As Far as Republican Principles Will Admit. Essays by Martin Diamond. Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1992. Pp. 309-318. 2 On this point see Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, Presidential Elections. Strategies and Structures of American Politics. Tenth Edition. New York: Chatham House Publishers, 2000. Especially pp. 266-272. 3 One of the most incisive critiques of Wilson, as well as later advocates, of responsible parties appeared in A. Lawrence Lowell, Essays on Government. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889. Pp. 20-59. See William F. Connelly, Jr., “Introduction,” in Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government. A Study in American Politics. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2002. (Reprint of 1885 edition.) 4 Sidney A. Pearson, Jr., “Reinterpreting the Constitution for a New Era: Woodrow Wilson and the Liberal-Progressive Science of Politics,” in Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2002. (Reprint of 1908 edition.) 5 Frank J. Goodnow, Politics and Administration. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900. See especially chapters VII and IX. 6 “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 44, Issue 3, Part 2 (September, 1950). For the background of this report, see John C. Green and Paul S. Herrnson, “The Search for Responsibility,” in John C. Green and Paul S. Herrnson (eds.), Responsible Partisanship? The Evolution of American Political Parties Since 1950. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003. 7 John Kenneth White, “E. E. Schattschneider and the Responsible Party Model,” PS: Political Science and Politics, June 1992. P. 167. 8 Robert Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 55, No. 4 (December 1961). Pp. 763-762. An early rejoinder to the behavioral school is Herbert J. Storing (ed.), Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1962.

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A partial listing of the literature influenced by Schattschneider would include James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy. Four Party Politics in America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963; Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, along with his more recent continuation of the same thesis in How Democratic is the Constitution? New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001; Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy. Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984, and his A Passion for Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Responsible party government gained considerable attention at the end of President Carter’s administration when Lloyd Cutler, counsel to the president, complained that the failures of the Carter administration were rooted in the Constitution because it prevented party government, in Lloyd N. Cutler, “To Form a Government,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 59 (Fall, 1980). Cutler’s view was widely, but not universally, endorsed at the time and was cited as one of the motivations behind a Brookings Institute study by James L. Sundquist, Constitutional Reform and Effective Government. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institute, 1986. Pp. 177-205. The general attitude has become a staple of more popular works such as that of journalist Daniel Lazare, The Frozen Republic. How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. 10 Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System. The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840. Berkley: University of California Press, 1969. P. 123. The most judicious account of the origins of political parties remains Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System. Three Essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. Charles doubted that Jefferson had very much to do with the origin of party opposition to Hamilton. Pp. 8485. 11 The reference for this discussion is Federalist 51. 12 William F. Connelly, Jr., “The Party Government School of Thought and Action,” in Bradford P. Wilson and Peter W. Schramm, (eds.), Separation of Powers and Good Government. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994. Pp. 169183. 13 Academic and popular discussion of the separation of powers is a separate volume in itself and it would be almost pointless to try to compile even a minimal bibliography on the subject. My own favorite treatment is M.J.C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1967. The best collection of essays discussing the various aspects of the arguments over the topic remains Robert A. Goldwin and Art Kaufman (eds.), Separation of Powers—Does It Still Work? Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1986. See also Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra (eds.), How Democratic Is the Constitution? Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1980. In the latter volume the gem of an essay by Ann Stuart Diamond, “Decent, Even Though Democratic,” captures the founders’ science of politics in its totality as well as any essay of which I am aware. 14 E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government. New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc. 1942. P. 8. (Hereafter cited as PG.) See also his comments on pp. 8-11.

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Paul J. Pollock, “Is The Federalist Anti-Party?” The Political Science Reviewer, Vol. XII, Fall 1982. Pp. 79-97; see also the cogent observations by Donald V. Weatherman, Endangered Guardians. Party Reform Within a Constitutional System. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994, esp. pp. 1-11. The pioneer work on this subject remains that of Harry V. Jaffa, “The Nature and Origin of the American Party System,” in Robert A. Goldwin (ed.), Political Parties. U.S.A. Chicago: Rand McNalley & Company, 1961. Pp. 59-83. 16 Galatians, 5:16-20. 17 Charles, op. cit., pp. 90-92. 18 On the mutual misunderstanding between Hamilton and Madison on this point, see Michael Allen Gillespie, “Political Parties and the American Founding,” in Peter W. Schramm and Bradford P. Wilson (eds.), American Political Parties and Constitutional Politics. Am, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993. 19 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. 166-167. 20 James Madison, “A Candid State of the Parties,” National Gazette, September 26, 1792. James Madison. Writings. The Library of America, 1999. P. 530. (Hereafter cited as JMW.) 21 These arguments may be traced most insightfully in David P. Currie, The Constitution in Congress. The Federalist Period 1789-1801. Chicago: The University of Chicago press, 1997. 22 For a critique of this view of Hamilton, see Stephen F. Knott, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2002. 23 James Madison to Henry Lee, June 25, 1824. JMW. P. 803. 24 PG, p. 1. 25 Ibid., p. 4. 26 Ibid., p. 2. 27 Ibid., p. 32. 28 Ibid., p. 209. 29 Ibid., p. 7. 30 E. E. Schattschneider, Politics, Pressures and the Tariff. New York: Prentice Hall, 1935. 31 The Semi-Sovereign People. A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. (Hereafter referred to as SSP.) Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of Government. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. (Hereafter referred to as THM.) 32 PG, p. 60. 33 THM, p. 42. 34 Ibid., p. 43. Schattschneider cites A. D. Lindsay’s Essentials of Democracy. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1929, as a source for his ideas on democratic theory. For a critique of Lindsay’s approach, see Leo Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” in Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies. New York: The Free Press, 1959, esp. p. 69.

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THM, p. 45. Ibid., p. 49. 37 PG, p. 18. 38 Ibid., p. 58-59. 39 E. E. Schattschneider, The Struggle for Party Government. College Park: The University of Maryland, 1948. P. 1. (Hereafter cited as SPG.) 40 This thesis has been most insightfully described in Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties. The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. A short version of this thesis can be found in Sidney M. Milkis, “The New deal, Party Politics, and the Administrative State,” in Peter W. Schramm and Bradford P. Wilson (eds.), American Political Parties and Constitutional Politics. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993. Pp. 141-180. 41 PG, p. 106-107. 42 Ibid., p. 209. 43 Ibid., p. 124. 44 Ibid., p. 16. 45 Ibid., p. 23. 46 Ibid., p. 101. 47 Ibid., p. 103. 48 Political scientists have promiscuously used the term “critical elections” trying to define these eras. See Walter dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1970. James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection. Theor y and De velopment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Paul Kleppner, et al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981. See the very cogent critique of this genre in American political science by David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments. A Critique of an American Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, especially Mayhew’s chapter “Policies and Democracy,” pp. 103-140. 49 PG, p. 129. 50 Ibid., p. 136. 51 Ibid., p. 30. 52 Ibid., p. 31. 53 Ibid., p. 35. 54 Ibid., p. 37. 55 Ibid., p. 67. 56 Ibid., p. 109. 57 Ibid., p. 122. 58 Ibid., p. 163. 59 Ibid., p. 155. 60 Ibid., p. 61. 61 Ibid., pp. 131-132. 62 Ibid., p. 136. 63 Ibid., p. 137. 36

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Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., pp. 142-143. 66 Ibid., p. 148. 67 Ibid., p. 149. 68 Ibid., pp. 151-152. 69 Ibid., p. 155-156. 70 Ibid., pp. 163, 166. 71 The point has been clearly discussed in James Pierson, “Party Government,” The Political Science Reviewer, Vol. XII, Fall 1982. P. 46. 72 David Menefee-Libey, The Triumph of Campaign-Centered Politics. New York: Chatham House Publishers, 2000. 73 See Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 74 See the very suggestive work by Ward Y. Elliott, The Rise of Guardian Democracy. The Supreme Court’s Role in Voting Rights Disputes, 1845-1969. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk. The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: The Free Press, 1991. See also the very stimulating discussion by James T. Patterson, “The Rise of Rights and Rights Consciousness in American Politics, 1930’s-1970’s,” in Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger (eds.), Contesting Democracy. Substance and Structure in American Political History. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2001. 75 See William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR. From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Revised Edition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Particularly galling to Leuchtenburg was Ronald Reagan’s remark that Roosevelt was his favorite president. The remark was political blasphemy to those scholars who still nourished the idea of responsible political parties. The very idea of a conservative Republican comparing himself to a liberal Democratic did not make sense. But in reality it may have meant nothing more than the final passing of the New Deal legacy in American political thought. Roosevelt was now non-partisan, much like Lincoln. Everyone and anyone could claim him because his record of accomplishments and failures were so woven into the fabric of American life that their origins were forgotten as partisan battles. 76 Nelson W. Polsby and William G. Mayer, “Ideological Cohesion in the American Two-Party System,” in Nelson Polsby and Raymond E. Wolfinger (eds.), On Parties. Essays Honoring Austin Ranney. Berkley: University of California Press, 1999. 77 Herbert F. Weisberg, “The Party in the Electorate as a Basis for More Responsible Parties,” in Green and Herrnson, op. cit., pp. 161-179. 78 Nelson W. Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. See also Byron E. Shafer, Bifurcated Politics. Evolution and Reform in the National Party Convention. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988. 79 David R. Mayhew, Divided We Govern. Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations 1946-1990. New Haven: Yale University Pres, 1991. Esp. pp. 175-199. 65

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Raymond E. Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone, Who Votes? New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. 81 Peter B. Natchez, Images of Voting/Visions of Democracy. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1985, pp. 35-36. SSP, 2-4. 82 For a particularly insightful discussion of these points in the context of specific presidents see Fred I. Greenstein, The Presidential Difference. Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton. New York: The Free Press, 2000. 83 Charles, passim.

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Preface

TTHE

SUCCESS or failure of any attempt to understand politi­

cal parties depends on whether or not the student knows what to look for and where to find it. There is doubtless an unlimited quantity of unimportant information about parties that might be assembled, arranged, and learned, but the promiscuous accumulation of facts about politics is likely to prove unprofitable. What, therefore, do we need to know about political parties in order to understand them? The following are the crucial points in the system: 1. A political party is an organized attempt to get control of the government. What then is the position of the parties in the government? Has a system of party government been established, or does the government merely tolerate the parties ? What organs of government have been seized (and magnified) by the parties as the instruments of their con­ trol ? H o w have powers been redistributed within the govern­ ment for party purposes? What is the position of public officials in the party ? 2. The parties live i n a highly competitive world. T o what circumstances do they owe their supremacy and survival? What are the relations of the parties (as mobilizers of ma­ ux

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jorities) with pressure groups (the mobilizers of minorities) ? Is it not strange that the parties tolerate the pressure groups ? What are the relations of the parties and unorganized politi­ cal movements ? 3. The major parties manage to maintain their supremacy over the minor parties. H o w do they do so? More specifi­ cally, what are the relations between the second major party and the first minor party ? This relation will determine whether or not a two-party system or a multiparty system will result from party competition. H o w does it happen that the two-party system does not become a one-party system? Obviously the health of the second major party is one of the crucial factors in the system. 4. The internal processes of the parties have not generally received the attention they deserve i n treatises on American politics. What sort of association is the party ? What is meant by party "membership"? 5. The party is a process that has grown up about elec­ tions. What is the effect of the special system of elections found in the United States on the parties ? 6. Most important of all is the distribution of power within the party organization. This leads directly to the whole subject of the relations between the central and local party organizations, doubtless the most significant datum concerning any party. More than any other factor the bal­ ance of these relations determines the nature of the system. A vital point in this connection is the relation among the local party machines i n the same region, for this relation determines whether or not local machines remain local in character. Finally, it should be observed that politics is the most intensely practical of all studies. There is a good reason for this condition. Politics is an extremely competitive enter-

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prise and politicians who try procedures that do not work are put out of business. E . E . S. Middletown, Connecticut December, 1941

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Chapter I In Defense of Political Parties

"No force acting on mankind has been less carefully exam­ ined than Party, and yet none better deserves examina­ tion."—SIR HENRY MAINE.

T H E rise of political parties is indubitably one of the princi­ pal distinguishing marks of modern government. The parties, in fact, have played a major role as makers of governments, more especially they have been the makers of democratic government. It should be stated flatly at the outset that this volume is devoted to the thesis that the political parties created democracy and that modern democracy is unthink­ able save in terms of the parties. A s a matter of fact, the condition of the parties is the best possible evidence of the nature of any regime. The most important distinction in modern political philosophy, the distinction between democ­ racy and dictatorship, can be made best in terms of party politics. The parties are not therefore merely appendages of modern government; they are in the center of it and play a determinative and creative role in it. American major parties deserve to be treated with great respect by all students of political science, for their age if for no other reason. The Democratic party, for example, is truly venerable. Its history is substantially coterminous with

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that of the Republic, making it the senior of all but three or four of the governments among the original signatories of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Its vitality is proved by the fact that it survived the Civil W a r when the Republic itself was torn apart and organizations as viable as the Meth­ odist; Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Baptist Church were split by the conflict between the N o r t h and the South. The Democratic party is therefore one of the most tenacious governing organizations i n the world. Moreover, the partnership of the Democratic and Republican parties, having survived twenty-two presidential elections, has dem­ onstrated its capacity to outlive most of the governments in the world. The limited rivalry of these potent organizations began approximately at the time of the admission of Japan into the family of nations; it antedates the unification of Italy, the creation of the first German Reich, and the estab­ lishment of the T h i r d French Republic. Compared with American major parties, nine tenths of the governments of the world have had a volatile and turbulent existence. American parties are important in view of their accom­ plishments. It can be said justly that they have transformed the American Constitution. They have substantially abolished the electoral college, created a plebiscitary presidency, and contributed powerfully to the extraconstitutional growth of that office. A s a result of the efforts of the political parties the President of the United States today receives a mandate to govern the nation and is responsible for the safety and wel­ fare of the Republic. The parties have greatly simplified the most complex system of government in the world, and we may be certain that the work of reconstruction will continue as long as the party system endures. More important than all other changes the parties have wrought i n the system of gov­ ernment is the fact that they have democratized it. They took over an eighteenth-century constitution and made it

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function to satisfy the needs of modern democracy i n ways not contemplated by the authors. A s the political entrepreneurs who have mobilized and organized the dynamic forces of American public life, these parties have presided over the transformation of the government of the United States from a small experiment in republicanism to the most powerful regime on earth, vastly more liberal and democratic than it was i n 1789. They have supervised or adapted themselves to the conquest of a continent, the transformation of the eco­ nomic system, the absorption of the largest immigrant popu­ lation i n the history of the world, a series of great economic crises, and the rise of the modern administrative state, to mention only a few of the developments in which the parties have participated. The significance of the parties in this system of government is illustrated by the fact that the fall of a major party or a major shift of power within one of the great parties is likely to be followed by the gravest consequences. It is more than eighty years since a major American party was forced out of business and a new major party rose to take its place; that party crisis was followed by the Civil War. Superficial stu­ dents of politics sometimes speak lightly of producing new alignments that would wipe out the existing parties and sub­ stitute therefor other systems of antagonisms and tensions as if these explosive materials were mere sticks and stones to be tossed about as we like. It should not surprise anyone that the parties have irri­ tated and alarmed philosophers, for the discovery of the party tactic was certain to disturb relations and to transfer power within the regime. The victims of these transformations and transfers have naturally hated the instruments of their dis­ comfiture. What is surprising is the fact that the beneficiaries of the revolution in government wrought by the parties have not generally been grateful. That William III and the friends

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PARTY GOVERNMENT

of the old British monarchy did not relish party government is understandable because the parties stripped the monarchy of power and importance. It is possible even to understand the irritation felt by George Washington at the rise of parties a hundred years later, for the parties subverted the Consti­ tution of the United States before it was a decade old. But where have the friends of democracy been? H o w does it happen that Jefferson's resignation from Washington's cabi­ net (indicating the collapse of the Washingtonian attempt to govern without parties) is not marked by a national holiday? W h y are not the primitive experiments in party government, the Boston Caucus Club, the Congressional Caucus, and so on, celebrated i n song and story, along with Bunker H i l l , and the Declaration of Independence? H o w does it happen that the Constitution rather than the parties is described in the schoolbooks as the bulwark of American democracy? If we are not surprised to observe that Washington preserved intact ideas about parties first expressed by Bolingbroke a century before the American Revolution, what are we going to say about John W . Burgess, who maintained a Washing­ tonian attitude toward parties in the 1890's? The parties created democracy, or perhaps more accurately, modern democracy is a by-product of party competition. H o w does it happen that the literature of democracy is on the whole hostile to political parties, seems to reserve its enthusiasm for nonpartisan popular government ? Tories, reactionaries, royalists, and fascists ought to hate parties, but fantastically the parties are treated with contempt by the champions of democratic government. The reception of political parties into political theory is so remarkable that it requires further comment. More amazing than the condemnation of parties by democratic and anti­ democratic philosophers alike, has been an overwhelming tendency of all philosophers to ignore the subject altogether.

