American Political Parties as a Conservative Force

Abstract

N CLASSICAL democratic theory political parties, when mentioned at all, were treated as one-way transmission belts between the electorate and those persons voted into office. The role of the parties was seen in extraordinarily passive terms. The parties were considered, at least ideally, to be essentially mechanisms through which the will of the citizenry could be canalized and turned into positive law. Today, in contrast to the view held half-a-century or more ago, parties are also viewed as social groups. To some extent, persons who identify themselves with parties share some common expectations, or values, or goals. As the Survey Research Center has shown, it is a ticklish business to pin down the exact ingredients of identification and to measure precisely the factors in voter motivation.' Yet enough insight has been gained so that it may be stated categorically that parties are social groups or, to put it differently, that they have lives of their own. They are to some degree an independent variable in the total political process. Foreign observers of the American political scene the names of Laski, Brogan, Siegfried, and Duverger come readily to mind have often commented upon the conservative nature of American politics. Without embarking on a safari into cultural anthropology, the thesis can be defended that the parties themselves are partly the cause of the conservatism so frequently noted in our political life. For purposes of the discussion, it is not necessary to give a technical definition of conservative; the term is used in its ordinary common-sense meaning, as will become apparent. It will also be assumed that there is general agreement on a few basic propositions, e.g., that the national parties are rather decentralized, that constitutional factors have strongly shaped the development of the parties, etc., so that there will be no need to quibble over the obvious. Each of the ways in which the parties are believed to contribute to conservatism is summarized below, and the evidence tending to substantiate the proposition is dealt with briefly. While the reader familiar with the literature on parties might have chosen different illustrations, it is hoped that those which are given are sufficiently representative to carry conviction.