The Two Party System

The patterns of sectional, class, pluralistic and individualistic political behaviour in the American electorate suggest, at first sight, that the most likely shape for the party system would be a number of different parties, each giving expression to the interest of an important section of the political universe. Surely only a multi-party system could give expression to such diversity. Yet a second look at the evidence of the previous chapter throws some doubt on this suggestion. Are the numerous cross-pressures of American politics, the overlapping patterns of group behaviour, consistent with the existence of a number of relatively stable political parties of the kind to be found in continental European countries? In fact, two political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, dominate the scene without any serious rivals on the horizon. There have been important third-party movements in American history, and even today there are many minor parties. In 1968 George Wallace, the candidate of the American Independent Party, polled 13.5 per cent of the total vote, and in 1924 Robert La Follette, the Progressive candidate for the presidency, attracted the vote of one-sixth of those who went to the polls. In 1992 Ross Perot, running as an Independent, polled 19 per cent of the total vote, and may have been responsible for the defeat of George Bush. Perot ran again in 1996 but attracted a very much smaller proportion of the vote. Ralph Nader, the candidate of the Green Party, attracted only 2.7 percent of the presidential vote in 2000, but his intervention meant that George W. Bush rather than Al Gore carried the state of Florida, which ensured the election of Bush. Another type of third-party movement, the breakaway States Rights Party of 1948, won five of the Southern states that normally went to the Democratic Party. In 1964 there were six minor candidates for the presidency, including the first black ever to run for the office, and in 1980 an independent candidate, John Anderson, polled over 5.5 million votes, 7 per cent of the total. However, when there is no stimulus for a protest vote to draw electors away from the two major parties they may between them poll over 99 per cent of the votes cast, as they have done in most of the elections since 1952.

Thus the diversities of political life suggest that we might expect to find Thus the diversities of political life suggest that we might expect to find a multi-party system of the most thoroughgoing and unstable variety, and yet in fact there is in operation an established two-party system of the most inclusive sort. How is it that, from the morass of groups and interests, two parties emerge with a seemingly unchallengeable grip on political power? The answer lies in the complex relationships between the constitutional framework of government, the organisational structure of the political parties, and the ideological bases of political behaviour. For the American party system is a two-party system only in a very special sense. We must not look at the American party system simply in a two-dimensional way, for it has many dimensions, and becomes a ‘two-party system’ only if viewed from a particular standpoint. From another point of view it is an agglomeration of many parties centred on the governments of the fifty states and their subdivisions, and yet from another point of view it is a loosely articulated four-party system based upon Congress and the presidency. The names ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ are not meaningless labels, as Lord Bryce suggested they were at the end of the nineteenth century; nevertheless, they do tend to obscure the fact that for most purposes America operates under a multi-party system which coalesces into two great coalitions for strictly limited purposes.

Fifty Party Systems

The major function of American political parties is to provide candidates for office and to secure their election. The effective offices for which candidates have to be nominated are very numerous, particularly at state and local levels. The rewards of office – the spoils, as they are sometimes referred to – are to be found at all levels of government, and there are important policy decisions to be taken, involving the expenditure of billions of dollars by federal, state and local officials. The fact that the Constitution diffuses authority among these levels of government has had a strong disintegrating effect upon party structure. The constitutional division of authority between the federal government and the states is reflected in the realities of the distribution of effective political power. Conceivably, the effects of the constitutional fragmentation of authority might have been offset by a strongly centralised party system binding the parts of the government together, but the conditions that might have led to such a centralisation of power have not been present in the system. As a result, national party organisations have had a very restricted function to perform in the political system, concerning themselves mainly with the nomination and election of presidential candidates. The national parties have tended to be coalitions of state and local parties, forming and re-forming every four years for this purpose. Thus, rather than a single party system, we have fifty state party systems with the national political parties related to them in a complex pattern of alliances.

