trends in public support for the american party system

Trends in Public Support for the American Party SystemAuthor(s): Jack DennisSource: British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Apr., 1975), pp. 187-230Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/193398 .

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B.J.Pol.S. 5, 187-230 Printed in Great Britain

Trends in Public Support for the American Party System JACK DENNIS*

From the earliest beginnings of the American nation, the legitimacy of the institution of the political party has always been open to question. The Founding Fathers feared political parties and framed a Constitution that would discourage and control them. Nonetheless, a party system began to develop almost immediately after the new nation was established. While the country's leaders continued to voice concern about the dangers of faction that parties could represent, they came gradually to recognize that partisan opposition - within bounds - could be a healthy, indeed essential, element in the development of democracy.'

As experience with parties accumulated, a new theory of democracy evolved, incorporating the idea of legitimate, organized partisan opposition as a central assumption; and some proponents of parties, such as the late E. E. Schatt- schneider, went so far as to argue that democracy is not possible without partisan competition. Schattschneider put this case most directly when he began one of his works: 'It should be stated flatly at the outset that this volume is devoted to the thesis that political parties created democracy and that modern democracy is un- thinkable save in terms of the parties.'2

* University of Wisconsin, Madison. This paper was presented in earlier draft at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, August 1974. I am indebted to the Research Committee of the Graduate School, University of Wisconsin, Madison, for financial aid used in conducting the 1964, 1966, I970 and 1972 Wisconsin surveys and for aid for computing and other analysis costs connected with these studies. The National Science Foundation's assistance is also gratefully acknowledged in providing funds for the 1974 Wisconsin survey and for my section of the 1972 US Election Study conducted by the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan. I wish to thank the Ford Foundation for its aid, through the Center for Comparative Studies of Post-Industrial Society, which I used to collect collateral data from the Roper Public Opinion Research Center, from Louis Harris and Associates and other sources. I am grateful also for the assistance of Royce Crocker, Patricia Giles Leeds and Paula Klein Sydow, who helped process and manage the data.

1 Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, I78o-s840 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1969). Also see Wil- liam Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience I776-i809 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); Austin Ranney and Willmoore Kendall, Democracy and the American Party System (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), pp. 83-I 15; and Ronald P. Formisano, 'Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic's Political Culture, I789-I840', American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 473-87.

2 E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Rinehart, I942), p. I. This is quoted in Theodore Lowi, 'Toward Functionalism in Political Science: The Case of Innovation in Party Systems', American Political Science Review, LVIII (1963), 570-83, at pp. 57 I-2. It is also quoted in Frank J. Sorauf, 'Political Parties and Political Analysis', in William Nisbet Chambers and

















I88 DENNIS I88 DENNIS I88 DENNIS

Contemporary students of parties have elaborated the role of parties in democracy. A prominent mode of explication has been to define the functions that parties are presumed to perform in a mass democracy. As Frank Sorauf observes, 'The parties have been variously said to: simplify political issues and alternatives, produce automatic majorities, recruit political leadership and personnel, organize minorities and opposition, moderate and compromise political conflict, organize the machinery of government, promote political consensus and legitimacy, and bridge the separation of powers.'3

With such a wide range of positive functions to perform in the establishment and maintenance of democracy, one would think that the party system would be the sine qua non of American government. But such is not the case. To varying degrees the institution has been limited in its operations; and in recent times it has become subjected to severe institutional constraints, such as the imposition of the direct primary, non-partisan elections and the removal of patronage appointments from a wide range of government offices. And critics from Ostrogorski on have argued, sometimes successfully, that the parties should be curbed because of their self-aggrandizing tendencies.4

Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, I967), pp. 33-55, at p. 50. Sorauf, in Party Politics in America

(Boston: Little, Brown, I972), pp. 54-5, puts the case for parties more elaborately: At the most fundamental level the American parties, and those of the other democracies,

serve democracy by reaffirming and promoting its basic values. The very activities of the two gigantic and diversified American parties promote a commitment to the values of compromise, moderation, and the pursuit of limited goals. They also encourage the political activity and participation that a democracy depends on. And they reinforce the basic democratic rules of the game: the methods and procedures of orderly criticism and opposition, change by the regular electoral processes, and deference to the will of the majority. These reaffirmations of the democratic ethos are achieved by the parties in part by the example of their operations and in part by their clarification and simplification of political choices.

