No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Prophets of Party in American Political History
Abstract
This article pursues a developmental understanding of American parties as autonomous and thick collective actors through a comparison of four key historical actors we term “prophets of party”: partisans of the nineteenth-century Party Period; Progressive reformers; mid-twentieth century liberal Democrats; and activists in and around the body popularly known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission. Leading theories portray political parties as the vehicles either of ambitious politicians or of groups eager to extract benefits from the state. Yet such analyses leave underdetermined the path from such actors’ desires for power to the parties’ wielding of it. That path is mediated by partisan forms and practices that have varied widely across institutional and cultural context. As parties search for electoral majority, they do so in the long shadow of ideas and practices, layered and accreted across time, concerning the role of parties in political life. We analyze four such prophesies, trace their layered contributions to their successors, and reflect on their legacy for contemporary party politics.
In this article, we detail how the rise of executive-centered partisanship has transformed president-Senate relations since 1993. We argue that the growing centrality of the president as a figurehead for their party has produced incentives for both co-partisans and out-partisans. We use a measure of presidential “success” to model variation over time and between individual senators. We show that rising presidential partisanship has increased the likelihood for out-partisans to oppose the president’s legislative position, even after controlling for other markers of partisan polarization. This relationship is strongest among electorally vulnerable out-partisans. In addition, our data suggest that Republican out-partisans asymmetrically oppose Democratic presidents. We conclude that the growing centrality of the presidency in party affairs has had effects beyond administrative preemption of the legislative process; it has increasingly set a hard limit on bi-partisan cooperation on legislation and nominee confirmations in the Senate.
This chapter describes the ways that executive-centered partisanship has transformed the Republican Party since the 1960s. While Democrats may have been the first to throw the country “off-center,” Republicans and the conservative movements that have captured the party have had a particularly divisive effect on the political system. Beginning in 1968, with the election of Richard Nixon, the Republican Party came to embrace national administrative power and put it to work on behalf of impassioned causes that mobilized against the anti-war movement and federal civil rights enforcement. Conservatives are often portrayed as resisting federal power, but this chapter shows that the Republican Party and Republican presidents have deployed national administrative powers at least as ardently as liberals. This has further raised the stakes of party politics and weakened the party system’s ability to temper populist unrest.
Scholarly debates over the nature of political parties and the identity of their principal actors have been hampered by relative inattention to the historical processes of internal party change. This study, drawing on archival sources, interviews, and one of the co-author’s personal experiences, analyzes the Georgia delegate challenge to the 1968 Democratic Convention as a case of internal party conflict generating lasting institutional reform, with implications for existing theories of party development, nominating politics, and democratic representation. In a convention marked by an unusually large number of challenges to state party delegations, the Georgia delegate challenge was unique. There, a conflict between the segregationist regulars and the moderate and liberal Democrats was complicated by an internal division in the latter camp between Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy supporters. The McCarthy forces’ success in garnering a dominant position within the challenge delegation alienated many of the Georgia movement’s organizers and leaders. The McCarthy campaign's takeover also linked this southern challenge both to the antiwar politics coloring the national nomination fight and to a particular conception of representation that would influence subsequent party reform efforts. In tracing the origins, dynamics, and aftermath of Georgia’s delegate challenge, we show both that group- and candidate-driven efforts together shape party development over time, and that normative ideas concerning representation can play causal roles in party development.
For theories to be useful across systems requires a fundamental similarity of the things theorized about. In the 1980s, it was easy to question whether European and American political parties were sufficiently of the same “genus” for a single theory of parties to be relevant in both contexts. This paper asks whether that is still the case, identifying several respects in which European and American parties have become more comparable, but also a dimension on which they have become more different.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.