1. The Challenge of Democracy
CHAPTER 8
Political Parties

2. Copyright © 2016 Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
Learning outcomes
Define political party and list the functions performed by parties in democratic government.
Outline the history of the U.S. political party system.
Explain why two parties dominate the history of American politics.
Compare and contrast the Democratic and Republican parties on the basis of ideology and organization.
Identify the principles of responsible party government and evaluate their role in majoritarian democracy.
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3. political parties and their functions
What Is a Political Party?
Sponsors candidates for political office under the organization’s name
Party Functions
Nominating candidates
Structuring the voting choice
Proposing alternative government programs
Coordinating the actions of government officials
political party
An organization that sponsors candidates for political office under the organization’s name.
Nomination
Designation as an official candidate of a political party.
political system
A set of interrelated institutions that links people with government.
Political parties help democratic government by structuring the voting choice—reducing the number of candidates on the ballot to those who have a realistic chance of winning.
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4. A history of u.s. party politics
The Preparty Period
No parties mentioned in Constitution
Constitution provided for electoral college
Caucuses used in early presidential elections
The First Party System: Federalists and Democratic Republicans
Elections of 1796 and 1800
Twelfth Amendment
electoral college
A body of electors chosen by voters to cast ballots for president and vice president.
caucus
A closed meeting of the members of a political party to decide questions of policy and the selection of candidates for office.
In the election of 1796, the Federalists supported Vice President John Adams to succeed Washington as president. The Democratic Republicans backed Thomas Jefferson for president but could not agree on a vice-presidential candidate. In the electoral college, Adams won seventy-one votes to Jefferson’s sixty-eight, and both ran ahead of other candidates. At that time, the Constitution provided that the presidency would go to the candidate who won the most votes in the electoral college, with the vice presidency going to the runner-up (like a school election). So Adams, a Federalist, had to accept Jefferson, a Democratic Republican, as his vice president.
The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, prevented a repeat of the troublesome election outcomes of 1796 and It required the electoral college to vote separately for president and vice president, implicitly recognizing that parties would nominate different candidates for the two offices.
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5. A history of u.s. party politics
The Second Party System: Democrats and Whigs
National convention
Party platform
The Current Party System: Democrats and Republicans
Early 1850s: Republican Party forms to oppose slavery
Election of 1860: First of four critical elections
Electoral realignment
The Jacksonian faction of the Democratic Republican Party represented the common people in the expanding South and West, and its members took pride in calling themselves simply Democrats.
Parties now needed to campaign for votes cast by hundreds of thousands of citizens. Recognizing this new dimension of the nation’s politics, the parties responded with a new method for nominating presidential candidates.
national convention
A gathering of delegates of a single political party from across the country to choose candidates for president and vice president and to adopt a party platform.
party platform
The statement of policies of a national political party.
critical election
An election that produces a sharp change in the existing pattern of party loyalties among groups of voters.
electoral realignment
The change in voting patterns that occurs after a critical election.
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6. A history of u.s. party politics
Eras of Party Dominance Since the Civil War
Election of 1860 established two-party system
A Rough Balance:
A Republican Majority:
A Democratic Majority:
A Rough Balance: 1968-present
Electoral dealignment
two-party system
A political system in which two major political parties compete for control of the government. Candidates from a third party have little chance of winning office.
When one party in a two-party system regularly enjoys support from most voters in an area, it is called the majority party in that area; the other is called the minority party.
From 1860 through 1894, the Grand Old Party (or GOP, as the Republican Party is sometimes called) won eight of ten presidential elections, which would seem to qualify it as the majority party.
A second critical election, in 1896, transformed the Republican Party into a true majority party.
The Republicans’ majority status ended in the critical election of 1932 between incumbent president Herbert Hoover and the Democratic challenger, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
electoral dealignment
A lessening of the importance of party loyalties in voting decisions.
Some scholars say that in the 1970s and 1980s, we were in a period of electoral dealignment, in which party loyalties became less important to voters as they cast their ballots. Others counter that partisanship increased in the 1990s in a gradual process of realignment not marked by a single critical election.
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7. William Jennings Bryan: When Candidates Were Orators
Today, televised images of a candidate waving his hands and shouting to the audience would look silly. But candidates once had to resort to such tactics to be effective with large crowds – as demonstrated here by William Jennings Bryan.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C
One of the most commanding orators around the turn of the 20th century was William Jennings Bryan ( ), whose stirring speeches extolling the virtues of the free coinage of silver were music to the ears of thousands of westerners and southern farmers.
Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C
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8. The american two-party system
Minor Parties in America
Bolter Parties
Progressive party
Farmer-Labor Parties
Populist party
Parties of Ideological Protest
Socialist party
Single-Issue Parties
Prohibition party
Bolter parties are formed by factions that have split off from one of the major parties.
Farmer-labor parties represented farmers and urban workers who believed that they, the working class, were not getting their share of society’s wealth.
Parties of ideological protest go further than farmer-labor parties in criticizing the established system.
Single-issue parties are formed to promote one principle, not a general philosophy of government.