In addition, the parties offer an operating mechanism for the processes of democracy. By organizing aggregates of voters, the major American parties express the demands and wishes of countless Americans with meaningful political power. They are mobilizers of both democratic consent and dissent. By channeling choices into a few realistic alternatives, they organize the majorities by which the country is governed. Because of the parties' simplification of political choices, the average citizen, distracted often by his personal worries and limited in his background, can participate more meaningfully in the affairs of politics. The party is, moreover, the instrument of compromise among competing claims on public policy. Interest groups generally represent a specific, comparatively narrow interest, but the party must bring together a wider range of interests. To put the matter briefly, the political parties have helped fashion a workable system of representation for the mass democracies of the twentieth century.

3 'Political Parties and Political Analysis', in Chambers and Burnham, The American Party Systems, p. 50. Also see Lowi, 'Toward Functionalism in Political Science', for a useful general discussion of functionalist analyses of parties.

4 See M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (New York: Anchor, I964), Vol. II. Seymour Martin Lipset, in his introduction to this volume (p. lix), says that, 'As he [Ostrogorski] noted in much detail, party organizations are not democratic reflections of popular will, but powerful instruments for dominating the electorate, for imposing officials, opinions, and policies on the public. As he, and later Michels, noted, party functionaries have interests of their own and use their control of the party apparatus to further them.'



















Trends in Public Support for the American Party System 189 Trends in Public Support for the American Party System 189 Trends in Public Support for the American Party System 189

At the present time, moreover, there is being voiced considerable concern about the future of the institution. The assessment that the party system's store of legitimacy is being rapidly depleted has become a recurrent contemporary theme. Indeed, a number of recent observers have been predicting that the party system will soon disappear as a major institution of American politics.5

THE PRESENT STUDY

This brings us to the major question of this study: are the political parties now at a low point in their capacity to command support from the American people ? If we think in terms of a reservoir of public goodwill, or of what Easton has termed 'diffuse support',6 are we able to say with any assurance that public goodwill has reached a dangerously depleted level - a point low enough to make the institution unable to withstand major new stresses during the coming years ? To answer this question, we need to have some valid empirical measures of public regard for the party institution; and, using such indicators, we need to see the trends in levels of public support over time.

Now the answer that a number of recent observers have given - on the basis of what I will argue is relevant but limited data - is that the parties are clearly and sharply on the wane as an important feature of American politics. Indeed, the hypothesis is that the party institution has entered a period of rapid decline which could well be followed by its demise. Furthermore, should the parties fail, there will be severe consequences for the system of government and for democracy.7 Relative to such trends, Walter Dean Burnham has argued that

the New Deal might come to be regarded one day as a temporary if massive deviation from a secular trend toward the gradual disappearance of the political party in the United States. It is clear that the significance of the party as an intermediary link between voters and rulers has again come into serious question. Bathed in the warm glow of dif- fused affluence, vexed in spirit but enriched economically by our imperial military and space commitments, confronted by the gradually unfolding consequences of social change as vast as it is unplanned, what need have Americans of political parties ? More precisely, what need have they of parties whose structures, processes, and leadership cadres find their origins in a past as remote as it is irrelevant?

Burnham believes that the consequences of the trend toward politics without parties will be profound, because parties, in his view, are the only effective devices thus far invented that are able to generate countervailing collective power on be-

5 See, for example, David S. Broder, The Party's Over: The Failure of Politics in America (New York: Harper, 1971); and John G. Stewart, One Last Chance: The Democratic Party, 1974-1976 (New York: Praeger, 1974).