It is by no means fanciful to think of politics in the United States operating within a framework of fifty party systems rather than one. A great centralisation of government power undeniably took place during the twentieth century, giving to the federal government in Washington an interest, and an influence, in a large number of fields of action that in earlier times were almost exclusively the concern of the states, and yet these states are by no means political dodos. They continue to exercise important governmental functions. Perhaps the most important single fact about American politics today is that the centralisation of decision-taking power in the hands of the federal government has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the power of the national political parties over the state and local organisations. Governmental power has been centralised, but political power has remained diffuse. This is one of the crucial facts about American politics, which helps to explain why the most powerful government in the world may, at certain times, be directed by political forces originating from remote parts of the country with seemingly little relevance to the problems under consideration. Organisationally, the national parties are weak and sporadic in operation. The continuously operative and powerful political organisations are at the state and local level, although their degree of coherence and effectiveness varies considerably from place to place. The constitutional basis of this diffusion of power is reinforced by historical events, such as the Civil War, which have tended to entrench a particular political pattern in a region; by the regional differences of interest that characterise the subcontinent; by a general resistance to the idea of ‘big government’; and by the vested interests of those groups, particularly local politicians, who benefit from the status quo. Thus there exists a whole network of disintegrating factors that reinforce each other and prevent the emergence of powerful national parties that could coerce state and local parties.

There are good reasons for describing politics in, say, Mississippi as constituting a different and distinct political system from that of New York or Michigan. The very quality and nature of political life differs greatly from state to state. In a number of states one party maintains a position of dominance such that the opposing party can only fitfully win certain state and local offices. In the states of the Deep South the Democratic Party was for a long period the only effective political organisation, establishing one-party systems in those states, which enabled them to maintain white supremacy by excluding blacks from the political process. The progressive disillusionment of Southern whites with the civil rights policies of the national Democratic Party since the 1960s enabled the Republicans gradually to gain support with white voters in the South. In 1994 for the first time since the reconstruction period following the Civil War the Republicans held a majority of governorships in Southern states, and a majority of the Senators and Congressmen from those states were Republicans. Since then the Republicans have tightened their grip further on the Southern states. In 2004 all the Senate seats up for election in the southern states were won by Republicans and of the twenty-two Southern Senators eighteen were Republican after the election. We will examine the pivotal role of the South in the political system in a later chapter.

The presidential and congressional parties

The structure of American federalism provides one of the most important disintegrating influences on American politics, but the Constitution struck a further blow at the basis of any attempt to centralise political power. The Founding Fathers, in their determination to limit the power of government, also established a strict separation of personnel between Congress and the president’s administration, and gave to president and Congress a different electoral basis and different constituencies. The president cannot dissolve Congress if it displeases him, nor does he resign if his proposals are rejected by it. Thus, although both president and Congress are concerned with the passage of legislation and with the way that it is put into effect, there are very few formal links between them. A major function of the political parties throughout their history has been to provide such links between the separated branches of government; but their success in coordinating these activities has been only partial. Indeed, as a result of this institutional division of governmental power, each of the political parties has been divided into a presidential wing and a congressional wing.

The distinctive quality of these two wings of each of the major political parties led James McGregor Burns to describe the American party system as a four-party system. The presidential Democrats, the presidential Republicans, the congressional Democrats and the congressional Republicans are, he argued, ‘separate though overlapping parties’. Each has its own institutional patterns and ideology, representing a different style of politics. The presidential Democrats differ from the congressional Democrats in their electoral base, appealing, in part at least, to different sections of the population. The presidential party seeks its major support in the urban areas of the large industrialised states, while many Democratic senators and congressmen are much more responsive to rural and suburban influences. The presidential wings of both parties tend to be closer together doctrinally than they are to the respective congressional wings of their own parties. Indeed, the conflict between the two wings of a party may be more bitter and intense than the conflict between the parties themselves.

It is, of course, difficult to draw precise lines between the presidential and congressional wings of the party. Some members of Congress must be numbered among the supporters of the presidential wing, although usually they are relatively few in number, and each of the two wings will make attempts to influence or even control the other. The nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater by the Republicans in 1964 represented the success of the congressional Republicans over the presidential Republicans, and his ensuing defeat at the hands of the electorate illustrated the differing bases of support upon which the two wings of the party must depend. Goldwater was out of his element in presidential politics, and never seemed able to come to terms with the new context in which he found himself. Although both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had served in the Senate before election tothe White House, few senators have been able to make the transition to the presidency, experience as the governor of a state being considered a better apprenticeship. President Lyndon Johnson had been Democratic leader of the Senate, but he succeeded to the presidency as a result of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and was subsequently elected in his own right.

