In tracing the development of increased polarization in the United States, numerous scholars have noted the apparent importance of the American Political Science Association's (APSA's) Committee on Political Parties. The committee's influential (and often criticized) report, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, called for a wholesale transformation of political parties in the United States.Footnote 1 On its publication in October 1950, political scientists quickly concluded that, taken together, the committee's recommendations represented a reworking of a distinct approach, usually known as “party government” or “responsible party government.”Footnote 2 (The origins of responsible parties dated back to Woodrow Wilson's classic 1885 text Congressional Government.Footnote 3) Since then, the notion of party government has become a core issue in the study of American political parties, albeit a contentious one. A recent survey ranked the APSA document at seventh as a canonical text in graduate syllabi concerning parties.Footnote 4
In the last decade or so, political scientists have been more forthright in repeatedly associating the APSA report directly and negatively with the polarized state of American politics. Focussing on the document's authors, as part of their coruscating critique of American democracy, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson put it starkly, “Be careful what you wish for.”Footnote 5 As I demonstrate below, for whatever reason, their aphorism caught on across the debate. More recently, Sam Rosenfeld has placed APSA's Committee on Political Parties at the centre of his monograph, published to critical acclaim, on the emergence of partisanship in the United States since 1945.Footnote 6 In this review essay, I examine the manner in which various scholars have attributed motivation to the committee in their discussion of polarization. I discuss Rosenfeld's claims about the wider influence of the 1950 report. Finally, I offer an assessment of the contribution made by APSA to American political development in this area. Overall, I ask: what impact did political scientists’ ideas about party government have on political polarization? Or, to put the question in terms of the Hacker and Pierson epithet, what did members of the APSA committee really wish for and exactly how did they attempt to realize that wish?
POLARIZATION AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
In their influential 2006 volume Off Center, Hacker and Pierson blamed members of APSA's Committee on Political Parties, alongside politicians, for the state of American politics. They conjectured that the committee's 1950 document may have “resonated beyond the confines of political science, or more likely the forces of history simply pushed in the direction the committee wanted to go.”Footnote 7 Either way, it did not really matter. Far from responsible party government, “what they [the committee members] got – along with the rest of us – was irresponsible party government.”Footnote 8 Subsequently, their “careful what you wish for” slogan became, as Rosenfeld notes (writing with Daniel Schlozman), a “staple of political science,” with many scholars deploying the same trope.Footnote 9 A year or so later, Nicol Rae used it as the title for a piece.Footnote 10 Then Todd Donovan deployed it as a header in an account of party polarization while Steven Schier finished an article on partisanship by criticizing the 1950 report as a “classic example of ‘be careful what you wish for’ – you may get it.”Footnote 11 Johnathan Lewallen, Sean Theriault and Bryan Jones also used the slogan as a heading, maintaining that “we have the Congress that the APSA wanted.”Footnote 12 So did Lawrence Jacobs.Footnote 13 James Morone repeated it, drawing on the APSA report, for a discussion of health care.Footnote 14 In 2015, David Schleicher offered a variant of it: the authors of the 1950s report had had “their dreams realized.”Footnote 15
