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

Chapter 2 The True Character of Politicians

chapter 2 The True Character of Politicians Character, it is said, is how one behaves when nobody is looking. What, then, is the character of a politician? Moral implications aside, we may use this line of thought to inquire about the nature of partisanship among politicians. Are legislators natural partisans? Do they, as some political scientists argue, freely choose partisan institutions and discipline to organize their legislative activity? Or, do they actually resist partisanship, preferring an undisciplined chamber of loose, temporary coalitions? That is, do politicians create strong parties or simply try to survive them? This question is nearly impossible to answer in a functioning party system. After parties are established, one cannot tell what keeps them going —the commitment of party politicians, pressure from activists, or perhaps just their own momentum. How politicians might organize legislative activity if they could start over, free of either institutional momentum or outsider pressure, is usually impossible to say. However, the Progressive takeover of the California government in the 1910s gives us an unusual historical opportunity to examine this question . Progressive reformers did everything they could to crush parties and to prevent them from returning. In particular, they made it nearly impossible for party activists outside government to organize, coordinate actions, keep informed about legislative activities, or, perhaps most importantly , in›uence party nominations to of‹ce. Under these conditions, in which the normal party activity had been thoroughly disrupted, California politicians revealed their true character. What they revealed is that they are fair-weather partisans—happy to use partisan af‹liations when it is useful to do so but unwilling to organize the 54 legislature for partisan purposes or to pursue a genuinely partisan agenda. Nor were they sorry about this state of affairs. Rather, they enjoyed and sought to perpetuate their nonpartisan legislature. Only when partisan activists outside the government regained in›uence over the nominating process did elected of‹cials begin behaving like partisans, voting in coherent party blocs and trying to advance a partisan agenda. In this chapter and the one that follows, I describe these ‹ndings that reveal the character of politicians and the necessity of outside activists to enforce partisan discipline. The present chapter focuses on the impact of Progressive antiparty reforms from their imposition in the 1910s until their removal in the 1950s. I examine the behavior of both voters and legislators in the years surrounding these crucial events. For the reader to understand these reforms and their impact, a brief history lesson is necessary , which I provide in this chapter. The subsequent chapter details legislative behavior over more than 150 years, showing how incumbents responded to a variety of institutional changes, again concluding that, when insulated from party activists, incumbents prefer nonpartisanship to the challenges of enacting a legislative agenda. Both these chapters draw upon a new dataset consisting of every roll call vote cast in the California assembly between 1849 and 2003. The collection of this dataset was funded in large part by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 0214514). putting theory to the test: progressive era california, 1910–1952 At the turn of the twentieth century, California politics was dominated by two major political machines. One was local, based in San Francisco, and under the leadership of Abraham Ruef. Boss Ruef had few ideological impulses but controlled essentially all of the elected of‹cials and convention delegates in San Francisco (then the largest city in the state) for the purpose of graft. He sold utility franchises and licenses for exorbitant sums until his conviction for bribery in 1908. The other machine was a statewide organization run by the Southern Paci‹c Railroad. This machine had but one legislative goal: to protect the railroad industry. Indeed, representatives of the railroad company literally wrote the state Republican Party’s 1902 platform. An observer of the 1907 legislative session reported, “Scarcely a vote was cast in either house The True Character of Politicians 55 that did not show some aspect of Southern Paci‹c ownership, petty vengeance, or legislative blackmail.” And when an editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Examiner drew images critical of the machine and its grip on the state, the legislature passed a law prohibiting the publication of such drawings (Mowry 1951: 16, 19–20, 63). Through its effective control of state politics, the railroad managed to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes, appropriated land at will, and regularly subverted...