The Purpose of Political Parties

The author of the attached article, Pam Meister, says one thing that I found of interest. She states that the purpose of political parties is to "act in a partisan manner to advance their own interests." (She says a lot of other things about Senator McCain, Governor Palin, and the Republican fiasco of 2008, but I'll let those pass.) I would like to take issue with that statement, and to point out that this kind of thinking about political parties leads to some bad consequences.

The purpose of an interest group - whether it is the National Rifle Association or the United Auto Workers, the National Association of Manufacturers or NARAL Pro-Choice America, is to promote the interests of that group and its members. It is only natural for an interest group to be very single-minded; its raison d'etre is to espouse a single position. Interest groups aren't out there to tell us both sides of the story, to be "fair," or to point out the weaknesses in their own arguments. They are there to maximize the benefits their members derive from government action or inaction. There is a fundamental difference between this single-minded pursuit of one goal and the purpose of a political party.

Ms. Meister talks as if a political party were an interest group, whose only job was to promote its own interests. The real purpose of a political party is to win elections, to win elections which will enable its representatives to govern, to win elections which will result in its platform and principles being translated into law and policy for the next term of years. In order to win elections, a party and its candidates need to gain the support of a plurality of voters (in some cases, a majority). In this sense, such organizations as the Socialist Workers Party, the Green Party, the Prohibition Party, and so on are not political parties at all. They not only have no realistic chance of winning elections and gaining the right to govern - they are not really trying to win elections; they are trying to "send a message." In other words, they are interest groups using electoral politics as a means to influence the people who do get elected, not to gain election themselves.

In order to gain the support of a plurality of voters, political parties gather together members of many interest groups, reconciling or ignoring the contradictions among their positions, as well as unaffiliated voters, who may respond to any number of issues. Real political parties perform an integrative function in society. In American history, the classic example of a political party performing this role was the Democratic Party from 1829 until 1860. The Democrats lost some presidential elections, and the Whigs had their share of Senators and Representatives, but the Democratic party held together for thirty years a coalition of Southern (pro-slavery) planters and Northern farmers and mechanics. When the Democrats were unable to contain the stresses between their pro-slavery and anti-slavery wings, at the Charleston convention in 1860, they failed of their integrative function, and a civil war resulted.

The Republican Party has always contained a number of elements: pro-business interests, anti-immigrant groups, religious reformers, pro-growth elements, and conservatives of various stripes. When they party is able to pull enough of these groups into its electoral coalition, it tends to earn the chance to govern by winning elections. When one or more of these groups drop out, the party tends to lose. It is also the case that individual voters often belong to more than one interest group, i.e., they have more than one interest. The question then becomes one of finding out which interest is determinative, and then appealing to it.

There are four basic reasons that electoral coalitions are not stable, why parties lose an election one year on the same platform that won in the past. First, there is demographic change. If your appeal is to voters of a certain generation - people who remembered World War II, for example, then natural mortality is going to reduce your number of voters. Young people come into their politically active years with a different set of experiences and expectation than their elders. Second, there are outside events. The Great Depression broke up the Republican coalition and gave the Democrats the opportunity to pick up a lot of voters. The Democrats exploited that opportunity and have been the default party in this country since 1930. Third, your opponents come up with new appeals, new candidates, new techniques, to which you must respond or lose ground. Fourth, your period of governance actually ameliorates some of the problems you exploited to win elections. It has been pointed out that the Republicans' hold on crime as an issue was weakened by President Clinton's policies, but the issue itself has been devalued as crime has been perceived to be diminishing. This is the political equivalent of the law of diminishing returns.

All four of these factors are now operating to ensure that, if the Republicans continue to appeal to the same interests in the same manner, they will continue to lose. Again and again I see conservatives urging the party to stick to the low-taxes message. Because the Republicans have succeeded in lowering taxes at various levels, this issue doesn't have as much traction with voters as it once did. When an economic crisis has people worrying about keeping their jobs, they will be less concerned about how much of their income goes to pay taxes. When the credit crunch has people worried about keeping their houses, how high their property taxes are may be less important than having a program to forestall foreclosure. The lower taxes message has, in my opinion, reached the point of diminishing returns; the more effort the Republicans put into pushing this message, the less payoff they'll see at the ballot box.

This is not the time for the Republicans to act in a partisan manner, or to pursue the same interests they have been since 1964. This is the time for the Republicans to look outside their shrinking tent and reach out to a larger audience.