In reviewing the article in 1991, and offer fourteen years in retirement, I found that no comprehensive revision or updating seemed possible or desirable. The final third of the paper, on whether it is possible to move toward more responsible political parties, was written against the background of things as they were in 1978, but still seems relevant to contemporary circumstances, so I hove preferred to retain it. The only revisions I have given the 1979 draft are a few word changes and additions intended for clarifcation. The article has been valued by most readers for its attempt to correct some misconceptions and to give an inside view of the work of the old Committee on Political Parties.
The recent wave of party reform (as of 1979), particularly in the Democratic party, has brought on a corresponding wave of academic interest in how American political parties undertake to perform themeselves periodically.[1] These considerations have much in common with those that concerned the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association (APSA) from 1946 to 1950. The committee's report, entitled "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, " sparked a generation of academic debate.[2] It is not clear that this long debate had any direct influence on the recent reforms, but it certainly contributed to preparing many of the participants. Because the issues that brought the old committee into existence are still very much alive, its work merits another look in light of recent events.
Because I was an active participant in the work of the committee from
its earliest conception until its final demise, this article is partly
a memoir, and may thus be a contribution to the institutional history of
the association. The article is also, in part, a reply to the attack on
the committee that was delivered by one of its former members, Evron Kirkpatrick,
on the twentieth anniversary of the report.[3] This article may also help
to redress some widely prevalent misconceptions about the committee; namely,
(1) that its work was heavily dominated by the views of its chairman, E.
E. Schattschneider; (2) that the committee was completely committed to
the British party system as an ideal; and (3) that the committee had a
unified, homogeneous, and internally consistent view of its work. Actually,
the committee was as internally divided, heterogeneous, and inconsistent
in its various views as the recent McGovern-Fraser, Mikulski, and Winograd
commissions of the Democratic party, each of which has nonetheless delivered
itself of a completed report. That the APSA committee was able to complete
a report at all was perhaps the strangest part of the whole affair. Among
other things, this article attempts to explain how it happened.
Picture the political situation as it existed at the end of World War II. Franklin Roosevelt was recently deceased; Harry Truman was president. Congress was in disorder, paying little attention to the recommendations of the president. Any semblance of party discipline had vanished from both houses. Activists both inside and outside of the federal government who were trying to advance a liberal program were in despair. As vehicles for action, the political parties were at a low ebb. This condition seemed to meet with approval in the pluralist doctrines of Pendleton Herring, who had published The Politics of Democracy in 1940. Rebuttal was offered by E. E. Schattschneider in Party Government, published in 1942, and an adaptation of the British parliamentary model was offered as an alternative by Thomas K. Finletter in Can Representative Government Do the Job?, published in 1945.
As World War II moved toward its conclusion, a recurring concern was the threat of postwar unemployment, a possible return to the prewar conditions of the depression years. In Congress, this concern was focused in the campaign for what eventually became the Employment Act of 1946--a policy commitment to maintain high levels of employment and a charter for the president's Council of Economic Advisers.
While the act was still pending as proposed legislation, a group of articles entitled "Maintaining High-Level Production and Employment: A Symposium," organized and edited by Fritz Morstein Marx, appeared in the American Political Science Review. One of the articles, "Party Government and Employment Policy,"[4] was by E. E. Schattschneider. In it, Schattschneider reiterated his well-known views of the need for party government, urging in particular that the consistent achievement and maintenance of a full employment policy would be impossible in any government as characteristically disorganized as the American one.
Schattschneider's message was taken seriously by three of his contemporaries who were in official positions with the federal government. One was Bertram M. Gross, then on the staff of the Senate committee handling the full employment legislation. A second was Fritz Morstein Marx, then on the management staff of the Bureau of the Budget. I was the third, then a chief fiscal analyst on the economics staff of the Bureau of the Budget. Early in 1946, this group began consultations on what could be done to bring about a study of political party reform in the United States. During the summer, the group drafted a "Proposal for a Committee on National Political Parties and Elections, " an action-oriented proposal that was endorsed by the District of Columbia Political Science Association and was then presented at the annual meeting of APSA in Cleveland in late December 1946, where it was approved by the executive council.
The appointment of the proposed committee fell to Arthur W. Macmahon, then president of the association. Initially a mixed committee was suggested, to be composed partly of professional political scientists and partly of leading figures from each of the two major political parties. Eventually this plan was given up, and in April 1947, Macmahon appointed a list mainly of academic students of political parties. He included Morstein Marx, Gross, and me, the original proponents of the committee, all of whom were members of the association, despite some obvious questions about our qualifications.[5] E. E. Schattschneider was appointed chairman and immediately began circularizing the committee for suggestions on its work. Some attempts were made to secure special funding with which to staff the committee, but these efforts failed, and the committee was dependent essentially on the voluntary participation of its members.
