Why Parties

I have just finished reading Aldrich’s book, Why Parties?, in which he presents his version of what passes for theorizing about parties in political science. He starts from the assumption that individuals are atoms of self-interested wants and needs. From this position, he reasons, it is necessary to justify why these individuals would get together into a party. He uses the theorizing about collective action, social choice, and utility maximization to justify why basically selfish individuals would go against their own self-interest to form parties. For me all of this theorizing is unnecessary, since I take the urge to associate with others in groups as basic, not needing explanation. Thus much of what Aldrich says in this book misses the goal of explaining how parties operate and function in the larger picture of governing.

Nevertheless, Aldrich does have some things to say about the history and structure of political parties that come through in spite of his superstructure. He divides the history of political parties in the US into three phases: 1. The early non-acknowledged parties of 1790 to 1828, 2. The “mass” parties created by Van Buren, lasting until 1960, and 3. The candidate centered parties since then. I am not sure I agree with this division of the historical record, but it is something to think about. His description of the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs is interesting, especially after reading about the 1850 Compromise that effectively destroyed the basis of the alliances of both parties that tried to ignore the issue of slavery.

Aldrich does not follow up on his discussion of the Democrats and the Whigs with a similar discussion of the Democrats and the Republicans after the Civil War, and their implicit agreement to again ignore the continuation of slavery in the south. Aldrich also does not really discuss the role of the professionalization of the federal executive, and the consequent loss of patronage as a tool for the parties to discipline their members. Such loss of patronage places for me the transition from the “mass” party Aldrich describes in the 1910-1930 period, rather than the 1960s. Jacksonian parties were not just “mass” parties, but parties organized in terms of patronage primarily at the state and local levels.

Further, Aldrich does not discuss the role of two world wars and the depression on the structure and organization of the parties, as if these events had no effect on the parties. Another problem I have with Aldrich is that he seems to focus much of his attention of the presidential elections, and when he does discuss parties in congress, he does so almost exclusively in terms of the house, where majority rule is more clearly a major factor. This allows him, though, to largely ignore the interaction between the house and the senate, and between the congress and the executive. These to me are crucial to a real understanding of how the parties function-or do not function-in our government.

In sum, Aldrich provides some useful details of the history of parties, but his orientation prevents him from going beyond the conventional history. His claim that parties are in fact not weak but are actually stronger than they have ever been, seems to me to misunderstand the way in which they may seem to be stronger. To say that parties function in service to the candidates is to admit that they are now subordinate, in a position of weakness, relative to the candidates. This is especially true given the Citizens United decision, which he could not have known about.

I am still in search of a good account of the role and function and history or parties in the US.

The 1850 Compromise

I have been reading, as a slight deviation from reading on democracy and parties, a book on the Compromise of 1850, where supposedly the Civil War was delayed for ten years. The book is The Great American Debate by Fergus Bordewych. I had read about this period in our history before, but this book provides a more detailed look at the events of that time. The book makes it clear that far from delaying the Civil War for another ten years, what the debate did was to galvanize the North into a much more explicit antagonism against the institution of slavery. From the founding to 1850 the effort was to avoid the issue, given the dominance of the South in the federal government, in the presidency and in congress, and it may have been that the moral and economic dimensions of slavery were just not as well recognized. The Compromise of 1850 ended this willful ignorance. It was the end of an era, with the deaths of John Calhoun, the apostle of the virtues of slavery, of Henry Clay, the great compromiser, and of Daniel Webster, the great orator and traitor to his principles. It was the beginning of the career of Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas. The only heroes were William Seward, who spoke early of the moral evil of slavery, and Abraham Lincoln, who came only ten years after to make the same argument.

All of the elements I discuss in my book, the dominance of the senate, the ability of the south to use the lack of discipline in the senate to delay proceedings, the changes in demography, the blatant effort of the south to enshrine minority privileges for its institution of slavery, the inability of the north to take a principled stand on the issue, in part because of the south’s control of the senate—all of these things were present then and did not get discussed. These issues continue to plague us today. There is still little discipline in congress, and the minority is able to prevent action. I learned that the first mistake was to give to the south the ability to count every slave as 3/5 of a person, giving them an advantage in the House in terms of representation. This prolonged the dominance of the south, and allowed them to develop the delusion that they were somehow privileged even though they were a minority. Another aspect of the basically undemocratic constitution.