I N DEFENSE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

5

Examples of the predisposition to overlook the parties can be found at every hand. Thus Francis Lieber i n his Civil Liberty and Self-Government* published i n 1853, devotes one and one-half pages to a discussion of parties. A treatise on The Science of Government in Connection with American Institutions, written by Joseph A l d e n and published about 1869, makes only one reference to the role of political parties in the process. John Fiske i n his Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Ori­ gins makes only passing references to the parties. John W . Burgess, who enjoyed an incomparable reputation among American political philosophers at the end of the nineteenth century, ignored the parties completely i n his Political Sci­ ence and Comparative Constitutional Law, " published i n 1890. H e too was able to describe presidential elections i n detail without reference to parties. Illustrations might be multiplied almost without end. In fact the conspiracy of silence was broken only when Bryce, an Englishman, and Ostrogorski, a Russian scholar writing i n French, wrote the 2

3

4

Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government, 2 vols. (Phila­ delphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1853). Joseph Alden, The Science of Government in Connection with American Institutions, new ed. (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1876). 2

John Fiske, Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1890). James Sayles Brown, Partisan Politics, the Evil and the Remedy (Philadel­ phia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1897), wrote that political parties are "hostile to free institutions and the liberties of the people, and as such should be subjected to the restraints and prohibitions of law." Alexander Johnston, History of American Politics (and ed.; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1882), contains a bibliography, pp. viii-x, which does not, how­ ever, list any works dealing with political parties as such. Woodrow Wilson's treatise, The State, Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (rev. ed.; Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1898), describes in one brief paragraph the role of the parties in American presidential elections. The index contains two references to parties. 8

^(Boston: Ginn and Company, 1890), 2 vols.

6

PARTY GOVERNMENT

first comprehensive accounts of the American party system near the turn of the century. One gathers that the matter was regarded as no fit object of intellectual curiosity, though it would be inaccurate to say that this attitude was peculiar to Americans exclusively. In attempting to explain the incuriosity of political philoso­ phers toward the subject, it must be said, in the first place, that American parties had their inception i n circumstances well designed to confuse the issue. The theory of the Con­ stitution, inherited from the time of the Glorious Revolution in England, was legalistic and preparty in its assumptions. Great reliance was placed in a system of separation of powers, a legalistic concept of government incompatible with a satisfactory system of party government. N o place was made for the parties i n the system, party government was not clearly foreseen or well understood, government by par­ ties was thought to be impossible or impracticable and was 5

See F. G. Wilson, The Elements of Modern Politics (New York: Mc­ Graw-Hill Book Company, 1936), 316-40, for a brief account of the intel­ lectual history of parties. C. E. Merriam, American Political Ideas (New York: The Macmitlan Company, 1920), 269-309, touches upon the history of the theory of political parties. Parrington is silent on the subject. A. P. C. Griffin, List of Wor\s Relating to Political Parties in the United States (Washington: Superintendent of Documents, 1907), is a compilation by the chief bibliographer of the Library of Congress. Indicative of the growth of interest in political parties is the following table showing the number of items appearing in Griffin's bibliography listed according to the decade in which they were published : 6

1850-59 — 5 1860--69 — 8 1870-79 — 7

1880-89 — 23 1890-99 — 60 1900-07 — 87

Sir Henry Maine, having in mind his British contemporaries, in the i88o's was impressed by their obstinate refusal to look at the parties, although he himself was intrigued by the subject. "The difficulty which Englishmen in particular feel about it is very like that which men once experienced when they were told that air had weight. It enveloped them so evenly and pressed on them so equally, that the assertion seemed incredible.*'—Popular Govern­ ment (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1886) 98-99.

I N DEFENSE O F POLITICAL PARTIES

7

feared and regarded as something to be avoided. The Found­ ing Fathers knew intuitively that party competition, if given a chance, would upset their calculations. Consequently, the Convention at Philadelphia produced a constitution with a dual attitude: it was proparty i n one sense and antiparty in another. The authors of the Consti­ tution refused to suppress the parties by destroying the fun­ damental liberties i n which parties originate. They or their immediate successors accepted amendments that guaranteed civil rights and thus established a system of party tolerance, i.e., the right to agitate and to organize. This* is the proparty aspect of the system. O n the other hand, the authors of the Constitution set up an elaborate division and balance of powers within an intricate governmental structure designed to make parties ineffective. It was hoped that the parties would lose and exhaust themselves i n futile attempts to fight their way through the labyrinthine framework of the government, much as an attacking army is expected to spend itself against the defensive works of a fortress. This is the antiparty part of the constitutional scheme. T o quote Madison, the "great object" of the Constitution was "to preserve the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction [party] and at the same time to preserve the spirit and form of popular government." 6

7

In Madison's mind the difference between an autocracy and a free republic seems to have been largely a matter of the precise point at which parties are stopped by the gov*That Madison realized the implications of civil rights in this connection is clear from Number 10 of the Federalist in which he wrote, "Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires." 'Madison used thefigureof afilter.He said that the function of a republic with representative institutions, etc., was "to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country."— Federalist, Number 10.

8

PARTY GOVERNMENT

crnment. In an autocracy parties are controlled (suppressed) at the source; i n a republic parties are tolerated but are invited to strangle themselves i n the machinery of govern­ ment. The result i n either case is much the same, sooner or later the government checks the parties but never do the parties control the government. Madison was perfectly defi­ nite and unmistakable i n his disapproval of party govern­ ment as distinguished from party tolerance. In the opinion of Madison, parties were intrinsically bad, and the sole issue for discussion was the means by which bad parties might be prevented from becoming dangerous. What never seems to have occurred to the authors of the Constitution, however, is that parties might be used as beneficent instruments of popular government. It is at this point that the distinction between the modern and the antique attitude is made. The offspring of this combination of ideas was a consti­ tutional system having conflicting tendencies. T h e Consti­ tution made the rise of parties inevitable yet was incom­ patible with party government. The scheme, i n spite of its subtlety, involved a miscalculation. Political parties refused to be content with the role assigned to them. The vigor and enterprise of the parties have therefore made American political history the story of the unhappy marriage of the parties and the Constitution, a remarkable variation of the case of the irresistible force and the immovable object, which in this instance have been compelled to live together i n a permanent partnership. Nearly the whole of the constitutional theory on the sub­ ject of political parties can be studied i n capsule form i n Number 10 of the Federalist Papers, written by James Madi­ son. The ideas i n this little essay deserve examination i n de­ tail. Madison's argument, referred to i n the preceding pages, is part of his defense of the separation of powers. H e justifies the system by stating a famous argument against democracy,

IN DEFENSE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

9

the supposed tendency of majorities to become tyrannical. In the course of this argument Madison makes his celebrated analysis of the origins of parties and the economic basis of politics; that is, he argues that the rise of parties in a free system of politics is inevitable. H e then demonstrates that parties ("factions") are inherently oppressive and must be frustrated by an elaborate system of separation of powers if liberty is not to become self-destructive. Almost immediately, however, he turns his attention to a second argument, his famous defense of "large republics," i.e., federalism. This argument is indubitably one of the principal claims of James Madison to immortality. W i t h rare prescience he saw the multiplicity of interests i n a modern national state and demonstrated that, as a consequence of the multiplicity of interests, no one of them is likely to w i n a majority. The advantage of a large republic, a federal republic, is that the diversity of interests i n a large community is greater than it is i n a small community and, consequently, the danger that a tyrannical majority, composed of a single interest, will be able to oppress the whole community is correspondingly diminished. This analysis might still be used as an introduc­ tion to the study of political parties. Considering the fact that Madison, though a veteran of factional politics i n V i r ­ ginia, had never seen a modern party in action when he wrote his essay, his insight was remarkable. What is more amazing, however, is that the second argument destroys the first. Madison's defense of federalism annihilates his defense of the separation of powers. If the multiplicity of interests in a large republic makes tyrannical majorities impossible, the principal theoretical prop of the separation of powers has been demolished. While the authors of the Constitution did not understand parties and certainly did not admire them, it cannot be said that they ignored the subject. It remained for later and lesser

10

PARTY GOVERNMENT

philosophers to treat the parties with a stony, unseeing silence that deprived them of all meaning. In the postconstitutional period, the parties reposed unobserved for the greater part of a century in a dark corner of the intellectual universe. Scholars and publicists explained everything—democracy, sovereignty, law, constitutions, suffrage, representation, lib­ erty, and so on—in such a way that there was no place for the parties; they never stumbled upon anything that could not be explained without taking account of the "factions" condemned by Madison and Washington. The parties thus became the orphans of political philosophy. What cause or combination of causes has obscured the view? Aside from the influence of the theorists of the Con­ stitution, American political thought has been dominated by two principal categories of thinkers, the lawyers and the classical philosophers of democracy. Each of these categories of theorists, for special reasons of its own, found it easy to overlook political parties. First, theorists have been conditioned by the rivalry be­ tween lawyers and politicians for a position of dominance in American government. The irritation felt by lawyers en­ gaged in this struggle has not been lessened by the fact that politicians have used a technique that makes irrelevant the tightest monopolies of the legal profession. More con­ cretely, there has been a contest, now greatly prolonged, both in England and America between those who wanted to es­ tablish and perpetuate a lawyers' constitution and those who have wanted to create a politicians constitution. In England the lawyers set up their constitution at the end of the Glori­ ous Revolution, only to see the scheme subverted by a rising class of politicians who substituted political responsibility for legal responsibility, cabinet government for a separation of powers, and gave England what is justly known as the world's foremost example of party government. This revolution was

I N D E F E N S E OF POLITICAL PARTIES

n

accomplished without changing the law by processes of which the law was ignorant. In the United States the battle, already fought to a con­ clusion in England, is being played over again but with the result still in doubt. The Convention of 1787 copied the English model of 1688 and thereby established the founda­ tions upon which have been erected the world's foremost example of government by lawyers. As an incident of the struggle, the lawyers have assumed a general responsibility for formulating American political philosophy, and in their statements of the philosophical basis of American government they have not been generous to their rivals. O n the other hand, the politicians have rarely shown a taste for literary expression and have not therefore produced a politician's theory of politics. The Parties and the Law It is necessary to examine the relation of the parties and the law in order to appreciate the significance of this struggle to the intellectual history of parties. Everyone who has thought about it at all has recognized that the parties and the law are nonassimilable. The extralegal character of po­ litical parties is one of their most notable qualities. In a highly legalistic system of government such as the govern­ ment of the United States, therefore, the parties seem to be a foreign substance. It is profoundly characteristic that the fundamental party arrangements are unknown to the law. The law, it is well recognized, cannot control public au­ thorities perfectly. It is precisely through this breach in the rule of law that the parties make their way to the citadel of government. That is to say, they undertake to control the 8

^he extralegal character of parties remains in spite of an interesting attempt at regulation of parties in connection with direct primaries.

12

PARTY GOVERNMENT

decisions of public authorities at the points at which the law cannot control them. Furthermore, by political devices which are far more subtle than the devices of the law, they are able to establish refinements of control of which the law is in­ capable. (Compare, for instance, the delicacy of political re­ sponsibility depending on confidence with legal responsibility based on the kind of evidence that can be used i n a court of law.) The parties are able to compel public officers to behave in ways that the law does not contemplate, by methods of which the law is ignorant, without i n any way affecting the validity of their official acts. What goes on behind the formal act, the official seals, and public documents the law refuses to know. Since the parties operate i n a legal no man's land they are able to produce startling effects : in effect they may empty an office of its contents, transfer the authority of one magistrate to another magistrate or to persons unknown to the constitution and laws of the land. It follows that though politicians may know something about the law, it is com­ pletely unnecessary for a lawyer to know anything about politics. The lawyers as formulators of a philosophy of gov­ ernment have contributed little to the theory of parties be­ cause they have a blind spot i n the region of the parties. This has been especially true because the lawyers have al­ ways been extremely skillful in excluding from the evidence all facts that have seemed irrelevant to the closed theoretical system of the law. If it is true that the feud of lawyers and politicians has obscured the view of political parties, it must be added that the work of obfuscation was done also by another old con­ troversy, the controversy over the merits of democracy, per­ haps the greatest debate i n modern political philosophy. In view of the role of the parties in democratic government it might have been expected that the critics and friends of democracy would have examined party government for

IN DEFENSE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

13

evidence to support their arguments. Strange to say, this has not been the case. Although a line of critics from Bolingbroke to Disraeli, including George Washington, argued for a partyless government or a government "above" the parties, the nature of the parties has not been the principal fighting ground of the controversy over democracy. A thoroughgoing debate on this point might have clarified the issues and pro­ moted an understanding of the whole subject. Instead, the admirers and critics of democracy chose to exhaust their for­ ensic talents in arguments that seem to have beclouded the whole question indefinitely. T o appreciate the manner i n which the debate has been confused it is necessary to recall that the controversy about democracy is older than democracy itself; at least it antedates the rise of modern democracy. The main lines of the argu­ ment were laid down long before anyone had ever seen a real democratic government actually at work. Predemocratic philosophers on both sides of the controversy found it neces­ sary to visualize democratic government as best they could without benefit of experience by a sort of tour de force of the imagination. For want of anything better these philosophers turned to Greek concepts of democracy formulated under conditions greatly unlike those to be found in Europe and America i n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. De­ mocracy became, therefore, simply government by the people. Predemocratic philosophers were a little vague about the de­ tails of the operation of the system but took it for granted that the sovereign will of the people would be translated into governmental action more or less automatically and inevitably just as the owner of a piece of property might be expected to administer it i n his own interest. Even when it was realized that some system of representation would be necessary, no immovable obstacles to the full and precise expression of the popular will i n the government were foreseen. The

14

PARTY

GOVERNMENT

sovereign elector was expected to produce the most enor­ mous effect in government simply by voting. The fact that this assumption involves a colossal oversim­ plification of the democratic process was not and probably could not have been understood by the predemocratic theo­ rists. They made the very natural mistake of underestimating the difficulties arising from the numbers, preoccupation, im­ mobility, and indifference of the people. Everyone took it for granted that the people themselves would assume respon­ sibility for the expression of their own will as a matter of course without so much as dreaming of the intervention of syndicates of self-appointed political managers and manip­ ulators who for reasons of their own might organize the electorate and channelize the expression of the popular will. This is the great omission in the theory of democracy formulated by the classical philosophers who dealt exclusively with imaginary democracies. There was no logical process by which these philosophers could have derived modern political parties from the classical concepts of popular sov­ ereignty. The gap in the theory of democracy left by the predemo­ cratic philosophers has never been closed. So certain were the philosophers that the people would in fact use their new powers that the whole controversy has been concen­ trated on the competence of the masses to direct public affairs. A t this point oceans of ink have been wasted. In the manufacture of this breach in the theory of the subject, the admirers and critics of democracy have collabo­ rated with a singular unanimity of opinion. The enemies of democracy assumed, as unquestionably as did its friends, that popular sovereignty would be effective automatically. The fact that both sides agreed upon a definition produced an interesting debate. It is unfortunate, however, that the defi­ nition agreed upon had little relation to the facts of a

I N D E F E N S E OF POLITICAL PARTIES

*5

working democratic system of government. F r o m the point of view of a theory of party politics the result has been dis­ astrous. The general acceptance of the classical definition of democracy precluded debate based on other sets of as­ sumptions. In this way parties were excluded from the dis­ cussion. The classical definition of democracy left a great, unexplored, undiscovered breach in the theory of modern government, the zone between the sovereign people and the government which is the habitat of the parties. The parties occupy a blind spot in the theory of democracy just as they occupy a zone unknown to the law. The only way to discover the parties is to revise the definition of democracy. W e are now i n a position to explain the general neglect of political parties in the philosophy of government. The po­ litical parties live i n a no man's land which has been ex­ plored neither by the lawyers nor by the classical philoso­ phers. A s far as the lawyers are concerned, the parties are something outside the law and unknown to the law. O n the other hand, the parties are equally unknown to the philoso­ phers because i n the greatest controversy i n modern political philosophy the antagonists have agreed upon a definition of democracy which excludes consideration of the parties. It can no longer be said that professional students of po­ litical science neglect the study of parties. A substantial body of literature on the subject has been written, and courses in political parties are an established part of the instruction offered by academic departments of political science. Can it be said, however, that political parties have been assimilated in political philosophy ? It is not enough that textbooks on political parties have been published nor is it enough to in­ corporate a chapter on political parties in volumes on po­ litical theory. The assimilation of political parties into the philosophy of government involves a revision of political theory itself. The classical definitions of democracy, popular

i6

PARTY GOVERNMENT

sovereignty, representation, and so on, refer to no political processes that may be observed in the facts of an operating democratic system; they were formulated wholly without respect to political parties. The entire theory of suffrage must be rewritten in the light of what we now know about political parties. For the same reason the meaning of civil rights must be redefined. Classical concepts, such as the idea of the tyranny of the majority and with it a large part of the theory of the separation of powers, must be discarded. The Aristote­ lian classification of government on the basis of the number of persons participating in power has been made meaningless by Robert Michel's iron law of oligarchy. What good does it do us to examine the role of parties in modern govern­ ment if we continue to state our political philosophy i n a way that ignores their existence ? One need only examine a treatise such as Professor Coker's Recent Political Thought to see that the political parties are still the orphans of po­ litical philosophy. A great labor of revision and reconsidera­ tion awaits the political philosophers and must be performed before it can be said that the parties have been assimilated in the philosophy of politics. What is now needed is a politi­ cian's theory of politics.

