This paper offers a theory of political parties that explains how their various branches -- in the government, in the electorate, and in organization -- work together to structure political conflict. Its basic posture is that parties are a conspiracy of intense minorities against the less attentive and involved. Yet, as a by-product of their wish to govern, parties offer a degree of responsiveness and accountability to all voters. The extent of parties’ responsiveness and accountability depends on how closely voters monitor them. Parties wish to cede only as much to public opinion as necessary to win control of government via fair elections, so they do what they can, via agenda control, secrecy, and other devices, to make monitoring difficult.
Nominations for office are the fundamental act of parties. Choice of nominee reflects the balance of forces within a party, structures electoral politics, and sets the agenda of government. The fact that parties sometimes struggle in primary elections to control nominations does not make nominations less important. When party interest groups control candidate choice, and especially when they enjoy the power of de-nomination, they insist on candidates who deliver policy benefits to coalition members. When candidates gain control of their own nominations, as sometimes occurs, delivery of partisan benefits slows and parties themselves may wither.
Nothing in our theory challenges the important argument, widely accepted in the literature, that politicians build party institutions, both inside and outside of government, to advance their goals. But the goals of politicians are, in our theory, mainly the goals of the groups and activists that nominate them. When new groups enter the party coalition, or when old groups make new demands, the goals of office-holding politicians change. Office-holders, most notably presidents, have some capacity to shape party coalitions, but our theory holds that groups and activists are generally dominant. Thus, in contrast to recent theorizing, which tends to view party institutions as creatures of partisan office-holders, we view partisan office-holders as the creatures of their group and activist backers. Even for the current period, we propose a group- and activist-centered theory of parties rather than a candidate-centered one.
Although we emphasize that parties are anything but the humble servants of democracy, our theory is consistent with the widespread view that, as put by E. E. Schattschneider, “modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties (p.1).” In our theory, parties serve voters for the same reason that profit-hungry corporations serve consumers -- because they need public support in order to achieve their own goals. Under the right conditions, parties provide a high level of service to voters. Whether, over the long haul, the level is high enough is a difficult normative problem that we do not engage in this paper. Our purpose here is to explain party behavior. And since, as we hold, the
aim of party interest groups and activists is to maximize their share of policy benefits, our explanation focuses on that motivation.
The building blocks of our theory are, as the reader will quickly discover, familiar. It builds above all on Schattschneider’s definition of a party as “an organized attempt to seize control of the government,” making this notion applicable to more recent theorizing and to current party practice. The theory attempts, inter alia, to reconcile the competing arguments of David Mayhew’s Electoral Connection, which explains why office-holders have little use for parties, and Thomas Schwartz’s and John Aldrich’s “Why Parties?” arguments, which explain why they do. It seeks also to explain why parties sometimes nominate relatively extremist candidates and why they sometimes offer candidates closer to the median, as documented especially by Ansolabehere, Stewart and Snyder in their paper on “Candidate Positions in Congressional Elections.” David Rhode's theory of Conditional Party Government sits comfortably within our argument, as does recent research on the importance of Rules Committee agenda-setting in legislative politics. The theory explains why the current system of presidential nominations, which seems to some to be over-run by special interests, is actually an example of a strong party process, as maintained by Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller in their paper on “Beating Reform: The Resurgence of Parties in Presidential Nominations.”
download file at http://www.princeton.edu/~csdp/events/pdfs/seminars/Noel051806.pdf
0 comments:
Post a Comment