Separating finance from campaigning

I have been talking about doing a study of the role of political parties in America, and I mentioned this to my brother recently. He told me about his experiences working at the local level with politics. He was involved in recruiting candidates for the local city council. At the local level at least for him money did not seem to be much of an issue. The real problem was finding people willing to serve on the council. This got me to thinking about at what level in the process does money become a real problem, and how is the candidate involved. In the case of primary elections, where the candidates are chosen through preliminary elections of candidates, money raised by the candidates is clearly an issue. In this case the potential candidates are actively seeking the position, rather than being recruited by the party. Some of them may in fact be unwelcome to the leaders of the party. Under these circumstances, the money the potential candidate can raise independently of the party may be important in determining whether he becomes a candidate.

If the potential candidates were by law limited to spending only money provided by the political party, and the party were required to allocate money to the potential candidates equally as long as each qualified, through some petitioning process, to be a candidate, then the issue of raising money for candidates in a primary battle would go away. The onus for raising money and allocating it to the candidates would be on the party, not on the individual candidates. This would deprive the candidates of their freedom to act independently of the party through their ability to raise money, but it would relieve them of the burden of raising money. Competition between candidates would shift to their positions on issues and abilities to communicate with voters and manage the campaign.

At the national level, preventing candidates from soliciting funds would make fund raising dinners where the candidate himself appeared illegal. The party as an entity would be able to hold fund raising dinners, but the candidate would not be able to appear. This would perhaps reduce the attraction of the dinner for donors, but it would make it clear that the donations are to the party, not to the candidate, removing the ability of the donor to specifically (and improperly) influence the candidate. PACs would be forced to coordinate with the parties, not the candidates. They could still spend as much as they want, but only on the parties, not the candidates—unless of course, they spend so much money that they in effect take over the party, making it an appendage of the PAC rather than the other way around, as may occur with the Republican party.

Parties and budgeting

With this posting I launch into an area with which I have no first hand experience or expertise. It is the area of budgeting, or more generally the process by which a government raises revenue and allocates it to the programs the government provides to the people. In Britain, as I understand it, the budget is prepared by the executive departments in consultation with the ruling party. There is a special period during which the budget is presented to parliament, but it almost invariably approved, since the ruling party has the majority, and the budget is a high priority item. On approval, the budget, the appropriations, and the associated taxes to pay for the expenditures is set. These are all taken care of in one period. The rest of the time in parliament is taken up with legislating on new programs and policies that I suppose will be paid for in the next budget if they have not already been incorporated into the current budget.

In the US, on the other hand, the process of budgeting, authorizing, and appropriating are separated and chaotic. The House, especially lately, has come up with a budget, and then complains that the president and the senate have not produced a budget. One would think that it is especially the House’s responsibility to produce the budget, since it is responsible in the constitution for raising and appropriating funds, but this has become more and more blurred over our history. It used to be, before we began to have deficits, and needed to raise taxes to pay for them, that the allocation and appropriation of money for the executive departments was carried out by the individual House and Senate committees responsible for the departments, without much coordination between them, since, with a surplus, it was not necessary.

Once coordination became necessary, the question of who would do the coordinating became an issue, and since there were no strong ruling parties, the tendency was for the executive departments to do the coordinating. Congress resisted this, and tried to establish its own independent coordination process, but the result was only that the process became a contest between the executive and the legislative. This contest goes on today, and the process is chaotic. Often there is no budget, appropriations are delayed until the last minute, and then bundled into continuing resolutions that only continue the chaos. The House goes through a process of developing a budget, but it is only a sham, since it does not require that authorizations and appropriations conform to the budget, and usually they don’t.

