Over time, the American political system has become steadily more democratic - controlled by the people at large, rather than by party bosses negotiating with each other in smoke-filled rooms. This trend can be seen in the evolution of the presidential primary system; it can also be seen in the way that Americans have rejected indirect elections for governors and senators.
Some political scientists will say that stronger political parties are better. They say that America’s problems with excessive partisanship are due, counterintuitively, to weak political parties. (C.f. this article.) This is in sharp contrast to non-academics interested in political reform, who frequently blame the parties themselves for excessive partisanship.
The first thing we need to do is define a strong party, and this is where things get tricky. One recent paper defines a strong party as having a coherent agenda,1 permanent organizations, and centralized candidate selection. There aren’t obvious direct downsides to parties being permanent organizations with coherent agendas.
If a stronger party has more centralized control over who will go into office to represent its interests, then the entire course of American political reform from the death of King Caucus to the 17th Amendment to the McGovern-Fraser commission has steadily weakened political parties. Can it be that stronger political parties are simply better? Is there room for nuance?
The good done by political parties
In general, political scientists do not agree on how many political parties is best.2 Most will agree that there is such a thing as having too few political parties3 or too many.4 As with most social sciences, there is a diversity of opinion grounded in the fact that evidence is weak, but the following three points are generally accepted:
The formation of political parties is inevitable in any representative democracy.5
Membership in political parties is correlated with being better politically informed and more politically engaged.
The major failure modes of democracies are dictatorship and civil war.
Organized political parties can be seen directly working to inform voters on political issues and encouraging their membership to show up and vote in elections. Political parties shape the negotiations needed to successfully pass legislation, and they create brand identities that make it much easier for voters to make decisions.
The fact that the Republican Party became the “Party of Trump” in 2016 over the objections of Republican party elites meant that the Republican Party was weak. By the nomination rules in place a hundred years ago, Trump would have lost in the convention hall, party leaders rejecting a politician who was both disliked by party insiders and the most-disliked presidential candidate since the invention of telephone polling.
On the other hand, Democratic elites lined up to push hard for the selection of Hillary Clinton, who contends with Harry Truman for the #2 spot on that list only because of methodological issues in early telephone polling. Truman’s supporters were disproportionately unlikely to own telephones.6 The fact that the major parties failed the American electorate in 2016 by not managing to offer up a single popular candidate was arguably due to both party strength and party weakness.
California and the war against parties
In general, electoral systems that give party leaders more control over which candidates are chosen for office make parties stronger. Thus, open primaries serve to weaken political parties compared to closed primaries and caucus systems. A closed primary, party caucus, or closed-list system therefore indirectly increases voter participation by strengthening parties.7
The state of California makes extensive use of direct democracy, and while California is a safely Democratic state in terms of national politics, Californian voters chose to weaken the political strength of the California Democratic Party by instituting a “top two” primary system. California’s Democratic Party fought tooth and nail against electoral reforms that eliminated partisan primaries and took redistricting out of the hands of professional politicians.
Anti-gerrymandering reform and the “top two” primary system had the same express goal of disempowering the major political parties. In the US, gerrymandering gives parties more control over which candidates are chosen for office, as party insiders have greater influence over primary elections with lower turnout. It also lets them draw district lines that help or hinder specific candidates.
Logically speaking, in other words, gerrymandering strengthens parties by increasing partisan insiders’ control of who gets elected.
The power problem
In a way similar to how major corporations are generally invested in the success of the economy, major political parties are generally invested in the success of the political system. However, this does not mean political parties’ interests are perfectly aligned with the interests of their voters any more than major corporations’ interests are perfectly aligned with those of workers and consumers.
In general, independently of current political agenda, political parties seek to maximize their long-term power. Gerrymandering is one toxic example of that tendency. Many politically engaged individuals within parties also seek to maximize their power over the party. In ideal circumstances, a party selects select competent and reliable candidates who match the party’s brand. Under less ideal circumstances, patronage and corruption come into play.
The early smoke-filled rooms that party insiders worked in during the 1800s in the US are generally thought to be examples. Boss Tweed, for example - famous as the man who ran the New York City political machine in Tammany Hall from 1858 to 1871. Boss Tweed and his fellow insiders controlled who would run as a Democrat in New York City.
While corruption is difficult to measure and quantify, Boss Tweed serves as a base anchor point on the scale from venal corruption to ideological purism: He started his political career as a street thug and worked his way up to embezzling what, after inflation, would be the equivalent of a billion dollars today.8 The long arc of American politics towards electoral reform has been a long arc away from corruption.
Parties are a good servant and a terrible master
Political parties are useful for organizing coherent political agendas. They inform the public and get voters to the polls. When well-organized and distinct political parties compete with each other vigorously for votes, democracy wins. However, not everything that can be seen as strengthening a political party is necessarily good for democracy.
Where do you think the balance lies? Let me know in the comments.
To quote precisely, “legislative cohesion,” “minimal party switching,” and
“programmatic, rather than clientelistic, linkages to their social base.”
My experience is that older Americanist political scientists tend to be more likely to appreciate the two-party system as a source of stability, while younger comparativist political scientists are more likely to think that European levels of multipartyism are more ideal.
One-party states like the USSR tend to have problems.
The usual example for this is the Weimar Republic just before the Nazis rose to power.
More or less synonymous with “republic” in an American context, though the phenomenon includes representative democracies that have a monarch glued into the system as “head of state,” such as the U.K. - constitutional monarchies are not republican, but can qualify as representative democracies.
Polling methodology was crude at the time, and results suggest that many polls were systematically off in ways that later generation of pollsters would try to correct.
I have trouble believing these indirect gains outweigh the direct losses in voter participation that come from shutting voters out of the process.
While the true extent of his thefts is uncertain, figures range from twenty-five to two hundred million in 1877 dollars, the upper end of that range corresponding to a little less than six billion in 2023 dollars.