During its first year, the committee mainly exchanged memoranda on possibilities for research and seemed reluctant to take up action proposals. This changed during the second year: at meetings on May 22 and 23, 1948, the committee began work on a draft statement on party responsibility, reviewing two lectures by Schattschneider and a draft by Bert Gross. It was agreed that the committee would shape its work in terms of "a more effective party system," with emphasis upon more responsibility in party operations. The concept of "responsible party government, " as urged by Schattschneider, was deliberately abandoned at meetings on December 30 and 31, 1948, however, on grounds that this wording implied more than most members of the committee were willing to endorse.[6]
The decision to proceed with a full-scale report along the lines of the original prospectus for the committee was made at the meetings in December 1948. I prepared proposals for the further procedures of the committee, which were approved on the second day of the meeting, when it was agreed that there should be a drafting committee of not more than seven members to prepare a report for adoption by the rest of the committee. It was announced that the APSA had provided two thousand dollars to finance the work of the committee, and it was agreed that at least half of this should be used to finance the drafting committee, with the remainder to be used to finance small conferences and panel discussions on the draft report as it emerged.[7]
Following this decision, a drafting group of seven members met in Washington in February 1949 and prepared what was called an outline draft of a report, a document roughly thirty-seven pages long, of which three hundred copies were made.[8] The document was widely circulated and discussed, and the amount of comment was so extensive that the need for the further services of a drafting committee was apparent. Schattschneider resolved these issues in August of 1949 by appointing Fritz Morstein Marx as chairman of the drafting committee. The additional members of the drafting committee as finally constituted included Clarence A. Berdahl, from the University of Illinois; Bertram M. Gross, from the Council of Economic Advisers; Louise Overacker, from Wellesley College; and Schattschneider.[9]
Berdahl and Overacker had been greatly influenced by the ideas of the Progressive movement and were in favor of party nominations for Congress by primary election. Gross and Morstein Marx were pragmatists who were in favor of any reasonable action that might increase the effectiveness of the federal government. Schattschneider continued to press the ideas to which he had long been committed. All five members of the drafting committee worked actively on the successive stages of the drafting. In effect, they were the coauthors of the report that finally emerged, but Morstein Marx had more influence on the details of the drafting and organization of the report than anyone else and was largely responsible for its tone.
The preliminary draft appeared in the spring of 1950 and was discussed by the entire committee at a meeting in May. Approximately two hundred copies were circulated for another round of consultations and discussions with members of Congress, staff assistants on Capitol Hill, civic leaders, executive officials, party officials, members of the press, and teachers of political science.[10] Again, there was an extensive volume of commentary, and the burden of adjusting the text where possible fell mainly to Morstein Marx. The final version, entitled "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System," was circulated to members of the committee as it went to press in August for publication as a supplement to the September 1950 issue of the American Political Science Review.
As the front matter of the report made clear, it was a "consensus" report,
with which not all members of the committee were in full agreement. Earlier,
it had been assumed that there would be an opportunity for the expression
of individual views; but it became apparent that these might be so extensive
that they would swamp the major areas of agreement. In the end, the drafting
committee had to take responsibility as best it could for stating a middle
course among the divergent views. This decision was accepted by the committee
at the time, and it was only later that some members became explicit in
disagreeing with what had been done.
In the years since its publication, the report of the Committee on Political Parties has been the target for an immense amount of critical comment. Much of the comment has been adverse; hardly anyone has attempted a full-scale defense of the committee. Yet the report has survived as an object of study and as an important reference point. This is undoubtedly due, in part, to the persistence of the issues that it addresses, but it also suggests that the report may not be as bad as some critics have alleged. Clinton Rossiter, for example, after briefly reviewing the report in his widely read book on political parties, commented that "in general, the committee did an able, conscientious job of pointing out the road that we may yet travel to more disciplined and more responsible parties...."[11] A more recent writer remarked that "whatever the merits of the American Political Science Association's Committee on Political Parties, there is little doubt that its report 'Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System' did represent the predominant feelings and beliefs of most association members."[12] The truth of this remark is further suggested by the fact that E. E. Schattschneider was elected president of the APSA in 1956.
Two of the earliest critics of the report were Julius Turner and Austin Ranney. Both produced commentaries that have been prominent in the literature. Turner argued that the value of the report "is limited by errors in two broad aspects, as follows: I. The Committee has underestimated present party responsibility. II. Some reforms which the Committee proposes will accentuate present defects in our party system."[13] Turner's case for his first contention was considerably better than that for his second. His first point was based on the intensive research for his book, Party and Constituency: Pressures on Congress, in which he produced massive evidence of the persistent differences between the parties in their voting records in Congress. He showed that each party had a distinctive position on such issues as control of business, taxation, civil rights, farm policy, relief, housing, national defense, size and power of the executive branch, and states' rights. Furthermore, these were long-standing differences, in most cases, and were reflected regularly in party platforms and voting records.