In discussion of contemporary polarization, scholars have frequently used the parties’ report as a correlate by which to locate analysis of what has gone wrong with American parties.Footnote 16 Opening It's Even Worse Than It Looks, their 2012 volume, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein complained about the APSA committee's “clarion call for more ideologically coherent, internally unified, and adversarial parties.”Footnote 17 They praised the contribution made by Austin Ranney, the much-venerated political scientist, in criticizing the parties’ report (one of his first publications back in 1951): “Time has proven Austin dead right – we now have the kind of parties the report desired and it is disastrous.”Footnote 18 James Thurber and Antoine Yoshinake's recent collection, American Gridlock, opened with a repeat of Thomas Mann's forceful critique of the report: the APSA document offered “a formula for wilful obstruction and policy irresolution.”Footnote 19 Thurber and Yoshinake closed the volume with a slightly more positive reference.Footnote 20 But, in 2017, a Brookings Institution collection asked Is Congress Broken?. Daniel Skid's answer was straightforward: “The responsible party government reform tradition has helped bring us to where we are today.”Footnote 21 One journalist, David Shribman, advanced an even more direct critique of the Committee on Political Parties in a piece entitled “The Culprits behind Today's Polarized Politics.”Footnote 22
THE COMMITTEE ON POLITICAL PARTIES IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In The Polarizers, like many of the authors noted above, Sam Rosenfeld contends that political scientists, particularly the authors of the APSA report, played a significant part in shaping the transformation of American political parties. He outlines a micro-level actor-focussed account of the mechanisms by which polarization emerged in the decades after 1945.Footnote 23 Boris Heersink has suggested that Rosenfeld is “somewhat vague in terms of the causal claims the book makes.”Footnote 24 But I take The Polarizers to indicate that, among other activities, scholars pushed for polarization, justified it normatively, outlined potential reforms, battered politicians into accepting them, and legitimated many of the measures that policymakers subsequently introduced.Footnote 25 In this sense, Rosenfeld aims to go beyond Hacker and Pierson's conjecture about the APSA report's wider resonance. Commenting on the thesis from which Rosenfeld produced his volume, Skid argues that this “important new assessment traces the myriad ways in which the ideas presented in the report of APSA Committee on Political Parties filtered directly into the Democratic Party and congressional reform efforts in the ensuing decades.”Footnote 26 Alongside the APSA committee, Rosenfeld details the work of scholars such as Samuel Beer, James MacGregor Burns and Austin Ranney, influential professors who were active within the Democratic Party. Beer and Ranney were members of the McGovern-Fraser Commission in the 1970s (established in the aftermath of the 1968 convention to restructure the presidential nominations process); Burns's work was part of the commission's discussion.
It is to the APSA report, however, that Rosenfeld returns at several points in his text, noting its apparent impact on subsequent developments. The document made a host of recommendations about how to transform the American party system, largely through the development of nationally based parties, with a distinct hierarchical structure and active memberships, which articulated defined and stable policy platforms. From the available archival material and from other accounts, it is not totally clear why political scientists on the committee came up with this range of proposals.Footnote 27 Some members felt that, given the growing complexity of public policy and the increasing responsibilities that government had taken on during the New Deal and during wartime, reform was necessary to make the political process more effective. There were several similar developments in the 1930s and 1940s, including the Reorganization Act of 1939 and the Congressional Reorganization Act of 1946. Academics played an important part in shaping both through the Brownlow Committee and the Galloway Committee respectively. Certainly, wartime Washington had been flooded with political scientists working on federal programs, at such agencies as the National Resources Planning Board and the Bureau of the Budget. Another reason for academic engagement with party reform was more straightforwardly partisan, reflecting a belief that activist Democratic administrations needed a different kind of party structure to be able to implement their policies successfully. A reformed party structure would overcome the resistance offered by conservative Democrats in the southern states who frequently blocked liberal initiatives.
