Political Party Project
  1. Identify the major ideas of the two major parties
Criticism: Explore the criticism supporters of the parties have of each other
Identify positive legislation/directives/agencies/policies & so on for each party
  1. Create a Political Party for the 21st Century:
-Name
-Platform
-Target Constituency
-Future Plans/Plans for a better America
-Domestic Policy
-Foreign Policy
  1. Third Parties
CRITICAL ESSAY: Why do Third Parties experience limited success in America? (Consider history, political strength, access, and what would it take to gain a major victory?).
  1. Realignment
MAGAZINE ARTICLE: (a) Discuss the issue of realignment involving African Americans’ shift from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party;
(b) and the dominance of the Democratic Party in the South to the emergence of the Republican Party’s influence in the region.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After students have read and studied this chapter, they should be able to:
  • Distinguish between a political party, an interest group, and a faction.
  • Identify the functions of a political party.
  • Identify the two major-party face-offs that developed in the years before the Civil War crisis.
  • Distinguish between the various parties or tendencies that have adopted the name Republican.
  • Explain the transformation of the Democratic Party from a party of limited government, states’ rights, and racism to a party of strong government, national authority, and support for civil rights.
  • Describe the core constituents and economic beliefs of the Republican and Democratic parties.
  • Explain how economic politics and cultural politics often pull in different directions.
  • Describe the three faces of a political party, including the party organization, the party in electorate, and the party-in-government.
  • Explain how the winner-take-all election system works against third parties.
  • Distinguish between ideological third parties and splinter parties.
  • Explain what realignment is and identify the four most important realignments in American history.
  • Briefly describe the rise of independent voters and split ticket voting.
  • Define the concept of demographically based political tipping.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
Do democratic governments need political parties? If a democratic government has political parties, will the structure always be a two-party system? What factors impact how many political parties will exist?
Would proportional representation for the House of Representatives be a good idea? How about for the Electoral College?
Why does the U.S. have only two major parties?
Is the United States returning to the era of personal politics? Consider the increase in the number of independent voters and ticket splitters.
Is party identification a major factor for voters in presidential elections?
Why is it difficult for independent candidates or minor party candidates to get elected to Congress?
What types of factors influence one’s party identification? If you consider yourself to be a “party identifier,” why do you identify with your party?
What inferences can be made about the voting population through the closely divided elections of 2000 and 2004?
What role did third parties play in the 2000 presidential elections?
Under what circumstances could a viable third party emerge to challenge the Democrats and Republicans?
BEYOND THE BOOK
The question of when the anachronistic label “Democratic-Republican” came into existence to describe the Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson is an interesting one. Despite some effort, we have not been able to pin down who coined the term, but it clearly did not come into use until the 20th century. The apparent purpose of the coinage was to claim that Jefferson’s party was the direct ancestor of the Democratic Party of today. While in a way that is a true enough claim, the fact is that the Whigs could also claim to be direct descendents of the Jeffersonian Republicans, and through them, the modern Republican Party could make the claim as well. A footnote: the one instance in which a major political party ever referred to itself as the “Democratic Republicans” came after the election of the second president Adams, when the term “Democratic Republican” was, for a time, an alternative to “Jacksonian Republican.” These people were soon to be simply the Democrats, of course.
So how did Democrats get assigned the color blue, and Republicans the color red? This seems a bit of a reversal, because red was traditionally the color of the political left, dating back to the days of the French Revolution when the term “left” was first coined. And the Democrats are presumably to the left of the Republicans. In countries such as Canada and Britain, the conservatives are always blue and the more left-of-center parties are red. The answer seems to be that in the United States, red came to be identified specifically with the communist movement. During the “red scare” following World War II, certain Republicans attempted to gain political traction by accusing the Democrats of being “soft on communism.” (Fear of this charge, in fact, may have helped lead Democratic President Lyndon Johnson into his fateful decision to fight Vietnamese communists with U.S. troops.) To avoid any appearance of echoing this accusation, network news departments avoided assigning the color red to the Democrats in election-eve results maps. They gave it to the Republicans instead, on the assumption that there could be no confusion—no one has ever credibly accused the Republicans of being soft on communism. The color blue was left over for the Democrats. Hence another American political reversal, paralleling the reversal of the meaning of liberalism as detailed in Chapter 1.
The text is purposefully vague about how proportional representation (PR) would work. It is a complicated topic, and many groups of students might be confused by it. If your students are relatively advanced, however, you could spend a little time on this topic. For the House, there are basically two realistic ways to do it. One is to have fewer congressional districts than there are available House seats. The extra House seats can be awarded to a party’s statewide list to make up for any departure from proportionality at the district level. This is how the Germans do it, by the way. A second method would be to transfer surplus votes from one congressional district to another. Consider Oregon, which under PR would almost always break 3-2 in favor of the Democrats. The actual Oregon delegation in 2003-2005, however, was 4-1 for the Democrats. Under this PR system, the one Republican who turned in the best relative performance while still coming in second would go to Washington instead of the Democrat in that district. In a large state, this system would elect some third-party candidates.