Chapter II The

Raw Materials of Politics

The other point of difference is, the greater number of citi­ zens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance principally which renders factious combina­ tions less to be dreaded in the former than in the latter. The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals com­ posing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.— Hence it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a re­ public has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic,—is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it.—JAMES MADISON, in The Federalist Papers, No. io. 1

*See also Madison's letter to Jefferson, October 24, 1787. by

Writings, edited

G . H u n t ( N e w Y o r k . G . P. Putnam's Sons, 1900-10) V , 1 7 Î Î . "In a large

society, the people are broken into many interests and parties, that a c o m ­ mon

sentiment is less likely to be felt, and the requisite concert less likely

to be formed, by a majority of the whole."

17

i8

PARTY

GOVERNMENT

IVLADISON'S STATEMENT is quoted at length because it merits the closest possible scrutiny. In it are to be found the ele­ ments of a working theory of politics, as valid today as it was in 1788, for it has the merit of being on all fours with the facts, an operating explanation of things as they are. What, i n plain language, is Madison's theory ? Broken into its elements the theory is: (1) there exist in society a multi­ plicity of conflicting interests which project their rivalry into politics; (2) political divisions are, therefore, inevitable in a free society; (3) on the other hand, the larger the community, the greater will be the number and diversity of interests in­ cluded i n it; (4) but the greater the number of interests the less likely is it that any one interest will constitute a majority of the electorate, with the result that it becomes increasingly difficult for one interest to oppress the rest of the community in direct proportion to the increase i n the size of the com­ munity. The size of the community is thus a factor i n the safety of free politics. Unstated implications of Madison's hypothesis are that, in a large community, majorities can be produced only by compromise and accommodation among a variety of interests. That is, first, the process of creating a majority is a moderating process, and second, to speak of the tyranny of the majority is to betray ignorance of the way in which majorities are formed. What makes N o . 10 of the Federalist one of the curiosities of political philosophy, however, is the fact that i n spite of the logic of his argument, Madison did fear the tyranny of the majority and he says so i n the very essay from which the quotation is taken. One is compelled to conclude that Madison did not observe the consequences of his own theory. While Madison did not understand the distinction between a political party and what we would now call a pressure group (he attributed some of the characteristics of a pressure group

T H E R A W M A T E R I A L S O F POLITICS to "factions"), he understood something about the manage­ ment of interests. H e took an optimistic view of the possi­ bility of so organizing government that it would not be paralyzed or run over by the organized pressures of modern society. Madison is the first American theorist to have a philosophy of pressure politics. According to his analysis, the government of the new American republic might hope to retain its freedom of movement in spite of the pressures of the interests because opposing pressures would to a large extent neutralize each other. The pressure of one overwhelm­ ing interest is something to be feared ; the pressures of a multitude of interests tend to cancel out. In foreseeing the strategy of government in the world of interests Madison avoided the error of less important students of history and politics who observe that there is a connection between economics and politics and conclude at once that politics is a mere resultant of economic pressures. Madison is therefore the father of a political theory of the behavior of economic interests. The Multiplicity of Interests Are Madison's generalizations about the number and di­ versity of interests in a large community borne out by the known data of modern society ? H o w many interests are there in the American nation ? Even the most superficial ob­ servations reveal a staggering complex of interests. If a hasty survey is followed by a closer and more detailed study of the condition of society, there is disclosed a variety and multiplicity of interests that is somewhat astronomical in character and proportions, a universe of interests. N o one would be so bold as to estimate the number of interests i n the United States, a variable approaching infinity, depending largely on the power of the social microscope used in making the observation. What can be done is to look at some of

20

PARTY GOVERNMENT

the data most readily available to get an impression. Without pretending that the account is exhaustive, the following table may illustrate the proposition. Interests and associations are listed together because frequently the association itself is the only available evidence of the existence of the interest. The Multiplicity

of Interests

Families Religious denominations Local religious congregations Agricultural marketing associations Corporations Manufacturing establishments Occupations Farms Commercial and industrial organizations and associations American Federation of Labor: Local unions National and international unions Congress of Industrial Organizations: Affiliated unions Local industrial unions Organizing committees Associations and societies listed in World Almanac Associations listed in Social Wor\ Year Boo\ Associations listed in Municipal Year Boo\ Associations listed in Directory of Organizations Engaged in Governmental Research Associations listed in Directory of Organizations in the Field of Public Administration Local and ad hoc governmental authorities

30,000,000 201 250,000 12,000 533,000 169,111 16,000 6,288,648 19,000 32,631 102 36 675 8 450 967 201 499 1,901 175,000

The fact that the foregoing tabulation merely scratches the surface of the subject is too obvious to require comment. In fact, no mere library research could pretend to exhaust the field, for vast aggregates of organizations do not get into the books at all. Only the most resolute efforts of some public agency such as the Census Bureau, supported by the resources and authority of the government of the United States, could

T H E R A W M A T E R I A L S O F POLITICS

21

make a survey that might be considered comprehensive. It is probable that the growth of voluntary organizations and societies is one of the prime social phenomena of this age. This is one aspect of the expanding universe of politics. The discussion of "interests" becomes inevitably a discus­ sions of associations, for the association is the visible body of something of which the interest is the invisible motive. A n unorganized interest is merely something potential and may i n fact never become overt. In a way, organization is proof of the reality of an interest. In practical politics the distinction between organized and unorganized interests is about as fundamental and decisive as any distinction can be. The study of abstract interests, even when measured i n dollars and cents, is at best an attempt to determine how people ought to act if they responded to the stimulus of the interest as they are expected to do. The difference be­ tween a mere theoretical interest that might drive people to act and the actual behavior of real people may be very great indeed. If this were not true, clergymen would not need to exhort sinners to save their souls, nor would bankers need to urge men to save their dollars. Are the interests and associations listed i n the foregoing table significant politically ? Merriam and Gosnell have esti­ mated that approximately 75 per cent of the voters have a "hereditary" allegiance to one or the other of the major parties. If this estimate is correct, it makes the family by a very wide margin the greatest formulator of political opinions and political loyalties i n our society. The families are, more­ over, the custodians of a remarkably diverse racial heritage. N o t even the resources of the United States Bureau of the 2

3

See E. E. Schattschneider, Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff (New York: Prentice-Hail, Inc., 1935), Chap. III. 2

*The American Party System (2d ed., New York: The Macmillan Com­ pany, 1929), p. 28.

PARTY GOVERNMENT

22

Census are sufficient to untangle the national origins of the whole population of the United States, though the fact that 51 million people living i n this country cannot be classified as native-born whites of native-born parents indicates that the racial composition of the American people is complex. Under a kind of legislative duress the Census Bureau several years ago established immigration quotas for 67 countries on the basis of somewhat dubious calculations concerning the national origins of the American population. Indubitably the special kind of heterogeneity reflected in these calculations has been a fruitful source of political conflict ever since the rise of nationalism first made man acutely conscious of these distinctions. A r e racial and nationality differences exploited in fact by people who seek to organize their fellows, and do the organizations so created have a political importance ? It is probably sufficient to quote one specialist who has in­ vestigated the organizations formed i n one of the immigrant elements i n the population of the United States : "Everyone of the eighty-two [Rumanian] Beneficial and Cultural So­ cieties can claim the honor of having helped to initiate its members into a better understanding of their duties as citi­ zens of the United States." It need hardly be said that re­ ligious differences are important in politics in view of the fact that it was long supposed that stable regimes could rest only on a basis of religious homogeneity; uniformity was enforced with the whole authority of the state. The fact that the American people enjoy great liberty in religious matters does not mean, however, that religious differences 4

5

^Recent Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1934) I, 17-21. See message of the President of the United States transmitting a communication relative to the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1924 (70th Cong., 2nd Sess., Sen. Doc. No. 259). C. A. Galitize, A Study of Assimilation among the Roumanians of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 119. Quoted in Recent Social Trends, I, 594. 6

T H E R A W M A T E R I A L S O F POLITICS

23

have been neutralized perfectly as far as politics is concerned. There is probably no such thing as an association that is perfectly neutral in politics under all circumstances. Recogni­ tion of this fact has forced modern dictatorships to become totalitarian, i.e., to monopolize associations, because any association, however innocent it might seem, is potentially a center of resistance. In the case of religious associations, however, political influence is almost never merely potential. O n the other hand, whether we assign a decisive and deter­ minative influence to economic differences or attribute a less overwhelming weight to them, we must probably concede that Madison was telling the precise truth when he said that these differences are "the most common and durable source of factions." There is a presumption therefore that the interests and associations referred to in this discussion are not only numerous and diverse but are also significant politically. The pattern of these differences has increased enormously in complexity since the Federalist Papers were written. What are the main outlines of this pattern ? The census of 1930 classified nearly 69,000,000 people as urban (living in places having more than 2,500 population), and almost 54,000,000 people as rural. Of the latter, however, only about 30,000,000 actually lived on farms—on 6,288,648 farms, to be exact. The rural nonfarm population, approximately 23,000,000 living in 13,000 villages, constitutes the remainder of the rural inhabi­ tants. Six million farm establishments and 13,000 villages form the traditional base of American politics. The rural-urban conflict has been the foundation of most major political alignments in American history. In addition, rural life has been the source of a prolific impulse to create organizations that are never wholly passive in politics. Thus, in 1931, there were in the United States approximately 12,000 agricultural co-operative marketing associations with a total member-

2

PARTY GOVERNMENT

4

ship of 3,000,00o. Although agriculture is relatively less im­ portant in national politics than it was a century ago, it is evident that farmers have sought, by a great intensification of organization, to preserve their bargaining power vis-à-vis other elements in the population now growing more rapidly than the farm population. The city dwellers, on the other hand, now constitute a substantial majority of the American people. W i t h i n this category is included the bulk of the 32,000,000 nonagricultural workers of the United States. Most of the industrial and commençai establishments in these cities are owned and operated by the 533,000 corporations existing i n the United States in 1935. Urban industries em­ ployed a large proportion of the people engaged in the 16,000 occupations recently listed in one great survey of employ­ ments. F o r business, bargaining, and other purposes, not the least of which is political, the owners and managers of these enterprises have formed a multitude of organizations. Thus, the United States Department of Commerce publication, Commercial and Industrial Organizations in the United States (of 1931), lists more than 19,000 associations of busi­ nessmen. Even the farmers are not as intensively organized. O n its side, labor, employed by the corporations, the manu­ facturing and business establishments, and the businessmen whose organizations are described in the preceding para­ graphs, has created its own system of organizations. Between the business organizations on the one side and the labor or­ ganizations on the other side there lies one of the major cleavages of modern society. A s a warning against the over­ simplification of ideas about these alignments of interests 6

7

^Recent Social Trends, op. cit. (above, n. 4), I, 506. See also United States Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Business Organizations, published annually. W.P.A. National Research Project, Publications Section, Division of In­ formation, Work Projects Administration (Washington: 1940). See also The Occupational Index (New York: Occupational Index, Inc.). 7

T H E R A W M A T E R I A L S OF POLITICS

25

it is necessary merely to remember that labor organizations are divided among themselves. Anyone who attempts to understand these movements will know what complexity is. Labor has too many enemies, too many needs, and too many votes to avoid becoming a political factor. Even the foregoing account does not begin to convey an adequate impression of the variety and number of interests or of the organizations formed to promote these interests in the community. People generate a host of interests that bear no visible relation to factors of race, religion, occupation, or economic status. Interests are contagious and multiply with disconcerting ease and speed. Some inkling of the fertility of American society in creating organized interests may be gained by examining the list of associations and societies published annually in the World Almanac. Though the list is hopelessly incomplete, it is suggestive of the com­ plexity of the subject. The Almanac lists a number of the standard type of economic associations such as the Automo­ bile Manufacturers' Association, or the Aeronautical Cham­ ber of Commerce of America, the Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.A., and so on. H o w insufficient this list is in the sphere of business organizations is shown by a comparison with the directory of Commercial and Industrial Organiza­ tions published by the United States Department of Com­ merce. O n the other hand, if one were to try to imagine all possible bases of association, it is improbable that he would be able to invent titles as interesting, amusing, or astonishing as those published in this curtailed list. A few titles will i l ­ lustrate the point : American Society of Agronomy American Alpine Club National Society of Americans of Royal Descent, Inc. Anti-Profanity League National Archery Association

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American Association for the Advancement of Atheism American Birth Control League Boy Rangers of America American League to Abolish Capital Punishment American Colonization Society National Society of Daughters of 1812 American Society for the Hard of Hearing Indian Rights Association Ohio Society of New York Save-The-Redwoods League National Small Business Men's Association First Avenue Association Grand Jury Association of New York County Mexican Society of New York Special Libraries Association Thirty Fourth Street Midtown Association It is not surprising to find that dentists, statisticians, trapshooters, numismatists, mayors, mammalogists, bibliogra­ phers, and the like, form associations, for if there are dentists, statisticians, and trapshooters, and so on, it is probable that their special interests will be organizable. Other associations are more wonderful, reflecting enthusiasms and convictions of various sorts, often extremely specialized. For example : The Non-Smokers Protective League of America Simplified Spelling Board American Sunbathing Association Blizzard Men of 1888 (to commemorate a famous storm) Scientific Temperance Federation World War Amputations Association Society of Friends of de Grasse American Hackney Horse Association American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society Soaring Society of America American Steamship Historical Society Toastmasters International World Calendar Association

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27

One of the processes by which associations multiply is the tendency to establish special women's societies parallel to older organizations of men, as for example the Women's Bar Association, the Society of Women Geographers, the Regular Veterans Woman's Association. The tendency of veterans' organizations to multiply (the Almanac lists ten societies un­ der the title "veteran," though there are many more) shows how eager promoters are to take advantage of diversities within seemingly homogeneous groups. N o r is this tendency contradicted by the formation of a society of A l l American Veterans of A l l Wars because the universal is merely another dimension i n which this group can be organized. N o doubt, the political content of many societies is not great, but it varies radically. A multitude of organizations such as the National Economy League, the Home Market Club, the Foreign Policy Association have a 100 per cent concentration of interest i n public affairs. The activities of modern government are so multitudinous and pervasive that they affect people i n nearly all imaginable sectors of life. Most kinds of private activity find their counterpart some­ where in governmental activity, for public and private in­ terests tend to travel i n pairs. One of the most savage de­ nunciations of any public policy the author has ever seen was a philippic against the so-called Tugwell Food and Drug B i l l published several years ago in a magazine devoted to gardening. A t any rate, the protestations of organized inter­ ests that they are "nonpartisan" should be construed nar­ rowly, for it is one thing to be nonpartisan and another to be nonpolitical. Pressure groups have sound strategical reasons for avoiding affiliation with either of the major parties, but they avoid one type of politics merely to par­ ticipate more effectively i n another. 8

See Pendleton Herring, Public Administration and the Public Interest (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1936), for evidence that every 8

28

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GOVERNMENT

A n examination of these organizations shows how slight is the excuse needed by men for forming an association and how prodigious is its growth. Surely this luxuriance of so­ cieties, this prolific multiplication of associations, is one of the principal distinguishing marks of a democratic regime. Freedom of association has probably been the most enthusi­ astically exercised as well as the most significant of the civil liberties. People do not usually become formidable to gov­ ernments until they are organized. The contacts of the in­ dividual citizen with his government through voluntary organizations of his own creation are sufficiently diverse and numerous to distinguish modern democracy from all other systems of government. It has required the rise of the totali­ tarian dictatorships to awaken democratic philosophers to the political significance of a system of free association. Nothing could be more mistaken than to suppose that the parties monopolize the impulse to organize politically; the parties do not operate i n an organizational vacuum. Although interests and organizations of interests are nu­ merous and diverse, the governmental response to these de­ mands has been proportionately extensive, varied, and multi­ farious. One of the most spectacular aspects of modern gov­ ernment has been its attempt to meet the demands made on it with a program of activities on a scale of grandeur and in­ tensity that would have overwhelmed any other generation, or for that matter would have swamped any other organiza­ tion i n the history of the race. O n the one hand, modern democratic government is subjected to the stimulation of great pressures; on the other hand, the governmental reac­ tion is appropriately manifold and polymorphic. A modern 9

public agency seems to attract a cluster of private associations interested in its work. °The totalitarian dictatorships shed a flood of light on theories developed by philosophers such as the "pluraliste." See H . J. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), for example.

