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The End of Party Politics? Activist-Officeseeker Relationships in the Colorado Democratic Party

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Alan Ware
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Extract

This Note is concerned with a neglected aspect of American party politics in the last decade: the sources of development or decay in local and state organizations. In the wake of much research into the transformation of the American electorate during this period, it might seem surprising that changes in organizational politics should have attracted such scant attention. Nevertheless, this is easily explained once it is recalled how virtually all American politics textbooks analyse parties. In the first place, they compartmentalize problems about parties into ones affecting either ‘the party-in-the-electorate’ or ‘the party organization’ or ‘the partyin-government’. One consequence of conceiving parties in this way has been to obscure an obvious fact: party organizations both affect and reflect electoral decomposition, and they partly define the potential for cohesion between a party's public office-holders. When the concept of party is taken to be a ‘confederate’ trinity of concepts, it is only to be expected that rigid boundaries will be established separating what are seen as being the major problem areas of electoral politics from those of organizational and governmental politics. Secondly, party organizations in America are usually dismissed as ‘disorganizations’. They are bodies that perform the minimum necessary electoral functions, but are incapable of becoming anything more and could scarcely be anything less without ceasing to exist. From this perspective both the alleged decline of party machines and the rise of amateur politics are merely interesting phenomena, ones that are unconnected in any important ways with the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , April 1979 , pp. 237 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 Scorn is poured on this conceptualization of party in King, Anthony, ‘Political Parties in Western Democracies’, Polity, II (1969), 111–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 This is an unstated assumption in the conclusions of an important article by Pomper, Gerald M., ‘Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System? What Again?’, Journal of Politics, XXXIII (1971), 916–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The argument is made more explicitly in Saloma, John S. III and Sontag, Frederick H., Parties (New York: Random House, 1973).Google Scholar

3 The best-known accounts of the apparent decomposition of party electorates are those by Walter Dean Burnham; see especially: ‘The End of Party Politics’, Transaction, VII (1969), 12–23Google Scholar; Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970)Google Scholar; and ‘Theory and Voting Research: Some Reflections on Converse's “Change in the American Electorate”’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 1002–23.Google Scholar

4 For Wilson, James Q.'s original distinction between amateur and professional activists see The Amateur Democrat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar. A good example of the willingness to compromise shown by the Denver ‘amateurs’ was the inclusion of a machine politician, Mike Pomponio, in the Kennedy–McCarthy coalition (described below).

5 Clark, Peter B. and Wilson, James Q., ‘Incentive Systems: A Theory of Organization’, Administrative Science Quarterly, VI (1961), 129–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 The Colorado quota system was even more strict than that enforced nationally in 1972.

7 Immediately after the selection of the state delegation, the party's weekly newspaper, The Colorado Democrat, published the sex, race and age-group of each delegate.

8 Eyre, R. John and Martin, Curtis, The Colorado Preprimary System (Boulder, Colo: Bureau of Governmental Research and Service, University of Colorado, 1967), p. 48Google Scholar. For more general comment on the effects of ballot position see Bain, Henry M. and Hecock, Donald S., Ballot Position and Voter's Choice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1957).Google Scholar

9 Interview with Harold Haddon, Gary Hart's campaign manager, 11 September 1976. The third candidate on the primary ballot, Marty Miller, was the only one of the original six seeking the nomination in early 1974 who came from the moderate-conservative wing of the party.

10 An account of the Roth–Meany dispute is contained in Roth, Herrick S., Labor: America's Two Faced Movement (New York: Petrocelli/Charter, 1975).Google Scholar

11 It is not surprising that Dawson and Zinser report that 14·4 per cent of U.S. Senate campaign expenditures is accounted for by television broadcasting, but that this forms only 7 per cent of House campaign expenditures. See Dawson, Paul A. and Zinser, James E., ‘Characteristics of Campaign Resource Allocation in the 1972 Congressional Elections’, in Maisel, Louis, ed., Changing Campaign Techniques (Beverly Hills, Calif. and London: Sage, 1976), p. 109.Google Scholar

12 It is interesting to compare the drawn-out disputes between for example, Reginald Prentice or Sir Arthur Irvine and their constituency Labour parties with the four month period of organized opposition necessary to remove Byron Rogers. More generally, of course, it may be questioned whether in respect of nominations parties do function to the benefit of their members.

13 I have argued elsewhere that some critics of the 1950 APSA Report have misunderstood the function of intra-party democracy as outlined in the Report, see The Logic of Party Democracy (forthcoming).

14 For an analysis of ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ as alternative instruments of control see Hirschman, Albert O., Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

15 This table is one contained in The Logic of Party Democracy, Chap. 6. The remainder of the discussion in this section is also derived from that chapter.

16 Mail survey of the 102 members of the Executive Committee, 1976.

17 For example, only 9 per cent of respondents to the mail survey agreed with the statement ‘The candidates of the Democratic party should only discuss specific policies in the general election campaign if this will win them votes.’

18 In Hirschman's language referendums are a form of ‘exit’ from party work when the alternative, ‘voice’ within the party, seems less likely to achieve immediate results.

19 Denver Post, 14 05 1976.Google Scholar

20 These were Governor/Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, State Treasurer, U.S. Senator, Congressman, State Senator and State Assemblyman.