Manifestly, the APSA report influenced several Democratic Party politicians in the 1950s. Stephen Mitchell and Paul Butler, successive chairs of the Democratic National Committee, praised it.Footnote 28 In establishing the Democratic Advisory Council, a relatively short-lived arrangement, Butler took up some of its ideas. But it is less clear to me whether the report had the direct impact going into the 1960s and thereafter that Rosenfeld ascribes to it. Certainly, media references to the document, from publication onwards, were relatively few and far between. Many were the work of a single journalist, Richard Strout, a dogged supporter of its proposals who wrote for the Christian Science Monitor and for New Republic. Strout was still bringing it up into the 1980s, arguing that the committee members were concerned by an overextended presidency bringing in, in their words, “personal government” and the “wrong ending.”Footnote 29 But Strout also felt that the report had been “forgotten for 30 years.”Footnote 30
Politicians were, if anything, even more reticent in mentioning the report. There are occasional references to it in Congressional Record. It came up in speeches in the Senate about caucusing on 23 February and 19 March 1959 by, respectively, William Proxmire (Democrat, Wisconsin) and Richard Neuberger (Democrat, Oregon).Footnote 31 Proxmire called the document “the most authoritative statement by outstanding professional experts on this subject.” Neuberger was rather less supportive of the APSA report than Proxmire, accusing him of having quoted selectively from it. (There is a sense from the debates that Neuberger went away and looked it up after Proxmire mentioned it on the first occasion.) Neither Senator wholeheartedly supported the document's recommendations regarding binding and disciplining Senators on issues. In any case, such interventions seem to have been rare. Rosenfeld's account emphasizes the role of agency in promoting a polarized politics: “individuals brought this change about deliberately.”Footnote 32 I do not dispute the significance of the choices and activities of a myriad of individuals. I am less persuaded about the part played in such interventions by political scientists.
Even upon publication, APSA did little to disseminate the report, though they did distribute a second printing in the summer of 1951. Briefly, on the basis of personal contacts, the Truman White House took up and pushed for some of its proposals to improve electoral turnout. There was talk of a presidential commission on voting. But, while the initiative was packaged by politicians as one driven by the political scientists, in fact the proposals were part of a Democratic Party initiative that was established before the document's publication.Footnote 33 The report helped legitimate proposals that were already underway and which might have seemed unduly partisan without academic endorsement. In any case, ultimately, the initiative came to nothing. Over a decade later, John F. Kennedy finally established a Presidential Commission on Registration and Voting Participation, including Evron Kirkpatrick, who had been a member of the Committee on Political Parties (and was a subsequent critic of it), as well as Roy Reuther (a trade union leader and supporter of earlier efforts) and the political scientist Richard Scammon. When the commission published its report in 1963 it neither cited the parties’ report nor mentioned its earlier contribution to the debate around turnout.Footnote 34
In subsequent debates about party government, regardless of whether those discussions were either academically or practically oriented, the report's authors played almost no part. Scholars subjected Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System to a barrage of criticisms. In 1992, Paul David, one of the committee's key members, finally produced a response (drafted in the late 1970s but unpublished for over a decade).Footnote 35 Until then, none of them had replied to their critics. The academic onslaught in the 1950s went unanswered. Unlike Beer and Ranney, the report's authors were not members of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. Schattschneider, the chair of the committee, and in many ways the main theoretical force behind the report, took no part in further discussion on the theme and, as far as I am aware, made only one comment on it, an unpublished talk from around 1960.Footnote 36 His argument was simply that developments toward more organized, nationally oriented parties confirmed the analysis of the report. Schattschneider distanced the report from having had any causal role in this process: “I do not credit the Committee on Political Parties with these achievements. All I claim is that history is going to bail us out.”Footnote 37 Similarly, in his 1992 piece, on only one minor point did David claim the report had had any influence (as “a modest factor”): the abolition of cross-filing in California, in 1958.Footnote 38
Apparently irritated by arguments within APSA, from the early 1950s onwards, David focussed less on party government and more on what direct reforms might be possible to the presidential conventions. Based at the Brookings Institution, he directed APSA's large-scale research project into the nominations process in 1952 and then followed this up with another book on the subject in 1960. For more than thirty years, when he wrote about parties, he does not appear to have cited the 1950 report (between an article in 1955 and his reflective piece in the early 1990s). David attended some meetings of the O'Hara Commission (established to examine the Democratic Party's rules around the same time as McGovern-Fraser) as a consultant, essentially reflecting his expertise from the 1950s conventions project.Footnote 39 In a 1972 talk to the National Municipal League on party reform, he focussed on the national conventions. while noting the core features of party government, David did not use the phrase and he did not mention the work of the APSA committee.Footnote 40
Together with David, two others, Fritz Morstein Marx and Bertram Gross, had proposed the establishment of the Committee on Political Parties back in 1946. But neither of them really followed up on it after 1950. Morstein Marx wrote papers about it for law reviews at the time of publication that went pretty much unnoticed. He did not write thereafter about parties. Under pressure because of his radical politics and his past affiliations, Gross left the United States in 1953 to work in Israel. He did not return until the 1960s, researching mainly organization theory and public policy thereafter.