The ideological content of American politics

The constitutional and structural aspects of the party system that we have surveyed are understandable as far as they go, but something more is needed to comprehend fully why America has a ‘two-party’ system. What is politics about in America, and what role do ideas play in the working of the system? What are the issues that give life to the political system?

The relation between ideas and political structures is always very complex and nowhere more so than in the United States. Political ideas take different forms and exist at different levels of consciousness. The term ‘ideology’ is usually applied to a system of thought in which a number of ideas about the nature of the political system and the role of government are logically related to each other, and developed as a consciously held guide to political action. Socialism, communism and fascism are the prime examples of such ideologies. In this sense ideology plays a very small, indeed an almost negligible role in American politics. These ideologies have never been held by any more than a tiny proportion of the American population and although there are a number of political parties based upon these ideas, among them the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Labor Party of America and even the American Nazi Party, these organisations have never had a significant effect on American politics, at any rate at the national level. This is often referred to as ‘American exceptionalism’, the fact that American politics has always been different from the politics of old Europe. Yet there is an important role for ideas in American politics, and an understanding of the American ideology, ‘Americanism’, is essential for a full understanding of the two-party system.

The American ideology is fundamentally the ideology of Western liberal democracy but, whereas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain this set of ideas could almost be taken for granted, in the United States it had to be continuously and consciously asserted. The apparent contradictions in American life stemmed very largely from this felt need to impose an ideology that has as its main tenets freedom of speech and freedom of political action. The diverse characteristics of American society are such that many Americans felt that the toleration of unusual behaviour or unusual ideas might lead to the break-up of their society; there had to be a minimum conformity enforced by society. Ideas that introduced the germ of a divisive force into the community could not be tolerated.

Thus all tendencies towards a sharp polarisation of ideas were consciously resisted. Both major parties shied away from ideological commitments, and those issues that cut deepest into American society usually also cut across the parties. When important problems of a potentially divisive nature arose, such as the Vietnam War, or civil rights, the tendency of the national leaders of both parties was to move towards a middle course, avoiding extremes. There arose what has been described as a consensus of ideas, a broad agreement upon the basic attitudes towards the political system and political problems, which was shared by the vast majority of the American people.

This consensual basis of American politics had a number of important results. First, it allowed particular issues to be discussed as isolated problems, to be solved empirically without reference to any set of fundamental principles, so that within the accepted limits of what was considered an ‘American’ solution, compromises could be found both within and between the parties. Second, as a corollary to this, it made possible the cross-party voting that was, and to a degree still is, so characteristic of the American legislature. Here constitutional and ideological factors reinforced each other. Congressmen when casting their votes do not have to worry about governmental instability of the sort that would result from cross-voting in a parliamentary system. Legislators can make up their minds on the merits of the proposals in front of them, or they can respond to constituency or other pressures. American senators and congressmen therefore have voted against their party leadership with a frequency and a regularity that would be intolerable in a more ideological context. Party loyalty is a factor in the legislator’s behaviour, but it is valued for its results rather than as an end in itself. Furthermore, consensus politics leaves much more room for the play of personalities in politics than when there is a strong ideological background to the division between the parties. Third, it created, in the American context, a positive need for outlets for extremist views, outside the party system, on the part of those minorities, either of the left or of the right, who felt that American society needed fundamental change, but could see no hope of obtaining it through the established parties. The moderating effect of the two-party system, appealing as it does to the vast majority of Americans, can drive dissident groups into extremism and violence to achieve their ends. Most important of all, however, the ideological consensus provided an umbrella that made possible a two-party system of the American kind. The parties have important electoral and organisational roles to play, but they are not in any sense tied to nicely wrapped-up packages of political policies. They can divide on organisational and electoral matters without their organisation being disrupted by differences on questions of policy. On policy questions, as we shall see, the divisions within the parties have often been as great as the divisions between them, but this was tolerable in the American context in a way that would be inconceivable in Europe. The ideological framework allowed the two-party system to evolve and to operate.