American Political Parties and the American System

DISTINGUISHED INDIAN SCHOLAR recently said that he thought it was a fraud and a mockery to call American parties by that name. They had no program, they had no internal solidarity. The reasoning is familiar and easy to follow. A foreign student finds it hard to designate as a a political group that controls a majority of the Congress but cannot formulate and by its own votes pass a program; that stands together only, and not always then, for national elections, for matters of patronage, and for the organization of the legislative business; that in convention chooses a leader and presidential candidate by unanimous vote and then, in Congress, forces that leader as President to depend upon defections from the other side. The purpose of the following pages is to comment on the functional consequences of this unique party arrangement for the larger governmental system in which it operates. How does the operation of American parties affect the operation of the American government? The argument, in a single sentence, is that the parties function to preserve both the existence and form of the considerable measure of governmental decentralization that today exists in the United States. The focus of attention is, therefore, upon the classic problem of a federal government: the distribution of power between the central and peripheral units. Yet there is little in what follows concerning formal, or constitutional, power relationships. The word sovereignty does not appear. Decisions of the Supreme Court are not emphasized. The concern of the paper is not juridical concepts or the sporadic umpiring of the courts, but the day-to-day pattern of who does what under whose influence; not the theoretical locus of supreme powers, but the actual extent of the sharing of decision-making in legislation and administration among the central, state, and local governments.