A second PR problem: If you had PR for the Electoral College, how do you keep the race from being constantly thrown into the House? Even Ralph Nader in 2000 would have kept either major party from obtaining a majority. Some countries have a set minimum percent of the vote a party must reach before votes for that party begin to count. In Germany, that threshold is 5%, which would certainly have eliminated Nader’s ability to tie up the race. As noted below, however, Ross Perot received 19% in 1992. What could stop such a candidate from sending the race to the House? The answer: awarding electoral votes only to the top two finishers in each state. Under such a modified PR system, Perot would have gotten exactly four electoral votes, two from Bush and two from Clinton. Of course, such a plan would tend to preserve the two-party system. Its only real benefit would be to make the electoral vote a more faithful reflection of the popular one.
Do cultural politics trump economic politics nowadays? A map of the presidential election results would seem to argue that this is so. Prosperous culturally liberal states confront less-well-off culturally conservative ones. However, cultural issues may have more to do with whether a particular state goes Republican or Democratic than whether the country as a whole goes Republican or Democratic. The reason for this is that cultural politics may have a stronger regional component than economic politics. “The poor you will always have with you,” and the rich as well. In any locality, the rich and poor measure themselves against each other, and not against people living in some more remote region. Though some states are richer than others, the “skewed bell curve” of income within any state or locality looks about the same. Economic issues may likewise hit home relatively equally all over the country. Cultural values, however, really do pit different parts of the country against each other. Therefore, even if economic issues move many more voters than cultural ones, the even dispersion of the impact of such issues would not change the striking cultural appearance of the partisan map. (It would merely move some marginal states from red to blue, or vice versa.)
The 1992 presidential election serves as an example of the impact a candidate who is not affiliated with one of the two major parties can have on the electoral process. Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate and received 19 percent of the total popular vote. Only two candidates not affiliated with a major party have received a higher percentage of the popular vote in this century (T. Roosevelt, 1912 and LaFollette, 1924). However, Perot, like Roosevelt and LaFollette, did not win the election. In fact, Perot did not receive any electoral votes, though he did push George H. W. Bush into third place in Maine and Bill Clinton into third place in Utah. Nonetheless, many would contend that he impacted the election by taking votes from either Bush or Clinton. Note also, when a candidate runs for the office of president and is unsuccessful and then runs again four years later, the percentage of vote the candidate receives will probably be less. Perot received only 8.5 percent of the popular vote in 1996.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
In the United States the voting population is nearly evenly divided between people who identify themselves as Democrats, as Republicans and as “independents,” (a voter who does not identify with a political party). Very few people are actually “card-carrying” party members, however.
  1. What Is a Political Party?
A political party is “a group of political activists who organize to win elections, to operate the government, and to determine public policy.” This definition makes a distinction between a political party and an interest group. Interest groups want to influence public policy, but are not interested in controlling the government. This definition also distinguishes parties from factions, which are smaller groups of individuals, often within a political party, who are acting together in pursuit of some special interest or position. For a political party to be successful, it must unite diverse groups that have different policy orientations. These are the functions of political parties in the United States:
  • Recruiting candidates to run for elective offices at all levels of government on the party label. By attracting quality candidates the party enhances its chance of winning the elective positions and controlling the government.
  • Organizing and running elections is technically a government responsibility, but the parties mobilize citizens to vote and participate.
  • Presenting alternative policies to the electorate is an essential role. By understanding the position of each party on the major issues the voter has some indication of the position of the party’s candidates.
  • Accepting the responsibility of operating government at all levels of the government is crucial to the functioning of the political process. Parties organize Congress (see Chapter 11 for details on committee organization), affect how the president selects individuals to serve in the executive branch (see Chapters 12 and 13 for details) and how the president nominates federal judges (see Chapter 14 for details on the nomination process). Parties also perform the same functions at the state and local levels of government.
  • Providing organized opposition to the party in power is an essential role for a party that does not control one or another branch of the government.
  1. A History of Political Parties in the United States
Political parties did not exist when the Constitution was drafted and are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Yet the debate on the ratification of the Constitution helped give rise to the first political parties.
  1. The Formative Years: Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The two-party system can be said to have originated in the debate between supporters of the Constitution (the Federalists) and those who though the states should be the locus of authority and advocated a Bill of Rights (the Anti-Federalists). Under George Washington and John Adams, the Federalist Party was the first party to control the national government. By 1796, however, another party came into the political process. This party was headed by Thomas Jefferson and was called the Republicans. (Do not confuse this party with the later party of Lincoln.) While Jefferson’s party supported the Constitution, it was clearly the heir of the pre-revolutionary republican movement and the later Anti-Federalists.
