Could Stronger Parties Be Part of the Solution?
Photo credit: Sage Ross / CC BY-SA
Looking around, we can readily see the problems caused by political parties, including polarized politics and gridlocked government. In contrast, we must squint to fathom what contributions (if any) parties make to our public life. Recent political developments, however, suggest strengthening parties could help citizens recognize the importance of and acquire a knack for associating in civil society. Let’s delve into this counter-intuitive notion.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville devoted a chapter to tracing the connections between civil associations (what today we call nonprofits and community groups) and political associations (e.g., political parties and interest groups). He proposed civil associations formed habits useful for political associations, and vice versa. But political associations had a stronger formative effect on citizens. The need for collective action in civil society can be murky. In democratic politics, though, the need to associate with a group large enough to secure one’s views and interests is obvious. When one of Adlai Stevenson’s supporters shouted, “all thinking people are for you!” his quip back said it all: “That’s not enough. I need a majority.” For this reason, Tocqueville believed political associations can be “looked upon as vast free schools to which all citizens come to learn the general theory of associations.”
For most of the nation’s history, political parties have helped Americans learn how to associate in generally edifying ways. In recent decades, however, our “vast free schools” have faltered. Parties have become too strong in some respects and too weak in others. Parties in government are more powerful and disciplined than ever, as demonstrated by the whip hand wielded by Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi over their majorities. The bipartisan, split-the-difference governance of the Postwar Era has been replaced by hyper-partisan, win-at-all-costs politics. Similarly, partisanship holds powerful sway in the electorate, and not just among voters who identify as Republicans or Democrats. Most independents tend to vote with one party against the other.
Voters’ antagonism toward the parties they dislike is now entrenched by what political scientist Eitan Hersh has termed political hobbyism. Such hobbyists voraciously consume political news and viscerally dislike the opposing party, much like a devoted Red Sox fan pores over box scores and loves hating the Yankees. Yet hobbyists do not channel their political energy into associating with neighbors to tackle community problems. Instead, they indulge in their hobby from the privacy of their own homes.
While parties in government and the electorate have become overbearing, national, state, and local party organizations have been hollowed out. As Daniel Scholzman and Sam Rosenfeld have observed, “parties are neither organizationally robust beyond their roles raising money nor meaningfully felt as a real, tangible presence in the lives of voters or in the work of engaged activists.”
The hollowing out of party organizations has been most pronounced and consequential at the local level. Local parties served as the primary classrooms in Tocqueville’s vision of political associations as schools of citizenship. But the classrooms have been deserted as local party activity has diminished to the point of being moribund – where it still exists at all.
What happened to local party organizations? Multiple factors led to their demise, but foremost among them were reforms advanced by progressive elites and good government advocates beginning in the early 1900s. The reformers wanted to rein in what they saw as the unseemly and frequently corrupt power of political machines and backroom bosses. To clean things up to their liking, reformers pushed for secret ballots, primary elections, campaign finance regulations, and civil service reforms.
Successive generations of reformers have gotten what they wanted. Local parties now find it much harder to mobilize voters, control nominations, and fund campaigns. They can no longer reward loyalists with patronage jobs and sweetheart contracts. The incentives enabling collective action in politics have thus ceased to be greased by grubby material concerns and became pure and purposeful, resting on shared commitments to issues and policies. What’s not to like?
Well, as James Q. Wilson presciently predicted in 1962, as the reforms took hold, “the need to employ issues as incentives and to distinguish one’s party from the opposition along policy lines will be intensified, social cleavages will be exaggerated, party leaders will tend to be men skilled in the rhetorical arts, and the party’s ability to produce agreement by trading issue-free resources will be reduced.” There is a through-line between the hollowing out of local parties and the hobbyism and hyper-partisanship that are now the hallmarks of our nationalized and polarized politics.
Thoughtful political realists like Jonathan Rauch have looked back wistfully at how the political machines of yore enabled government to function. But people are demanding more transparency, participation, and democracy, not less. If we can’t go back, can we go forward? Are there alternative ways in which parties can contribute to the health of our democracy—and, in the process, civil society?
New alternatives have been playing out in powerful ways, in different places and parties, since 2008. It turns out local parties, because they are empty vessels, can be infused with new energy. It just takes leaders and organizers with initiative and resolve to do the work, a willingness to engage their neighbors and communities, and a game plan for gaining power.
President Obama’s campaigns provided an early example. Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han have shown how the campaigns broke new ground in the ways they engaged, trained, and deployed more than 2 million volunteer leaders. Lauded for its innovative use of technology, Obama for America’s real secret lay in its use of relational community organizing, of neighbors talking with neighbors. The energy it generated, however, dissipated as the vibrant grassroots network morphed into a top-down structure controlled by the national Democratic Party.
