The Legacy of the Crash

by Terrence Casey

  With Blair’s establishment of devolved governments and Parliaments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland and the new directly elected Mayor in London, government in the UK has splintered in hitherto unforeseen ways. Coupled with the growing power of the EU over British government policy, we can see that the supremacy of Parliament itself has come under challenge from above and below. Thus, despite having reached a relative consensus on the economy the new political cleavages in Britain seem to be fragmenting its politics and presenting new difficulties for deliberation on post-materialistic issues.

  Ideological ‘sorting’, culture war, and US parties since 1980

  In the decades following the 1950 APSA report, the evidence seemed to indicate that the major American parties were slipping further into decline and irrelevance. Traditional party machines continued to erode as civil service reform and state and federal welfare dried up their traditional sources of rewards to their adherents (Burnham, 1981). The advent of television further personalized politics and placed an onus on individual candidates and personalities rather than party programs (Ranney, 1978). Evidence from voting behavior studies during the 1960s and 1970s seemed to demonstrate a move away from both political parties toward independence as the party identities forged in the New Deal era eroded with the passage of time (Nie et al., 1979; Ladd and Hadley, 1978). US presidents after Franklin D. Roosevelt largely abandoned attempting to govern with their parties and turned to personal appeals and coalitions of support on an issue by issue basis (Milkis, 1993). In Congress the party leadership remained weak in the face of powerful congressional committees in the 1960s and 1970s, and reforms that eroded the power of committee chairs in the early 1970s appeared only to have diffused power further to subcommittees and individual members (Patterson, 1978). Post-Second World War American parties remained stuck in a peculiarly American mold: decentralized, undisciplined, and, by comparison with the European mass parties, ideologically incoherent.

  Yet while parties’ scholars were proclaiming the final demise of the American political parties as anything more than ballot labels for ‘structuring the vote’ (Ranney, 1978), during the late 1970s and 1980s they missed signs of a dramatic transformation of America’s major political parties and the emergence of a new era of partisan polarization in American politics. These changes occurred in all aspects of party activity: organization, governing institutions, and electoral support.

  After the 1968 election debacle, the Democratic Party’s McGovern-Fraser Commission, established to propose reforms in the party’s rules for presidential delegate selection, more or less created the new primary system of presidential candidate selection through the imposition of national party rules on the Democratic state parties (Shafer, 1983). This was an unprecedented development (later upheld by the federal courts) in American party history since state parties had hitherto been sovereign over national parties. By contrast the Republican Party – starting in the mid 1960s under the national chairmanship of Ray Bliss – led the way (the Democrats had caught up by the 1990s) in the development of the national party committees as fundraising machines and providers of services such as candidate recruitment, polling, and candidate and campaign consultant training (Cotter and Bibby, 1980; Bibby, 1980). This transformed the role of the national committees from doing little beyond organizing the quadrennial national party conventions to regularly coordinating national party campaigns. The evolution of what John Aldrich (1995) has described as ‘the party in service’ (a concept somewhat similar to Panebianco’s ‘electoral professional party’) has led to far more visible and effective national party organizations in American politics than was the case at the time of the APSA report.

  The rise of partisanship in the electorate and in government since 1970 has been driven by the long-term fallout from the civil rights revolution of the 1960s (Abramowitz, 2010). For the generally progressively-inclined political scientists writing about US parties in the 1940s and 1950s, the presence of the white segregationist South in the Democratic Party was the single greatest barrier to an American party alignment along the class lines more familiar in other advanced democracies (Key, 1949). Once the Democrats adopted the cause of black civil rights in the 1960s and enforced desegregation and equal voting rights on the recalcitrant South in the mid 1960s, the barrier was removed as newly enfranchised Southern black Democrats enrolled overwhelmingly as Democrats and the more economically conservative elements in the White South moved towards the increasingly conservative national Republican Party after the 1964 Goldwater campaign (Rae, 1994). Lower-status white Southerners were initially homeless in the post-civil rights Southern political system, many gravitating toward the former Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace in 1968 and Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976. Since 1980 they have generally aligned with the Republican Party largely due to their conservatism on cultural-religious issues (Layman, 2001).

  Following the civil rights revolution Southern white conservative Democrats in Congress were largely replaced either by African-Americans or Republicans, depending on the racial composition of the district. Those who survived compiled a voting record much closer to the liberal mainstream of the national Democratic Party than their white segregationist predecessors (Rohde, 1991). The result in Washington and in many state legislatures has been two more ideologically homogeneous parties with members keen to implement liberal and conservative goals in legislation. To do that these members have strengthened the party leadership in both chambers of Congress at the expense of committees and committee chairs. In turn the leadership is expected to manipulate the procedures of the House and Senate to achieve partisan objectives (Sinclair, 1995; Aldrich and Rohde, 2000). The upshot since 1980 has been a degree of partisan unity and partisan voting unprecedented since the last decades of the nineteenth century, and a much more polarized relationship between the parties on Capitol Hill and between the White House and Congress when they happen to be controlled by different parties: witness the government shutdown of 1995, the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton, and the battles over continued funding of the Iraq War and the ‘War on Terrorism’ between President George W. Bush and the Democratic Congress in the last two years of Bush’s presidency.