T H E R A W M A T E R I A L S O F POLITICS

29

system of public administration is able to execute simultane­ ously an incredible number and variety of public policies. The intensity of conflicts over public policy is reduced by the resources at the disposal of the government, the capacity of the government to meet a high percentage of ail demands made on it. The versatility and resourcefulness of the govern­ ment enable it to dissipate friction that might result from a more restricted and exclusive program. H o w many policies can a government pursue simultane­ ously? T h e number of activities actually carried on by any existing government cannot be determined accurately because the term "activity" is difficult to define. Some conception of the variety and number of the activities of the American na­ tional government can be gained, however, by an examina­ tion of Wooddy's Growth of the Federal Government, 1915— 1930, or by a study of the items in the federal budget. Im­ pressions derived from these sources will be re-enforced by an examination of the general statutes and special acts passed by Congress i n a single session, the Federal Register, and a variety of other sources. Associated with the national government are more than 175,000 state and local authorities of all descriptions, established among the people i n all parts of the country and subject to local control to make them most immediately accessible to the public. These local au­ thorities are doubtless as responsive to the demands of the public as is the national government itself. The reaction of government to public demands is proof of the proposition that the exchange between the public and its government is genuine, i.e., that it is a working two-way system of communi­ cations. The volume of consultation, hearing, exchange of opinion, 10

See Lent Upson's study of the growth of the functions of the city of Detroit, The Growth of a City Government (Detroit: Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, 1931). 10

3

o

PARTY GOVERNMENT

adjudication, and adjustment going on between the people and the government overflows all traditional channels of communication. The people have developed organs for collec­ tive communication with the government at all stages of the process, while the government on its own initiative has also developed new agencies of consultation. This is one of the most reliable evidences of the proposition that American government is democratic. The right of free association, the greatest of the democratic liberties, shows no signs of becoming atrophied for want of use in the United States; American politics is indubitably the classical instance of a system of free association. Moreover, the responsiveness of the government to the claims of organized interests is the best possible proof that the right of free association is valu­ able. H o w does one fit political parties into this aggregate of private associations and organized minorities ? Is govern­ ment possible at all under these circumstances ? In the uni­ verse of minorities, what does a majority look like ? American government has grown great by meeting the demands made upon it. The catholicity and versatility of the governmental response to the demands made upon it seem at times to have been based on the assumption that all claims ought to be met regardless of their merits. Unquestionably the capacity of the government to meet an enormous volume of demands has been a kind of emergency solution of the problem created by the clamor of organized interests, be­ cause in a large number of instances conflicts can be mini­ mized by giving all claimants something. This policy (or perhaps it is a complete absence of policy) is no permanent solution of the problem, however, because the demand can be expanded more rapidly than the supply, even in the case of the richest government of all. Sooner or later it be­ comes necessary, therefore, i n any political system to discriminate among the demands. This involves the establish-

T H E R A W M A T E R I A L S O F POLITICS

3

1

ment of a public policy. N o public policy could ever be the mere sum of the demands of the organized special interests. For one thing, the sum of the special interests, especially the organized special interests, is not equal to the total of all interests of the community, for there are vital common in­ terests that cannot be organized by pressure groups. Govern­ ment by organized special interests, without some kind of higher integration, must break down of its own weight. The mobilization of majorities in recognition of the great public interests, the integration of special interests with public policy, and the over-all management and planning involved in discriminating among special interests cannot be done by organized special interests on their own initiative. These are the functions of an entirely different kind of organization, the political party. The majorities formed by the parties are never mere aggregates of special interests, i.e., the parties and pressure groups consist of two different syntheses of in­ terests. For this reason the problem of the political manage­ ment of interests can be studied most profitably by examining both species of political organization at the same time. O n what grounds can it be argued that a democratic gov­ ernment may retain its freedom of movement i n spite of the pressures of the organized minorities ? The theory formulated by Madison, as already stated, supplies one answer to this question. Multitudinous conflicting interests neutralize each other, leaving the government free to pursue its own policy. This is, however, only a partial answer to the problem. A s a matter of fact, the mechanistic interpretation of politics, according to which it is assumed that economic interests register themselves in public policy automatically, is a mani­ fest absurdity. The hypothesis that economic interests are irresistible would be more plausible if economic interests were always i n conflict with noneconomic interests and regu­ larly overcame all opposition. Unhappily, however, economic

3

2

PARTY GOVERNMENT

interests are most frequently opposed by other economic in­ terests, and they destroy each other. In the simplest sort of case, the veterans' bonus for example, the veterans exact a sum of money from the taxpayers. Presumably the taxpayers dislike parting with their money as much as the veterans enjoy getting it, making the economic interests on one side exactly equal to the economic interests on the other side. The resultant of these pressures ought, therefore, to be zero, but it is not. There is no economic explanation of the success of the veterans. People who write about interests sometimes seem to assume that all interests are special and exclusive, setting up as a result of this assumption a dichotomy in which the interests on the one side are perpetually opposed to the public welfare on the other side. But there are common interests as well as special interests, and common interests resemble special interests in that they are apt to influence political behavior. The raw materials of politics are not all antisocial. Alongside of Madison's statement that differences i n wealth are the most durable causes of faction there should be placed a corol­ lary that the common possessions of the people are the most durable cause of unity. T o assume that people have merely conflicting interests and nothing else is to invent a political nightmare that has only a superficial relation to reality. The body of agreement underlying the conflicts of a modern society ought to be sufficient to sustain the social order pro­ vided only that the common interests supporting this unity are mobilized. Moreover, not all differences of interest are durable causes of conflict. Nothing is apt to be more perish­ able than a political issue. In the democratic process, the nation moves from controversy to agreement to forgetfulness; politics is not a futile exercise like football, forever played back and forth over the same ground. The govern­ ment creates and destroys interests at every turn.

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33

There are, in addition, powerful factors inhibiting the un­ limited pursuit of special aims by any organized minority. T o assume that minorities will stop at nothing to get what they want is to postulate a degree of unanimity and concen­ tration within these groups that does not often exist in real life. If every individual were capable of having only one in­ terest to the exclusion of all others, it might be possible to form dangerous unions of monomaniacs who would go to great extremes to attain their objectives. In fact, however, obsessions of this sort are too rare to be organized. Generally people have many interests leading to a dispersion of drives certain to destroy some of the unanimity and concentration of any group. H o w many interests can an individual have? Enough to make it extremely unlikely that any two indi­ viduals will have the same combination of interests. Anyone who has ever tried to promote an association of people having some special interest in common will realize, first, that there are marked différences of enthusiasm within the group and, second, that interests compete with interests for the attention and enthusiasm of every individual. Every organized special interest consists of a group of busy, distracted individuals held together by the efforts of a handful of specialists and enthusiasts who sacrifice other matters in order to concen­ trate on one. The notion of resolute and unanimous minori­ ties on the point of violence is largely the invention of paid lobbyists and press agents. The result of the fact that every individual is torn by the diversity of his own interests, the fact that he is a member of many groups, is the law of the imperfect political mobiliza­ tion of interests. That is, it has never been possible to mobi­ lize any interest 100 per cent. This condition not only limits the effectiveness of the special interests but, as will be shown in another connection, it upsets many paper calculations con­ cerning politics.

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It is only another way of saying the same thing to state that conflicts of interests are not cumulative. If it were true that the dividing line in every conflict (or in all major conflicts) split the community identically in each case so that indi­ viduals who are opposed on one issue would be opposed to each other on all other issues also, while individuals who joined hands on one occasion would find themselves on the same side on all issues, always opposed to the same combi­ nation of antagonists, the cleavage created by the cumulative effect of these divisions would be fatal. But actually conflicts are not cumulative in this way. In real life the divisions are not so clearly marked, and the alignment of people according to interests requires an enormous shuffling back and forth from one side to the other, tending to dissipate the tensions created. In view of the fact, therefore, ( i ) that there are many in­ terests, including a great body of common interests, (2) that the government pursues a multiplicity of policies and creates and destroys interests i n the process, (3) that each individual is capable of having many interests, (4) that interests cannot be mobilized perfectly, and (5) that conflicts among interests are not cumulative, it seems reasonable to suppose that the government is not the captive of blind forces from which there is no escape. There is nothing hopelessly wrong about the raw materials of politics.

•

•

*

*

*

•

Chapter 111 What Is a Political Party?

The Types of Political Organizations

BROADLY, there are two fundamental types of political or­ ganizations, political parties and pressure groups. In the United States it is necessary to distinguish a third type, the minor party, which differs from the major party or the real party more fundamentally than in size, merely. That is, the minor party is not a smaller edition of a real party; it is not a party at all. Leaving minor parties for later examination, we shall find it necessary first to distinguish between political parties and pressure groups, the two principal types. The distinction between these types is fundamental, and if it is not made clear it will be impossible to understand either parties or pressure groups. PARTIES

What is a political party ? A party may be defined in terms of its purpose and in terms of the methods used to attain its purpose. A political party is first of all an organized attempt to get power. Power is here defined as control of the gov­ ernment. That is the objective of party organization. The fact that the party aims at control of the government as a whole distinguishes it from pressure groups. The fact that 35

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the major party bids for power at all distinguishes it from minor parties whose interest in power is too remote to have a determinative effect on their behavior. The life of the parties revolves about the present posses­ sion of power or the bid for power, a bid made with a reasonable expectation that it will be successful at an early date. Only when an organization is in control of the govern­ ment or is able to create and maintain a widespread expecta­ tion that it will take over the government soon does it be­ come a major party or a real party. One does not whistle up a party at will, therefore, or make a party by calling some­ thing a party. Whether or not a given political organization is a real party is a question of fact. Does it in fact have con­ trol of the government or has it in fact been able to create a general belief that it will take control of the government at a date early enough to be so exciting and serious as to deter­ mine the behavior of the people who are participating i n the adventure? Since control of a government is one of the most important things imaginable, it follows that a real party is one of the most significant organizations in society. Parties are defined i n terms of the bid for power because it is impossible to define them i n terms of any other objec­ tive. Presumably the men who engage in a great political enterprise of this sort do not in every case want power for its own sake, as an end in itself. There is no one universal motive for seeking power. A thousand men want power for a thousand different reasons. This is especially true because a modern government is a prodigious establishment in pos­ session of enormous resources and capable of executing a vast number of policies simultaneously. T o attempt to define parties in terms of the motives for which men want power is, therefore, to open a bottomless pit. Burke obscured the issue first by defining a party as an association of men who have agreed on some principle of public policy, but it is equally

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37

just to say that parties are held together by the "cohesive power of public plunder." It is obvious that men will not get power unless they want it. Moreover, it ought not to be very difficult to imagine reasons for wanting to control a modern government. W h o does not? Finally, it is ridiculous to assume that men cannot collaborate to get power unless they are actuated by the same impulses. Possession of the vast resources of a modern government, its authority, its organization, administrative establishment, and so on, will provide something for nearly everyone willing to join hands in the political enterprise. The winners get so much more than the losers that the difference is worth the struggle. But power is the common denominator of all their ambitions. Partisans may therefore get the benefit of the kind of unity that counts in spite of the fact that they do not have identical opinions and interests. Finally, it is futile to try to determine whether men are stimulated politically by interests or by ideas, for people have ideas about interests. If it were nec­ essary to produce agreement on all matters of public policy or to create an identity of interests within the group before it could be organized as a political party, the whole project would obviously be impracticable. In the second place, the bid for power must be made by way of certain special and characteristic means. What is the party method ? First, it is a peaceable method. The parties do not seize power by a coup d'état. They act within the framework of the regime. This presupposes also that the parties are free to use peaceful methods. The precondition of party government is that the parties and the government tolerate each other, i n other words, that there is a certain comity between the party i n power and the opposition party. It goes without saying that party government is impossible if the successful party cannot get control of the government i n any case.

38

PARTY GOVERNMENT A Study in the Dispersion and Concentration of Votes

More definitely the distinguishing method of party politics is a maneuver with numbers carried out in connection with voting in some numerous body having the power to govern. The governing body within whose ranks the party maneuver is executed may be a representative assembly or it may be the electorate itself provided only that ( i ) it has the power to govern (parties do not originate in debating societies or in old ladies' sewing circles), (2) the rights and position of the governing body are well established, so that the members may play the game without hazard to their personal safety, and (3) provided that the governing body is numerous and therefore finds it necessary to act by voting, preferably by a majority or a plurality vote, for the maneuver involves num­ bers. The quest for power largely determines the method, for the processes of a debating society are fundamentally unlike those of a parliamentary assembly having the power to govern. Power and the necessity of getting things done (i.e., using power) dominate the procedures in a governing as­ sembly. Theoretically all members of the assembly have pre­ cisely equal powers. That is, in an assembly of 300, each member in theory has one three-hundredth of the total power of the assembly. The pressure to get things done operates, however, to redistribute this power drastically. Debate cul­ minates in acts of government i n the form of votes on a motion, let us say by a simple majority. The effect of this device is to redistribute power within the assembly. Thus, in an assembly of 300 a simple majority (151) can, in effect, exercise all of the authority of the whole assembly, while the remaining 149 members are powerless to do anything about it. A s a result of the redistribution of power involved in this proceeding, each of the 151 members i n the majority has approximately doubled his power, while the minority has

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39

been stripped of power, as far as this one issue is concerned. By a general agreement covering all issues the majority could conceivably appropriate all power permanently while the minority was rendered permanently impotent. In this way the equality of members contemplated in the law is de­ stroyed. A requirement that all decisions be made by a unani­ mous vote would make party government impossible, but majority rule is an invitation to party organization. What is said here concerning the processes in an assembly having the power to govern is true also of an electorate having the power to make or break a government. Beyond this the method is simplicity itself. It is based on the discovery that a few members agreeing in advance to concentrate their voting strength can control a large body in which the other members do not consult for this purpose. For the purpose of this discussion the whole membership is divided into two classes: ( i ) a few members who parti­ cipate in the conspiracy, and (2) the many remaining mem­ bers who do not participate in it. The few present a united front, i.e., they concentrate their voting power, while the unorganized remainder, having neglected to consult in ad­ vance, exhibit a normal dispersion of strength. A n examina­ tion of the probabilities will show how easily and cheaply the organized minority is likely to get its way if the others are completely unaware of what is going on. A t one time the author of this volume conducted an election in a boys' club to select a chief officer of the club, only to discover when the vote was tabulated that each of the boys had voted for him­ self. This condition might be described as absolute zero in organization. Assuming that only a plurality had been re­ quired to elect, it follows that two members could have determined the result in this case by agreeing in advance. This is the absolute minimum of consultation capable of producing an effect.

40

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THE CAUCUS

The practice of prior consultation i n order to agree upon a united front is an old one, usually described by the word "caucus." The caucus is the core of party politics; it makes political parties possible and distinguishes them from all other political organizations. H o w many members must join the caucus to make it ef­ fective? T w o answers may be made to this question. First, prior consultation leading to agreement in advance by any number, however small, is apt to produce some effect. Sec­ ond, the number required to take control depends entirely on the dispersion of votes by the members not participating in the caucus. Perfect dispersion is rare, but the more nearly it is approached, the less effort is required for the caucus to control the result. The whole procedure is a study in the concentration and dispersion of voting strength. The degree of concentration which must be brought about by the caucus in order to determine the result depends on the degree of dispersion in the votes of the membership not participating in the caucus. The greater the dispersion, the less the degree of concentra­ tion necessary. Concentration is produced deliberately by prior agreement, dispersion is accidental. Some questions permit a wider degree of dispersion than others, i.e., in a vote on a "yea" and "nay" question the alternatives are so restricted that every member must vote for one side or the other. In an election, on the other hand, the members may scatter their votes very widely among many candidates. Plurality elections, when there is a wide dispersion of the unorganized vote, make the work of the caucus especially easy. The general principle underlying the stratagem is that, other things being equal, any unorganized group will exhibit a tendency toward dispersion of its voting strength which

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41

can be overcome only by planning, consultation, and organ­ ization. It has been traditional for textbooks on political parties to introduce the subject by citing an account of the Boston Caucus taken from the journal of John Adams for February, 1763. Whether the discovery of the technique was first made i n the meetings held i n the garret of T o m Dawes (it almost certainly was not), these early accounts of the Caucus are justly celebrated. Gordon says, "By acting i n concert, together with a careful and extensive distribution of ballots, they generally carried the elections to their own mind." About the meetings of the Caucus Club, John Adams says, ". . . selectmen, assessors, collectors, fire-wards, and repre­ sentatives are regularly chosen before they are chosen i n the town." ". . . There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one end of the garret to the other." From the smokefilled garret in Boston i n 1763 i n which candidates for select­ men, assessors, and so on, were "put over" on the town meet­ ing to the smoke-filled room i n the Blackstone Hotel i n Chicago i n June, 1920, when the nomination of Warren G . Harding was agreed upon, the technique of the caucus has remained fundamentally the same. The discovery that a few men, often acutely conscious of their lack of public influence, can by the use of the caucus technique and a little cool calculation acquire a wonder­ working efficacy i n town meetings and parliaments has never ceased to amaze and fascinate people. T o speak of party politics as if it were a case principally of the creation 1

2

3

The Wor\s of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1850) II, 144. Sec also Gordon, The History of the Independence of the United States of America (London: 1788) I, 365, quoted by M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902) II, 4. J

2

Op. cit. (above, n. 1), I, 365. 0p. cit. (above, n. 1), I, 144.

