Party Period And Public Policy

These boldly argued essays describe and analyze key developments in American politics and government in an era when political parties commanded mass loyalties and wielded unprecedented power over government affairs. McCormick follows the major parties from their emergence in the 1820s and 1830s to their transformation almost a century later, discussing the nature of governance, clarifying economic policies of promotion, distribution, and (later) regulation that characterized government functions at every level, and sorting out the complex relationships between politics and policy during the "party period."

In democracies, contemporary politics is party politics, and parties serve to organize the political process even as they ensure democratic representation of minority and majority policy preferences. How do they do this? In great part, as this ambitious survey shows, parties translate policy preferences into policy priorities by articulating and enacting clearly defined party platforms. There is, this international author team demonstrates, a strong connection between what parties say they will do in an election campaign and what they actually do when elected. In sum, we are shown that political parties deserve more credit than they often receive.This book addresses questions central to the operation of modern democracies and can be used to inform institutional development in emerging democracies. It is at once an ambitious summary of original research and a model text for students of comparative politics. First the theory and method are introduced. Then, ten key countries are covered in parallel detail, with the discussions proceeding from general consideration of institutional and political context and program and party trends to more specific examinations of the congruence between party programs and policy outcomes. The data for all countries and parties span the post-World War II period up to the late 1980s. The analyses employ agenda, mandate, and ideology models and expenditure analyses across key policy arenas.Because of its commitment to comparative rather than merely descriptive analysis, Parties, Policies, and Democracy offers convincing answers to basic questions about the functioning of democratic political systems. Rigorous comparative analysis of forty years’ experience across ten countries demonstrates that political parties in contemporary democracies work better than critics have claimed. This is important news for emerging democracies just now establishing institutions and policies that bear watching over the next forty-year period.

This bold venture into democratic theory offers a new and reinvigorating thesis for how democracy delivers on its promise of public control over public policy. In theory, popular control could be achieved through a process entirely driven by supply-side politics, with omniscient and strategic political parties converging on the median voter's policy preference at every turn. However, this would imply that there would be no distinguishable political parties (or even any reason for parties to exist) and no choice for a public to make. The more realistic view taken here portrays democracy as an ongoing series of give and take between political parties' policy supply and a mass public's policy demand. Political parties organize democratic choices as divergent policy alternatives, none of which is likely to satisfy the public's policy preferences at any one turn. While the one-off, short-run consequence of a single election often results in differences between the policies that parliaments and governments pursue and the preferences their publics hold, the authors construct theoretical arguments, employ computer simulations, and follow up with empirical analysis to show how, why, and under what conditions democratic representation reveals itself over time. Democracy, viewed as a process rather than a single electoral event, can and usually does forge strong and congruent linkages between a public and its government. This original thesis offers a challenge to democratic pessimists who would have everyone believe that neither political parties nor mass publics are up to the tasks that democracy assigns them. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

In this wide-ranging new volume, one of our most important and perceptive scholars of the workings of the American government investigates political parties, politicians, elections, and policymaking to discover why public policy emerges in the shape that it does. David R. Mayhew looks at two centuries of policy making—from the Civil War and Reconstruction era through the Progressive era, the New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan years, and the aspirations of the Clinton and Bush administrations—and offers his original insights on the ever-evolving American policy experience. These fourteen essays were written over the past three decades and collectively showcase Mayhew’s skepticism of the usefulness of political parties as an analytic window into American politics. These writings, which include a new introductory essay, probe beneath the parties to the essentials of the U.S. constitutional system and the impulses and idiosyncrasies of history.

The recent debate on the role of money in politics has shed the light on the challenges of political finance regulations. What are the risks associated with the funding of political parties and election campaigns? Why are existing regulatory models still insufficient to tackle those risks?

Contradicting the conventional political wisdom of the 1970s, which said state political parties were dormant and verging upon extinction, this book reveals that state party organizations actually grew stronger in the 1960s and 1970s. Reprinted with a new preface that covers changes in the 1980s in electoral politics, Party Organizations in American Politics encourages a reappraisal of scholarly treatment of party organization in political science.

How popular democracy has paradoxically eroded trust in political systems worldwide, and how to restore confidence in democratic politics In recent decades, democracies across the world have adopted measures to increase popular involvement in political decisions. Parties have turned to primaries and local caucuses to select candidates; ballot initiatives and referenda allow citizens to enact laws directly; many places now use proportional representation, encouraging smaller, more specific parties rather than two dominant ones.Yet voters keep getting angrier.There is a steady erosion of trust in politicians, parties, and democratic institutions, culminating most recently in major populist victories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Frances Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro argue that devolving power to the grass roots is part of the problem. Efforts to decentralize political decision-making have made governments and especially political parties less effective and less able to address constituents’ long-term interests. They argue that to restore confidence in governance, we must restructure our political systems to restore power to the core institution of representative democracy: the political party.

What will gain the system’s attention? “Explores the dynamics of a broad range of policy issues in different countries . . . an important scholarly contribution.” —Political Studies Review Before making significant policy decisions, political actors and parties must first craft an agenda designed to place certain issues at the center of political attention. The agenda-setting approach in political science holds that the amount of attention devoted by the various actors within a political system to issues like immigration, health care, and the economy can inform our understanding of its basic patterns and processes. While there has been considerable attention to how political systems process issues in the United States, Christoffer Green-Pedersen and Stefaan Walgrave demonstrate the broader applicability of this approach by extending it to other countries and their political systems. This book brings together essays on eleven countries and two broad themes. Contributors to the first section analyze the extent to which party and electoral changes and shifts in the partisan composition of government have led—or not led—to policy changes in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and France. The second section turns the focus on changing institutional structures in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Canada, including the German reunification and the collapse of the Italian party system. Together, the essays make clear the efficacy of the agenda-setting approach for understanding not only how policies evolve, but also how political systems function.