Turner's second point rested mainly on a speculative argument that if discipline is enforced in the minority major party, dissident members will be driven out, the party's competitive position will be weakened, and the party's suicidal tendencies will be enhanced. He neglected to describe the counterpart process that would take place in the majority major party, where the driving out of dissident members may have been among the hopes of those drafting the report, or to assess the consequences of offsetting shifts for the system as a whole. Yet it seems clear that one major party's loss may be the other's gain; and a simultaneous committing of suicide by both parties is difficult to imagine, especially if they merely exchange dissident groups in a process of party realignment.
It was obvious when the report was being written that most of the proposed reforms would be impossible or unlikely unless some realignment occurred, especially in the South. Hence I suggested to the drafting committee that the report should deal much more directly than it did with the whole problem of party realignment. Morstein Marx responded that this issue had been carefully considered and that the omission of any discussion of realignment had been deliberate. It was the thinking of the drafting committee, he said, that if the Democratic party went ahead firmly with the development of the programmatic views that were held by a majority of the party, then the southern dissidents would eventually find themselves so out of place that they would leave the party. In retrospect, the view seems prophetic.
Ranney first offered his views in an article criticizing the report[14] and then expanded them in his well-known book, The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government. Throughout the book, Ranney treated the committee's report as an exposition of party government, saying that most of its recommendations "were based squarely upon the doctrine of responsible party government"[15]--this despite the disclaimers implicit in the title of the report, "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System," and despite the fact that, in its recommendations, the committee specifically declined to go as far as British practice, rejected the cabinet form of government, and endorsed the characteristically American practice of primary elections, which imposes severe limits on the practical possibilities for any advanced form of party discipline. Some members of the committee undoubtedly had party government in mind as an ideal, but the committee as a whole clearly desired to go no further in that direction than American constitutional practice would permit--which, in the committee's view, was a considerable distance but not the whole way.
In his critique, Ranney emphasized the distinction between democracy between the parties and democracy within each party. As he pointed out, Henry Jones Ford and E. E. Schattschneider had both argued that the two kinds of democracy were incompatible with each other; parties competitive with each other were likely to be too centralized for much internal democracy. Yet the Committee on Political Parties had argued that both kinds of democracy are desirable, with Schattschneider concurring, and saw no irreconcilable conflict between them. The McGovern-Fraser Commission on reforming the Democratic party later took a similar position, with Ranney participating as a member.[16] In part, the McGovernFraser Commission favored more democracy inside the party in order to make it more attractive to the members that it needs.
More telling, perhaps, is Ranney's argument that the committee's report could not succeed because, as A. Lawrence Lowell had argued, the American people do not want a more responsible party system; "they are not clearly committed to the idea of majoritarian democracy."[17] On the contrary, it is said, they are interested in preserving minority rights against majority rule. Yet they are also interested presumably in having a government that can operate effectively. On those occasions when presidents and congressional majorities of the same party have worked in unison on constructive programs of legislation, popular approval generally has been the rule.
Other academics weighed in with arguments both similar to and different from Ranney's, and the two views most averse to the position of the committee became clear only gradually. One of these views was that expressed most clearly by Herbert Agar in his book The Price of Union, published in 1950, the same year as the report's release. Agar argued that a system in which the parties divided on principle was dangerous and could lead to civil war, as it had in the 1860s. Why this should be more true in the United States than in other countries was not made clear; Agar seemed to think that it was a characteristic implicit in a federal union. But the position taken by Agar had much appeal, and still has, to many leaders of opinion and especially to all defenders of the status quo. Countless editorial writers have followed Agar in defending the virtues of a mixed up party system. For many years, the outstanding exception was David Lawrence of U.S. News & World Report, who consistently editorialized in the other direction.
The other view most averse to the report is that generally known as pluralism--the view that natural majorities rarely exist and that the political universe consists only of a multitude of minorities in uneasy relationship to each other. Pluralist theorists tend to believe that cohesive and disciplined majoritarian parties are difficult or impossible to create in a pluralist society, unless they are strongly favored by the governmental institutions, as in the British system. Hence the more outspoken pluralists have tended to disagree with the feasibility of the objectives sought by the committee. Their view is expressed well by Leon Epstein in his widely used book, Political Parties in Western Democracies.
Yet most members of the Committee on Political Parties were probably pluralists of one persuasion or another; they recognized that either major party would be a coalition, but hoped each would be a coalition of compatible groups. Furthermore, and somewhat oddly, the antipluralists were no more friendly to the report than the pluralists, regarding it as either trivial or irrelevant in relationship to their major concerns. One antipluralist referred to the report as "the apotheosis of a critical tradition whose timidity is revealed most clearly by contrast with Mills' Power Elite, which appeared a year later."[18]
Much of the adverse comment on the report is summarized by Evron Kirkpatrick in his retrospective review of the issues twenty years later.[19] The Kirkpatrick article is important not only for its content but also for its documentation, which includes references to substantially the entire literature in which the report is discussed. Kirkpatrick attacks the empirical basis for what the committee attempted. In doing so, he asks four questions:
"(1) Can political parties formulate policy, and should they?
(2) Can voters discriminate among policies, and will they?
(3) Is it like that in Britain?