6 See David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965), pp. 273-4.

7 Some contemporary students do not see such drastic consequences should the party institution disappear, however. See, for example, Leon D. Epstein, Political Parties in Western Democracies (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 7-8; or Anthony King, 'Political Parties in Western Democracies: Some Sceptical Reflections', Polity, I (1969), I 1-4I.


THE PRESENT STUDY









THE PRESENT STUDY










190 DENNIS 190 DENNIS 190 DENNIS

half of the many individually powerless against the few who are individually or organizationally powerful.8

David Broder, an influential and widely read political journalist, sees perhaps a more immediate effect of the presumed decline of public support for the parties. He observes that: 'The governmental system is not working because the political parties are not working. The parties have been weakened by their failure to adapt to some of the social and technological changes taking place in America. But, even more, they are suffering from simple neglect: neglect by Presidents and public officials, but particularly, neglect by the voters.'9

Citing the 1950 American Political Science Association report, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,10 Broder goes on to point to the danger

that with growing public cynicism and continuing proof of the ineffectiveness of the party system, the nation may eventually witness the disintegration of the two major parties. That has not yet happened, but we are appreciably closer to that danger than we were twenty years ago. Popular dissatisfaction with the two-party system is manifested in many ways: by the decline in voting; by the rise in the number of voters who refuse to identify themselves with either party; by the increase in ticket splitting, a device for denying either party responsibility for government; and by the increased use of third parties or ad hoc political coalitions to pressure for change.1'

Now in these various quotations we find some relatively definite hypotheses about the present state of party system legitimacy (low), the trends in public support over time (declining), the relationship of support for the parties to general political alienation (close), the consequences for the two major parties (disintegration) and for the governmental system more generally (it becomes inoperative). We also receive from Broder some clear suggestions about appropriate indicators of the decline of public support for the parties: decline in voting turnout, rise in the number of partisan independents, increase in split-ticket voting, and increased use of third parties or ad hoc political coalitions to pressure for change.

What I shall argue, however, is that, while these various indicators taken from the realm of electoral behavior are all clearly relevant to our questions of how full is the reservoir of public support for the party system and of which way such support is tending, none of them, taken individually or collectively, is sufficient to measure the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the party as an institution. Indeed, these electorally derived indicators take on full value only if they are supplemented by more direct and comprehensive indicators of public regard, or lack of it. What I shall do here therefore is assemble for review the various available data on this question, including a number that I have collected in original surveys specifically

8 Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 132-3.

9 David Broder, The Party's Over, p. xxiii. 10 The report was originally published by Rinehart in 1950 and as a supplement to the Sep-

tember, 1950 issue of the American Political Science Review. For a useful overview of these proposals, see Austin Ranney, The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962).

11 Broder, The Party's Over, pp. 245-6. See also Stewart, One Last Chance, p. 33.























Trends in Public Support for the American Party System I9I Trends in Public Support for the American Party System I9I Trends in Public Support for the American Party System I9I

for this purpose. But before my own data are presented, let us first consider the evidence on the indicators that Broder has suggested - or at least the evidence on the first three of them, where clear and systematic trend data are available.

PARTY SYSTEM SUPPORT DATA FROM ELECTORAL RESEARCH

Turnout

The first measure that Broder suggests will show a decline in public regard for the parties is voter turnout in elections. Figure I presents the trend line on turnout in presidential and congressional contests since I920, using per cent of adults 2I years and older who voted as the measure.'2

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Fig. i. Voter turnout in presidential and congressional elections, 1920-72 (per cent voting)

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Two things are readily apparent from this evidence. One is that there has been a long term increase in voting participation since I920. For example, only 43'5 per cent voted for president in 1920, but 55'5 per cent voted for president in 1972 - a 12 percentage point rise. If turnout is a measure of public support for the party system, then the long term situation has been favorable. But the other observation one would make about Figure I goes in the opposite direction. In recent years - and these years have been the main focus of current concern about the fate of the parties - there has been a discernible decline in turnout. Since 1960, there has been a drop of about 8 percentage points for presidential year contests. In this sense and to this degree, party system support has declined. The trouble for the party system, on this indicator, has come in the 'sixties and 'seventies; and the trend in these years reverses the trend before that time.

