AP United States Government and Politics
Summary Overview
Chapter 9: Political Parties
Overview
A political party exists in three arenas: among the voters who psychologically identify with it, as
a grassroots organization staffed and led by activists, and as a group of elected officials who seek to act
on its ideals. This chapter studies the party primarily as an organization that takes various forms at the
local level. These include the political machine, the ideological party, the solidary group, the sponsored
party, and the personal following.
National parties are weak coalitions of these local forums. As organizations that influence the
political systems, parties are becoming even weaker. Voters no longer strongly identify with one of the
major parties. The spread of the direct primary has made it harder for parties to control who is
nominated for elective office, thus making it harder for the parties to influence the behavior of
officeholders they once elected. Delegate selection rules, especially in the Democratic Party, have
contributed to shifting the center of power away from officeholders and party regulars and toward the
parties’ more ideological wings.
Minor parties have arisen from time to time, but the only ones that have affected the outcome
of presidential elections have been those that began as splinter groups within one of the major parties.
An example of such a party is the Bull Moose Progressives. The two-party system is maintained, and
minor parties are discouraged, by an election system of winner-take-all, plurality elections. This
arrangement makes voters fear that they will “waste” their vote if they vote for a minor party.
Meanwhile, the primary system makes it possible for minor parties to wield influence through the major
parties.
Theme A: Party Structure Today
Although they are very similar on paper, the structure of the national Democratic Party differs
substantially from that of the Republican Party in practice. The Democrats, torn by ideological conflicts,
have evolved into a factional party emphasizing the mobilization and conciliation of party activists. The
Republican Party has become a bureaucratic party devoted to winning elections by focusing on raising
money and providing consulting services to its candidates. The result is that the Democrats have
selected presidential candidates with a decidedly liberal orientation, whereas Republicans have fielded
more moderate nominees capable of attracting middle-class voters. Thus the numerical advantage of
the Democratic Party has been offset by the electoral appeal of Republican candidates.
These generalizations, however, apply to national—largely presidential—elections. The parity of
the two parties breaks down at the state and local levels, where party strength varies by region.
Moreover, the key organizational units of the party structure are located at the city, county, and state
levels. The national parties are little more than an affiliation of these regional entities and lack any real
control over them. Five distinct types of local party organizations have developed.
1. The machine is a party organization that recruits its members with tangible incentives and is
characterized by a high degree of leadership control over member activity. In their heyday,
machines were dependent on federal patronage jobs (such as in the post office), kickbacks on
contracts, payments extracted from officeholders, and funds raised from businessmen. With the
influx of poor immigrants, the machine adopted a social welfare function. The abuses of the
machine were curtailed through stricter voter registration laws, civil service reforms, competitive
bidding laws, and the Hatch Act, which made it illegal for federal civil servants to take part in most
political activities. More important, as increased income and sophistication made voters less
dependent on what the machines could offer; so did the growth of the federal welfare system. It is
easy to scorn the machine as venal and self-serving; however, machines mobilized a very high level
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of participation. Furthermore, their interest in winning elections meant that machines supported
popular candidates, regardless of ideology.
2. Ideological parties value principle above all else. Because of their unwillingness to compromise,
ideological parties are typically third parties such as the Socialist, Prohibition, or Libertarian
parties. However, some local organizations within the two major parties fit into this category.
Ideological parties are marked by intense internal conflict over issues, and leaders have little room
for maneuvering and bargaining.
3. Solidary groups are composed of people who find politics fun. Such groups have the advantage of
being neither corrupt nor inflexible; however, often they will not work very hard.
4. Sponsored parties are created when some other organization provides money and workers for a
local party. These instances are rare, the UAW’s role in the Detroit Democratic party being the best
example.
5. Personal followings attracted by the personality of the candidate have become much more
important as other forms of party organization have declined. Such a following can allow a
candidate to be independent, but the politics of personality (as opposed to machine or ideological
politics) deprives the average voter of any reasonable basis for judging most candidates.
The various types of local parties are all important. But increasingly, political activists who become
nationally known enter that scene from interest groups such as the National Organization for Women
(NOW), the National Educational Association (NEA), and the AFL-CIO.
Despite the concentration of power at the local level, most Americans define the parties on the
basis of their national identities. Yet an odd role reversal seems to be taking place, as each national
party has begun to assimilate characteristics of the other. The electoral fortunes of the parties have
much to do with this process. The string of presidential victories from 1980 through 1988 lulled
Republicans into equating their success with the conservative ideology of Ronald Reagan. This
assumption proved fatal in 1992. The genial personality of Reagan had concealed the rough edges of his
conservative principles; voters were attracted more to the person than to the value system. In the 1984
election, for example, the pollster Louis Harris discovered that Americans preferred the position of the
Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, to that of Reagan on twelve of sixteen issues surveyed.