(4) Are parties the keystone of the political arch?"[20]
Kirkpatrick answers no to each of these questions after an extended analysis. Somewhat different answers might emerge, however, with only a modest rephrasing of the questions:
1. Can political parties nominate candidates without regard for their stands on issues and platform, and should they?
2. Can voters be trusted to disregard party stands on issues they consider vital?
3. Are the British political parties as irresponsible as the American?
4. Are parties an essential part of the political system?
Kirkpatrick's first question relates to the programmatic function of the parties, a point of primary concern to many critics. The key passage most often cited in the report is the following:
An effective parry system requires, first, that the parties are able to bring forth programs to which they commit themselves and, second, that the panics possess sufficient internal cohesion to carry out these programs.[21]
For many critics, this passage conjures up a vision of parties as ideological as those of Europe used to be. Yet the committee denied any intention of building an ideological wall between the parties and used the term program in an American sense.[22] The committee discussed at length the means by which the parties might better form program statements in the platform writing process.
It can be argued, moreover, that the process the committee recommended for preparing platforms has been increasingly more operative in the years since 1950 than it was previously. I took this position in an article published in 1971, in which I reviewed the platform-drafting process since World War II and concluded, on the basis of Gerald Pomper's careful research, that platform execution had reached markedly higher levels during the 1960s than had been characteristic of the Truman period.[23] Another scholar, James L. Sundquist, studied public policy development in six major fields of domestic policy during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson years and summarized this whole experience as follows:
In democratic theory, the process by which a government responds to a problem is a simple one. Those among its citizens who advocate a course of action to cope with the problem organize for the purpose, through the mechanism of a political party. They present their solution to the people in an election. If they win, they have a mandate--and enact their program. The narrative studies of Part I [of this book] reveal, perhaps surprisingly, that amid all the complexity of politics and government in a vast nation with an enormous range of problems this simple process is still discernible. In the 1950s activist politicians, working in alliance with organizations outside the government, did develop a program aimed at the solution of the country's major identified domestic problems, and with the Democratic party as their instrument in most cases, organized to present that program to the people. The Democrats received the electoral mandate. Then- after some delay--they enacted the program.[24]
Finally, a 1971 article by Gerald M. Pomper offers an opposing view to Ranney's point that the people do not wish to have a set of parties that offer clear alternatives. Pomper argues that "a critical link between voter preferences and electoral choice was missing at the time of the Report" because the voters "did not see the parties as representing policy differences." On the basis of a mass of survey research, Pomper concludes that this is no longer the case; thus, "the potential for responsible parties is slowly emerging."[25] After further work, he reiterates the point in 1975:
The American electorate today shows an increasing sophistication and a potential for clear political choice. Mass belief systems are internally coherent and constrained. The voters do see differences between the parties, both on general ideology and on particular issues. At appropriate times, they align their party loyalty to their issue preferences. A link has been forged that can promote a 'responsible party' system, in which the parties put forth programs, receive popular approval of these programs, and then carry out the popular mandate.[26]
After the 1972 election, even the experts of the Michigan Survey Research Center concluded that the electorate as a whole had changed in the direction of a more ideological and more issue-oriented politics. No longer was the voter the uninformed and issueless creature of the early voting studies of the Eisenhower years. The analysts of the election found "a spectacular change in the quality of mass attitudes toward questions of public policy," and further concluded that "the political scientists' pleas for the elevation of issue politics and the creation of conditions that would permit or force responsible party government into existence were being answered."[27]
An early report on the Michigan studies of the 1976 presidential election
concluded that issues may have been decisive in the close 1976 election
even though they were less important in the election of 1976 than in that
of 1972. There is little doubt that the students of voting behavior are
giving increased attention to the relationships between political leadership,
issue positions taken, voting behavior, and the outcomes of political campaigns.[28]
Attitudes among political scientists, at least, seem more favorable to
conceptions of party responsibility than was the case a generation ago.
But the question still remains as to the balance of forces in the world
of action.
Is it desirable to move toward a system of more responsible political parties? If it is desirable, is it possible?
It has become increasingly obvious that the influence of single-issue pressure groups is on the rise. These groups are one of the oldest features of American political life, but recently they have multiplied in number, in financial power, and in their ability to intimidate the individual member of Congress.[29] With the parties' present weakness, the pressure groups no longer feel compelled to work through the parties, and individual members of Congress find themselves defenseless. To protect themselves, the members of like-minded groups in Congress need to band together. If the parties were performing their historic functions, the banding together might most easily take place through the media of the two political parties. Most professional students of government agree that this would be desirable.
In these days of party weakness, it may seem impossible to move the
parties toward more internal strength and capacity for responsibility.
Yet the case needs a fresh examination in light of the institutional and
other changes of recent years. The parties and the party system have continued
to evolve since 1950. That evolution has been the product of forces so
massive and so diffused that they almost defy analysis. Students of the
party system are in reasonable agreement on what has happened but are far
from agreement on any precise analysis of the causes, which leaves the
field wide open for speculation.
