10/27/2015
Understanding the Second Party
System
Jeff Selinger
10.26.15
A Brief Sketch of the First Party
System, 1793-1815
The Federalists and the Jeffersonian
Republicans (DemocraticRepublicans)
What issues divided the Federalists and
Republicans (Democratic-Republicans)?
• Funding and assumption of the war debt
• The Bank of the United States (1791)
• Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality
(1793)
• The Genêt Affair (1793)
• The Jay Treaty (1794-1795)
• The Alien and Sedition Acts (1798)
• The Quasi-War with France (1798-1800)
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Hamiltonian Federalists versus
Jeffersonian Republicans
• Foreign war divided the American people in a
new way: monarchism versus republicanism,
Anglophiles versus Francophiles
• Mutual suspicion of national disloyalty
• “Party competition”: a euphemism for civil
war?
• The specter of political violence . . .
“You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by
Genêt, in 1793, when ten thousand people in
the streets of Philadelphia, day after day
threatened to drag Washington out of his
house, and effect a revolution in the
government, or compel it to declare war in
favor of the French Revolution and against
England.”
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1813
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What issues divided the Federalists
and Republicans, post 1800?
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The contested election of 1800
The Louisiana Purchase (1803)
Jefferson’s Embargo Policy (1807-1808)
War of 1812 (1812-1815)
The Hartford Convention (1814)
The Federalists collapse after 1815
The Constitution was designed to limit the
scope of political conflict. Was is a failure?
• Political conflict as “whack-a-mole”?
• The Constitution re-patterned political
conflict: contained and assuaged the preindustrial class divisions of the 1780s
• New divisions emerged in the 1790s focused
less on economic relations between classes
within the states and more on foreign affairs
and the reach of federal authority
The Second Party System, 1830s1850s
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Key Political Developments
• The War of 1812, the Hartford Convention,
and the decline of the Federalists
• The Missouri crisis of 1819
• The election of 1824: Andrew Jackson (99),
John Q. Adams (84), William Crawford (41),
Henry Clay (37)
• The “corrupt bargain” between Adams and
Clay
Attributes of the Second Party System
• Nominating the president: the national party
convention, replacing the congressional
caucus system
• Organizational structure:
– “Mass parties” designed to mobilize the electorate
– The two national parties were decentralized
coalitions of state parties
• Universal white male suffrage by 1851
Aldrich’s Questions
• Why do political parties form? How can we
explain their institutional design?
• The institutional attributes that interest him:
the development of mass parties and the
design of the convention system
• The virtues of his approach:
– Linking micro-foundations to macro-outcomes
– Political elites as calculating, strategic actors
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Aldrich’s Answers
• A note on genre: rationalist abstractions nested
within a historical narrative
• Collective action problem I: coordinating the
presidential electoral preferences of elites
– National nominating convention of state party leaders
• Collective action problem II: mobilizing the
electorate
– State-level party infrastructure to promote party
attachments and turn out voters
The limits of Aldrich’s account
• One solution to these collective action problems:
organize a party of the slaveholding states (or a
party of the non-slaveholding states)?
• Why must some policy issues be removed from
the national political agenda while others may be
safely politicized?
• “Deep agreement” (Robert P. Forbes)
• After abolition and the defeat of the Confederacy,
the unionist exigency to form intersectional party
coalitions disappears
Martin Van Buren’s grand strategy
“Party attachment in former times furnished a complete
antidote for sectional prejudices by producing counteracting
feelings. It was not until that defence had been broken down
that the clamour agt Southern Influence and African Slavery
could be made effectual in the North . . . Formerly, attacks upon
Southern Republicans were regarded by those of the North as
assaults upon their political brethren & resented accordingly.
This all powerful sympathy has been much weakened, if not,
destroyed by the amalgamating policy of Mr. Monroe. It can and
ought to be revived and the proposed [presidential nominating]
convention would be eminently serviceable in effecting that
object.”
