The Rise of Programmatic Partisanship in the United States

• In Event: Interest Group and Party Alliances in Historical Perspective

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project presenting an analytical history of programmatic partisanship—the extent to which policy positions serve as a key basis of electoral competition—in the United States, using mixed methods to investigate when, how, and why it has changed since the Democratic and Republicans parties began competing with each other in 1856. To date, most studies of programmatic partisanship (or “programmaticism”) have been cross-national, focusing especially on new democracies and developing nations in the contemporary era. Work on this subject shows a striking positive relationship between programmaticism and economic development. The association is far from perfect, however, and the underlying mechanisms are disputed. We can gain new leverage over the question of why countries shift toward issue-based competition by examining a single case over time, following American parties as the nation grew from a relatively new, embattled democracy with an industrializing economy and largely clientelistic parties to an advanced post-industrial democracy with the most programmatic party system in the world.

The last part of the project traces the history of programmaticism through the lens of party organizations, examining the theory outlined in an earlier chapter and learning inductively from the process of reading primary materials from 1856 to the present. This will illuminate not only who and what ultimately facilitated programmaticism’s contemporary rise, but also who and what hindered earlier attempts to increase it. I will trace the history of when and how parties increased their emphasis on party position development, how and why the process for position development became more advanced and institutionalized over time, and who pushed and who resisted these efforts and why, drawing on transcripts of Democratic and Republican National Conventions and party committee meetings, oral histories, archival materials collected at various presidential libraries, historical newspapers, and secondary sources. The chapter to be presented at this conference will focus on the period from 1950 to the present.

This project intervenes in an important debate about party conceptualization: are they, as in the traditional view, coalitions of office-seekers or coalitions of policy-demanding groups, as argued by a new “group-centered” theory of parties (Cohen, Karol, Noel and Zaller 2008, inter alia)? I argue that this question is temporally dependent; U.S. parties have become more, though not entirely, group-centered over time as programmaticism developed.

Author

• Katherine Krimmel, Barnard College, Columbia University