B

4a

PARTY

GOVERNMENT

and manipulation of opinion is to miss the point entirely. Persuasion is unnecessary or secondary. Politicians take people as they find them. The politician has a technical specialty based on a profitable discovery about the behavior of numbers. To illustrate the process, let us take the hypothetical case of a committee of seven elected by an assembly of 300. It is assumed that each member casts seven votes, one vote for each of seven candidates, the seven candidates receiving the highest vote being elected. It is not unreasonable to suppose that one sixth of the membership could determine the out­ come of the election by agreeing i n advance on a carefully selected slate, provided that the remaining 250 did not con­ sult at all. Assume that the 1,750 votes of the unorganized 250 members were distributed among the leading candidates as follows : A B C D E F G H I J K

— — — — — — — — — —

210 140 90 75 70 60 60 55 55 50 50

L M N O P Q R S

— — — — — — — —

50 50 40 40 40 40 40 35

1,250

The remaining 500 votes cast by the members not partici­ pating in the caucus might reasonably be expected to be too scattered to contribute to the decision, i.e., they are ob­ viously wasted. O n the other hand, the caucus is able to add 50 votes to the total cast for each of seven candidates. That is, the caucus is able to take advantage of the fact that many nonparticipants will vote for caucus nominees unaware of

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

43

the fact that a slate has been nominated. Thus the un­ organized nonparticipants not merely waste a high per­ centage of their votes but actually assist the caucus by casting unsolicited votes for the caucus nominees. It must not be imagined that the caucus would be so stupid as to align itself against the nonparticipants by nominating candidates who get no support outside of the caucus. Far from it; the caucus counts on its candidates' receiving substantial as­ sistance from outsiders who know nothing about the con­ spiracy. In this way the caucus is able to make a few votes go a long way. A n analysis of the vote i n the election described i n the foregoing paragraph will show that the caucus could not de­ feat A and B who received a very large vote. O n the other hand, the caucus could, with a little luck, determine which five of the remaining seventeen popular and respected mem­ bers of the assembly would be elected. A wider distribution, very likely to occur i n the vote of an unorganized group, would improve the chances of success, while a greater con­ centration of the vote of the unorganized membership would make the maneuver more difficult. If we assume that the caucus nominated D , E , G , I, K , M , and O . the votes of these candidates would be: Unsolicited vote from unorganized members D E G I K M O

Caucus vote

Total

125 120

55 50 50 40

50 50 50 50 50 50 50

400

350

750

75 70 60

no

105 100 100 90

44

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GOVERNMENT

The successful candidates supported by the caucus thus might expect to receive more unsolicited votes from the outsiders than the caucus casts altogether. COUNTERORGANIZATION

F r o m the foregoing discussion it is obvious that the caucus will get its way most easily if the nonparticipants are not forewarned, for the maximum dispersion of the vote of nonparticipants will occur only if nothing is known of the conspiracy. Hence early attempts at party organization were carried on i n extreme secrecy. Indeed, the parties have never wholly abandoned the weapon of secrecy. A s information about the conspiracy leaks out, however, cpuntermeasures are certain to be taken. What countermeasures are possible? The only defense against organization is counterorganization. Counterorganization makes victory more difficult for the caucus but not impossible. This is a crucial point i n the development of party politics. Since it is inevitable that the conspiracy will be discovered sooner or later, it is important to observe that the caucus technique can be used effectively even against an organized opposition. W h e n organized ef­ forts to concentrate voting strength on one side are opposed by equally well-organized efforts to concentrate support on the other side, the second stage i n the process is initiated, and it may be said that a kind of party system has been established. The principal effect of counterorganization is a great in­ tensification of efforts by the caucus. Deprived to some extent of the weapons of secrecy and surprise and confronted by a hostile concentration of voting strength, the caucus must now produce a larger concentration of its own. The op­ position i n turn must enlarge its membership also. Pro­ gressively organization is intensified, and the mobilization of support is pushed on both sides as the alignments become

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

45

better known. The limit is reached when every member of the assembly belongs to one camp or the other and is recognized as such by both parties. This limit is approached in Congress, but it has never been approximated i n the electorate at large. If counterorganization makes the task of the party caucus more difficult by making a larger concentration of votes necessary, it also makes it easier. It has already been noted that the effect of the operations of a party organization i n a representative assembly or in the electorate (the process is the same in both cases) is to simplify and restrict the al­ ternatives. Carried to its logical conclusion in an election, the process limits the voter to the choice of one of two candidates. Thus the voter is restricted i n effect exactly as if he were answering a "yes" or "no" question, and the dispersion of votes is eliminated entirely. This is a disad­ vantage because the party must now get a majority i n order to win, whereas a small plurality was sufficient as long as the votes of the nonparticipants were scattered. But it is also a great advantage because voters have only turo places to go. The party thus is certain to get freely a substantial number of unsolicited votes for the simple reason that in­ different voters are so restricted in their choices that they are half persuaded before they are asked. Here again party tactics are facilitated by the fact that the unorganized many unintentionally give a bonus to the organized few. The secret of the success of the parties is that innocent bystanders and nonparticipants regularly contribute to the advancement of the plans of the party managers. This is the unearned in­ crement of politics which makes things easy for politicians 4

4

A n unpublished study by Richard Petherbridge, in the library of Wesleyan

University, shows that the

identification of the members of Congress gen­

erally with one or the other of the parties occurred later than has sometimes been supposed.

46

PARTY GOVERNMENT

and does much to give the parties a dominant position in public life. Recurring to the hypothetical assembly of 300, let us see how the caucus works under the new conditions, namely a substantial development of party organization on both sides. It ought to be relatively easy for one fourth of the members to control the election of a chairman, let us say. Assume that 75 members absent themselves from the roll call (not an un­ reasonable assumption). It follows that a total of 113 votes is all that is necessary to elect. Even if we suppose that the organized opposition group has 75 members, the problem should not be excessively difficult, for the remaining 75 mem­ bers who are committed to neither side will probably be remarkably ineffective. The unorganized and uncommitted members have a choice of several courses. They may absent themselves, but this will merely reduce the number of votes required to elect a chairman. They may vote for candidates of their own, but unless they present a united front, i.e., form a caucus of their own, the result will be exactly as if they had not voted at all. O n the other hand, each of them may toss a coin to determine how he is going to vote. In this case both of the parties may in the strictest logic expect to get approximately half of the uncommitted votes—within a few votes of the total needed to win, as a matter of pure luck. Finally the 75 may play off one party against the other, but their bargaining power is restricted by the fact that there are 75 independents and only two parties. That is, the parties compete for the independent vote, but it is also true that the independent voters compete with each other for whatever concessions the parties may be prepared to make. In other words, it is extremely unlikely that the independents will dispossess the parties; one or the other of the parties is almost certain to win. Thus, the general strategy of the caucus continues to be feasible even when both sides are organized.

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

47

The intensification of competition between the rival cau­ cuses has two principal effects. First, there is a great ex­ tension of the area of competition. If the party movement begins i n a parliamentary assembly, it spreads into the country. That is, once the possibilities of organization and counterorganization i n Parliament or in Congress have been exhausted, the next logical step is to go behind the current membership of these bodies and make an effort to influence the election of the next Parliament or the next Congress, much as a college, if athletic competition gets too intense, might canvass the countryside for new football players out­ side its current student body. The party which first takes this step, i.e., first invades the country and participates i n elections, is likely to win a decisive advantage over its op­ ponents. This competitive advantage is so great that the opposition must retaliate in kind under the penalty of being put out of business if it does not do so. Thus the contest spreads from Parliament into the electorate and enlists the whole country i n the conflict. Once party organization be­ comes active in the electorate, a vast field for extension and intensification of effort is opened up, the extension of the franchise to new social classes, for example. The natural history of parties is a story of continuous expansion and intensification of competition from the caucus in Parliament to a small electorate in the country to a larger and larger electorate. This is the expanding universe of politics. In the United States, the activities of Jefferson and his friends following Jefferson's resignation from Washington's cabinet illustrate the spread of party conflict from the capital to the country. Jefferson was blocked in the cabinet, there­ fore he went to the country to start a backfire. The invention of this tactic by Jefferson was the basis of one of the most successful political careers i n American history. 5

See S. E. Morison and H. S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937) I, 230-45. 5

48

PARTY GOVERNMENT

The whole history of suffrage, intimately associated with an intensification of party organization in the electorate, i l ­ lustrates the second aspect of the expanding universe of politics. Just as the parties i n the parliamentary assembly in­ tensified their organizing activities until they had exhausted the possibilities of the membership, so the parties i n the electorate intensified their efforts in order to exploit the possibilities of the electorate more fully, with one important difference, however; the electorate could be enlarged. The Expansion of the Electorate What voters can be solicited most profitably by the parties in the expansion of their constituencies? Obviously, new voters who have formed no strong party attachments. In the search for new segments of the populace that might be exploited profitably, the parties have kept the movement to liberalize the franchise well ahead of the demand. As salesmen of politics the parties have operated in an everwidening market. T o assert that an indignant people wrested the right to vote from a reluctant government is a humorous inversion of the truth, an invention of persuasive politicians who sold the fable to the historians. It is impossible to explain the extension of the suffrage in terms that ignore the compe­ tition of the parties. The enlargement of the practicing electorate has been one of the principal labors of the parties, a truly notable achievement for which the parties have never been properly credited. Evidence of the force of the tendency here described may be seen in the fact that the only region of the United States in which drastic restrictions on the right to vote remain in effect is the Solid South, a one-party area in which party competition is inoperative. As a matter of fact, American parties have never found it necessary to operate in a closed electorate whose composition and size

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

49

has been fixed. There is evidence, moreover, that the move­ ments of voters i n and out of the reservoir of nonvoters have had more influence on the outcome of election contests than the movements of voters from one party to the other. Is the work of the party organization in the electorate ex­ cessively difficult? The initial efforts in this direction must have been extraordinarily productive: a previously unexploited field, no competition, a relatively small electorate, including a very large proportion of nonvoters. It must have been very much like fishing i n a pond that has never been fished before. It would be misleading, of course, to suggest that Jefferson and his friends created a modern party organ­ ization. The point is that even a small effort produced great results, sufficient not merely to overturn the party i n power but to annihilate it. Thus Jefferson and his friends destroyed the monopoly of politics by the nation's capital, though the meaning of the revolution was not clearly visible until the time of Andrew Jackson. T h e expansion of party organiza­ tion into the electorate established the basis for one of the great historic conflicts within the party organization, the conflict for supremacy between the party organization i n the electorate and the party organization i n the central gov­ ernment. The attempt to organize the electorate became a permanent part of the American political process because it yielded enormous profits for a relatively slight effort. That is, the new method wor\ed. Ultimately all parties were forced by the competitive situation to make an effort to organize the electorate. The progressive intensification of organization in the country gave rise to modern party organization. The evolution of party organization is thus i n two stages : ( i ) the rise of party organization i n Congress, and (2) the development of party organization i n the electorate.

50

PARTY GOVERNMENT

Has the organization of parties i n the electorate reached the limit of intensity? Decidedly not. The best proof of the rudimentary character of party organization i n the United States is to be found i n the fact that the parties rely very largely on patronage to build up a working organization, and make ridiculously few demands on their constituencies for contributions of money or work. The American major party is a low-grade organization which has exploited its oppor­ tunities by bonanza methods and has worked only the most accessible fields i n a very fertile wilderness, i.e., new voters, immigrants, newly enfranchised voters, indifferent voters without strong opinions, and others i n the great reservoir of nonvoters. For money the parties have gone very largely to the rich—the most accessible source. 6

The Simplification of the Alternatives Another effect of the competition of rival party organiza­ tions i n Congress and i n the country has been an enormous simplification of the alternatives. This is expressed most clearly i n terms of a reduction of the number of candidates in elections at all levels of government, though it is true also wherever the parties have taken effective control. T h e typical pattern of an election i n which there is no party organization is a multiplicity of candidates and a wide dispersion of votes among the candidates. The characteristic pattern of an election dominated by parties is a drastic limitation of the number of candidates and a high degree of concentration of votes. Thus i n the first presidential election, in spite of the popularity of Washington, twelve candidates received electoral votes. Later elections reduced this dis­ persion drastically, showing that party politics had begun See L. Overacker, Money in Elections (New York: The Macmillan Com­ pany, 1932) 132-338

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

51

to produce its characteristic effect. Even the man from Mars ought to be able to tell that presidential elections are dom­ inated by the parties if he saw that two candidates usually monopolize the electoral votes. One of the best proofs of the proposition that the authors of the Constitution did not understand party politics is to be found i n the Constitu­ tion itself i n the provisions made for the election of a presi­ dent by the House of Representatives when no candidate receives a majority i n the Electoral College. This machinery has now been unused for more than a century. More espe­ cially the provision i n the original Constitution that the House choose a president from the five candidates receiving the highest electoral vote shows how greatly the authors of the Constitution underestimated the power of the parties to bring about a concentration of votes. In effect, therefore, the parties frame the question and define the issue. In doing this they go a long way toward determining what the answer will be. This is best illustrated in a presidential election i n which the people for all practical purposes have a choice of one of the two major party candi­ dates. Assuming that there are thirty million people i n the United States who are eligible for the office of president, is it not clear that fifteen million times as much selecting is done before the election as is done by the people i n the elec­ tion itself? That is, by a pre-election process wholly under the control of parties, the number of candidates (the area of selection) has been reduced from thirty million to two. Assuming that there are sixty million voters, it follows that the ordinary individual voter has one sixty millionth of one fifteen millionth of the power to select a president of the United States. The parties which do >999>999 f h lect15,000,000 ing have contracted the choices to a tremendous extent. In framing the question they have to a very great extent deterI4

Q

t

e

se

PARTY

52

GOVERNMENT

mined what the answer will be. This is a very great simpli­ fication of the alternatives. People submit to this assumption of power by the parties because they cannot help themselves. T h e immobility and inertia of large masses are to politics what the law of gravity is to physics. This characteristic compels people to submit to a great channelization of the expression of their will, and is due to numbers, not to want of intelligence. A n electorate of sixty million Aristotles would be equally restricted. In other words, the parties take from the people powers that are merely theoretical. Nature, having first made numbers what they are, limits the effective powers of the people, and the parties merely take advantage of the fact. T h e people are a sovereign whose vocabulary is limited to two words, "Yes" and " N o . " This sovereign, moreover, can speak only when spoken to. A s interlocutors of the people the parties frame the question and elicit the answers. T o say this is not to disparage democracy; it merely demonstrates that parties are made possible by nature's limitations on the be­ havior of large numbers of people. N o r does it follow that democracy is unreal, for the alternatives remaining i n the free market of political organization and agitation are ex­ tremely valuable. Here again it is evident that parties are able to stay i n business because the assignment, however great it may seem, is practicable and possible. Moreover, the greater the numbers involved i n the scheme, the more neces­ sary become the organization and management of politics by the parties. N o r is this the only way i n which the parties simplify the alternatives. The boldness with which they undertake to get results is sometimes remarkable. American government is the most complex i n the world, by a very wide margin. In the 7

From the point of view of the materials discussed in Chapter II, the simplification of the alternatives is seen to be very great. 7

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

53

theory of American constitutional law the authority of any one public official, acting alone, is severely restricted, but it would be fantastic to conduct an election campaign within these limitations. People are not interested i n alibis for non­ action, not even when written by constitutional lawyers. They want results. T h e truth of the matter is that the American public has never understood the Constitution nor has it ever really believed i n it, i n spite of the verbal tradition of con­ stitutionalism. W i t h the rise of a plebiscitary presidency, making the president the one significant public officer elected by the nation as a whole, the office has become the vehicle for the expression of a great simplification of the Constitution. By a popular political interpretation of the Constitution, more important than any interpretation ever made by the Supreme Court, the president is made respon­ sible for the initiation, adoption, and execution of the policies by a mandate that merely ignores every known principle of the separation of powers and federalism. This is the cen­ tralizing (simplifying) tendency of the party, forever in conflict with the decentralizing tendencies described else­ where. The parties have imposed a great political simplicity on the most complex governmental system in the world. 8