The only exception to such a lack of subsequent activism on the part of members of the APSA committee concerning the unfolding polarization of American politics relates to the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978.Footnote 41 The Act marked an attempt, based loosely around Keynesian economics, to restore the government's commitment to the ideas contained in the original draft of the 1945 Full Employment Bill. In the 1940s, Bertram Gross had worked successively in Congress, at the Council of Economic Advisers, and at the Democratic National Committee.Footnote 42 His experience in helping to draft the 1945 bill contributed directly to the formation of the Committee on Political Parties and its package of proposed reforms. But, while Gross worked on Humphrey-Hawkins in the 1970s, his support was not framed around party government and its associated policymaking structures. Rather it concerned the substantive content of the bill (the nature of the rights involved) and its relation to the earlier employment initiatives.Footnote 43
One reason for the lack of attempts by APSA members to promote the 1950 report may reflect the nature of the document.Footnote 44 There is some doubt as to whether the Committee on Political Parties really offered a blueprint that it wanted to implement as a coherent package or whether its report was more of an attempt to generate further discussion about the subject. To be sure, supporters of party government manifestly wanted changes in the direction of those outlined in the document (and of some of those reforms that did take place after 1950). At the same time, however, the myriad of issues covered, the ambiguities of the proposals, and the uncertainties of the text all suggest that the report was also an attempt to stimulate future argument. Schattschneider reflected, “What we wanted was a discussion.”Footnote 45 The failure of the report's authors to come back and defend it may reflect the extent to which the published document was not a blueprint to be championed (though I concede that at times committee members spoke as if it was). Gross told a Senate hearing, “we believe it [the report] is a starting point. We do not believe it is the last word.”Footnote 46
From such a perspective, given the complexity of party government and the range of proposals contained in the APSA document, it is not clear to me that the parties’ committee advocated polarization between the parties in quite the manner that Rosenfeld and other scholars have indicated to be the case.Footnote 47 Accordingly, care needs to be taken in assuming that such polarization was exactly what they wished for. The report's authors certainly wanted a more defined choice in presidential and Congressional contests. But whether such choice should be quite so ideologically polarized is another matter. Rosenfeld suggests that the committee members would have been satisfied with the development of strident and aggressive political parties. I am less certain that this is the case. Interestingly, Schattschneider subsequently distanced himself from the ideological aspect of party change: writing around 1960 – the years of Nixon and Kennedy – he reflected, “I am less interested in sharpening the issues between the parties as I once was … Far from being meaningless, the conflict is always in danger of becoming too meaningful.”Footnote 48
The APSA report called, additionally, for much more in its recommendations than “an ideologically defined two-party system.”Footnote 49 The report covered a great deal of ground and a deluge of recommendations poured off its pages, sometimes in a rather abrupt manner. Aspects of the current American party system, for all the changes that have taken place, do not really resemble the plethora of proposals laid out back in 1950.Footnote 50 To take a few examples: parties do not have the kind of hierarchical structure that the report proposed, they have not developed a formal role for their members, and they have struggled in the articulation of stable and consistent policy platforms. Candidates remain at the center of electoral campaigning. These points are at odds with the measures contained in Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. Hacker and Pierson identified several reforms that might improve democratic arrangements in the United States, such as making election day a public holiday, easing voter registration, offering free air time to candidates, and introducing a degree of Congressional reorganization.Footnote 51 To increase turnout, the Committee on Political Parties proposed pretty much the same measures, including the reform of the electoral college.Footnote 52
