The Long War: Party Structure and Representative Democracy

• In Event: Contours of American Political Parties

Abstract

For close on to two hundred years, there has been a war over internal party structure in the United States, intensifying at some points, repressed at others. This war has had both theoretical and practical fronts, affecting both democratic theory and policy outcomes. The conventional narrative about it says that organized—machine-type—parties were dominant in the early years; that the battle was joined by volunteer—activist-based—parties in the late nineteenth century; that the two models fought for dominance into the 1970s; at which point one side—those volunteer parties—triumphed more or less universally.
This paper goes looking for relevant indicators for the distribution of party structures, beginning in the 1950s and continuing to the present moment, and then applies these to questions about the comparative representational impacts of the two structural alternatives. Some of the conventional narrative is convincingly affirmed; much of it is elaborated, given further detail and extended to further realms; and in the end, some fresh puzzles emerge as well. Along the way, party structure proves to have an impact on the transmission of public preferences on both social welfare and cultural values, while simultaneously shaping the representational contribution of Congresspersons and Senators.

Authors

• Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin

• Regina Wagner