In 1950 the American Political Science Association published a special report, produced by a Committee on Political Parties chaired by E. E. Schattschneider, entitled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” The report put forward a wide variety of recommendations designed to strengthen the institutional structures of the two major parties, centralizing authority in their national components and enhancing their capacity to develop coherent programs and, after election, to enact them into policy. More “efficient” parties would offer the electorate clearer and more meaningful choices and could be held accountable for their actions in office. Thus, they would be more “responsible,” and being more responsible, they would more adequately meet the standards of democratic government. The present volume consists of 11 essays by notable contemporary students of American politics that examine the ways in which developments of the past half century have altered the parties and affected the factors the original report believed were critical to “responsibility.”

After an introductory statement of the volume's purpose and design, John White and Jerome Mileur place the committee's report in its historical context, summarizing the decades of effort to reform the parties that led up to the report and going on to outline such major postreport reforms as the McGovern-Fraser changes that followed the 1968 Democratic Convention debacle. John Green and Paul Herrnson follow with a very useful review of the principal changes in party organization and practice, making it clear that party reform was characteristic of much of the twentieth century. Many of the changes, they believe, were consistent with the committee's recommendations, but others either failed to take hold or had consequences that moved away from the report's prescriptions. A rather similar conclusion is reached in the useful essay by Sandy Maisel and John Bibby, which describes developments in the formal rules and legal context of party practice. They suggest that these developments have enabled the national parties to develop a stronger organizational presence, but they have also encouraged the rise of candidate-centered elections in which the parties' role is reduced in its impact.

In an excellent summary of changes in the financing of parties and elections, Frank Sorauf describes the extraordinary growth in the national party structures' ability to raise and allocate money, but he notes that their emphasis on electoral success has cut into any tendency to use their financial lever-age to increase intraparty policy coherence. The national party committees serve primarily as service agencies for individual candidates, who, moreover, raise much of their money themselves and, in addition, build their own structures of campaign services by engaging consultants and technical experts of various kinds. David Magleby, Kelly Patterson, and James Thurber present data on campaign consultants showing that their ties are primarily to the candidates, not the parties. The direct primary has come to be the main method of nomination, as, ironically, the committee hoped, but this has helped make campaigns increasingly candidate-centered, rather than the coordinated processes of candidate recruitment and campaign appeal called for in the responsible parties model.

In the past half century, Congress has moved a consider-able distance in the direction of partisan government, adapting many of its rules and practices so as to strengthen the party leadership, especially in the House, and with the massive changes in the respective party constituencies—Republican growth in the South, Democratic dominance of the Northeast—there is relatively little ideological disunity to interfere with partisan government. Barbara Sinclair effectively describes the ways in which the changes in party composition and in the legislative process have interacted to generate intensely partisan behavior and, arguably, a politics of rancor and divisiveness that may be the underside of responsible partisanship. Charles Jones considers the position of the president in the responsible party model and, noting that the committee gave relatively little attention to the party leadership role of the chief executive, suggests that given the separation of powers, it is more appropriate to think of the American system as a government of parties with multiple structures, many of them partisan but neither cohesive nor centrally con-trolled, operating to shape the conduct of electoral campaigns and the formulation of policy proposals.

In its report the committee, writing just prior to the development of survey research, largely ignored the electorate. Essays by Herbert Weisberg and by Gerald Pomper and Marc Weiner consider the trends in voter behavior over the last several decades, pointing out the growth in ideological polarization but noting also the presence of a large uncommitted segment and, in the Weisberg essay, the tension between sharp partisan differences and a Downsian quest for the median voter. Leon Epstein concludes the volume with a nicely framed critique of the whole concept of responsible parties in the context of American constitutional and cultural realities. He points out that the committee worked from a normative model derived from British practice, and that despite the considerable extent to which committee recommendations have in fact been adopted, American party politics does not operate like the quasi-parliamentary system the committee seemed to want. More than that, as several of the essayists note, the committee had an implicit policy agenda. They reflected a deep frustration at the inability of strong and popular presidents, especially FDR, to secure programmatic support in Congress and the courts, and a distaste for such distributive policies as tariffs and pork-barrel spending, produced by bar-gaining among decentralized constituency agents uncoordinated by party discipline. As David Mayhew and others have shown, cross-party coalitions can sometimes achieve impressive policy results, and the Gingrich Congress of 1995–96 demonstrated that a showdown between strong parties may generate deadlock, rather than “responsible” government.

The committee's report was controversial when it was issued, widely regarded as flawed in its analysis and naive in its aspirations. Responsible Partisonship? underscores how many features of the party system have changed over the past half century, but it also demonstrates, if only between the lines, how much more comprehensive our knowledge of the system is today and how much more sophisticated the theoretical foundations of our analyses have become. These essays remind us that political reform is never a simple matter and should be undertaken with due caution, lest we get what we wish for.