One striking irony of Rosenfeld's account of the McGovern-Fraser Commission is the role of Austin Ranney, one of its academic members. Back in the early 1950s, Ranney was, of course, a passionate critic of the APSA report and of party government more generally. Yet in the 1970s, he was central to discussions that confirmed certain shifts concerning the selection of convention delegates that were broadly in accordance with some of the ideas contained in the 1950 document.Footnote 53 Ranney later regretted, as Rosenfeld notes, opening “Pandora's box” on the subject.Footnote 54 Referring to his own “not altogether praiseworthy participation,” he noted of reforms, “how often the consequences have been unanticipated and unwelcome.”Footnote 55 In his oral history for APSA, Ranney backs off, arguing that Byron Shafer's account gave him too much credit: “had I not done it, somebody else would have done it.”Footnote 56 But he affirms, “On the other hand, you know, I greatly regret it.” I think Ranney's contribution to McGovern-Fraser may have reflected, partly at any rate, his experience conducting fieldwork in the United Kingdom during the 1960s for his outstanding monograph on Parliamentary candidate selection. The resulting volume indicates that he found party government to be much more complex than he had anticipated to be the case back in the 1950s. In Pathways to Parliament, he concluded that the “idealized picture of British practises” – a depiction that he had helped to establish as something of an orthodoxy in his earlier work on party government – “only faintly resembles what actually happens.”Footnote 57
It is also noticeable that numerous critics of developments within the Democrats during the 1970s, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Max Kampelman, were able to move fairly seamlessly towards the Republican Party. Speaking bluntly to President Jimmy Carter at a White House meeting in January 1980, Ranney was very much part of discussions regarding dissatisfaction within the Democrats.Footnote 58 Rosenfeld does not address the impact of the neoconservative movement on party polarization in any depth. The implication of his argument is that the development of neoconservatism was a consequence of party polarization (basically a leftward shift on the part of some Democrats helped to generate the development of such a position). Another way of conceptualizing polarization, however, would be to take neoconservatism as an inherent part of the divide between and within the two main parties. For all their apparent hostility to party government and polarization, many neoconservatives were able to adopt a strident and ideologically defined position (effectively close to that of the Republican Reagan administration).Footnote 59
Taken together, the observations offered here lead me to doubt the practical impact that Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System has had directly on political parties in the United States. The fact that some of the reforms to parties since 1950 have represented a move in the direction of some of the many recommendations contained in the APSA report does not confirm the influence of that document in determining practical developments. Care, too, should be taken in ascribing motivations to the committee's members and in assuming that they wished for a polarized polity. They did not simply wish for the kind of developments that have led to such polarization: certainly, they did not promote that goal in isolation from other measures. Moreover, standing back from discussion, they did not seek to implement practical reforms during the 1960s and 1970s.
Indeed, rather than APSA shaping party polarization, the reverse may well be the case. Party polarization may have impacted on the association in a fundamental way. Rosenfeld details how Jesse Helms in North Carolina pushed for the Republicans to adopt a much more clearly defined policy platform, benefiting from a volatile electorate in winning his Senate seat in 1972.Footnote 60 Interestingly, though, Helms was pretty much just as aggressive back in the 1950s, in intra-party conflict within the Democratic Party. In 1950, he worked with Willis Smith's campaign in North Carolina against the incumbent liberal Frank Graham in the Democratic primary for the Senate.Footnote 61 Smith successfully ran a racialist and Cold War campaign against Graham. The movement against Graham so shocked members of a liberal charity, the Edgar Stern Family Fund, and particularly Will Alexander, its adviser, that it made generous donations to APSA in the early 1950s to fund improvements in the electoral process.Footnote 62 At the time, the Stern Fund was the biggest single donor to APSA – pretty much its only benefactor – underwriting many of its activities. In all, between 1952 and 1955, the Stern Fund gave the association around $300,000 (worth something like ten times that amount in today's currency).Footnote 63 It gave a slightly smaller sum to an APSA affiliate. It was through such support that the association launched its program of Congressional internships. Party polarization in North Carolina, albeit intra-party in orientation, paved the way for the transformation of APSA.