12 The sources for these data are U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1970, 9ist edn.), p. 368, and 1973 (94th edn.), p. 379.








An obvious problem of validity arises here. One must make some relatively strong assumptions about the purity of this indicator to make it serve as a measure of party system legitimation. One must assume that, in turning out to vote, people are not doing so primarily out of general interest and concern for the outcome of each particular election, or from a general feeling that one has a voice in politics and voting is the way to exercise that voice, or from an interest in the particular candidates or issues of public policy, or as an expression of ideological concern about the general direction of public policy and leadership, or from a sentiment of confidence in the system of democratic elections or even as a ritual- istic expression of commitment to the regime of democracy in general.13 As a measure of support for the party system, turnout is perhaps more indirect, more subject to contamination, and therefore serves more as a surrogate indicator than we would prefer. Nonetheless, the trends that we find are suggestive; they serve as benchmarks against which to compare other forms of relevant evidence. Political party identification - the second of the 'Broder indicators' - is one such indicator.

Political Party Identification Figure 2 presents trend-line data on political party identification drawn from the published observations of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup) since I939.14 The portion of the Gallup data that is presented is the sum of party identifiers - Democrat and Republican - at each data point.

What these Gallup data show is that from 1939 to about 1964 there had been a drop, but only of about 3 percentage points, in the level of political party identification. But the additional drop in the per cent who identify with a party has been from 77 in 1964 to 67 in I974. Most of the decline has come therefore in the past decade.

Figure 2 also shows the trends using independently taken observations of the levels of party identification in the U.S. by the Center for Political Studies and Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan (CPS/SRC) and in the state of Wisconsin by the Wisconsin Survey Research Laboratory (WSRL). These shorter-term but more statistically precise data (in that both of the latter series' samples are based on strict probability methods)15 show a similar decline. The pattern of identification in the country as a whole shows a drop from 74 per cent in 1952 to 64 per cent in I972. This effect is reproduced at an overlapping but later time span in Wisconsin, where the decline in party identification is from 70 per cent in I960 to 58 per cent by 1974. In both cases, the decrease has been

13 That these kinds of factors are associated with voting turnout is shown in Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, I960). For discussion of turnout as a measure of support for the institution of elections and of the regime of democracy, see Jack Dennis, 'Support for the Institution of Elections by the Mass Public', American Political Science Review, LXIV (1970), 819-35.

14 The sources used for the Gallup political party identification data are The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-197I (New York: Random House, 1972); and The Gallup Opinion Index (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, I965-74).

15 The source for the CPS/SRC data is the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research (ICPR). The 1952-70 data are published in Dan D. Nimmo, Popular Images of Politics (Engle- wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. I974), p. 122.

















Trends in Public Support for the American Party System Trends in Public Support for the American Party System Trends in Public Support for the American Party System

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Fig. 2. Gallup, CPS/SRC and WSRL data onpoliticalparty identification, U.S. and Wisconsin, 1937-74 (per cent identifiers)

especially marked since I964. The general effect hypothesized by Broder, Burnham and others is therefore confirmed when we observe party identification trend data from different sources and for comparable questions asked both at the national and state level. The importance of party in this sense has clearly waned.

Furthermore, if we consider the opposite of party identification, partisan inde- pendence, Gallup has concluded that, 'The current record high proportion of independents indicates an increasing trend in party alienation among the U.S. electorate.' 16 While this is true, it does not tell the whole story. Headlines such as 'Party Loyalties Disintegrating in a Nation Torn by Change', or 'Parties Don't Mean Much to Today's Confused Citizen' 17 ignore the fact that, at the national level, nearly two-thirds of the adult population still do identify with one or the other of the major parties. Whatever may be the trends of the past decade, there has not yet occurred a massive shift from the parties. We should probably await further evidence before deciding that the drift away from identifying with one or the other of the two major parties is more than a temporary public reaction to recent experience with particular leaders and policies. We cannot as yet say with much assurance that the party institution has become, or is about to become,