Martin Van Buren to Thomas Ritchie, 1827
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“We must always have party distinctions and the old ones are
the best of which the nature of the case admits. Political
combinations between the inhabitants of the different states
are unavoidable & the most natural & beneficial to the country
is that between the planters of the South and the plain
Republicans of the North. The country has once flourished
under a party thus constituted and may again. . . ”
“If the old ones are suppressed, geographical divisions
founded on local interests or what is worse prejudices between
free and slave holding states will inevitably take their place.”
Martin Van Buren to Thomas Ritchie, 1827
An interpretation of MVB’s grand
strategy
• The party system as an essential supplement
to the constitutional system of countervailing
forces, checks and balances . . . an
institutional technology to contrive an
alternate basis of political division, one that
would substitute for a sectional division of the
parties.
• Stated differently: to win national elections
without re-opening the slavery question
Thinking about the substantive policy
commitments of the parties . . .
“[Slavery] was the most accusing, the most tragic and the most
dangerous of all questions . . . like a man banishing a dreaded image
from consciousness, [the nation] turned and twisted desperately to
suppress and deny and bury the terrible fact. For almost a quarter of a
century after the Missouri crisis, slavery was blocked from gaining full
embodiment as a specific political issue. The trauma of 1820 was too
intense. Yet the question could not be exorcised by repression. It
remained ever just out of sight, occasionally flaring up for a moment in
an exchange on the floors of Congress . . . like a wild dream, shaking
the night with its burst of anxiety; then disclaimed and forgotten, as
the morning came again, and people returned securely to debating the
Bank or the tariff.”
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson, 424.
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How to explain the collapse of the
second party system?
• Aldrich’s story: ambition theory
• A tipping-point argument
Thinking outside of Aldrich’s model
• Western settlement and the status of slavery
in the territories
• The development of anti-slavery sentiment
and the abolition movement
• The influx of immigrants into the cities and the
resurgence of nativism
Framing our interpretive disagreements: some
further thoughts on the Tariff, Nullification, and
Slavery
• One way to frame our disagreement: was slavery the
“pre-eminent” issue?
• A better way: how were these issues related to one
another?
– Slavery contributed to the development of two distinct economies
that stood to benefit from very different kinds of tax regimes
– An indirect constitutional defense of slavery: flexible/expansive
interpretations of the constitutional text (esp art. 1, sec. 8) could
empower Congress to burden or abolish slavery
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Qualitative Differences between the
Slavery and Tariff Questions
• Unlike the tariff or the bank issues,
contemporaries believed that the slavery
question could not be politicized without
risking the peace and integrity of the Union
• Constructing a regime of silence to prevent
the politicization of the slavery question:
– Building the second party system (mid 1820s--)
– Censorship in the postal system (1835)
– The gag order in Congress (1836-1844)
Slavery as a Threshold Issue
• The slavery question had to be contained for other issues to emerge;
when politicized, this issue clears other questions from the national
political agenda
• Other threshold issues: national security, economic emergencies . . .
• The tariff question as a “proxy issue”? Which side was the proslavery side?
The antislavery side?
• Other ways to think about the relationship between slavery and the tariff:
– The containment of the slavery question allowed other issues to
ascend to the top of the national political agenda
– The interests of opposing “sides” in the tariff debate were shaped by
the nature of the northern and southern economies
– The resolution of the tariff question would shape the reach of federal
authority and, many slaveholders believed, could impact the future
management of the slavery question
Why slavery may be distinct from other
threshold issues . . .
• Defenders of slavery seeking to preserve the status quo “win” so
long as the issue remains un-discussed.
• As historians and social scientists, we can only examine observable
speech or action. If one of its potential consequences is silence (i.e.
the absence of observable behavior and speech), how do we know
when slavery is shaping events and when it is inconsequential?
