For all their value, the mountains of political science scholarship on polarization have still left analysts less attentive than they should be to the significance and historical novelty of the parties’ systematic substantive differences over policy. Polarization encompasses many disparate forms of divergence, after all, and behavioralist scholarship on affective polarization, social sorting, and partisan “tribalism” has done much to emphasize the nonpolicy-oriented drivers of political conflict. Yet the sound and fury of American party warfare signify something deeply substantive. The two parties now organize and define themselves around distinctive issue agendas, to a degree unmatched either in their own history or in comparative cases globally. In Divergent Democracy, Katherine Krimmel does us the favor of tackling this phenomenon—political party programmaticism and its fitful emergence across American history—as a subject of study in itself. In so doing, her rich and original book helps reframe our understanding not only of party polarization but of the dynamics of party development over time.
Krimmel distinguishes programmaticism, which she defines as “parties competing for public attention and approval through opposing policy positions” (p. 2), from polarization, the existence of which can but does not have to stem from programmatic division. Her major empirical contribution—and it is a profound one—is descriptive: a new quadrennial measure of programmaticism derived from analyses of national party platforms stretching back to 1856. The measure, plotted graphically over time, tells a tale of persistently low levels of programmaticism in American party politics across the nineteenth century, a modest increase from the Progressive Era to the 1940s, and then a sustained and much steeper surge starting in the late 1960s.
What emerges from this descriptive finding are two questions that motivate the book’s developmental story. First, why was the United States a “late bloomer” in its transition to a programmatic party system, which occurred many decades later than what would be predicted by prevailing models correlating socioeconomic development with programmatic politics? And second, once it belatedly made such a transition, what accounts for the United States becoming such an “overachiever” in programmaticism, with parties now differing more systematically and more intensely over policy positions than virtually any other country on earth?
The developmental analysis she lays out to answer these questions emphasizes, in turn, three distinct dynamics. First, drawing on a robust comparative literature, she emphasizes that clientelist relationships and political appeals, promising discrete material political benefits to supporters, serve as a constraint on the development of programmatic politics. In the United States, famously a precocious pathbreaker in the development of mass democracy, clientelism was entrenched early as the default of party politics, and it endured well into the twentieth century, thanks to path-dependent mechanisms. Common to the shared understanding of politics that clientelism fostered was “a tendency to avoid issue competition,” which could divide coalitions and complicate relationships forged by material incentives (p. 72).
Second, locally oriented machines had an ally in resisting programmaticism—namely southern political elites with their own motivations to resist the shift toward nationalized and policy-oriented political appeals. Drawing on Desmond King and Rogers Smith’s concept of racial orders in American political development, Krimmel details how the white supremacist order “long depressed support for the very notion of programmaticism” (p. 26), and so “delayed not only civil rights for African Americans, but the shift toward programmaticism more broadly” (p. 62).
Krimmel’s major contribution to causal analyses of American party development comes in her third hypothesis, which emphasizes “the critical organizational dimension of modern polarization” (p. 193). Though developments like the decline of clientelism created “windows of opportunity” for programmaticism’s rise, she says, they were insufficient in themselves so long as “supply-side” factors remained unconducive to policy-oriented politics (p. 47). Key among such factors was the programmatic capacity of the national party organizations, which involved the technical knowledge and resources necessary to develop policy positions and the ability to facilitate negotiation and agreement among coalition members. This capacity was lacking in the highly decentralized, skeletally staffed national party committees of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And so, even as forces ranging from national state-building to industrialization to rising educational attainment created the demand for policy-oriented politics, the core organs of electoral competition in the United States served as hindrances to its development.
Layer these stories together, and a cohesive account of programmaticism’s fitful historical emergence in the United States clicks into place. Clientalist politics survived the carping of the Gilded-Age Mugwumps and the much more serious assaults of Progressives to achieve something of an Indian summer during the New Deal, which “temporarily propped up machines” with new resources channeled from Washington “while planting seeds for their ultimate dissolution” through the construction of an activist national state (p. 87). A parallel story unfolded with respect to the national party’s relationship to the South, as the New Deal temporarily solidified southern pols’ pivotal intraparty role while unleashing long-term coalitional and programmatic developments that would compel a reckoning over civil rights. And so a slow decline of machine politics across midcentury turned into a comprehensive collapse after the late 1960s, just as southern electoral realignment accelerated. Across this same century of political history, as Krimmel documents through granular archival evidence, the parties slowly developed capacities for more extensive platform-writing and between-convention policy development. The quick collapse of clientelist politics thus occurred in the face of “pent-up demand for programmaticism and a bureaucracy ready to support this type of party system” (p. 102). And this, Krimmel concludes persuasively, “helps explain why, after a long period in which programmaticism was far lower than one would expect based on the nation’s level of development, it soared in the contemporary era” (p. 102).
This is a smart and valuable book. Its interventions are clean and credible, and the insights that accumulate along the way—about the unintended alliance of machines and segregationists as opponents of programmaticism, for example, or the profound downstream effects of the New Deal on the parties despite preceding the rise of polarization and programmaticism by decades—exemplify the value of thinking about party politics in developmental terms. As this reviewer can attest, the book also teaches wonderfully, with undergraduates particularly finding the conceptual and empirical work laid out in the first two chapters to be at once intuitive and deeply surprising.
The one component of the argument that leaves me less than convinced is its treatment of formal national committee work and platform-writing as central to the parties’ increasing programmatic capacity over time. With partial and sporadic exceptions like Paul Butler’s Democratic Advisory Council of the late 1950s and Bill Brock’s Republican Advisory Councils of the late 1970s, the formal parties have simply never been the place where the real and decisive work of programmatic politics—developing issue positions, forging collective policy agendas, and building party appeals based on them—has been done in the United States. That work has instead long been the province of the parapatry world: organized interests and issue advocates, pan-issue ideological groups, and ideologically oriented think tanks, the last of which began to proliferate in number and reach starting in the 1970s. This parapatry story is totally consistent with Krimmel’s overall hypothesis about the parties’ growing programmatic capacity over time—it’s just not the story documented empirically in her archival work, valuable though that work is in its own right.
The turn that American politics took while Krimmel was working on this book, meanwhile, leaves her grateful readers already in need of a sequel. The era of Donald Trump has been marked by signs of de-programmaticization, at least on the Republican side. Trump’s own personal disinclination toward wonkish governance has bled notably into his party’s broader approach. (Recall its decision not to even bother with a party platform altogether in 2020.) And the sources of Trump’s support suggest the enduring significance of modalities of political appeal other than the clientelism-programmaticism polarity that Krimmel emphasizes, including that of personalist charisma as well as the solidary benefits of socialization with fellow citizens. The patronage organizations of yore were also immensely skillful dispensers of that latter kind of benefit. Torchlight processions and election-day barbecues find their MAGA-fied echoes in marathon Trump rallies and boat parades. Krimmel concludes with the sound prescription to treat programmaticism as a “macropolitical indicator” that can sink too low or rise too high (p. 187). A broader civic revival of solidary activity, beyond the confines of MAGA, just might prove to be one mechanism for quelling the rancor and intractability that hyper-programmaticism has wrought.