  Polarization in Washington has been reinforced by growing electoral and societal polarization – particularly on economic and cultural issues.

  The civil rights revolution led to more ideologically homogeneous liberal (Democrat) and conservative (Republican) parties in Washington, DC, and as this persisted over time perceptions of party ideology filtered down to the electorate as voters took their cues from political elites (Hetherington, 2001). Political Scientists have also noted that: (1) voters increasingly perceive the ideological distinctions between the parties; and (2) the number of ideologically attuned partisans in the electorate has increased (Abramowitz, 2010). These voters of course are those most likely to be involved in political campaigns at all levels and to turn out in disproportionate numbers for the low turnout primary elections that select party candidates. As congressional and legislative redistricting has become a more exact science through the utilization of computer technology, so the majority of congressional districts are now drawn in such a manner as to guarantee the election of one party or the other, and this being the case more ideological candidates reflecting the activist base of the predominant party in the district are more likely to be elected (Fiorina et al., 2005). Redistricting cannot be the whole story; however, as party polarization has also risen in the US Senate, and it has been demonstrated that competitive districts have also been selecting ideologically polarized major party candidates (Oppenheimer, 2005; Abramowitz, 2010).

  It thus seems that polarization in the American electorate goes deeper than mere gerrymandering of Congressional districts to produce specific partisan outcomes. And while critics such as Fiorina (2005) have pointed out that the degree of issue polarization among party elites is not really replicated at the mass level, this may be largely irre
levant as voters appear to be increasingly taking their voting cues from those ideologically polarized elites (Hetherington, 2001). Another aspect of the increasing polarization is the so-called ‘culture war’, where the strongest divisions between the parties have occurred on issues with a religious-cultural dimension, such as abortion and gay rights (Layman, 2001). The more religiously observant voters and areas of the country have gravitated toward the Republican Party while the more secular regions on the coasts have become increasingly Democratic. In the 2004 election it was estimated from exit polls that the degree of religious observance had been the single greatest determinant of electoral choice (Jacobson, 2007). The strong role played by cultural-religious issues in electoral politics is almost unique to the contemporary US with its much higher level of religious observance, and has hardly been apparent in the more secular UK.

  In sum, American party politics has become markedly more polarized over the past 40 years, and the major American political parties far more homogeneous. In terms of organization the mass party model remains as remote as ever, however. Traditional state and local-based party machines have virtually disappeared, but the parties at the national level have become far more important players in electoral politics through their control of party rules and the development of the ‘party in service’. The driving forces behind polarization have been the various material and cultural interests associated with either party whose endorsements are eagerly sought by party candidates in low-turnout primary elections, and whose adherents account for most of the activist base of both parties. The expectation by the interests and the candidates they help elect that the party should ‘deliver’ for them in terms of policy once in power, accounts for the greatly enhanced power of party leaders on Capitol Hill. All of this does not amount to the evolution of a mass party but an adaptation of the American party system to a more ideologically charged and polarized national cultural climate than was the case half a century ago. And while something approaching ‘responsible party government’ has become more feasible in Washington than in the 1950s, the American constitutional system still places formidable barriers – the separation of powers, the short election cycle, and the supermajority requirements for most legislation in the Senate – in its path.

  Recession and the party system

  The onset of economic recession in the UK and the US in 2008 and the subsequent near collapse of the US and British banking systems certainly had major short-term electoral impact in each country.

  In the US the recession and the banking crash helped refocus the political debate on issues of size of government and competence in economic management, and guaranteed a comfortable if not overwhelming victory for Democrat Barack Obama, with a Democratic Congress in the November 2008 general election. In the wake of the election there was a great deal of speculation that the outcome foreshadowed the sublimation of the culture war by a new era of interventionist government. But almost all of the interventionist measures implemented by the new Democratic administration – the 2009 economic stimulus package, the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, and the massive expansion of the federal role in health care envisaged in the Obama heath care plan passed in March 2010 – proved to be not only unpopular with Republican and independent voters but inspired a conservative revival via a new conservative popular movement – the Tea Party (Rasmussen and Schoen, 2010). The January 2010 victory of Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special US Senate election for the seat of legendary liberal Democrat Edward Kennedy was an early demonstration of the potency of the Tea Party. The latter also played a critical role in the 2010 midterm elections which witnessed the return of the US House to Republican control with the largest House gains (63 seats) since 1938, and a net gain of six US Senate seats (Pew Research Center, 2010; Rasmussen and Schoen, 2010). Yet the culture war and its Red/Blue regional divisions were still evident in the 2010 electoral results. The Republicans made their greatest gains in areas of existing strength – the culturally conservative South and Midwest – and the Republican wave met its greatest resistance in New England and the Pacific Coast. The Democrats held on to four critical US Senate seats in Nevada, Colorado, Connecticut and Delaware and control of the chamber due to a reaction against Republican candidates who were too culturally conservative for these states. The partisan polarization that had characterized US politics since the 1970s rose to even higher levels in the first two years of the Obama administration with unprecedented levels of party voting in Congress and increasingly exaggerated partisan rhetoric on cable television, internet blogs and social networks (Brownstein, 2011). So while size of government issues definitely seemed to have gained ascendance over religious cultural matters relative to the pre-2006 situation, it seemed likely that the onset of economic recovery would see a return to the cultural-religious and lifestyle cleavages that had dominated US politics over the previous two decades.

