No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures

Chapter 1 The Modern Political Party

chapter 1 The Modern Political Party For decades after its 1974 publication, David Mayhew ’s Congress: The Electoral Connection was considered the premier text for anyone wishing to understand how members of Congress behaved . The description was not a pretty one for anyone who believed in the value of party government. According to Mayhew, it was easiest to think of members of Congress as “single-minded seekers of reelection.” Candidates, he found, didn’t have much use for parties other than to help mobilize voters. Attention to party agendas didn’t change much once politicians got into Congress, either. “To a remarkable degree,” Mayhew noted, “members can successfully engage in electorally useful activities without denying other members the opportunity to successfully engage in them” (82). Why didn’t members of Congress press a party agenda? Apparently, it was a matter of choice, and they chose not to. “American congressmen,” Mayhew wrote, “could immediately and permanently array themselves in disciplined legions for the purpose of programmatic combat. They do not” (98). Any party battles that occurred were, for the most part, theater; members of Congress maintained strong friendships across party lines and hewed closely to the median voters in their districts . Reelection was far more important than the advancement of any ideological agenda. Mayhew’s descriptions were merely the most eloquent of an era of scholarship extending from the early 1950s to the early 1990s that depicted American politicians as nonideological poll-watchers, sticking closely to the median voter in their districts and avoiding any stances that would offend the general electorate. The beginnings of this period are marked by the American Political Science Association’s report “Toward a 23 More Responsible Two-Party System,” which decried the lack of responsibility in the weak party system. “Alternatives between the parties are de‹ned so badly,” the authors claimed, “that it is often dif‹cult to determine what the election has decided even in the broadest terms” (APSA 1950: 3–4). One of the last gasps of such depictions was Hill Rat, an entertaining tell-all from a former Capitol Hill staffer. As the author described congressional committee work, “You sit around a table and divide up the money. Anything that gets in the way of that process—philosophy, conscience, and so on—gets checked at the door” (Jackley 1992: 103). The literature of this period generally describes a Congress full of ambitious, nonideological politicians. Interestingly, it closely charts an unusual period in congressional elections during which candidates actually tended, on average, to represent the median voter. An innovative study by Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart (2001) demonstrated that, at least since the mid–nineteenth century, candidates for Congress have deviated strongly from their districts’ median voters, stubbornly defying Downs’s (1957) prediction of convergence. The exception seems to be a period from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. Despite the relative oddity of this weak party period, its view of nonideological politicians is the one that is most ingrained in American popular culture. Notably, one of the most common epithets in modern political discourse is “›ip-›opper,” directed at those who appear to have no core beliefs. The essential plotline of 1990s political movies like Bullworth , Dave, and The American President is that a politician has lost his way, abandoning the issues and agenda that drove him to run for of‹ce in the ‹rst place, and is now “so busy keeping my job I forgot to do my job.” Only when the politician has some sort of catharsis (a near-death experience , falling in love, etc.) does he remember to “‹ght the ‹ghts that need ‹ghting,” rather than the ‹ghts he can win (Reiner 1995). This view of politics is hardly con‹ned to Washington. Many state governments went through a similar period of weak partisanship, avoiding the most controversial issues in order to protect their political class. “I’ve been on a tour of state legislatures,” humorist Mark Russell joked in 1991. “Mostly they are a bunch of fat white guys pretending to hurt each other” (Richardson 1996: 360). The pretense, for the most part, is gone. The literature from that weak party era is dif‹cult to reconcile with the modern Congress and state legislatures. Today, by virtual consensus, the parties in Congress and in many state legislatures have diverged (Poole and Rosenthal 1997). 24 no middle ground Candidates no longer converge on the median voter...