Clearly the US government is dysfunctional with respect to the budgetary process at least. My contention is that it is so because the parties are not strong enough to force a rationalization of the process. The ruling party in the House has come a long way toward imposing order on the process in the House. If it were only up to the House, we would have a rational, organized, effective process. Unfortunately the House is only one of the parties currently involved, and it is overshadowed by the president and the senate. If the ruling party were stronger it would be able to diminish the power of the president and senate, and establish the proper dominance of the House.

Committees and Parties

Getting away from the discussion of democracy, I have two observations about the US government. The first is that as I understand the British government, their use of committees is quite different from what is done in the US congress. The difference is that they do not use committees to formulate legislation—at least not committees in parliament. Their legislation is formulated within the party, with input from the executive departments. There are of course disagreements and compromises within the party, but these are worked out within an overall agreed on context, and the leader of the party has the final say. By the time the legislation reaches parliament, it is subject only to minor changes in detail, under strict rules of relevance to the issue involved. The opposition party is not able to make any significant changes in the legislation, and thus the majority party’s program is enacted or defeated as is.

Committees in the US congress, in contrast, function to formulate from the beginning the legislation, and input from both parties is allowed in the process of formulation. Although the majority party may have initially written a bill that reflects the party program, in the committee process changes and compromises are made that corrupt and distort the original intent of the bill, and the result of this process is a bill that often does not reflect the majority party program. All of this is done in the name of compromise and cooperation, but the result is to subvert the intent of the majority party, and thereby deprive the majority of its ability to respond clearly to the will of the majority. The recent ACA bill is a good example of this corruption.

I have said all of this before. The point is that the way committees operate in congress is completely up to each house of congress. There is no constitutional mandate that says the committees have to operate in this way. They could operate more like the British committees. Legislation could be more of a party controlled process.

This leads me to the second issue: Political parties in the US are weak and ineffective. Much of this has to do with the presumption that parties are bad, and their influence should be curtailed. The mantra is that we should get money out of politics, and politics out of government. Such a view is ludicrous, but it is promoted by “serious” people, such as Lessig and Ackerman. I do not understand the reasoning behind their arguments. They say that money serves as a way to influence candidates, and such influence is bad. Somehow candidates are supposed to be immune to influence and make decisions only on the basis of objective debate over the issues. There are no such candidates. Every candidate, just as every person, is inevitably influenced by others, and we would not want it to be otherwise.

If there is a problem with money, as opposed to influence, it is that it is allowed to be given to individual candidates. In any other area, such as the stock market or business, such use of money would be clearly illegal, a form of bribery or blackmail. It is clear to me that the problem is one of giving money to individual candidates. This is what should be made illegal. Money is of course necessary for campaigns and party activities, and it has to come from somewhere. This is where the bias against parties has warped the thinking of so many people. They are unable to get their minds around the idea that the parties, as independent organizations, might just be able to eliminate the improper use of money to bribe individuals. If the parties were strong enough to control the allocation of money, and if only the parties were able to give money to candidates, they would serve as a buffer between the sources of money and the candidates who need the money. But no one seems to want to hear this point.

recapitulation

To recapitulate this review of the meaning of democracy: First, democracy must be understood in the context set out by Winters, as a form of government existing in the space provided by oligarchs, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of government organization. Democracy in ancient Athens was a very primitive form of democracy surviving in a space provided by the ruling oligarchs of the day, and in spite of appearances, largely controlled by them. Athenian democracy lasted only for a relatively short period. The model of good government became the Roman Republic, but it was never a democracy, in spite of Machiavelli’s attempt to describe it as such.

It was not until the 1700s that democracy in the form of representative government appeared, although the English government had a tradition of democratic albeit non-representative government long before then. Representative government appeared perhaps first in America, then in France, and then in Britain, although British parliamentary government is the purest example of truly democratic government. Przeworski confirms that the elements of democratic government are that it is made up of representatives of the people, and that decision making is ideally by majority rule. Neither representation nor majority rule are universal. Representation is often constrained and restricted in various ways, and there are often restraints on the simple operation of majority rule, but these are the essential ingredients, and deviations from these ideals are only indications of how much a given government fails to be truly democratic.