Possibly the most important change that has occurred is a further loosening of party ties and a great increase in split ticket voting. In 1968, the voters elected a Republican president while electing Democratic majorities in both House and Senate. In the midterm election of 1970, Democratic majorities were again returned. In 1972, the Republican president was reelected by an overwhelming majority; and again the voters returned Democratic majorities to House and Senate--as they did again in 1974. In 1976, a Democratic president was elected by a narrow majority while the Democrats in Congress ran far ahead of him in most states. With the president's popularity at a relatively low ebb in 1978, large Democratic majorities in Congress were again returned.
The patterns of voting for members of Congress are, in considerable part, the result of the special characteristics of a long-term trend of party realignment in the formerly one-party states. The northern states that were essentially Republican realigned in 1932 to become politically more competitive, but the process was far from complete that year, and there was some reversion to Republicanism afterward. Increasing competition in congressional voting in those states occurred mostly in 1954 and 1956; and those states as a group have remained competitive in their congressional voting most of the time since 1956, with a corresponding decrease in their previous tendency to send mainly Republican members to Congress.[30]
The southern states that were one-party Democratic realigned sharply in presidential politics in 1948 and have been highly competitive in presidential politics since that time. But they did not begin to realign in congressional politics until after 1958. From 1958 through 1972, the trend in Democratic voting in congressional and gubernatorial elections was steadily downward but did not reach the 50 percent mark.[31] Democratic representation in Congress from the South has reduced progressively since 1958, but Democrats are still heavily in the majority in the southern representation.
Meanwhile, the amateurs have been having a field day in both parties. New types of political clubs have burgeoned in many parts of the country, especially in suburban areas.[32] A nationwide mobilization of amateurs with a heavy ideological motivation was largely responsible for the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater by the Republican party in 1964 and for that of Senator George McGovern by the Democratic party in 1972. Conflict between amateurs and professionals was a factor in the defeats that followed both of these nominations; and in each party, a maturing process resulted that may be helpful in the future. The characteristically antiorganization attitudes of many amateurs have not been helpful to conceptions of party responsibility, but, in both parties, the amateurs have been intent upon more concern for national issues and stronger platform action.
Although party unity in Congress appears to have continued to decline on the basis of some measurements, the statistical decline is largely the product of a sharper cleavage between the remaining conservative southern Democrats and other Democrats. According to a leading student of the subject:
If we euminate the South and party agreement roll calls, the incidence of party voting in recent sessions has been high, considerably higher, in fact, than it was in the years 1921 44. Given these conditions, the positions of the two parties are particularly clear-cut on economic issues, monetary and fiscal policies, government action, housing, labor, and taxation. Indeed, in the North, on issues of this kind, the two parties approach quite closely the model of responsible pany government. This statement could not have been made in 1951.[33]
Outside the South, there" has been a growing tendency for the constituencies to reject representatives who look like mavericks or insurgents in their respective parties.34 Even in the South, liberal Democrats with a national orientation are beginning to be elected in some urban constituencies. As party realignment continues to spread in the South, along with urbanization and industrialization, this may increasingly be the case for the Democrats who can survive.
The institutional changes that have occurred since 1950 have included some modest reversals of previous changes. There has been little or no further spreading of open primaries since 1950. Cross-fling was abolished in California in 1958 after a campaign in which the report of the Committee on Political Parties was a modest factor.[35] The challenge primary, in which no primary is held unless the nomination of a political convention is strongly objectionable, has begun to spread and is finding some favor among reform groups that were strongly antiparty in an earlier day. Various forms of preprimary endorsement have survived or arisen, in part as a byproduct of the club movement in some states.
Between 1968 and 1972, the McGovern-Fraser Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection was at work in the Democratic party. Its eighteen guidelines for delegate selection, produced in 1970, were thereafter the basis for the revision of party rules in substantially all states.[36] Most of the guidelines related to obviously needed reforms and were not controversial. Those that were controversial and looked to increased representation for women, young people, and blacks, however, did bring on a considerable increase in the representation of all three groups. One guideline prohibited the ex officio designation of delegates and contributed to a reduction in the number of party officials who served as delegates in 1972: objections to this change were so sharp that a reversal trend has occurred, as illustrated in the national convention of 1976 and the midterm conferences of 1974 and 1978. Perhaps the most important result of the McGovern-Fraser Commission experience was the demonstration that the parties can take national action that can be enforced on the state parties, a sign of the ongoing nationalization of politics that has been demonstrated in many other ways.[37]
At the Democratic National Convention of 1972, other reform efforts brought on a new formula for the apportionment of votes among the states, a formula in which nearly half of the apportionment was based on an average of the party's share of the popular vote in each state during the last three presidential elections, and the remainder was based upon each state's electoral college strength. The Republican party adopted no such change, but it brought the issue to the federal courts even before the convention, where the issue remained for some time thereafter. The Supreme Court eventually declined to intervene, in a decision that strengthened the control of the parties over their own affairs. The convention committees were also restructured at the Democratic convention of 1972 on a fair apportionment basis, and the Democratic National Committee was comprehensively revised on a mixed plan, part of which paralleled the revision of the convention committees, and the remainder of which mainly gave representation on the committee to the state party chairmen and the highestranking state officers of the opposite sex. The platform drafting process in the Democratic party was also substantially revised in 1972 under new rules requiring that the proposed platform be completed and distributed to the delegates before they leave their homes to come to the convention. This practice was followed again in 1976, when the platform was heavily influenced by candidate Jimmy Carter but also by the congressional forces within the party.