What the Political Parties Are Not Whatever else the parties may be, they are not associations of the voters who support the party candidates. That is to say, the Democratic party is not an association of the twenty"During the past nine years, as well as for many periods before that, Congress has been much further from the will of the people than has the President. It does not, for the most part, represent the people as a whole, but special and sectional interests. Again and again it has been demon­ strated that a forthright and courageous President can compel Congress, whining and snapping, to come along at the end of the leash, because he, and not Congress, embodies the popular will."—Editorial, 105 New Republic (July 21, 1941) 71. 8

54

PARTY GOVERNMENT

seven million people who voted for M r . Roosevelt i n Novem­ ber, 1940. T o describe the party as if it were this sort of association of voters is to produce confusion, and, moreover, to be victimized by a promotional device so old that it should deceive no one. T h e concept of the parties as a mass association of partisans has no historical basis and has little relation to the facts of party organization. It is only necessary to examine the platforms of the parties, however, to see how persistently the parties have tried to identify themselves with all voters who may have supported their candidates: . . we, the delegated representatives of the Republican electors of the United States, i n Convention assembled."— Republican Platform, i860. "We, the Democratic Electors of the United States i n Con­ vention assembled . . ."—Democratic Platform, 1872. "The Democrats of the United States, i n Convention as­ sembled. . . ."—Democratic Platform, 1880. "The Republicans of the United States, i n National Con­ vention assembled. . . ."—Republican Platform, 1884. "The Republicans of the United States assembled by their delegates i n National Convention. . . ."—Republican Plat­ form, 1888. "The representatives of the Republicans of the United States, assembled in general convention. . . ."—Republican Platform, 1892. "We, the Democrats of the United States i n National Con­ vention assembled. . . ."—Democratic Platform, 1896. The mental image behind these declarations is that of a huge association of partisan voters. The Republican party professes to be an association of all Republicans, i.e., of all partisans who vote for Republican candidates. It follows that these partisans are "members" of the Republican party. The

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

55

parties have drawn this portrait of themselves so successfully that assumptions concerning the nature of the parties, wholly unjustified by the facts, have gained general acceptance. One of the incidental consequences of the common notion that the parties are associations of large masses of partisans is that the states have enacted a large body of legislation regu­ lating the internal processes of the parties i n the interests of their "members." This is the surprising aftermath of some­ thing that seems to have been originally a mere promotional stunt invented by the party managers to emphasize the devotion of the parties to their followers. It is, however, one thing to be a partisan and another thing to be a member of an association. Let us suppose that the owner of a professional baseball club issued a membership certificate with each ticket sold and that these certificates entitled each "member" of an imaginary association of patrons to buy tickets to all future games and to cheer lustily for the home team. H o w would the purely promo­ tional "association" so created differ from the Republican and Democratic parties, conceived of as associations of partisans ? The concept of membership has doubtless enabled the parties to identify themselves with partisan voters more closely than they might have otherwise, but it has also evoked mental images of parties that are definitely mis­ leading. A s a matter of fact, membership i n a political party has none of the usual characteristics of membership in an as­ sociation. In most states the party has no control over its own membership. A n y legal voter may on his own initiative and by his own declaration execute legal formalities before 9

*The courts usually consider political parties as falling in the classification of un-incorporated non-profit associations. Only one case is on record in which a state supreme court (that of California) held that a political party is a corporate body."—J. R. STARR, "The Legal Status of American Political Parties, II," 34 American Political Science Review (August 1940) 693. 9

5*

PARTY GOVERNMENT

a duly designated public official making himself a registered member of the party. The party as such is not consulted. It does not accept the application; it does not vote the applicant into the association; it may not reject the application; and, finally, there is usually no recognized and authoritative procedure by which the party may expel a member. Moreover, the member assumes no obligations to the party. H e takes no oath prescribed by the party. H e does not sub­ scribe to a declaration of party principles and does not sign articles of incorporation. H e does not pay membership dues, is not liable for the debts of the party, and has no equity in its property. H e has no duties whatever to perform as a condition of membership. H e is not required to solicit votes, is not required to participate i n the campaign, need not attend party rallies, and need not vote for the party candidates. In fact, he need not vote at all. If he wishes to leave the party he does not resign. H e does not even notify the party. H e merely goes to the proper public authorities to register with another party. Membership in a political party is therefore highly unreal because the party has no control over its own membership and the member has no obligations to the party. What the partisan has acquired as a consequence of the attempt of the parties to identify themselves with him is a highly declamatory set of "rights." In the spirit of pure, unbounded extravagance, party managers have repeatedly "given" the party to the voters. The figure of speech by which the party managers have acted in the name of all past, present, and potential partisans should have been com­ pletely transparent. A s a matter of fact the ordinary partisan has not known what to do with the gift; he has rarely ex­ hibited a strong desire to run the party, any more than the ordinary baseball fan really wants to manage the club. It is a tribute to the histrionic talents of politicians that some people

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

57

have taken their pronouncements seriously enough to write the whole concept into law and to try to do something about it. Direct primary legislation is based on the mental image of the party as an association of which the partisans are mem­ bers. The purpose of the legislation is to use the authority of the state to protect the right of the members to control the party, much as a statute might direct a merchant to please his customers. The member has therefore acquired the in­ teresting status of belonging to an association in which he has nothing but rights. Legislation designed to democratize the internal processes of the parties (based on the opinion that all partisans are "members" of a vast party association) has taken the form of statutory abolition of the convention system and the sub­ stitution therefor of another system. For that reason it is worth recalling that the convention system was itself estab­ lished in the name of a movement to democratize the parties, to popularize control of the parties after the destruction of the undemocratic " K i n g Caucus." There is, however, no satisfactory evidence that the direct primary has i n fact pro­ duced a change in the character of the party system or that the internal processes of the party have i n fact been democ­ ratized. In the opinion of one expert: "It appears that by means of laws providing for the election of party officers we have given political bosses and their lieutenants a monopoly of the party and have provided them with a system which effectively shuts out opposition." A r e we now going to see a third attempt to "democratize" the internal processes of the parties by some new means designed to give control to the rank and file of the "members"? It is not here contended that attempts to democratize the 10

E . B. Logan (ed.), The American Political Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936) 72. 10

58

PARTY

GOVERNMENT

parties have done much harm. The whole episode has been innocent enough, but it has produced much confusion. If the parties are thought of as vast associations of partisans, it follows that their internal processes must be described as oligarchic because the great mass of partisans most cer­ tainly do not control them. Thus we arrive at the "iron law of oligarchy" formulated by Robert Michels, who, however, wrote primarily about the parties in European multiparty systems. The party is divided into two entities: ( i ) an or­ ganized group of insiders who have effective control of the party, and (2) a mass of passive "members" who seem to have very little to say about it. It is manifestly impossible for twenty-seven million Democrats to control the Demo­ cratic party. Neither the will nor the machinery, i n spite of the direct primaries and the conventions, exists for this sort of democratization of the parties. N o one has ever attempted to find out what a democratization of the parties i n this sense would entail. There is no basis i n reality for it, and the idea that a few party primaries might enable the rank and file of party membership to control the inner processes of the parties is fantastic. W i l l it be necessary to develop parties within the parties i n order to simplify and define the al­ ternatives for the members? Finally, no one has ever at­ tempted to find out whether democratization, if it were possible, would be appropriate to the legitimate functions of the parties in a modern political system. The unfortunate result of the confusion created by the 11

" T h e r e were better reasons for the development of the convention system and the direct primary than the democratization of the internal processes of the parties. Destruction of the Congressional Caucus became necessary w h e n the E r a of G o o d Feeling produced a one-party system. After 1896

one-party

areas deprived people of an alternative in state and local elections in some regions. T h e direct primary

did

something to restore the

alternative. In a

decentralized party system some formal means of settling internecine party conflicts must be provided.

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

59

concept of the party as a large association of partisans is that it blackens the name of the parties. The parties are the most important instrumentalities of democratic govern­ ment. T o call them oligarchies and thus to identify them with undemocratic tendencies is unfortunate. If it is true that the democratization of the parties is impossible, what is to be gained by insisting on it? A r e we any better off than we would have been if we had decided long ago that the internal processes of the parties are the private affair of the managers ? The relations of the party and the partisan are not oppressive. The hospitality of the parties has been practically unlimited; no one is forced to join a party and, if anyone does join, he assumes no obligations. In what sense is a partisan injured if he is deprived of the right to control an organization toward which he has no duties ? The whole theory is chaotic. A more realistic theory, closer to the facts, can relieve us of the nightmarish necessity of doing the impossible. Let us suppose that the concept of the party membership of the partisans is abandoned altogether. If the party is described as a political enterprise conducted by a group of working politicians supported by partisan voters who approve of the party but are merely partisans (not members of a fictitious association), the parties would seem less wicked. After all, we support many organizations without belonging to them and without asserting a right to control them. The partisans of a professional baseball team do not feel a sense of depriva­ tion because they are not owners of the ball club. A person may speak of "his" doctor or "his" college without implying possession. Loyalty need not express itself in the form of a proprietary relationship. Whether or not a great injustice has been done to the partisans by the fact that they do not control the parties depends merely on how the parties are defined. If we abandon the concept of party membership

6o

PARTY

GOVERNMENT

and substitute a concept such as that of the "good w i l l " rela­ tion of a merchant and his customers, much of the sense of immorality and deprivation associated with the member's lack of authority in the party will vanish. The partisan voter will lose merely imaginary rights but will also be relieved of merely imaginary injustices, if the nature of the parties as private associations is better understood. W i l l the parties be less responsive to the needs of the voters if their private character is generally recognized? Probably not. The parties do not need laws to make them sensitive to the wishes of the voters any more than we need laws compelling merchants to please their customers. The sovereignty of the voter consists in his freedom of choice just as the sovereignty of the consumer in the economic system consists i n his freedom to trade in a competitive market. That is enough; little can be added to it by inventing an imaginary membership i n a fictitious party association. Democracy is not to be found in the parties but between the parties. Once it is seen that the party as an association of all parti­ sans is a mere fiction, a whole series of myths about the parties will be exploded. It is not true, for instance, that the party managers perform miracles of contrivance i n keep­ ing control of the parties by managing an obstreperous mem­ bership. The eager party member who must be managed by the political bosses is largely a figment of the imagination. L o n g disquisitions designed to illustrate the intricate proc­ esses by which the party bosses maintain their control of the party against what is supposed to be the will of the rank and file of the members become irrelevant once it is realized that party membership is unreal. Equally doleful accounts of the indifference of party members toward their supposed party obligations are less exciting if the concept of party membership is simply dropped. The truth of the

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61

matter is that the partisan has nearly always been merely a partisan, and that is about all. The more intensely partisan he has been, the less interested has he been i n internecine party warfare; his interest has been i n party unity for the purpose of defeating the opposition party. W o u l d it not be to our advantage to abandon the whole concept of party membership, the mental image of the party as an association of all partisans, and to recognize frankly that the party is the property of the "organization" ? T h e voter might view the loss of his purely theoretical rights of ownership with equanimity because he would retain the valuable privilege of being courted by both parties. The Parties Try to Control the Government by Winning Elections The account of the expansion of the parties from Congress into the country explains sufficiently how it happens that political parties concentrate on winning elections. This is the point at which modern parties make an effort to get control of the government. T h e decision to apply control at this point implies that the parties must nominate candidates for elective office. The party becomes, therefore, a process formed about the elections. This statement seems trite enough until one observes that the elections are by no means the only point at which governments may be influ­ enced. In fact, the parties did not originally try to win control at this point, as has already been suggested. Pressure groups likewise generally ignore elections, or if they participate i n election contests, they do not do so by nominating candidates of their own. Minor parties use elections as points of de­ parture for their agitation but they do not seriously intend to w i n elections. T h e major party (the real party) is dis­ tinguished by the fact that it makes a b i d for power by

62

PARTY GOVERNMENT

nominating candidates for elective office and wages an electoral campaign with the serious intention of attracting a majority of the votes i n order to w i n the election. The most far-reaching consequences flow from this funda­ mental strategic decision. First, the nature of the party system is profoundly influenced by the nature of the election system, the kind of offices made elective, the way votes are counted, the system of representation, and so on. Second, in a two-party system, the real party must try to w i n a majority of the votes to accomplish anything, for the two-party system is run on a winner-take-all basis. W e begin by defining a party as an organization that makes a bid for power; to get power it must attract a majority. This requirement deter­ mines what sort of organization the party is going to be. That is, if the attempt is made to establish a major party, this commitment automatically forces the organization to make a real bid for a majority. It must subordinate many other things to this objective, for unless it has reasonable prospects of attracting a majority at an early date, it fails completely. The party must, therefore, prepare to do business with a great variety of people. The consistency and symmetry of programs must be bent, amended, and amputated to fit the cruel necessities of compromise on a multitude of fronts. It is idle to talk as if parties would not find it necessary to compromise if politicians were sufficiently high-minded. T o refuse to make concessions and to refuse to develop a manysided program is simply to refuse to make a bid for power. This does not mean that politicians are unprincipled men; they may decide, for example, that power is not worth the sacrifice. O n the other hand, an able political leader with good prospects of winning control of a modern government is i n a position to demand concessions from the interests; his bargaining position is better than that of any minority. This is not a study i n spineless futility, as it has sometimes been

W H A T IS A P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y ?

63

represented. For this reason, also, major parties and minor parties are fundamentally dissimilar. The minor party can evolve a precise, symmetrical, and consistent set of principles and a program that is designed to implement these principles because it does not need to conciliate a multitude of in­ compatible interests, since it is not seriously trying to win the next election. Minor parties deal in principles divorced from power, but the bid for power is the life of a major party. If politicians had no principles at all, there would be no real problem involved in the bid for power. The unprincipled politician interested only i n staying in office lets himself become a cipher, a mere resultant of the conflicting forces without influence on the course of events. The problem re­ sults from the fact that many politicians want to accomplish something, and are not content to let themselves go where they are pushed. About these politicians (who wish to gov­ ern) it may be said that they do what must be done; i.e., someone must grasp the thorny burr. O n the other hand, having principles without making a bid for power is only another way of evading the difficulty. A major party mobilizes a majority i n order to take control of the government and accepts responsibility for the whole conduct of public policy. These are the significant processes of democratic politics. These responsibilities are avoided by political organizations such as pressure groups and minor parties. Finally, if elections have become significant institu­ tions i n American government, who but the parties made them significant? The bid for power through elections, as now organized by the parties, has made the whole govern­ ment revolve about the elections. Elections are older than the parties, but they amounted to little until the parties adopted them for their own uses and invested them with a meaning and importance not dreamed of previously.

64

PARTY GOVERNMENT Nominations

The bid for power through elections has another con­ sequence: it makes the nomination the most important activity of the party. In an election the united front of the party is expressed i n terms of a nomination. For this reason nominations have become the distinguishing mark of modern political parties; if a party cannot make nominations it ceases to be a party. What is a nomination? A nomination is the designation, by some process or other, of a candidate who is accepted as the candidate by the party, i.e., the designation is con­ sidered legitimate and binding by the whole party and re­ sults in the effective mobilization of the voting strength of the party. Whether or not a nomination is a real nomination depends on whether or not it is binding, whether it ef­ fectively commits the whole party to support it. If it is bind­ ing, if all other candidates within the party (for the office in question) are denied party support, and if the party is able to concentrate its strength behind the designated candidate, a nomination has been made regardless of the process by which it is made. The nomination may be made by a con­ gressional caucus, a delegate convention, a mass meeting, a cabal, an individual, or a party election. The test is, does it bind ? Not, how was it done? Unless the party makes authori­ tative and effective nominations, it cannot stay in business, for dual or multiple party candidacies mean certain defeat. A s far as elections are concerned, the united front of the party, the party concentration of numbers, can be brought about only by a binding nomination. The nominating process thus has become the crucial process of the party. The nature of the nominating procedure determines the nature of the party; he who can make the nominations is the owner of the party. This is therefore one of the best points at which to observe the distribution of power within the party.