Przeworski does not emphasize that the process of representation is important not just in giving the voter a choice of who is to govern, but more importantly it forces the representative to pay attention to the will of the voters, and to shape his policies and programs to conform as much as possible to the will of the people. This more than anything else is what makes representative government responsive to the demos. Przeworski pays unnecessary lip service to the dogma of the separation of powers and the virtue of checks and balances, and he therefore ignores another necessary characteristic of democratic government, namely the effective control of the executive by the legislature.

Absorbing Przeworski

I was gone last week, so this posting is a double.

Incidentally, it is interesting to see that the current Republican nominating process does not seem to have been adversely affected by the elimination of limits on campaign contributions from the rich through superpacs. If anything it seems that Gingrich and Santorum have been able to continue their efforts long beyond what would have been normal without such limits. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion, but it is difficult to argue that debate has been curtailed or distorted. It may have become more negative, but I am not sure that this is because of the superpacs. But this is just my view. For me the issue is not the amount of money, but of how it is distributed—it should be under party control, not the control of individual campaign finance managers.

I am still rereading Przeworski. So far he has discussed democracy, where he seems to be saying that democracy is government decision making by majority rule. This is consistent with my view of the nature of democracy, and admittedly my view may have biased my interpretation of what he is saying. He next covers representation, where he does no more than do an in depth survey of the history and variety of representative governments around the world. He reviews parliamentary and presidential governments without clearly judging which is more democratic. Then he goes on to elections, and it is here that he seems to me to get off track. He discusses elections in terms of median voter theory, and bemoans the fact that political parties may give little choice to the voter because of the constraints of appealing to the median voter. To me this is a narrow and distorting way of looking at elections, even though it is the dominant approach taken in political science. To me he conflates voters voting in an election for representatives with legislators voting on a bill in a legislature. They are two different processes, and it is not clear to me that one can talk about them in the same terms. Median voter theory is just to simplistic to be useful in describing elections. Elections are much more a matter of assembling groups of voters into a majority coalition. Competition between parties is a matter of attracting more and larger groups into the party. The median voter would seem to be irrelevant to this process.

Nevertheless, Przeworski does assert that party government in most developed countries, even when party control changes from one party to another, has been remarkably conservative, in the sense that a change in party control has not resulted in any drastic change in policies. One might dispute how drastic the changes have been between Labor and Conservatives in Britain under Thatcher, and more recently under Cameron, or between Bush and Obama in the US, but perhaps this is only a matter of degree. In any case, Przeworski’s observations are an argument against the idea that democratic governments will be capricious. More later.

Part of the reason I had to reread Przeworski is that he does not organize his material in the way I would have. To me there are three parts to his argument, one on the structure of a democratic government, one on the nature of representative government, and one on the goals or ideals of government. His discussion, however, is divided into separate, non-consecutive chapters. His discussion of the structure of democratic government is in chapters two and six, his discussion of representation is in chapters three and five, and his discussion of the goals of government is in chapters four, on equality, and seven, on liberty. It was thus difficult for me to integrate his discussions into the frame I have developed.

Przeworski does a truly masterful job of reviewing the issues in each of these areas. He has a much more comprehensive grasp of the varieties of governments around the world and through history. I have learned a lot from him, and am humbled by the relative paucity of my knowledge. Perhaps he has no interest or inclination to make judgments about any particular government, such as the US government, in the face of the large variety he surveys, or at least he is very mild and indirect in his judgments, as befits an academic.

Nevertheless, he is dubious about the value of the almost universal efforts to restrain the expression of the will of the majority, in particular the notions of the separation of powers and checks and balances. He favors the dominance of majority rule and the role of political parties. He is dubious also about the value of representation by itself to ensure that the government is responsive to the people. I find little to disagree with in what he says.

My only regret about Przeworski is that he does not focus his knowledge on a critical judgment of the American system, and this is my problem, not his. He does not judge the US system perhaps because he knows of so many other systems that are no better, but my focus is on the US system in particular. My goal is to suggest changes to the US government, not just to describe it.