For both parties, the challenge is to find candidates who satisfy the ideological demands of the
party delegates while also appealing to rank-and-file party members. Since party delegates usually are
more ideological in their views, their expectations for candidates often conflict with the views held by
the rest of the American electorate. Democrats, for example, have had difficulty in selecting winning
presidential candidates in part because they choose candidates with views on social and taxation issues
that are too extreme for mainstream voters. Republicans also select candidates that appeal to their
delegates; however, in the general contests, they have typically fared better—capturing all but two of
the presidential contests between 1968 and 2004—because their candidates hold views that appeal
more to voters in the center.
Theme B: United States Parties as Broad Coalitions
It is remarkable that America have had only two major parties for most of its history; most
European democracies are multiparty systems. Two factors account for this. First, U.S. elections are
based on the plurality, winner-take-all system. Therefore, a vote for a minor party is often perceived as a
wasted vote. Under a system of proportional representation, which is common in Europe, even very
small parties have a chance of winning something and therefore have an incentive to organize. Second,
in spite of occasionally bitter dissent, Americans have not faced divisive and long-standing controversies
over the organization of the economy, the prerogatives of the government, and the role of the church.
They have agreed on enough issues to make broad coalitions possible. Finally, state laws make it
exceedingly difficult for third parties to get on the ballot, as third-party candidates George Wallace and
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John Anderson quickly discovered in 1968 and 1980, respectively. Matters were only somewhat better
for Ross Perot in 1992.
Third parties continue to form, however. They are typically one of four types: ideological parties,
such as the Socialist, Communist, and Libertarian parties; one-issue parties, such as the Free Soil or
Prohibition parties; economic protest parties, such as the Greenback and Populist parties; and factional
parties, such as the Progressive Party in 1924 and the American Independent Party in 1968. Of these,
factional parties probably have had the greatest influence on public policy. This is due to the impact of a
factional split on the unity of a major political party and the subsequent possibility of an electoral
defeat.
Theme B Abstract: The Two Party System and the Electoral College
The existence of the American two-party system is linked to the winner-take-all character of the
electoral system. Unlike many European nations, the United States does not have a proportional
representation system (which encourages multiparty systems) but rather a single-member district
system, whereby only one candidate can win the public office being contested. Given the additional
middle-class/centrist nature of the United States electorate, preferring candidates from either one of
the two major political parties becomes a natural choice for most voters.
These effects have been a source of concern for some political scientists, most notably Lawrence
D. Longley and Neal R. Peirce. These scholars described the Electoral College as a “fatally flawed means
of determining the American president” that “has the potential for . . . deeply eroding the security of our
democratic processes.” In The Electoral College Primer 2000 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1999), they list the following deficiencies of this institution:
1. It is a distorted counting device. Its winner-take-all mechanism exaggerates electoral margins.
Additionally, the two additional electoral votes, which correspond to the number of senators in
each state, further distort the states’ Electoral College representation. Less populated states are
overrepresented. In addition, the allocation of electoral votes ignores differences in voter turnout
among the states.
2. Candidates’ campaign strategies are shaped by these distortions, which consequently affect policy
decision making and implementation. In particular, the concerns of the large, swing states receive
more careful consideration. Concerns distinctive to the smaller states are more likely to be
ignored. When this analysis is conducted at the more precise regional level, the Electoral College is
shown to advantage urban voters.
3. The Electoral College generally discriminates against candidates from third parties and preserves
the dominance of the two major parties. Although regionally based third parties may hope to carry
some states, third-party candidates with more broad-based appeal are sharply disadvantaged. In a
three-way race (as in 1992 and 1996), the candidate receiving a mere plurality of a state’s popular
vote will still be awarded all that state’s electoral votes.
4. Faithless electors may further distort the popular will—particularly in the event of a close election.
5. The structure of the Electoral College system allows a candidate to win the election even though
he may have received fewer popular votes. This divided outcome was seen most notably in the
contentious 2000 presidential contest between the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, and the
Republican candidate, George W. Bush.
Of course, the authors of the Constitution would be surprised, first by the current functioning of
the Electoral College, and second, by a desire to place such great reliance on the popular will. As
originally designed, the Electoral College was intended to mediate the popular will, ensuring that the
people’s passions did not lead to the selection of a corrupt national leader. The notion that this
institution should either merely reflect (if exaggerate) the popular vote—as is currently and most
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frequently the case—or be abolished in favor of electing the president by a national popular vote is
therefore a contradiction and even a perversion of the Federalists’ expectations for their democratic
republic.