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

Conclusion: The Price and Payoff of Parties

Conclusion: The Price and Payoff of Parties The preceding chapters have covered more than 150 years of political history utilizing a variety of research methods, from qualitative interviews to complex statistical analyses. Before concluding, it is worth asking what exactly we have learned from this multifaceted view of California’s political past. Perhaps the most important lesson we can draw is that rational, career -minded politicians don’t necessarily build or sustain parties. California ’s legislators in the early twentieth century were presented with just the sort of chaotic, unproductive environment that should demand party building. Yet they did not seek to create strong legislative parties. Instead , they enjoyed and protected the chaos, which, while making legislating dif‹cult, made reelection easy. As it turns out, the creation of disciplined parties inside the legislature requires the presence and engagement of activist groups outside it. When Progressive reforms in the 1910s made it virtually impossible for activists to participate in primary elections or in›uence elected of‹cials, the incumbents charted moderate paths, raising the reelection goal above all others. Conversely, when those restrictions on activists were relaxed , and when activists began to form alliances to control primary elections , incumbents responded by behaving as partisans. They began to pay attention to the groups that controlled primaries, working more along party lines in the legislature, fearful that the activists, if displeased, would de-nominate them by running more disciplined challengers against them in the next primary. The reelection goal and the desire to converge on the 188 median voter never vanished, but, for most, the partisan agendas of the activist alliances simply demanded more attention. Thus did the California legislature, along with the U.S. Congress, embrace the strict partisanship for which it is now both famous and infamous. It is fair to ask at this point whether the California case is generalizable to the rest of the United States. California’s experiences with cross- ‹ling, and indeed its whole brand of early-twentieth-century Progressivism , were atypical (Ware 2002). Shouldn’t we expect the state to continue to stand apart from the rest of the nation? Perhaps. At a minimum, we can conclude that the notion that parties are the creatures of politicians isn’t true in this particular state during this particular time. However, many other states have had similar experiences. Roughly half the states—mostly in the West and Midwest —experienced some form of Progressive takeover in the early twentieth century. Although strains of Progressivism varied from state to state, there was a widespread belief among Progressive reformers that the political parties were corrupt and that their control over governing institutions had to be curbed. In such states, it would not be surprising to ‹nd that interested political actors have found extralegal ways to form and in›uence government. Colorado, a Progressive state, is rife with informal party organizations, although, as in California, the IPOs from less populated areas appear to have less of a commitment to party purity (Masket 2007). Wisconsin, the home of Progressive hero Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, certainly has some history of partylike alliances among political actors (Epstein 1958). It may very well be that in states without such a Progressive legacy, those interested in controlling government could do so within the formal parties and thus never needed to develop an informal apparatus. But control of nominations— regardless of how they are controlled—should still be key to in›uencing government. Beyond that, the Golden State offers us more general lessons about parties. California’s unusual experience with cross-‹ling made for a convenient natural experiment, helping us understand the relationship between legislators and their partisan backers. This example shows us that politicians are content with partyless politics. And it shows us that political actors outside the government are usually not content with such politics and will use what means they have at their disposal to force of‹ceholders and candidates to adhere to a program. Politicians, if anything, are the creatures of parties. Conclusion 189 addressing rival hypotheses: why is partisanship increasing? This book has made the case that the dramatic increase in legislative partisanship in California is due to the rise of political activists. The reader may legitimately note that the rise of activists is not the only thing to happen in California in the past half century. Could the increase in legislative partisanship in this state and across the...