The Idea of Responsible Partisanship, 1945–1952

On November 4, 1952, Adlai Stevenson lost handily to Dwight Eisenhower in the presidential election, ending twenty years of Democratic control of the office. Over 80,000 people wrote Stevenson in the immediate aftermath of the election. One of them was the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider.

The Wesleyan professor had read newspaper reports that Stevenson was assuming the mantle of leader of the Democratic opposition, and he wrote to express his hope that this leadership would embody "a more active effective sense than that implied in the expression 'titular head' of the party." He credited Stevenson with having "done very much to interpret for the nation the idea of party government and party responsibility" and implored him to build upon the popular following and policy agenda he had established in the campaign and sustain them in opposition.

What end would this leadership serve? "The function of the Democratic party as an opposition party," Schattschneider wrote, "is to remain, first, a liberal party, and second ... to help the public understand the meaning of the liberal alternatives" to the coming Republican rule, which he was sure would be brief. Moreover, structural developments, particularly "the breakup of the Solid South, which seems now to be near at hand," might allow for a newly effective party governance when the Democrats returned to power. Thus the party should prepare now for that power and responsibility by mounting a cohesive opposition.

Adlai Stevenson responded to this letter, as he responded to the many others articulating similar arguments in the winter of 1952, with a courteous and noncommittal note of thanks, after which, it appears, the politician and the professor never communicated again. In itself, the exchange meant little. But it hinted at a postwar intellectual and political story with lasting consequences.

Schattschneider, a lifelong student of American parties, was associated more closely than any other scholar with a specific outlook on how they should function, summed up by two terms he used in the letter: "party government" and "party responsibility." Proponents of responsible party government sought to nationalize the structures of American parties that had long been patchworks of state and local organizations. They promoted programmatic parties, organized around policy positions rather than ties of tradition, patronage, or personality. And to secure democratic accountability in a system that provided voters with only two real options, they sought ways to ensure that the two parties' respective programs were at once coherent and mutually distinct. The goal, as a Schattschneider-led committee of the American Political Science Association (APSA) wrote in 1950, was a system in which the parties "bring forth programs to which they commit themselves and ... possess sufficient internal cohesion to carry out these programs."

This was a theory with intellectual roots in the turn of the century, later taken up by a set of advocates influenced by their political experiences of the 1930s and 1940s. The modern national state created by the New Deal and World War II brought with it a new politics centered on issues of federal policy. Franklin Roosevelt's presidency reshaped American liberalism as a public philosophy of government activism. But, crucially, that liberalism only partially defined the program and personnel of the party that Roosevelt led — a party that contained factions opposed to various aspects of the New Deal agenda. Liberal Democrats, frustrated with the obstacles to effective policymaking posed by dissident elements of their own party, would thus prove the most eager proponents of responsible party notions in the ensuing decades.

Seeking to ensure that the Democratic Party would "remain, first, a liberal party," such liberals targeted those Democrats whose partisan identity was not tied to the New Deal. These included the declining ranks of nonideological patronage-based organizations as well as the conservative party leaders of the Solid South. The southern bloc compromised the coherence and effectiveness of the Democratic Party in Congress and made mischief in conventions and national committee deliberations. Thus, liberals pushed for party discipline in Congress and majority rule within national party affairs. Schattschneider's heralding of two-party competition in the South, meanwhile, hinted at a logical end product of these intraparty struggles: a realigned party system structured by coherent policy agendas, consisting of one broadly liberal and one broadly conservative party.

The doctrine of responsible party government was most clearly articulated in the 1950 APSA report, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, whose critics responded in turn with a vigorous defense of traditional American parties as valuable forces for stabilization and inclusion. This scholarly dispute helped to set the terms of debate for conflicts that would soon erupt in the rough-and-tumble world of party politics. Indeed, the questions it touched on — about the proper function of parties, their connection to policy and ideology, and their role in the political system — were to recur in American politics for another half century.

The New Deal's Incomplete Revolution

When Franklin Roosevelt enticed Wendell Willkie in 1944 with his vision of "two real parties — one liberal and the other conservative," a top-down party realignment seemed a tantalizing possibility. Some mistimed press leaks, a spate of cold feet, and, most important, Willkie's sudden death that October all compelled the president to abandon this pursuit. But the mere fact of his overture signified how the New Deal era had provided a new impetus for the ideological realignment of the parties.

The New Deal transformed American politics but only partially transformed American parties. This sparked a revival of responsible party doctrine as both an idea and a plan of action. Government activism during the Roosevelt years centered political conflict on federal policy and inspired a new belief in the power of state intervention in markets and society. But though Roosevelt's massive electoral victories occurred under the Democratic label, the New Deal was less a party program than the agenda of a congeries of interest groups, social movements, experts, and public officials, some entirely disconnected from Democratic organizations. The New Deal's effect on the Democratic Party was dramatic, shifting its electoral center of gravity to the North, associating its national agenda with the president's liberalism, and...