• Politics as a public negotiation: it is not always advantageous for
political actors to disclose their true preferences or to reveal what
they take to be at stake in a given dispute
– Especially true in a representative democracy: public officials do not
and should not represent themselves alone
– When in doubt, prioritize private correspondence over public positiontaking
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Why this matters: romance versus
realism
• In this classroom, we are all interested in historical realism,
but the American public is deeply divided
• The romance of the 18th and 19th centuries: architecture,
museums and other sanitized representations of the past
• When we idealize the past, we contribute to a narrative of
decline: the country was once true to its founding
purposes, but is no longer so . . .
• Social, political, and biological realism is not patriotically
correct; dismissed as subversive revisionism
• Throwing the baby (federalism) out with the toxic
bathwater?
Distributive Policy and Party Competition
in the Nineteenth Century
• Distributive policy: conferring privileges and
benefits in a particularistic manner—i.e., without
a general or uniform rule; selective nonenforcement of a uniform rule
– Disaggregable (divisible) goods or privileges
– Not coercive
– Synonyms: patronage, pork-barrel policy
• Regulatory policy: directly coercive
• Redistributive policy: applying a uniform rule to
the distribution of resources
Why did the parties in the nineteenth century
prioritize distributive policymaking?
• It’s what the voters wanted (the “responsible
party government” view)
• It’s what the developing economy needed
• It empowered a new class of politicians (as
opposed to patrician statesmen)
• The federal govt, and even the state govts, were
incapable of enforcing other kinds of policy
• Low stakes policy: it focused political conflict on
matters that could be peacefully settled and
diverted discussion from more divisive questions
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McCormick’s Question
• How does voting behavior relate to lawmaking
during the long “party period,” 1830s to 1900?
• One answer: the “responsible party government”
(RPG) model:
– party leaders present their policy programs to the
people and voters’ policy preferences are represented
on election day
– Close correspondence between voting decisions and
policy outcomes
• What are the limitations of this theory?
The Ballot Box in the Nineteenth
Century
• How were votes cast at this time?
• “Man of ordinary courage”; the polls were “no
place for a woman”
• Third parties and a printing press . . .
• The Australian Ballot:
– Secret
– Printed by government (state and local govts)
One answer to McCormick’s question
...
• Voting behavior and policy outcomes are loosely
correlated, but not causally related to one
another; patterns of voting behavior and policy
outcomes are separately caused by a common set
of factors:
– A decentralized system of government
– Counties, towns, cities as “island communities” knit
together by ethno-religious attachments and
distributive policymaking
– Voting behavior may appear “issueless” because
distributive policymaking is low salience and “under
the radar”
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Bensel’s answer to McCormick’s
question
• The “interpretive chasm between the microfoundations of
electoral politics and the macrocoalitions that shaped the
national polity” (Bensel 26).
• The disconnect between the “ground floor” and the “top
floor” of politics
• The “ground floor” of politics where cultural and ethnoreligious slogans and cues appear to shape voting behavior
and the environment surrounding the ballot box
• The “top floor” of politics where economic and political
elites appear to rationally engage in a contest over
questions of political economy
Bensel’s answer, cont’d
• What Bensel observes: voters are making
choices based-upon criteria that has little to
do with policies; religious, sectional, racial
prejudices and symbols—“us v. them”
discourse
• The parties appear to be channeling the
ethno-religious prejudices of the voting public
to the benefit of powerful interest-brokers.
How do elite interests pull this off?
Bensel’s answer, cont’d
• The important role of party agents operating at
the mezzo level . . .
• Economic and political elites desire specific policy
outputs from govt they make deals with either
or both of the parties the parties command
their agents (funded by economic and political
elites) to make a “sales-pitch” to voters
• The sales-pitch is often made in the language that
common people understand—a language replete
with ethno-cultural cues and religious symbols
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Implications for Aldrich’s Collective
Action Second Problem
• Likeminded citizens share common policy
purposes, but lack the incentives to vote and
place likeminded citizens in office.
• Party organizations lower the cost of voting
for fellow partisans and distribute solidary and
particularistic benefits for voters who turn out
• Do the elites who fund parties and the voters
who turn out share common policy purposes?
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