  In the fall of 2008 the UK experienced its own banking crisis and bailout with the government essentially taking over several major UK banks – such as the Royal Bank of Scotland. The recession also hit hard in Britain with rising unemployment and growing public concern about the UK’s escalating budget deficit. From a balanced budget, when Labour came to power under Tony Blair in 1997, the deficit had escalated to £170 billion by early 2010. With a general election imminent, the need for drastic reductions in public spending to deal with the deficit resuscitated the traditional economic cleavage between Labour and the Conservatives. The latter emphasized the need for public spending reductions, while Labour, under Blair’s successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, advocated combining spending reductions with tax increases and sparing the social services.

  The economic meltdown certainly was the major contributory factor to Labour’s dismal showing in the May 2010 UK election, when its popular vote total fell below 30 percent (Wilson, 2010). This led to big gains by the Conservatives under David Cameron, but the Tories’ popular vote total increased only by 3.8 percent and they failed to secure an overall majority in the House of Commons. To do so they had to form an unlikely coalition with the Liberal Democrats who did not make the major advance expected of them during the campaign but whose vote held up well enough to deny the Tories an overall majority and simultaneously seal Labour’s doom. The 2010 election was characterized by the increasing importance of party leader personalities (as exemplified by the UK’s first televised debates between party leaders), the micro-targeting of voters, and the funding of the parties by large donations from outside interests rather than membership dues. The ‘party in service’ thus continued its ascendancy in UK electoral politics.

  The advent of a full Coalition government for the first time since the Second World War was another indication of the UK’s move to multiparty politics. In return for joining the Conservatives in government, the Liberal Democrats were given five cabinet seats including the position of deputy prime minister for their leader, Nick Clegg. They also extracted a promise from Cameron that a referendum would be held on the use of the Alternative Vote (AV) system for Westminster elections. The advent of Britain’s first Coalition government since the Second World War has consolidated the development of multiparty politics – already commonplace in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland and in local government throughout the UK – at the national level. This is likely to be the case even given the continuance of the plurality voting system for Westminster elections following the defeat of the proposal to introduce AV by a more than two to one margin in the May 2011 poll.

  Conclusion: convergence and divergence

  The fundamentals of the American political system have not changed since Epstein (1980) wrote, but the US parties have undoubtedly become more polarized and ideological, while Britain’s – as we have seen in the preceding section – have become somewhat less so and the mass party organizational form of the major parties has come under considerable strain. From this it would appear that party polarization is not a product of strong party organizatio
n but deeper societal forces. In the US the mass party never developed and US parties remain organizationally weak (although their national organizations are currently more vigorous than at any previous point in US history). Yet the existence of increasingly strong cultural cleavages in American society has polarized the party system as party activity at all levels has become dominated by single-issue activists and interest groups on either side of the cultural-religious divide. The end result has been a party system that more closely matches the prescriptions of the 1951 APSA report, although whether this has had the desired positive effect on the quality of American democracy and government is highly debatable.

  In the UK, new models such as Panebianco’s ‘professional party’ and Aldrich’s ‘party in service’ seem to more accurately describe much of current political party activity than the mass party model. The mass party organizational structure of the Conservative and Labour parties remains fundamentally the same, but membership in both parties has drastically reduced and private financing of parties has come to play a much greater role. As the British political universe has changed due to societal and technological change so the old socio-economic class basis of British politics has attenuated, regional electoral cleavages have become much more salient, and a new set of post-materialist issues has appeared on the political spectrum although none of these is as strong as the religious-cultural cleavage in the US. The multiparty system has become prevalent in the new devolved politics of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and is becoming increasingly evident at the national level as well with the major parties now regularly securing less than 70 per cent of the national popular vote and the formation of the first Coalition government since the 1940s after the 2010 general election. In the devolved Parliaments the multiparty system has been further encouraged by the adoption of more proportional electoral systems.