The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics
... While in the short term, these new service parties effectively mobilized voters on behalf of national elections and national party objectives, they also produced a more "hollow" party structure, top-heavy and ill-connected to the daily lives and concerns of their voters (Schlozman and Rosenfeld 2024). These effects had, to some degree, been foreshadowed by the call for a "more responsible two-party system" led by the American Political Science Association in the 1940s (Committee on Political Parties 1950). ...
... Such a vision still commands considerable support today. Even those who explain how grassroots political parties promote civic virtue and engagement also call for a more ideological, issue-based party system (Schlozman and Rosenfeld 2024;Jenkins 2023). However, if we consult experience, this kind of ideological party system seems to be at odds with how grassroots parties function. ...
Current attempts to improve civic education through higher education should be supplemented by a focus on political parties, which have traditionally served as the “great schools” of civic education. America’s nineteenth-century parties drew voters out of their private concerns, engaged them in social life, and taught them to tolerate and bargain with each other. Legal changes over the past century have deprived them of the tools needed to fulfill this role. Policymakers should reconsider campaign finance laws that cripple parties, especially state and local organizations. Moreover, parties themselves should dedicate more time and resources to building a permanent presence in local communities and engaging citizens on the ground.
... 2. Beyond the recent structural analyses of Levitsky and Ziblatt (2023) and Pierson and Schickler (2024), I have also learned a lot from Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2020). My approach likewise has some resemblance to the recently published book Hollow Parties by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld (2024), but I focus more specifically on changing organizational configurations in and around the two major parties and I conclude that the twenty-first-century GOP has been much more "hollowed out" than the Democratic Party. ...
This is the expanded written version of the James Madison Lecture delivered on September 6, 2024, at the APSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA. I grapple with the pressing question before us as social scientists and as citizens: How and why have US politics and governance arrived at the present juncture where long-standing constitutional practices and democratically responsive governance are very much at stake? My answer focuses on what I see as the prime driver of the current crisis: the recent radicalization of the Republican Party and its allies, as they have pursued two forms and phases of antidemocratic politics. The first version involves maximum use of legal hardball steps that stretch existing laws and rules to disadvantage partisan opponents (I also call this approach “McConnellism” in honor of its chief practitioner, outgoing GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky). The second approach targets political competitors and government operations with extralegal harassment, threats of violence, and even actual violence. Drawing on my own research with many collaborators, as well as from many excellent studies by colleagues in political science and beyond, I will dissect the elite and popular roots of recent Republican embrace of both forms of antidemocratic politics.
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