  2. The Era of Good Feelings. The Federalist Party began to erode as a viable party after 1800. (It was fatally identified with aristocratic tendencies.) By 1820 it was unable to field a presidential candidate and was essentially extinct. Only the Republicans were left to control the government. This period, sometimes called the Era of Good Feelings, is perhaps the only time in which the United States did not have a two-party system. Given the relative insignificance of parties, it is also referred to as the era of personal politics.
  3. National Two-Party Rule: Whigs and Democrats. With the fiercely contested election of 1824, the Republican Party split into the Democrats (Jackson supporters) and the National Republicans (Adams supporters). The National Republicans soon renamed themselves the Whigs.
  4. The Civil War Crisis. The argument over slavery first split the Whigs and then the Democrats along North/South lines. Northern Whigs formed the largest element in the new anti-slavery Republican Party.
  5. The Post-Civil War Period.
The abolition of the “three-fifths” rule meant counting all former slaves in allocating House seats and electoral votes. With this addition, and after the readmission of all Confederate states, the reunited Democratic Party was now about as strong as the Republicans.
  1. “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Cultural factors divided the parties. The Republican ranks contained an aggressive Evangelical Protestant element that was hostile to Catholicism and favored moralistic initiatives such as banning the sale of liquor. Democrats opposed a strong national government that could impose coercive moralistic measures in the North and protect the rights of the “freedmen” in the South.
  2. The Triumph of the Republicans. The Republicans did not gain a decisive edge until 1896, when, at the bottom of an economic depression, the Democrats endorsed a pro-debtor populist platform that frightened Eastern workers. The Republicans won just in time to benefit from the end of the depression, and thus sealed their reputation as the party of prosperity.
  1. The Progressive Interlude. A temporary split in the Republican ranks allowed the Democrats to gain control of the government under President Woodrow Wilson from 1912 to 1920. This period is significant because under Wilson, the Democrats began to move away from their former hostility to government action in the economy.
  2. The New Deal Era. “The Great Depression shattered the working-class belief in Republican economic competence.” President Franklin Roosevelt completed the evolution of the Democrats into a party of active government. (One characterization by a sympathetic professor was, “Hamiltonian means, Jeffersonian ends.”) Roosevelt’s “big tent” was big enough to welcome African Americans, an unprecedented development.
  3. An Era of Divided Government. Northern Democratic support for the civil rights movement tended to push Southern conservatives out of the party. The unrest of the late 1960s (urban riots, anti-Vietnam War protests) alienated other cultural conservatives from the Democrats. These voters largely became Republicans, though the process was a slow one lasting decades, not an overnight revolution such as was seen in 1896 and 1932.
  4. The Parties in Balance. In any event, the result has been a nation very evenly divided between the two major parties. In the years after 1968, the pattern was often a Republican president and a Democratic Congress. Under Democratic President Clinton, the pattern was reversed.
  5. RedState, BlueState. The extraordinarily close presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 focused attention on the supposed differences between Democratic “blue states” and Republican “red states.” The geographic pattern of state support for the parties is the reverse of the pattern of 1896, neatly exemplifying the reversal of Democratic Party ideology and support.
  1. The Two Major U.S. Parties Today
  2. The Parties’ Core Constituents. These constituencies were set forth in Chapter 6.
  3. Economic Beliefs. Labor and minorities have been Democratic core constituents since the New Deal era, and their social and economic positions tend to reflect this. “Republicans are more supportive of the private marketplace, and believe more strongly in an ethic of self-reliance and limited government.”
  4. Economic Convergence? In recent years, however, and especially under President George W. Bush, the Republicans have in practice matched or exceeded the Democrats in their support for public spending.
  5. Republican and Democratic Budgets. Still, Democrats have the reputation of supporting the less-well-off, and Republicans the prosperous.
  6. Cultural Politics. Cultural politics have become more important in recent years as a reason why people support one of the major parties.
  7. Cultural Politics and Socioeconomic Status. In cultural politics, the upper classes tend to be more liberal than the lower ones, a reversal of the pattern seen in economic politics.
  8. The Regional Factor in Cultural Politics. Wealthy states and regions now appear more supportive of the Democrats, and less-well-off ones more supportive of the Republicans.
  9. The 2004 Election: Economics and National Security. Despite the importance of cultural values in defining the parties’ core supporters, in 2004 Kerry and Bush concentrated on foreign policy and the economy, the two issues identified by the voters as the most important (see Chapter 6).
  10. The Three Faces of a Party
Political parties in the United States can be said to be comprised of three components. The party in the electorate is comprised of the people who identify with the party or who regularly vote for the candidates of the party in general elections. Without the party in the electorate, it would not be possible for the party to have electoral success. The party organization is the second element. The function of the party organization is to provide leadership and structure for the party. The last element is the party-in-government. This includes the elected and appointed officials who gained office under the label of the party. Once in office these leaders organize to influence governmental policy toward the platform of the party.