Several changes have occurred in Congress.[33] By a series of steps and with accumulating changes in its membership, the Rules Committee of the House has been changed from a recurring obstacle to a facilitator of legislation; formerly responsive to the conservative coalition for most of a generation, it no longer is. In the Senate, where the filibuster had prevented civil rights legislation for many years, filibusters were successively broken in 1960, 1964, and 1965. The filibuster remains as a tactic but no longer has the fearsome quality that once attended it. In the House, the Democratic Study Group has reached maturity (two-thirds of the Democrats in the House are members), and has been increasingly effective in organizing liberal Democrats and in achieving various reforms. The seniority rule for electing committee chairmen has been modified to require a record vote by secret ballot in the caucus. Three seniority chairmen were displaced by caucus voting after the elections of 1974.
Perhaps most important of all, the House Democratic caucus has been meeting regularly since 1969 to discuss legislation and has become increasingly important as a forum in which party policy is worked out.[39] A similar shift occurred among House Republicans at an earlier date, and the party conferences have also become increasingly important in the Senate. Congress, at least, has been moving back in the direction of party responsibility for program.
For the last several years, however, much of the literature on political parties has been sounding cries of alarm over "the onward march of party decomposition"[40] and over the tendency of other agencies to replace the parties in the mobilization of the voters.[41] Processes of party weakening seemed to reach a new level in the elections of 1978.42 The candidates for Congress and the governorships used more television advertising than ever before, establishing their own direct contacts with the voters, who, in turn, acted more like observers at a sporting event than participants in an election. Candidates were able to spend unprecedented amounts of money, much of it their own, as the result of the Supreme Court ruling some years before that had struck down limits on candidate expenditures. Political action committees (PACS) had proliferated under campaign finance laws, and many candidates received multiple contributions of five thousand dollars each from many different PACS. It was a campaign of loners, in which every candidate seemed to be in business for himself. Grassroots campaigning by knocking on doors was less important than formerly. The influence and contributions of the political parties, both financial and organizational, seemed to reach a low ebb, with press and other media commenting with unusual unanimity on the disintegration of party structures.
There is no doubt that the parties and the party system are in a difficult period of transition, marked, most of all, by a weakening of the relationship between the parties and the voters and of that between the parties and their elected officeholders. Yet, as the previous pages have indicated, there have been occasional signs of revitalization, mainly in the work of the national party conventions and their reform commissions and in party organization in Congress. It may be that further attempts to restore party vitality are most likely to arise in the party groups in Congress--and in the White House.
David S. Broder, one of the most astute students of the problem, recently offered some pungent comments:
American politics has reached the point where it has to get worse before it can get better. Specifically, it must become more painful and difficult for offiecholders. And because single-interest groups are making it more painful and difficult, they are helping create the conditions in which responsible politics and government may be reborn....
More and more officeholders are demanding protection from what one of them has called the `issues extortionists., They are asking why there is nothing to provide some defense against this crossfire of non-negotiable special-interest demands.
The blunt answer is that they themselves helped destroy the one institution that historically filled that function--the political party. The officeholders are now being victimized by people who have borrowed their own campaign techniques to use against them.
My guess is that few candidates or officeholders are ready to sacrifice their own &eedom of action to rehabilitate their party....
The lesson the of ficeholders have to learn was stated at the beginning of the republic by Benjamin Franklin: Either they hang together or they hang separately.
Give them a few more years of the rigors of single-shot candidacies and single-issue movements, and even the dullest politicians will discover the need to reinvent political parties.[43]
Perhaps the best illustration of Broder's position on party decay is the timidity with which the Democratic party has approached the holding of midterm conferences. The holding of such conferences was one of the recommendations of the Committee on Political Parties. A conference was envisioned as a campaign rally to start off the midterm campaigns and as a place to write an updated party platform on which the party's candidates for Congress could all run. But after the 1972 national convention mandated a midterm conference for 1974 to consider the proposed party charter, it finally agreed to hold the conference only after the election,lest it embarrass a Democratic candidate in his local campaign. The charter, as adopted in 1974, looked to the possibility of further midterm conferences, and again it was decided to hold one in 1978. But again the forces of timidity--probably both executive and legislative--postponed the holding of the conference until after the election, leaving the whole enterprise without much point. A conference in May or June of the midterm election year, which comprehensively addressed the issues confronting the party and prepared a new platform, would oe a scene for serious negotiation among all elements of the party, including the president, when the party had one, and the party's members of Congress. Nothing else could more clearly embody the party's concern for program; and the absence of such a conference is one of the clearest demonstrations of the general reluctance of the parties to move toward more responsibility for the conduct of the government.