•

•

•

•

•

•

Chapter IV The Special Character of the American Parties: The Two-Party System

TTHE study of party politics has been remarkably confused by the poverty of the English language as far as the vocabu­ lary of politics is concerned. Organizations called "parties" at various times and in various places have i n fact been fundamentally dissimilar, but all alike have been called parties for want of a sufficient variety of words corresponding to the diversity of the realities. The label has therefore been attached to many different things. Confusion has resulted from the tendency of lazy people to imagine that all things known by the same name must be the same. It is assumed that a party is a party whether found in the United States in 1800 or i n 1940 or i n England as of the time of the Great Reform Act. From the scientific point of view this failure of the terminology of the subject has been fatal. T o assume that French, English, German, and American parties could or ought to behave as if they were identical or equivalent as­ sociations that could be freely substituted for each other like so many blocks of cement is to shut off the most interesting and suggestive inquiries concerning the nature of these as­ sociations. It is only when it is seen that American parties are different that it is likely to occur to anyone to try to explain the singular and special character of the system. T o compare party systems and observe their resemblances and 65

66

PARTY GOVERNMENT

differences is therefore the beginning of wisdom. The at­ tempt to isolate and explain the aberrations of American parties is one of the principal functions of this volume. What are the qualities that distinguish American parties from all others ? First of all, American politics is dominated and distinguished by the two-party system. This is the most conspicuous and perhaps the most important fact about the system. It accounts for a great variety of secondary char­ acteristics of the parties and differentiates the major parties from all minor parties and all varieties of political organiza­ tions found in multiparty systems. Second, the internal proc­ esses of American parties indicate that the distribution of power within these parties, always a significant datum, is so unusual as to require explanation. T o say that American parties are decentralized is to open up a world of inquiries. Obviously any account of the parties that does not attempt to discover the locus of power i n the parties or fails to explain this fact is not worth the paper on which it is written. Related to the distribution of power within the parties is the special character of American nominating procedures. Local party organization assumes a form and an importance that cannot be easily understood by anyone who has not become familiar with the peculiar political institutions of this country, for the American local party boss is as in­ digenous as baseball. Intimately related to the boss system is the professionalization of American politics, another distinguishing mark of the system. Finally, the hypertrophy of a system of pressure politics, parallel to the system of party politics, challenges inquiry. Nearly all of the distinctive characteristics of the American parties turn about the prob­ lem of the locus of power within the parties or some aspect of the internal processes of these parties. Even the twoparty system is interesting principally for the light it sheds on the composition and internal structure of the major

T H E TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

67

parties. Only when the special characteristics of the interior operations and the internal relations of the American parties have been described and explained can we pretend to under­ stand the place of the parties in American government. The Two-Party System The two-party system is the most conspicuous feature of American political organization. H o w does it happen that party politics in the United States has been organized on this pattern? In spite of the fact that the two-party system has been explained by saying that it is a mark of the "political maturity" of Anglo-American peoples (while the multi­ party systems of prewar France expressed the "national char­ acter" of Frenchmen), we are reasonably certain that definite circumstances, easily identified, make this system inevitable in the United States regardless of the personal preferences of individual critics. W e could not discard the two-party system and adopt a multiparty system in the United States, exactly as a lady might change her hat, even if we wanted to do so. What we wish for has very little bearing on what we get i n the style of parties. What do we mean by the expression "the two-party sys­ tem"? Certainly not that there have been only two parties. We have i n fact usually had about as many parties as the French had in the palmiest days of the T h i r d Republic, though few people have ever heard of most of them. A t ­ tempts to break up the two-party system by organizing third party and minor party movements have been made in sub­ stantially every presidential election in the last century. 1

*See E. E. Robinson, The Presidential Vote (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1934) 33, for data on the number of minor parties in various presi­ dential elections. According to Robinson the number of parties participating in presidential elections from 1896 to 1932 were: 17, 14, 12, 13, 11, 11, 15, 12, 15, and 11.

68

PARTY GOVERNMENT

What we have i n mind when we say that we have a twoparty system is an organization of polities i n which there are two major parties and a number of minor parties. The major parties monopolize power, while the minor parties use the elections as an occasion for a subsidiary political agitation that does not lead to power. The major parties maintain their position i n the face of a continuing effort to under­ mine it. In view of the assaults made on the major parties by the minor parties, it must be said that the two-party system (the monopoly of votes and power maintained by the major parties) is one of the most firmly established Amer­ ican institutions. The strength of the two-party system is important because the politics of the major parties i n a twoparty system is fundamentally unlike the politics of a multi­ party system. If this is true, the system deserves examination and analysis. The relation between the major and minor parties is the crucial point i n the two-party system. In the United States the minor parties are excluded from power. This is done so effectively that these parties cease to be genuine parties at all and should probably be spoken of simply as educational movements. In a multiparty system the distinction between major and minor parties is not clearly marked, if it exists at all, and all parties may hope to get a fraction of the power to govern, though none hopes to get the whole of the power to govern. In practice the two-party system means that there are only two major parties, one or the other of which usually has the power to govern, though they may share power sometimes, and that no minor party is able to be­ come a third major party permanently. The gap between the second major party and the greatest minor party is enormous and insurmountable ; no minor party i n American history has ever become a major party, and no major party has ever be­ come a minor party.

THE TWO-PARTY

SYSTEM

69

The monopoly of power by the major parties is real. It means that ordinarily they will poll not less than 95 per cent of the total popular vote cast in a presidential election. They will usually win every one of the places in the electoral col­ lege, all but a handful of the seats in the House and Senate, and all but one or two of the governorships of the states ; and, with the exception of two or three states, they will w i n all or very nearly all of the seats i n both houses of the legisla­ tures. Only in municipal elections, where nonpartisan ballots are used more extensively, is the monopoly of the major parties relaxed appreciably, and even this concession is slightly unreal. Attacks on the monopoly of the major parties have produced only the most negligible results. The two-party system is therefore the Rock of Gibraltar of American politics. H o w does it happen that the two-party system is one of the fixed points of the political universe ? There is in fact nothing mysterious about the causes of this condition. The demonstration is mathematical and conclusive. CAUSES OF THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

The American two-party system is the direct consequence of the American election system, or system of representation, which is only another way of saying the same thing. The elective process is used more extensively i n the United States than it has ever been used anywhere else in the world. About 800,000 officials i n the national, state, and local governments are elected by the people. This is a colossal performance, and since parties are built around elections it would be amazing if the form of the party system were not influenced pro­ foundly by the nature of these elections. The bulk of the elec­ tive places in the government are of two principal kinds : (1) members of legislative bodies, and (2) executives. It is probably most instructive to examine first the process of elect­ ing representatives to legislative bodies, more particularly the

70

PARTY GOVERNMENT

election of members of the United States House of Repre­ sentatives, as a type. W i t h certain exceptions that need not be considered here, members of the United States House of Representatives are elected from single-member districts, one district for each representative. Consequently, to elect 435 members, separate elections are held in approximately 435 districts, and in each case the candidate receiving the greatest number of votes wins, even if he does not receive a majority of the votes cast. Though this arrangement seems simple, the results from the standpoint of the parties are amazing. A s far as the parties are concerned, the geographical distribution of their electoral strength becomes, as a consequence of this system, one of the decisive factors i n determining the outcome of the election. That is, the result of the election is determined by turo fac­ tors: (1) the size of the vote, and (2) the geographical dis­ tribution of the vote; the total vote cast for the candidates of the two parties does not alone decide the issue. The singlemember district system complicates all calculations govern­ ing the outcome of elections by injecting into them the second factor. Even a very slight change i n the geographical distribu­ tion of the party vote i n an election held under the singlemember district system may produce an effect that seems in­ credible when first observed. If, for example, one were told merely that a given party received a total of 10,000,000 votes i n all of the 435 districts taken together, out of a vote of 40,ooo,boo, it would be impossible to guess even approximately the number of seats won by the party until something were known of the distribution of the vote. In an extreme case the party i n question might win all of the seats, or it might win none at all merely by virtue of the fact that it received 25 per cent of the total vote. The accident of the geographical dis­ tribution of the popular support of a party has therefore been made a factor of great consequence by the special kind of election system used i n the United States.

THE TWO-PARTY

SYSTEM

A precisely proportionate representation of the parties in the House, i.e., proportionate to the popular vote, would re­ sult i n the single-member district system if all of the electoral strength of all of the parties were concentrated perfectly by 100 90 80 70 60 50 ' 40 30 20 10 5

10

15

20 25 30 35 40 Districts Fig. i . — A n Imaginary Election A party receiving 4 0 % of the total popular vote distributed uni­ formly throughout the electorate (i.e., the party candidates receive 4 0 % of the vote in each district) would win no seats at all.

congressional districts i n each case. That is, if party A re­ ceived 100 per cent of the vote i n some districts and no votes whatever i n the others, and party B likewise received all of the votes cast in a number of the districts and none whatever in any other districts, and so on, each would be represented i n the House i n exact proportion to its popular strength. O n the other hand, if the vote of all parties were distributed uniformly throughout the country (so that a party receiving 33 per cent of the total vote would receive 33 per cent of the vote i n each of the 435 districts) it follows that the strongest

PARTY

72

GOVERNMENT

party would win all of the seats and the other parties would win none whatever. Since it is unlikely, however, that party strength will be concentrated perfectly or will be distributed with perfect 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 5

10

15

20 Districts

25

30

35

40

Fig. 2.—An Imaginary Election A party receiving 25% of the vote perfectly concentrated in 10 dis­ tricts out of 40 (i.e., the party in question receives 100% in

of the vote

10 districts and no votes whatever in the remaining 30

districts)

would win 25% of the seats. In this kind of election representation would be exactly proportional to the popular vote.

uniformity throughout the country, the number of seats likely to be won i n an election is highly unpredictable even when the total party vote is known. This is so true that relatively slight adjustments of the system of representation affecting the factor of distribution may produce great consequences. A major change i n the system, such as a provision that all rep­ resentatives be elected at large on a single national ticket, would give the strongest party all of the seats, while the other

100 90 80 70 60 50 40

73

30 20 10

12 Indiana districts

9 Iowa districts

6 Maryland districts

15 Massachusetts districts

Fig. 3.—A Real Election Percentage of popular vote cast for Democratic candidates for Congress in 42 districts in Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, and Massachusetts in 1932. They received 54% of the popular vote but won 29 seats, while the Republicans with 46% won only 13 seats.

74

PARTY GOVERNMENT

parties would be reduced to zero, as has been demonstrated in the dictatorships where this device has been used to de­ stroy the opposition parties. Again, an arrangement whereby congressmen are elected on a state-wide basis (i.e., from 48 districts, each state being one district—as presidential elec­ tors are now elected) would exaggerate the victory of the win­ ning party even more than the present system does. This can be demonstrated by comparing the vote in the electoral col­ lege with the results of the congressional election. O n the other hand, a system of proportional representation or voca­ tional representation, by abolishing the geographical factor, would almost certainly destroy the two-party system alto­ gether. Distortion of Results by the Single-Member District System W e are now in a position to observe the effects on the parties of the single-member-district-system-plus-pluralityelections. First, this system tends to exaggerate the represen­ tation of the winning party. Second, the greater the victory the more will it be exaggerated proportionately. Thus a party getting 55 per cent of the vote is likely to win 60 per cent of the seats, let us say. If, however, it gets 65 per cent of the vote it is likely to win 85 per cent of the seats, and so on, though it is not asserted that these proportions are accurate, or that they can be expressed i n a precise mathematical formula. The corollary of this proposition is that the smaller the per­ centage of the popular vote received by a given party, the more likely it is to receive less than its proportionate share of the seats. Without pretending to state an accurate formula, we can say that the tendency is about as follows : if a party receives 45 per cent of the popular vote, it is apt to get only about 40 per cent of the seats. If it gets 35 per cent of the popular vote it may get only 15 per cent of the seats, de-

THE TWO-PARTY

SYSTEM

75

pending, of course, on the vagaries of the geographical dis­ tribution of its popular vote. If a party gets less than 25 per cent of the popular vote it is apt to get very few seats, if any at all. Restated, the general proposition is that, other things being equal, the higher the percentage of the total popular vote cast for a party, the more cheaply ( i n terms of votes) will the party win seats i n Congress. O n the other hand, the smaller the percentage of the total popular vote cast for a party, the more expensively (in terms of votes) will seats i n Congress be acquired. Obviously, the individual voter can make his own vote weigh more heavily by voting for major party candidates than by voting for minor party candidates. Although the tendency of the single-member district sys­ tem described i n the preceding paragraph is not stated with the precision of a mathematical formula, it is clear that the operation of the system is to exaggerate the victory of the strongest party and to discriminate radically against lesser parties. T h e system discriminates moderately against the second party but against the third, fourth, and fifth parties the force of this tendency is multiplied to the point of ex­ tinguishing their chances of winning seats altogether. T h e odds against a minor party are especially great because it is certain to be no more than the third party, unless it has strongly concentrated its strength in one section. That the general proposition stated here is true can be demonstrated by an examination of election statistics. A tabulation of the vote i n congressional and presidential elec­ tions i n recent years shows the force of the tendency. T h e elections of 1928 and 1932 are sufficiently illustrative of the operation of the system. In 1928 the Republicans received 58.1 2

Professor Herring has observed that the most important third parties have also been sectional parties. See The Politics of Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1940) 182. This fact results from the singlemember district system which places a great premium on geographical con­ centration.

7

6

PARTY GOVERNMENT

per cent of the total popular vote cast i n the presidential elec­ tion, but won 61.9 per cent of the seats i n the House of Rep­ resentatives and 83.6 per cent of the presidential electors. O n the other hand, the Democrats polled 40.8 per cent of the total popular vote, but won only 37.8 per cent of the seats i n the House and 16.4 per cent of the presidential electors. Minor party candidates received 1.08 per cent of the popular vote but their parties won only one seat i n the House (0.0023 of the total membership) and were shut out of the elec­ toral college altogether. In 1932 the Democrats polled 57.4 per cent of the total popular vote but won 71.9 per cent of the seats i n the House and 89.9 per cent of the electoral college. In this election the Republicans, on the other hand, polled 39.7 per cent of the popular vote but won only 26.9 per cent of the House membership and n . i per cent of the electors. Minor parties polled 2.9 per cent of the popular vote, elected 1.1 per cent of the membership of the House, and were again shut out of the electoral college. Comparative data on the results produced by the Ameri­ can system and certain foreign systems are instructive : 3

The Number of Parties Represented in the Lower Houses of National Parliaments of Certain European

Countries in 1930 Austria Belgium Czechoslovakia Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece

4 5

16 7

8

6 13 13

9

Hungary Latvia Lithuania Poland Portugal Rumania Sweden Switzerland Yugoslavia

5 17 11 23

9 7

6 7

8

^he total popular vote cast in the presidential election is used as the basis of calculation because the total popular vote in the congressional elections is not obtainable in usable form.

77

T H E TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

The data i n the foregoing table is i n remarkable contrast to the figures i n the table below showing representation of the parties i n the American House of Representatives since the time of the Thirty-eighth Congress. House of Representatives M i n o r Parties Congress

Republican

Democratic

or Independents

38th 39th 40th 41st 42a 43d 44th 45th 46th 47th 48th 49th 50th 51st 52d 53d 54th 55th 56th

57th 58th 59th 60th 61st 62d 63d 64th 65th 66th 67th 68th 69th 70th 71st

103 145 143 170 139 203 107 137 128 152 119 140 151 173 88 126 246 206 185 198 207 250 222 219 162 127 193 216 237 300 225 246 237 268

80 46 49 73 104 88 181 156 150 130 200 182 170 156 231 220 104 134 163 153 178 136 164 172 228 290 231 210 191 132 207 181 195 175

3 M

11 6 2 4 i

14 8 7 16 9

5

... ...

i 18 8 9 7 i

3 5 3 1

7

8

PARTY GOVERNMENT

The tendency of the American election system to exclude minor parties from power is shown by the fact that in the twenty congressional elections from the Fifty-sixth Congress to the Seventy-fifth Congress the minor parties elected only five members per Congress on the average, or a little more than i per cent of the total membership of the House of Representatives. In the electoral college the exclusion of the minor parties is even more complete. In sixteen of the twentyone presidential elections held from 1840 to 1940, inclusive, the minor parties were excluded altogether. If we disregard the elections of i860 and 1912, the minor parties elected only 43 presidential electors out of a grand total of 8,267. A n examination of the party distribution of state gover­ nors and the members of state legislatures illustrates further the grip of the two major parties on American politics. Thus, on January 1, 1938, there were thirty-nine Democratic gov­ ernors, six Republican governors, with one each listed as Pro­ gressive, Farmer-Labor, and Independent. The major parties, as of this date, controlled forty-five of the forty-eight gov­ ernorships i n the United States. In the state legislatures the dominance of the two parties was even more complete. O f a total of 7,405 state legisla­ tors, i n office January 1, 1938, 4,722 were Democrats, 2,363 were Republicans and 320 were listed either without party designation, as independents; or as members of third parties. Of this 320, not listed as belonging to one of the major parties, 241 are members of the legislatures of Minnesota and Nebraska, elected on a ballot that is made nonpartisan by law. Members of these legislatures are consequently not listed as belonging to either party, though in fact they may be party men. If we disregard the 241 members of these legislatures, there remain 7,164 legislators in the other 46 state legislatures, and only 79 of the 7,164 are listed as not belonging to one or the other of the major parties. O f the 79, however, 11 are

T H E TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

79

listed merely as "Independents" and cannot on the face of the record be described as genuine third party representa­ tives. There remain, therefore, only 68 members of the state legislatures who may properly be described as third and minor party representatives. O f this number, 62 are Progressives i n the Wisconsin legislature which includes i n its membership also 2 Socialist members. A l l but 4 of the 68 third party legis­ lators are therefore members of the Wisconsin legislature. The remaining 4 are members of the American Labor party in the lower house of the N e w York legislature. It is not altogether just to discount the Farmer-Labor representation i n the Minnesota legislature merely because the law requires them to be listed as nonpartisan, but it is impossible on the face of the record to determine precisely how many mem­ bers of the Minnesota legislature belong to this minor party. It is a remarkable fact, however, that in at least 44 of the 48 state legislatures that is no real third party representation whatever, and that if the known representatives of third parties i n the two houses are added together they amount to somewhat less than 1 per cent of the membership of the 48 American state legislatures. Many other instances of the operation of the single-member district system could be found. Outside the United States the most conclusive demonstration is to be seen in the fate of the Liberal party i n England under an analogous election sys­ tem. Here was a party that had every advantage—money, prestige, able leadership, a glorious history, and a large body of devoted followers—yet it was strangled by the election system. The Liberal party had the great misfortune to be­ come a third party and, once caught in this position, was destroyed by the statistical tendency of the single-member district system. In the election of 1924 the Conservatives won 4

4

Scc table i n National Almanac and Year Boof{ (Chicago: National Survey

and Sales Corporation.