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A Third-Party Theme
The Libertarian Party values freedom above both order and equality. Founded in 1971, the party has run presidential candidates in every election since It was most successful in 1980, when Libertarian Ed Clark won about 920,000 votes, which was 1.06 percent of all votes cast. In 2012, Libertarian Gary Johnson won more votes (about 1,155,000), but they were only 0.97 percent of the total. Ron Paul, its 1988 presidential candidate, was elected to Congress in 1996 as a Republican. His son, Rand Paul, was elected to the Senate also as a Republican. None of the hundreds of Libertarian candidates in recent congressional elections was elected. Nevertheless, the Libertarian Party’s website justifiably describes itself as “America’s third largest and fastest growing political party.” That says something about the state of third parties in the United States.
The Libertarian Party,
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10. Party Candidates for the U.S. House in the 2014 Election
Figure 8.2 Party Candidates for the U.S. House in the 2014 Election
In 2014, as in other recent elections, the Democratic and Republican parties each ran candidates for the House of Representatives in about 90 percent of the 435 congressional districts. Of minor parties, only the Libertarian Party, the best-organized minor party in the nation, ran candidates in more than one hundred districts. In most of those districts, however, the Libertarian candidates usually got about 3 percent of the vote when they ran. All other minor parties ran fewer candidates than the Libertarians.
Sources: Candidate data come from Ballot Access News, 30 (October 1, 2014), p. 4; estimated percentage of votes cast come from Pew Research Center, at
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11. The american two-party system
Why a Two-Party System?
Electoral system
Historical pattern
Majority representation
Proportional representation
The Federal Basis of the Party System
Tend to ignore electoral patterns in states
The two most convincing explanations for the two-party system in the United States lie (1) in its electoral system and (2) in our historical pattern of political socialization.
The two principles of single winners chosen by a simple plurality of votes produce an electoral system known as majority representation.
majority representation
The system by which one office, contested by two or more candidates, is won by the single candidate who collects the most votes.
proportional representation
The system by which legislative seats are awarded to a party in proportion to the vote that party wins in an election.
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12. The american two-party system
Party Identification in America
Most people identify with one of the two parties
Lower income and less education think of themselves as Democrats
Citizens with advanced degrees are more Democratic
No affiliation with religious group tends to be strongly Democratic
More women tend to be Democrats
About half of all Americans adopt their parents’ party
party identification
A voter’s sense of psychological attachment to a party.
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13. Distribution of party identification, 1952-2012
Figure 8.4
In every presidential election since 1952, voters across the nation have been asked, “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, or what?” Most voters think of themselves as either Republicans or Democrats, but the proportion of those who think of themselves as independents has increased over time. The size of the Democratic Party’s majority has also shrunk. Nevertheless, most Americans today still identify with one of the two major parties, and Democrats still outnumber Republicans.
Sources: Data for 1952 to 2008 come from the American National Election Studies Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, org/nesguide/nesguide.htm. The 2012 figure is from the 2012 ANES Time Series tabulated at the Survey Documentation and Analysis website, The few respondents (typically under 5 percent) who gave other answers were excluded from the graph.
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14. Party ideology and organization
Differences in Party Ideology
Involved and uninvolved voters
Platforms: freedom, order, and equality
Different but similar
Some claim parties are quite similar in ideology compared to different parties in other countries
Party platforms also matter a great deal to the parties’ convention delegates—and to the interest groups that support the parties. The wording of a platform plank often means the difference between victory and defeat for factions within a party. Delegates fight not only over ideas but also over words.
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15. Ideologies of involved and uninvolved party voters in 2012
Figure 8.6
The Democratic and Republican parties differ substantially in their ideological centers of gravity, especially when party identifiers are classified according to their political involvement. Involved Democrats and Republicans were those who cared “a lot” about the 2012 presidential candidates. Uninvolved Democrats and Republicans cared less. Virtually none of the involved Republican identifiers described themselves as liberal, while almost all said they were conservative. Nearly half of involved Democrats described themselves as liberal.
Source: January 12, 2012 Pew Survey.
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16. Party ideology and organization
National Party Organization
Four components at national level
National convention
National committee
Congressional party conference
Congressional campaign committees
Every four years, each party assembles thousands of delegates from the states and U.S. territories (such as Puerto Rico and Guam) in a national convention for the purpose of nominating a candidate for president.
national committee
A committee of a political party composed of party chairpersons and party officials from every state.
party conferences
A meeting to select party leaders and decide committee assignments, held at the beginning of a session of Congress by Republicans or Democrats in each chamber.
congressional campaign committee
An organization maintained by a political party to raise funds to support its own candidates in congressional elections.
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17. Party ideology and organization
State and Local Party Organizations
Party machines
New York’s Tammany Hall
Chicago’s Cook County Central Committee
Decentralized but Growing Stronger
American parties most decentralized in world
party machine
A centralized party organization that dominates local politics by controlling elections.
American political parties are still among the most decentralized parties in the world. Not even the president can count on loyalty from the legislative members of his party. Decentralization of power has always been the most distinguishing characteristic of American political parties. Moreover, the rise in the proportion of citizens who style themselves as independents suggests that our already weak parties are in further decline
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18. The model of responsible party government
Four principles of responsible party government
Parties should present clear and coherent programs to voters
Voters should choose candidates on the basis of party programs
The winning party should carry out its program once in office
Voters should hold the governing party responsible at the next election for executing its program
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19. The Tea Party: Background Report
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20. video discussion questions
Why is the Tea Party a movement, and not a political party? What are its objectives?
What qualities, if any, do Tea Party advocates share with Libertarians?
Overall, has the Tea Party helped or hurt the Republican Party?
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