Yet the parties are not actually dead, even if moribund. It may be years
before there is again as strong a move toward party reform as the one that
started in 1968. On the other hand, having learned how to use reform commissions
and the extent of their effectiveness, one party or the other, or even
both, may soon begin to confront seriously the issues of more effective
government and the relationship of the parties to that goal. The reform
commissions, so active in the Democratic party, less so in the Republican,
have not been much concerned with executive-legislative relations and the
issues of party responsibility that underlie them. But the time may come
when future reform commissions will turn their attention in that direction.
In that case, the 1950 report of the APSA Committee on Political Parties
will again be a prime source for renewed attention, for ideas on the problem
as a whole, and for many of the specifics. It will not have been written
in vain.[44]
In preparing this article, I was helped extensively by two former members
of the APSA committee, Clarence Berdahl (now deceased) and Bertram M. Gross,
who assisted by providing both additional documentation on the work of
the committee and their own recollections of events. James W. Ceaser of
the University of Virginia was also helpful in commenting on an earlier
draft of the article.
[1.] Austin Ranney, Curbing the Mischiefs of Faction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Ranney, "Changing the Rules of the Nominating Game," in James David Barber, ea., Choosing the President (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 71-93; Ranney, "The Democratic Party's Delegate Selection Reforms, 1968-76," in Allan P. Sindler, ea., America in the Seventies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 160-206; William J. Crotty, Political Reform and the American Experiment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977); Crotty, Decision for Democrats (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Paul T. David and James W. Ceaser, Proportional Representation in Presidential Nominating Politics (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1979).
[2.] "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System" was published as a supplement to the American Political Science Review 44, September 1950. It has also been published commercially.
[3.] Evron M. Kirkpatrick, "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System: Political Science, Policy Science, or Pseudo-Science?" American Political Science Review 65 (December 1971): 965-90.
[4.] American Political Science Review 39 (December 1945): 1 147-57.
[5.] At the time, Morstein Marx v,-as well established as a political scientist and as an active member of the American Political Science Association, but he was known primarily as a theorist and practitioner in the field of public administration. I had a doctorate in economics, and Gross had worked mainly with economic agencies and programs of the federal government In 1947, neither I nor Gross had any record of research or publication in the field of political parties, although both of us were members of the American Political Science Association. Gross was just beginning the writing that led to his well-known book, The Legislative Struggle, published in 1953 and had moved from Capitol Hill to the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers by the time that he was appointed on the committee. I had left the Bureau of the Budget in 1946 to join the United States mission at the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal. What the three of us had in common was experience in the central staffing and legislative agencies of the federal government. We might be considered to have been somewhat akin to the young intellectuals described by Maurice Duverger who are sometimes coopted into the European political parties by way of their research groups. Duverger, Political Parties, 2d English ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959), 166-68
[6.] The documents under discussion at the meetings of May 22 and 23, 1948, included Schattschneider's two lectures at the University of Maryland, "The Idea of Party Government" and "Party Reconstruction," and a memorandum prepared by Bertram Gross, "A Program for Party Responsibility." The committee agreed that in revising the two lectures into a draft statement for committee adoption, Schattschneider would tone down the party government emphasis, but he was less than fully successful in the revised version circulated in June 1948 as "Political Planning and Party Reconstruction." This led to further conflict in correspondence during 1948, which culminated in the decisions made at the meeting in December 1948.
[7.] These decisions were recorded by Schattschneider in a lengthy postmeeting letter circulated to committee members on 10 January 1949.
[8.] "Outline of a Proposed Program for Party Responsibility," circulated in March 1949. Part 1, pages 2-13, was largely a revision of Schattschneider's previous materials; part 2, pages 14-24, the action proposals, was a revision of the earlier Bertram Gross memorandum. The group that met in February 1949 to produce the document included Frankbn L. Burdette, University of Maryland; Louise Overacker, Wellesley College; E. M. Kirkpatrick, Department of State; Howard Penniman, Department of State; Fritz Morstein Marx, Bureau of the Budget; Bertram M. Gross, Council of Economic Advisers; and E. E. Schattschneider, Wesleyan University.
[9.] Burdette, Kirkpatrick, and Penniman presumably declined further service and were replaced by Berdahl, who had been one of the most active members of the greater committee. This is the drafting committee as recorded in the front matter of the published report, the one that functioned after August 1949.
[10.] It fell to me to discuss the report with Senator Robert A. Taft and Congressman Joseph W. Martin, Jr., as the Republican leaders of Congress. Neither had any major problems and both seemed to think the report would be helpful. Another committee member, designated to discuss the report with Vice-President Alben W. Barkley and Speaker Sam Rayburn, was unable to secure their attention or views; each had reasons for having negative views of proposals for party reform.
