The Virtues of Participation Without Power: Campaigns, Party Networks, and the Ends of Politics

AbstractFollowing Francesca Polletta's call to reconsider participatory democracy in a new millennium, this article analyzes and makes a normative case for institutional and partisan forms of participation without decision making. I draw on field research and interviews conducted over the last decade on Democratic Party campaigns to argue against contemporary denunciations of partisanship and critiques of institutional participation by radical democrats. First, this article discusses the opportunities available for citizens to participate in electoral politics. Volunteering is often limited to fund-raising and instrumental voter contacts given the constraints of electoral institutions. Although campaign volunteerism is a fundamentally limited form of civic engagement, institutional and partisan participation has democratic value. Campaigns are institutionally linked to political parties that offer distinct moral, ideological, and policy choices to citizens. Recent analytical and empirical work shows that contemporary political parties are constituted by relatively coherent networks of civil society and social movement organizations that devote considerable resources to electoral politics to shape primary and general election outcomes and advance their agendas in governance. This reveals electoral participation to be tightly linked to larger partisan dynamics and institutional sites of power. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe author thanks participants in a roundtable at the 2013 American Sociological Association annual conference—Francesca Polletta, Nina Eliasoph, Caroline Lee, Jen Schradie, and C. W. Anderson—and Michael Heaney for comments on an earlier version of this article. This article is dedicated to the memory of Jamie Kirk Hahn.NOTESNotes1 This does not mean the Occupy movement was structureless (see CitationLeach 2013) or did not have links with other organizations such as unions (see CitationPiven 2013).2 For a discussion of the limits of the two-party system, see CitationDisch (2002).3 The evidence in this article is drawn from a number of research projects that I have conducted over the last decade. During the 2008 presidential primaries and general election, I interviewed over 60 political practitioners active across three presidential cycles and served as a volunteer precinct captain in San Francisco, CA and Laredo, TX (virtually), as well as traveled to Reno, NV, during the general election. This datum is presented in CitationKreiss (2012). During the 2012 presidential cycle, I conducted a five-day field research project at the Democratic National Convention, which entailed observations and interviews with delegates, activists, and journalists. This datum is presented in CitationKreiss et al. (2014). I am currently interviewing a number of party and campaign staffers on both sides of the aisle for a second book project. This research informs the arguments presented here. To date, I have conducted more than 30 interviews with staffers who worked in field, digital, and analytics from the 2000 through the 2012 presidential campaign cycles for candidates from both the Republican and Democratic parties.4 Should people perceive differences between the two parties is another question, primarily one of information (CitationBawn et al. 2012). For the normative argument that parties have a responsibility to stake out different issue positions, and make them clear to voters, see CitationSchattschneider (1942).5 In doing so, the campaign was inspired by—but ultimately went beyond—Bush's reelection bid. The Republican Party has recently been working to match this approach to data-driven field campaigning premised on volunteer participation.6 Contemporary parties are "nonhierarchical" at the interorganizational level. While party bureaucracies exist in the sense of there being formal organizations presided over by a chairperson and having federated structures, these bureaucracies are only one component of a broader field of organizations arranged in a nonhierarchical party network. The networked structure of parties is apparent in primary races. The chairperson of a bureaucratic party organization, party "bosses," or even elites within a party such as elected officials at the federal level cannot on their own determine the candidate that will emerge from a primary or even dictate where donors direct their resources. These donors and elites—and a whole host of organizations, activists, and consultants—vie among themselves to shape the outcomes of contested primaries that the party network as a whole decides collectively. That said, some individual and organizational members of the party network have more status, resources, or power than others. Indeed, recognizing differences across the party network and their own position, strategic actors create coalitions to promote their favored candidates—those individuals they believe will represent their interests and those of the organizations they are allied with. There are many reasons to think that the contemporary workings of parties is premised on the broad decline, over much of the 20th century, of centralized, formal party structures—although even these structures were always variably and unevenly distributed across the states.7 CitationClemens's (1997) magisterial history of the birth of interest groups reveals how they emerged to challenge parties and elites. The question is whether a tighter alignment of interest group and party is historically recent. The recent books on parties—CitationAldrich (2009), CitationCohen et al. (2008), CitationMasket (2009), and CitationRosenblum (2008)—do not cite or engage with Clemens's arguments. CitationLevendusky's (2009) argument about elite partisan sorting is consistent with the view that this is a recent phenomenon. Meanwhile, a number of scholars have looked at parties through the lens of linking citizens to government—although these accounts lack the expansiveness of the "party networks" approach. In a comprehensive recent statement, CitationDalton, Farrell, and McAllister (2011:17) show how parties around the world link to citizens through campaigns, participation, ideological associations with policies, political representation, and policy outcomes. See also, Lawson (ed.) Political Parties and Linkage: A Comparative Perspective; Romele, Farrell, and Ignazi, Political Parties and Political Systems: The Concept of Linkage Revisited. These works continue to draw distinctions between parties and civil society organizations, as does much normative theory (see, for instance, CitationRosenblum (2008:261–7).