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Party Responsibility in the States: Some Causal Factors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
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Pleas and programs for party responsibility are not new. It is remarkable, however, how little the discussion has advanced. I do not mean that I am surprised that the path of reform has been hard but that knowledge of the subject has not grown in proportion to the length of the discussion. Proponents believe party responsibility introduces desired qualities into the policy process and makes possible rational organization of the electorate in terms of policy. Not much has been done to provide adequate support for either of these propositions. In fact, it is hard to discover a serious effort to put these propositions in some form which would permit a partial but rigorous test. Opponents on the other hand conjure up visions of polarized parties, downtrodden minorities, and multipartyism as the fruits of party responsibility. They are able to make these improbable inferences by working with an exceedingly simple model, by ignoring the functions of party competition and the complex of factors which seem to shape party systems. Some observers less involved in the argument allow that the debate may have some value since it leads to notice of important realities. But, for them, proposed reforms are not to be taken seriously because they are Utopian in two senses: (1) sweeping and incalculable; and (2) out of reach. This view seems to overlook the fact that party responsibility is a matter of degree and that incremental reform is, at least, possible in principle. Finally, very little attention has been paid to factors which may promote or inhibit party responsibility.
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- Copyright © American Political Science Association 1964
References
1 This study is a revision of a paper delivered at the APSA annual meeting of 1963. I was assisted in preparation by a grant from the Ford Foundation to Oberlin College for the study of public affairs. The assistance of Robert Murphy and Virginia Woodcock is also acknowledged with deep appreciation.
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19 But see Froman, Lewis A. Jr., “Inter-Party Constituency Differences and Congressional Voting Behavior,” this Review, Vol. 57 (March, 1963), pp. 57–62Google Scholar. As I understand him, he seems to argue that intra-party differences relate to differences in constituency and that Democrats and Republicans tend to represent different kinds of constituencies. Therefore, differences between the parties are due to constituency influences. This is not necessarily true since intra-party differences may have little or nothing to do with inter-party differences, as Table II in this study shows. Furthermore, Froman's phi coefficients which he uses to measure the relations of constituency to intra-party differences are so weak as to suggest negative rather than positive findings.
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24 Dye, op. cit., pp. 476–477.
25 Ibid., p. 477.
26 Ibid., pp. 479–480.
27 Members were also scored on 60 party agreement votes. (10 of the original 183 roll calls were dropped since one party or the other was evenly divided making it impossible to characterize the vote as a party agreement or a party opposition vote.) The scores of Democratic and Republican members on party opposition votes were each correlated with their scores on party agreement votes. The product moment coefficients were less than .1 in each case, indicating that a party opposition vote and a party agreement vote are distinctly different events in the life of the legislature.
28 See Mood, A. M., Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (New York, 1950), pp. 318–326Google Scholar. The procedure is designed to permit comparison of variance around the over-all mean with the sum of the variance around class means. It is specially useful in the present situation since it allows flexibility in the creation of classes.
29 Fifty party opposition roll calls were selected. They are every such vote which occurred between May 15 and the July 11 recess. Members who voted on less than 35 of the 50 selected votes were dropped: 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats. Others were given scores expressing the percentage of their votes cast in support of positions taken by a majority of Democrats.
30 MacRae, op. cit., reprinted in Eulau et al., pp. 321–322.
31 Pesonen, op. cit., p. 62.
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39 McClosky, Herbert et al. , “Issue Conflict and Consensus Among Party Leaders and Followers,” this Review, Vol. 53 (June, 1960), pp. 406–427Google Scholar.
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