Democratic Party Leadership in the Senate

1961 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph K. Huitt
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
Majority Party ◽  
Party Strategy ◽  
Joint Policy ◽  
And Performance ◽  
American Party ◽  
Policy Committee

Party leadership in Congress has been one focal point for the sustained attack on the structure and performance of the American party system that has gone on for a decade and a half. Academic critics and members of Congress, individually and in committees, supplemented by a wide array of interested citizens and groups, have laid out blueprints for institutional reorganization. While there is some variety in their prescriptions, it is not hard to construct a composite model of party leadership in legislation on which there has been a fairly wide consensus among the reformers.The fount of party policy would be a reformed national convention, meeting biennially at the least. The obligation of the majority party in Congress, spurred by the president if he were of the same party, would be to carry out the platform put together by the convention. For this purpose frequent party conferences would be held in each house to consider specific measures. Some would be for the purpose of discussion and education, but on important party measures the members could be bound by a conference vote and penalized in committee assignments and other party perquisites for disregarding the will of the conference. Party strategy, legislative scheduling, and continuous leadership would be entrusted to a policy committee made up, in most schemes, of the elective officers of the house and the chairmen of the standing committees. Some have suggested a joint policy committee, made up of the policy committees of the respective houses, which might then meet with the president as a kind of legislative cabinet. The committee chairmen would not be exclusively, and perhaps not at all, the products of seniority.

scholarly journals The Ideological Asymmetry of the American Party System

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 825-844 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yphtach Lelkes ◽  
Paul M. Sniderman
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
American Party

Most Americans support liberal policies on the social welfare agenda, the dominant policy cleavage in American politics. Yet a striking feature of the US party system is its tendency to equilibrium. How, then, does the Republican Party minimize defection on the social welfare agenda? The results of this study illustrate a deep ideological asymmetry between the parties. Republican identifiers are ideologically aware and oriented to a degree that far exceeds their Democratic counterparts. Our investigation, which utilizes cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental data, demonstrates the role of ideological awareness and involvement in the Republicans’ ability to maintain the backing of their supporters even on issues on which the position of the Democratic Party is widely popular. It also exposes two mechanisms, party branding and the use of the status quo as a focal point, that Democrats use to retain or rally support for issues on the social welfare agenda on which the Republican Party’s position is widely popular.

Conclusion

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery A. Jenkins ◽  
Charles Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Organizational Capacity ◽  
Majority Party ◽  
Party Building ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Party Strength ◽  
American Party ◽  
The U.S

This chapter summarizes the key points raised by the book, with particular emphasis on questions of organizational control, party-building, and party strength in Congress. It begins with a discussion of the role that the party caucus has played in hastening a consistent House organization by the majority party. It then considers the organizational cartel's relationship with the procedural cartel and the applicability of the organizational cartel mechanism in other legislatures, including the U.S. Senate, American state legislatures, and parliaments around the world. The chapter also examines Martin van Buren's legacy, focusing on his role in developing the organizational capacity of the Democratic Party and his efforts in building the American party system, before concluding with some final thoughts on political parties and congressional organization.

Partisan Tumult on the Floor: The Speakership Elections of 1849 and 1855–1856

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery A. Jenkins ◽  
Charles Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Congressional Elections ◽  
Whig Party ◽  
New Parties ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Party

This chapter examines the speakership elections of 1849 and 1855–1856, the most chaotic instances of officer selection in the history of the House of Representatives. It considers how the Second Party System weakened and eventually collapsed as the slavery issue overwhelmed the interregional partisanship that had been in place for two decades. It also discusses the emergence of new political parties, such as the Free-Soil Party, the American Party, and the Republican Party, that created new avenues for coalitional organization. In particular, it looks at the rise of the Republican Party as the primary opposition party to the Democrats. Finally, it describes how the rising popularity of the new parties in congressional elections affected politicians in both the Whig Party and the Democratic Party.