Starting in 2009, the rise of the Tea Party provided another example of how activated citizens could revitalize local parties. Progressives tend to dismiss the Tea Party as an AstroTurf operation bankrolled by the Koch brothers and amplified by Fox News. But as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson noted after doing extensive fieldwork to understand the Tea Party on its own terms, it also had a bona fide local component. They identified 900 self-organizing Tea Party groups meeting regularly across the country. In contrast to Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party activists opted to pressure elites through the party system, joining and often taking over local GOP organizations.
While she disagreed with the Tea Party’s policy objectives and lamented its role in the rise of Donald Trump, Williamson later reflected on the civic virtues it nonetheless reflected. They included “the commitment of the grassroots activists to local political organizing – to the day-to-day grind of holding meetings, printing fliers, calling Congressmen, running for school board.” If 90 percent of politics is showing up, local Tea Partiers did. Meanwhile their opponents – in the GOP and the Democratic Party alike – stayed home, explaining much of what happened in our politics from 2009 through 2016.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, though, another pattern of local political activity began to emerge. Now it was on the center-left in Rust Belt battlegrounds where Trump had surged to victory. It drew in part on the opposition to the Administration expressed through the rapid spread of Indivisible groups and Women’s Marches across the country in early 2017. But as Theda Skocpol and Lara Putnam observed in a February 2018 article entitled, “Middle America Reboots Democracy,” the new pattern is pragmatic and constructive in nature. The catalysts are predominantly suburban and exurban women, from thirty-somethings to seniors, who have accumulated ample experience and community ties as teachers, librarians, social workers, nonprofit leaders, etc. Their work is short on outrage and long on listening and practicality–enlisting neighbors, building alliances, filling county party offices, recruiting and backing candidates for local, state, and congressional races.
The new groups rely on relational organizing much as the Obama campaigns did. But because they are building power from the bottom-up, their goals and approach are heavily tailored to local needs and realities. They have not been prompted by nor are they answering to a national campaign.
In 2019, Lara Putnam and Hahrie Han noted the success this new model produced for Democrats in the 2018 midterms. They encouraged local political organizers to keep doing what they were doing and not shift their focus to the 2020 presidential election. “People power is not a spigot that can be turned off and on with fancy technology. Instead, it depends on interwoven human networks through which people learn to work together on things they care about, even when the electoral spotlight is not on.”
The imperative of maintaining an active and engaging local presence beyond elections is a core recommendation of a paper on “How to Revitalize America’s Local Political Parties” from the Scholars Strategy Network. The Network’s members are university-based scholars that seek to improve policy and strengthen democracy. Many of the scholars cited here participate in the Network’s Working Group on State and Local Party Building and helped draft the guide. It draws on the co-authors’ fieldwork and observations as well as their own political participation. While some are active in Democratic politics, to their credit they draw lessons from and offer guidance to party builders on the left and the right. Their work has gotten take up from local leaders in both parties.
The guide points out how national groups working outside of the party, including many with 501(c)3 funding to undertake advocacy and voter mobilization, can confound local party building. Well-funded, outside-in campaigns to pump up the vote tend to run roughshod over volunteer-driven, inside-out efforts to broaden participation in response to local concerns. The guide therefore encourages funders to “resist giving to advocacy operations that often have weak local ties, if any, yet seek to serve as unaccountable alternatives to political parties.”
This approach to party building will be tested by the social distancing and economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Helpfully, in a new tool the Working Group has shared to help local party leaders assess and buildup their networks, they suggest ways to maintain and enhance them during the pandemic. The new paper concludes with a timely reminder: personal relationships remain key to political organizing, “and at a time of physical isolation those connections are also crucial to emotional well-being and to resilience for our communities.”
If this model of party building makes a notable difference in November and continues to take hold beyond it, it would establish a new combination of incentives for collective action in party politics. To be sure, the quest to realize shared purposes – supporting or opposing policies and politicians — will still feature prominently in the remix. But so will the claims of solidarity at the heart of the new model–the mutual regard and reciprocal commitments among neighbors and fellow citizens engaged in common work.
Eitan Hersh has even suggested enterprising local parties could re-introduce some material incentives, e.g., providing child- or elder-care, to stretched families to help build up their membership. The idea is intriguing and plausible. As the saying goes, people don’t care what you know until they know you care.
Revitalizing local political parties would not only flesh out hollowed parties but also mitigate hobbyism and hyper-partisanship. Citizens interested in politics would have new outlets for their energy, with neighbors encouraging and showing them how to put their passion to productive use. Political parties grounded in stronger and inherently varied local organizations would create room for a greater diversity of views and broader coalitions than our current nationalized and polarized divide allows.
Such parties would find their most compelling expressions not on Fox News or MSNBC but in community meetings and neighborhood canvassing. They would instill in their loyalists both an inclination and the wherewithal for listening to and persuading people who see the world differently. That is after all how you build up to a majority in a democracy. Parties oriented and organized like this could once again serve as “vast free schools of citizenship.”