N e w England edition; 1938)

264.

8o

PARTY

GOVERNMENT

415 seats in the House of Commons by virtue of having polled 7,838,225 votes, whereas the Labour party won 152 seats on the basis of 5,423,589 votes; but 2,925,142 Liberal voters elected only 42 members of the House. Five years later the Conservative and Labour parties polled a total of 17,044,221 votes (very evenly divided) and won 548 seats altogether, while the Liberal party won only 59 seats although it polled 5,301,127 votes. In the 1929 election the Labour party won 1 seat for every 28,996 votes cast for its candidates, the Con­ servative party paid 33,845 votes per seat, but the Liberal party won its seats at the cost of 89,850 votes each. In other words Labour party votes were more than three times as produc­ tive as were the votes cast for Liberal candidates. A proud and ancient governing organization such as the British L i b ­ eral party is not easily destroyed by adversity. Under the pressure of the single-member district system, the disinte­ gration of the Liberal party became inevitable, however. This is probably the most conclusive demonstration that could be imagined of the efficacy of the system in preserving the monopoly of the major parties. By this means the chasm between the second major party and the first minor party is made too deep and too wide to be crossed by any aspiring political organization. 5

The Crucial Position of the Second Major Party The foregoing statement seems to demonstrate sufficiently that minor parties are swamped by the single-member dis­ trict system, but it raises a question. W h y does this system not crush the second major party also? W h y does it fail to produce a one-party system? This question goes to the heart of the subject. There are two answers. First, the second major See R. Muir, How England Is Governed (New York: Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1930) 169 and The Liberal Year Book (London: 1930) 175-79. B

T H E TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

81

party (i.e., the defeated major party) is not easily wiped out completely because it is very likely to have sufficient sec­ tional strength to protect itself against annihilation even i n a crushing defeat. Since the defeated party is the first party in some regions, it benefits by the system, to an extent. Thus the Democratic party, operating from a strong sectional base i n the Solid South, is certain to win substantial representa­ tion i n Congress even when all else is lost. In other words, even if disastrously defeated, a major party will still be a major party. The distribution of the popular vote is almost certain to be so irregular that the defeated major party will win some seats, sufficient representation to enable it to con­ tinue its agitation i n the interval between elections and enough to maintain a formidable lead over all other oppo­ sition parties, i.e., to be the opposition. The sectional base of party alignments is thus likely to enable a defeated major party to outlive electoral disasters. T h e single-member dis­ trict system distorts the result i n favor of the winner, but it does not annihilate the defeated major party as the Fascist national ticket system does. The status of the second major party is the critical point in the two-party system. O n the one side this party is pro­ tected against annihilation by the victorious party. O n the other side it is protected against destruction by the minor parties. T h e same mathematical tendency that exaggerates the representation of the first party as against the second party operates even more drastically i n favor of the second party as against the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth parties. The system does not operate to destroy the defeated major party because the defeated major party is able to retain a 6

e

Since the 52nd Congress, elected i n 1890,

won

when the Republican party

only 88 seats i n the House, neither of the parties has been represented

by less than 100

seats.

members and very rarely has either had fewer than

150

82

PARTY GOVERNMENT

monopoly of the opposition. The cutting edge of the twoparty system is precisely at the point of contact of the second major party and the third party (or the first minor party aspiring to become third major party). What it amounts to is this : the advantage of the second party over the third is over­ whelming. It usually wins all seats or very nearly all seats not won by the first party. A m o n g all the opposition parties i n the field it has by a very wide margin the best chance of dis­ placing the party i n power. Because this is true it is extremely likely that it can assemble about its banner nearly all of the elements i n the country seriously opposed to the party i n power and seriously interested i n an early party overturn. The monopoly of the opposition is the most important asset of the second major party. A s long as it can monopolize the movement to overthrow the party in power, the second party is important; any party able to monopolize the opposition is certain to come into power sooner or later. The second major party is able to argue, therefore, that people who vote for minor opposition parties dissipate the opposition, that the supporters of the minor parties waste their votes. A l l who oppose the party in power are made to feel a certain need for concentrating their support behind the party most likely to lead a successful opposition. A s a consequence the tendency to support minor parties is checked. The tendency of the single-member district system to give the second major party a great advantage over all minor parties is extremely important. In this way it is possible to explain the longevity of the major parties and the instability of the minor parties. Thus, while the major parties seem to go on forever, what has become of, and who remembers a long series of Labor, 7

A. N. Holcombe, in The American Political Scene, op. cit. (Chap. Ill, n. 10), p. i , says: "The most striking characteristic of the two great parties in American politics is their longevity." On the other hand, very few minor parties have survived the decade in which they were born. 7

T H E TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

83

Farmer-Labor, Workers', United Labor, Socialist-Labor, Peoples', Union, and American parties launched since the Civil War? W h y are third parties with highly sectional support unable to survive? In this case, the single-member district system operates i n favor of the third party and against one or the other of the major parties within the section. A third party ought therefore to be able to entrench itself i n a region and maintain itself permanently. Obviously, the system of repre­ sentation cannot account for the tendency of sectional third parties to fade away; the explanation must be found else­ where. A s a matter of fact, it is not necessary to go far afield for an explanation. Even more important than con­ gressional elections are presidential elections, which might properly be described as the focus of American politics. American parties are loose leagues of state and local party bosses for the purposes of electing a president, though this statement does not exhaust the truth. In other words, presi­ dential elections probably influence the behavior of parties even more strongly than congressional elections do. N o w it is clear that a purely sectional party can never win a presi­ dential election. Presidents can be elected only by combina­ tions of sections, by parties that cross sectional lines. A n exclusively sectional party is doomed to permanent futility, therefore, i n the pursuit of the most important single objec­ tive of party strategy. Sooner or later exclusively sectional parties are likely to lose even their sectional support in favor of a major party which has a real chance of winning the supreme prize. For this reason narrowly sectional parties can­ not displace the traditional type of major party, even though the single-member district system of electing representatives might sometimes give them an advantage. W e conclude that the two-party system is firmly established because the second

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major party is able to defend itself against purely sectional parties as well as against all other varieties of minor parties. Significance of the Two-Party System Does the fact that we have a two-party system make any difference? Most emphatically, it does! The distinctive char­ acteristics of the major party i n a two-party system are strongly marked; the parties i n a multiparty system belong to another species entirely. What are the special qualities of American politics that result from the fact that we have a well-established two-party system ? First, the two-party system produces majorities automati­ cally. Since there are only two major parties actually i n the competition for power and these parties monopolize the vote, it is almost certain that one of them will get a majority. The voters have no other place to go. W h e n the alterna­ tives are simplified to this extent, there must be more of one than of the other, i.e., there must be a majority of one or the other. The difficulty of assembling a majority is thus reduced very greatly. Party politicians work hard to assemble a majority, but they do not perform miracles by piecing together a great diversity of groups having an infinity of free choices. O n the other hand, because they have only two alter­ natives, the groups, segments, classes, and occupations have less bargaining power than might be supposed. If this were not the case the difficulties of assembling a majority would be so great that no majorities would ever be produced at all. Party managers perform great labors of negotiation i n order that their party, and not the other major party, may get a majority, but one or the other is certain to get it; the value of this fact to the party managers is difficult to exaggerate. 8

Because minor parties poll some votes and because the major parties are evenly matched, the winning party often gets a little less than a majority, 8

T H E TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

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The Moderating Effect of the Attempt to Create a Majority The second effect of the two-party system is the fact that it produces moderate parties. The basis of the moderating effect of the process of creating a majority has already been de­ scribed in an earlier chapter dealing with the multiplicity of interests. These influences affect both major parties equally. A large party must be supported by a great variety of interests sufficiently tolerant of each other to collaborate, held together by compromise and concession, and the discovery of certain common interest, and so on, and bearing in mind the fact that a major party has only one competitor and that party managers need not meet every demand made by every in­ terest. T o make extreme concessions to one interest at the expense of the others is likely to be fatal to the alignment of interests that make up the constituency of a major party. The process moderates the course of party action, though the language of politics is usually immoderate. A homogeneous party might be oppressive, but the tentative aggregates of miscellaneous elements collected within the loose framework of a major party are unthinkable as instruments of tyranny. The major party cannot afford to take an extreme stand, but neither is it condemned to futility. When one stops to con­ sider the amount of thought and energy that has been de­ voted to the effort to protect people against oppression, it is difficult to imagine anything more important than the tend­ ency of the parties to avoid extreme policies. A generation ago President Lowell, writing about English major parties, said that the Liberal and Conservative parties i.e., it may get 49 per cent of the vote. See Merriam and Gosnell, op. cit. (Chap. II, n. 3), p. 355, for figures. This might be described as a political majority as contrasted with a mathematical majority, for its authority appar­ ently has never been impaired by the fact that it is slightly less than 50 per cent.

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tended to move toward the political center of gravity, i.e., they tended to be alike. Indeed, the most common criticism made of the American parties is not that they have been tyrannical but that they have been indistinguishable. A closer view of the process of accumulating a majority will illustrate how strong is the tendency of the parties to move toward the middle of the road. Assume that the community is composed of 1,000 inter­ est groups of uniformly equal weight. Assume, furthermore, that the worst is true, that each of these groups can be ap­ pealed to only on the basis of its special interests. Since these groups are equal, it would be necessary for a party to attach to itself 501 of these groups i n order to w i n . The amount of bargaining, compromise, and concession required to create a loose confederation of these interest groups is stupendous, even if we concede that all must sooner or later join one or the other of two rival camps. In the course of these negotiations the groups participating in the bargain must give as well as get. They must recognize other inter­ ests; if they cannot co-operate they are certain to be defeated. On the one hand, isolation is the extreme peril to be avoided by any interest at all costs; on the other hand, neither of the parties can afford to be identified exclusively with one interest or with a few interests. While it is true that the parties com­ pete for the support of the interests, it is also true that the interests compete for the support of the parties. Moreover there are 1,000 interests and only two parties. For this reason it is extravagant for a major party to offer too much for the support of any one special interest; as purchasers of political support the parties have a buyers' market. The foregoing paragraph understates the complexities of the process, however. It assumes that it is possible to get the support of 501 whole groups, each group joining the party as a solid block. A s a matter of fact, it is very rarely possible

THE TWO-PARTY

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to mobilize 100 per cent of any social group. Usually even under favorable circumstances 60 per cent or 70 per cent of any group is the maximum response that can be elicited in a political agitation. A l l political organization is subject to a law of imperfect mobilization of social interests, the conse­ quence of the fact that each individual person has many inter­ ests and belongs to many groups. This fact forces us to revise our calculations entirely. The party must get varying degrees of support from more than 501 interest groups in every 1,000 in order to win the election. If it is able to get 70 per cent of every group to which it appeals, it must win the support of 715 groups, i.e., it must get 70 per cent of the support of 715 groups in order to get a majority. If the party is able to get only 60 per cent of the support of every group to which it appeals, it must win 834 out of the 1,000 groups i n this theoretical community. These calculations assume, however, that the party will get no support from any group not solicited, an assumption that is certainly inaccurate. The corollary of the proposition that no party can win the unanimous support of any social group courted by its man­ agers is that the party may hope to get some support from all groups whether they have been solicited or not; this is the unearned increment of politics to which reference was made in Chapter III. If the party gets support elsewhere on general grounds it needs proportionately less intensive support from the special interest groups to whom it has made special ap­ peals. It may be more profitable therefore to make general appeals to a very wide public in order to attract these re­ mainders, than it is to exploit the special interests by special, but exclusive, appeals. This is a matter of extreme importance in the theory of party politics. Party politics is not a matter of mobilizing one great homogeneous group against another homogeneous group. Even more important, it is not a matter of mobilizing one aggregate of solid blocks against another

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aggregate of equally solid blocks of voters. The collision of parties is cushioned by the fact that there are no solid blocks, not even in the world of interest groups. The Democratic and Republican parties have always drawn some support from all sections of the country and from all strata of society. Both parties appeal generally to the whole country in addition to their special appeals to special interests. Striking confirma­ tion of the importance of these general appeals to the great public may be found i n the tendency of the party vote to rise or decline uniformly throughout the country from one elec­ tion to the next. While there are important differences i n the geographical and social distribution of the support of these parties, there is a strong tendency of all interest groups to maintain diplomatic relations with both parties just as there is a tendency on the side of the parties to keep contact with all interests. The appeal of a major party tends to become universal. The hospitality of the parties to all interests is one of their most pronounced characteristics. Measured on a scale of radicalism and conservatism from Left to Right, both parties try more or less successfully to spread over the whole political rainbow from one extreme to the other. Specimens of nearly all shades of opinion are found i n both parties; for strategic reasons the parties need to be strong on both wings. A party so equipped can move in either direction with the trend of public opinion, whereas a party exclusively radical or conservative is bound sooner or later to find itself dependent on an isolated minority interest and to discover that it has lost its freedom to adapt itself to the movements of opinion in the nation. The more inten­ sive the appeal to a special interest becomes, the more ex­ clus fact is the basis of much political forecasting. That is, a sample taken in one locality will show something about the political tendency of the whole 9

country. See L. H. Bean, Ballot Behavior (Washington: American Council on Public Affairs, 1940). See graphs in A. N. Holcombe, The Political Parties of Today (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924).

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SYSTEM

elusive it will be also, but isolation is precisely the condition most likely to destroy the influence of any minority. A s a consequence of the catholicity of the major parties it is im­ possible for the party in power to oppress any element of the opposition party without oppressing a corresponding element within its own ranks. Every interest within the con­ stituency of one major party has an opposite number i n the competing major party; it is always closer to some elements of the opposition party than it is to most elements in its own party. Some of the limitations of pure interest politics are made evident by this discussion; the appeal to special inter­ ests is not enough. Finally, the fact that the two-party sys­ tem is strongly established (that the choices are limited) makes the bargaining position of the parties vis-à-vis the interests strong; the parties need not yield to extreme de­ mands from any interest. Another characteristic consequence of the nature of the rivalry of the major parties i n a two-party system is that much business is done across party lines. This is proof of the thesis that the differences between the parties are not fundamental or absolute. In the interests of scientific investigation it is for­ tunate that the routine operations of American government offer conclusive evidence of the truth of this proposition. What happens when, let us say, the Democrats are i n con­ trol of one house of Congress and the Republicans in control of the other? A n examination of the following table shows that Con­ gress enacts substantially the same volume of legislation (public acts and private acts) when party control of Con­ gress is divided as it does when one party is in control of both houses. It is not contended here that the volume of legislation is an accurate measure of the legislative output of 10

Note the attempts of the Republican party in 1940 to recover its left wing, lost to the Democrats in 1932 with disastrous results. ao

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Number of Lams Enacted by Congresses in Which One Party Is in Control of Both Houses, and Congresses in Which Party Control Is Divided Congress 6oth 6ist 62nd 63rd 64th 65th 66th 67th 68th 69 th 70th 71st 72nd 73rd 74th 75th

Party Control Unified