The Rise of Political Action Committees

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily J. Charnock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Action Committees ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Conservative Coalition ◽  
American Party

This book explores the origins of political action committees (PACs) in the mid-twentieth century and their impact on the American party system. It argues that PACs were envisaged, from the outset, as tools for effecting ideological change in the two main parties, thus helping to foster the partisan polarization we see today. It shows how the very first PAC, created by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1943, explicitly set out to liberalize the Democratic Party by channeling campaign resources to liberal Democrats while trying to defeat conservative Southern Democrats. This organizational model and strategy of “dynamic partisanship” subsequently diffused through the interest group world—imitated first by other labor and liberal allies in the 1940s and 1950s, then adopted and inverted by business and conservative groups in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Previously committed to the “conservative coalition” of Southern Democrats and northern Republicans, the latter groups came to embrace a more partisan approach and created new PACs to help refashion the Republican Party into a conservative counterweight. The book locates this PAC mobilization in the larger story of interest group electioneering, which went from a rare and highly controversial practice at the beginning of the twentieth century to a ubiquitous phenomenon today. It also offers a fuller picture of PACs as not only financial vehicles but electoral innovators that pioneered strategies and tactics that have come to pervade modern US campaigns and helped transform the American party system.

A Key to American Politics: Calhoun's Pluralism

1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 412-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter F. Drucker
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Andrew Jackson ◽  
Political Pluralism ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
National Life ◽  
American Party

The American party system has been under attack almost continuously since it took definite form in the time of Andrew Jackson. The criticism has always been dircted at the same point: America's political pluralism, the distinctively American organization of government by compromise of interests, pressure groups and sections. And the aim of the critics from Thaddeus Stevens to Henry Wallace has always been to substitute for this “unprincipled” pluralism a government based as in Europe on “ideologies” and “principles.” But never before—at least not since the Civil War years—has the crisis been as acute as in this last decade; for the political problems which dominate our national life today: foreign policy and industrial policy, are precisely the problems which interest and pressure-group compromise is least equipped to handle. And while the crisis symptoms: a left-wing Thirl Party and the threatened split-off of the Southern Wing, are more alarming in the Democratic Party, the Republicans are hardly much better off. The 1940 boom for the “idealist” Wilkie and the continued inability to attract a substantial portion of the labor vote, are definite signs that the Republican Party too is under severe ideological pressure.

Activity of modern right-wing radical parties in the Czech Republic

2019 ◽  
pp. 164-173
Author(s):  
Tetiana Fedorchak
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Social Programs ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Political Radicalism

The author investigates political radicalism in the Czech Republic, a rather heterogeneous current considering the structure of participants: from political parties to the extremist organizations. The peculiarity of the Czech party system is the existence, along with typical radical parties, of other non-radical parties whose representatives support xenophobic, nationalist and anti-Islamic statements. This is primarily the Civil Democratic Party, known for its critical attitude towards European integration, and the Communist party of the Czech Republic and Moravia, which opposes Czech membership in NATO and the EU. Among the Czech politicians, who are close to radical views, analysts include the well-known for its anti-Islamic position of the Czech President M. Zeman and the leader of the movement ANO, billionaire A. Babich. Voters vote for them not because their economic or social programs are particularly attractive to the electorate, but because of dissatisfaction with the economic situation in the state. Almost all right populist parties oppose European integration, interpreting it as an anti-national project run by an elite distorted by a deficit of democracy and corruption. Keywords: Czech Republic, right-wing radical political parties, European integration, nationalism.

Testing the Causal Mechanisms in Additional Cases

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
System Stability ◽  
Relative Autonomy ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Liberal Democratic

Case studies of Indonesia and Japan illustrate that party-system stability in patronage democracies is deeply affected by the relative autonomy of political brokers. Over the course of a decade, a series of decentralizing reforms in Indonesia weakened patronage-based parties hold on power, with the 2014 election ultimately being a contest between two rival populists: Joko Widodo and Subianto Prabowo. Although Japan was a patronage democracy throughout the twentieth century, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) remained robust to outsider appeals even in the context of economic and corruption crises. However, reforms in the 1990s weakened the hold of central factional leaders over individual members of the LDP and their patronage machines. This was instrumental to populist Junichiro Koizumi’s winning of the presidency of the LDP and ultimately the prime ministership of Japan. This chapter also reexamines canonical cases of populism in Latin America.

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