As I mentioned in my last post on this topic, we have a political party that was elected in part because Americans are concerned about the price of groceries. Now that they hold three branches of government, their primary budget goal is to maintain and extend tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the very wealthiest in our society. And to pay for it, they are targeting food assistance, subsidies to health care through Medicaid and Medicare, and now Social Security.
As promised, here is the core of a new idea about how to think about rebuilding our party system. Again, this is a slight re-edit from an article I wrote almost a decade ago:
Wed to responsible party government and conceiving of parties narrowly and almost exclusively as ideological speakers, party reformers have been blind to the democratic potential arising out of the associational diversity within the partisan network. This blindness has prevented systematic consideration of both the part association can play in mobilizing and informing citizens and the ways that building out the associational life of contemporary political parties–by shoring up those nodes of the partisan network capable of fostering social ties between elected officials and activists and between activists and constituents–could contribute to good governance.
Contemporary party organizations, while not the membership organizations of bygone eras, have yet to shed their essential associational attributes. The era of nineteenth-century urban machine politics that depended on the confluence of relatively strong personal ties and a formal organization bound by patronage is long gone. Yet, even in the twenty-first century, political parties remain networks of individuals and groups– activists, donors, officeholders, and dealmakers–tied together and to the electorate by social connections of various strengths. Beyond their capacity to act as vehicles for aggregating and amplifying preferences and perspectives, the formal parties have an associational life, although there is great variation in the depth and breadth of that life.
Although some of this has changed since 2020 (particularly who votes), those concerned about the Democratic Party’s losses still have something to learn from this diagnosis:
. . . Without denying that the causes of our crisis in representation are numerous, an associational path to responsible party governance takes as its starting point a significantly underappreciated transformation of the political landscape: the increasing social isolation of political elites and its impact on both participation and the flow of political information between ordinary Americans and their leaders.
The contrast between the social networks of political elites today and those in prior eras of American history is both stark and revealing. While democratic politics is frequently a contest among elites, prior to the advent of mass media, candidates needed “to build extensive interpersonal networks not confined to particular occupational or social circles” to garner reputation and votes. As such, the path to political power ran through membership in socioeconomically integrated civic associations–the Shriners, the Rotary Club, the American Legion. These groups required regular attendance at meetings and frequently involved election to higher offices and attendance at federated meetings. Political elites were thereby prevented from becoming socially insulated from the rest of American society.
By contrast, electoral incentives today pull candidates and parties into a narrow social network of extremely unrepresentative and socially isolated donors and activists. Given the sheer cost of running a federal campaign in the current era, individuals running for office are required to tap their social networks for significant early capital to gain the confidence of party operatives. It is, thus, not surprising that a vast majority of members of Congress are millionaires.
Even beyond the donor circle, the tendency of contemporary political parties has been to eschew broad mobilization. For the average voter, computer-generated requests for donations have replaced the ward boss as the personal face of the party. This is particularly concerning since those most likely to be targeted by such impersonal requests also happen to have relatively high incomes and levels of educational attainment. Political commentator Michael Lind only slightly overstates the case when he writes:
Politicians chosen by membership-based mass parties have been replaced by politicians selected by donors and sold … to voters. At the same time, the decline of neighborhood party machines turning out the vote has resulted in declining participation by lower income and less educated voters. The Americans who do vote are disproportionately affluent.
When millionaires constitute a supermajority of Congress and lawyers are overrepresented in Congress, the interests of lawyers, millionaires, and college-educated white men have more resonance than other interests and experiences. The absence of individuals with more typical experiences of American life–individuals who have never had a white-collar professional job, women who have left their young, school-age children at home with siblings because they cannot afford daycare, or those who regularly navigate the criminal justice or welfare systems–in Congress (and presumably in the social networks of the partisans upon whom members of Congress rely for policy advice) makes it significantly less likely that Congress will prioritize policies addressing the experience of such citizens.
To make matters worse, entrenched socioeconomic segregation means politicians– even ones who gain from church attendance or NRA membership–are much more socially isolated from individuals from different walks of life than they were in the past. Put plainly, if members of Congress and their associates were financially dependent on public education for their children, they might not have been quite as taken aback by the broad bipartisan outrage at Betsy DeVos’s nomination. Equally important, the less government addresses those needs, the more likely those constituents will disengage from electoral politics, and the vicious cycle begins. While few would wish to return to the eras in which political power ran through sex-segregated and racially exclusionary clubs–veterans’ groups, Masonic Lodges, or the Klan–the socioeconomic exclusivity of contemporary partisan networks has had democratic costs.
Social insularity of party elites along with the unrepresentativeness of both voters and party activists affects the types of policies and actions that are considered, even in the absence of corruption or undue influence. Individuals’ experiences of the world shape how they process information, what issues they prioritize, and what issues fall off their radars. A behavioral economist might describe this in terms of the availability heuristic; an anthropologist might describe it in terms of culture and social practice. The bottom line, however, is the same: Social context shapes what one prioritizes (e.g., tax cuts or social security), finds reasonable (e.g., accepting extravagant gifts from donors or engaging in an illicit market to make ends meet), and perceives as being problematic (e.g., what constitutes sexual harassment or racism). No amount of data or polling can compensate for the fact that polls are written by the very elites whose world experiences are increasingly insular.
The associational life of partisan elites inevitably affects responsiveness and accountability. The absence of consideration of this phenomenon by responsible party government theorists can probably be attributed to the fact that through the 1950s, elected officials and party leaders had robust ties to their constituents through membership associations based on socioeconomic status (if not race or gender). Churches, veterans’ groups, and even the Ku Klux Klan in the South were extremely well integrated into the party network.
The optimal partisan network, it follows, is one with both socioeconomic and intergenerational breadth and interpersonal depth. Such a political organization would be more capable of mobilizing voters of all ages through a broad cadre of party activists with ties to a representative electorate. It would be better able to disseminate political information during and between elections.
There is much more to say and more that I have said about why the associational path is not only theoretically optimal but also practically possible. It is also increasingly clear to me that the reintroduction of fusion politics at the state and local level could go a long way to rebuilding our party system in an associational vein. But for now, I will stop.