[11.] Clinton Rossiter, Parties and Politics in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), 180.
[12.] Edward V. Schneier, Jr., Julius Turner, Party and Constituency: Pressures on Congress, revised ed. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), 245-246.
[13.] Julius Turner, "Responsible Parties: A Dissent from the Floor," American Political Science Review 45 (March 1951): 143-52.
[14.] Austin Ranney, "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System: A Commentary," American Political Science Review 45 (June 1951): 488-99.
[15.] Ibid., 6.
[16.] Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, Mandate for Reform (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1970).
[17.] Ranney, "A Commentary," 160.
[18.] David Kettler in William E. Connolly, ea., The Bias of Pluralism (New York: Atherton Press, 1969), 232. Actually, C. Wright Mills's Power Elite was published in 1957, seven years after the Committee Report.
[19.] Kirkpatrick, "Political Science, Policy Science, or Pseudo-Science?"
[20.] Kirpatrick, 969.
[21.] "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System," 1.
[22.] The term program as used in the report probably had a content similar to that in its usage around the Bureau of the Budget in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was a word of art in references to "the president's program." As seen by the budget's in-house theorists, of whom Fritz Morstein Marx was the leader, the president's program includes everything that the president favors, particularly as defined annually in the State of the Union message, the budget message, the economic report, and subsequent messages. In the same way, the program of an American major political party is defined mainly in its quadrennial party platforms, but also in supplementary statements by party councils, legislative leaders, congressional party conferences, and, of course, the president, when the party has a president in office, although the president's program is not necessarily identical with the party program.
[23.] Paul T. David, "Party Platforms as National Plans," Public Administration Review 31 (May/June 1971): 303-15. This article appeared as part of a symposium on national planning, edited by Bertram M. Gross.
[24.] James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1968), 8-9.
[25.] Gerald M. Pomper, "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System? What, Again?" Journal of Politics 33 (November 1971): 929.
[26.] Gerald M. Pomper, Voter's Choice (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1975), 182. Pomper's position inspired a degree of academic controversy that undoubtedly still continues. See especially Michael Margolis, "From Confusion to Confusion: Issues and the American Voter (1956-1972)," American Political Science Review 71 (March 1977): 31 43; idem, "From Confusion to Confusion," American Political Science Review 71 (December 1977): 1596-97.
[27.] Arthur H. Miller, Warren E. Miller, Alden S. Raine, Thad A. Brown, "A Majority Party in Disarray: Policy Polarization in the 1972 Election" (Paper presented at the 1973 APSA annual meeting), 3.
[28.] Warren E. Miller and Teresa E. Levitin, Leadership and Change: Presidential Elections from 1952 to 1976 (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 1976), esp. 224-25; Gerald M. Pomper et al., The Election of 1976 (New York: David McKay, 1977); Norman H. Nie, Sydney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
[29.] "Single Issue Politics," Newsweek, 6 November 1978, 42-52 (Australian edition).
[30.] Paul T. David, Party Strength in the United States, 1872-1970 (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 42.
[31.] Ibid., 45.
[32.] James Q. Wilson, The Amateur Democrat (Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
[33.] Schneier, Party and Constituency, 245.
[34.] Ibid., 227-29.
[35.] The report was one of the items cited in a campaign pamphlet.
[36.] Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, Mandate for Reform (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1970), 34-35.
[37.] Paul T. David, "Reform Efforts Continue on State Party Structures," National Civic Review 61 (May 1972): 226-31; idem, "Political Parties Continue Struggle for Reform," National Civic Review 62 (March 1973): 118-24.
[38.] Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce 1. Oppenheimer, eds., Congress Reconsidered (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1977); Stephen K. Bailey, Congress in the Seventies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970).
[39.] "Democratic Study Group: A Winner on House Reforms," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 31 (2 June 1973): 1366-71.
[40.] W. Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), chapter 5.
[41.] Frank J. Sorauf, Party Politics in America, 2d ed. (Boston, Mass.: Little Brown & Co., 1972), chapter 17.
[42.] For easy source material on this, see the postelection analyses in issues of Newsweek and Time published after the election of 1978; similar commentaries were carried widely in the press and on the media throughout 1978.
[43.] David S. Broder, "Let 100 Single-lssue Groups Bloom: The Pains They Cause May Push Politicians Back to the Parties," Washington Post, Sunday, 7 January 1979, Outlook section. See also Broder's book, The Party's Over: The Failure of Politics in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), esp. chapter 11 on the continuing need for more party responsibility.
[44.] Fritz Morstein Marx, who did so much to defend the report during the period soon after its publication, resumed to his native Germany within a few years. A mountaineer by avocation, he died in a mountaineering accident a few years later.
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Paul T. David has been professor emeritus of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia since 1977. He is also senior author of the five-volume report Presidential Nominating Politics in 1952 and of The Politics of National Party Conventions (unabridged, hardback ea., 1960; condensed paperback eds., 1960, 1964, and 1984). He served on the Committee on Political Parties.