16 Gallup Opinion Index, No. 105 (I974), p. 21. 17 David S. Broder and Haynes Johnson, 'Parties Don't Mean Much to Today's Confused

Citizen', Milwaukee Journal, Accent on the News Section, 16 October 1970, pp. I, 6; and 'Party Loyalties Disintegrating in a Nation Torn by Change', Washington Post, 9 October 1970, p. AI3. Also see James Reston, 'The Party's over for Political Party', Milwaukee Journal, 0o January 1972, p. 13; Louis Harris, 'Party Loyalty Waning', New York Post, 24 May 1971; and 'Is the Donkey Dying?', Milwaukee Journal, 12 March 1972, p. 24.

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illegitimate in contemporary America.18 Support at this level has not yet reached a critical point - a point below that necessary for maintaining party as a mass based institution. Indeed, were the data considered so far our only evidence on the state and tendencies of public support for parties, we might well conclude that the situation was still quite tolerable. But let us move on to some other indicators.

Straight-Ticket Voting and Consistent Partisanship Another electorally derived indicator suggested by Broder is straight or split- ticket voting. Considered in a wider frame, this is part of what we mean by consistent partisanship; it applies across different offices or levels of government and also over time to consistency from election to election. Let us consider a few data on each.

Many kinds of electoral indicators suggest that split-ticket voting in the United States has been growing. Louis Harris, in reviewing data on elections for president and Congress from I960 to I972, calculated that the difference in the aggregate between the major party vote for president and congressman was 3 per cent in

I960, 6 per cent in 1964, II per cent in 1968 and I6 per cent in 1972.19 Using aggregate data on presidential and congressional elections, Walter Dean Burnham shows that, whereas less than 5 per cent of the electorate cast split-ticket ballots in 1900-4, more than 30 per cent did so by I968.20 We could also use survey data on reported votes in given elections to ascertain the relative proportions who voted a straight ticket or not. If we leave aside those who did not give full information about their votes, then we see the following trends in straight-ticket voting for presidential elections since 1952, using CPS/SRC data (see Figure 3).

We see in Figure 3 a fairly striking decline in straight-ticket voting over this period. Whereas 66 per cent had been consistent partisans in 1952, only 42 per cent were such in I972.21 Furthermore, when we add to these data more direct reports of partisan consistency or inconsistency, we find a similar pattern. The Gallup data in Figure 3 show the aggregate decline in the proportion who say they voted a

18 On the other hand, the fact that an increasing proportion of young, college-educated voters are turning away from party identification could have important implications in future years. The proportion of such persons in the voting population has been increasing steadily for some time; and their weight could be thrown increasingly against partisanship. See the evidence presented in The Gallup Opinion Index, No. 55 (1970), p. I I, where we see that 52 per cent of surveyed college students considered themselves to be partisan independents! See also The Gallup Opinion Index, No. 57 (1970), p. 3; No. 37 (I968), p. 34; No. 48 (I969), pp. 37, 39; No. 36 (I968), pp. 2-5; No. 68 (I97I), pp. 34-5.

19 Louis Harris, The Anguish of Change (New York: Norton, I973), p. 274. 20 Walter Dean Burnham, 'The End of American Party Politics', Trans-action: Social Science

and Modern Society, VII (I967), 12-22, pp. 18-19. For Burnham's data source, see Milton Cum- mings, Congressmen and the Electorate (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Fress, I967), p. 37.

21 These calculations are based on data reported by Angus Campbell and Warren E. Miller, 'The Motivational Basis of Straight and Split-Ticket Voting', American Political Science Review, LI (I957), 293-3 I12, for 1952 and 1956; on work by William Sullivan, in 'Straight and Split-Ticket Voters for the I968 and 1972 Elections: Some Socio-Political Perspectives', unpublished paper, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison, May 1974, for I968 and 1972; and from data prepared by Royce Crocker for I960 and I964.






















80 80 80

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Fig. 3. Gallup and CPSISRC data on straight-ticket voting reports, 1948-72 (per cent straight- ticket)

straight party ticket ('in the election just held') in the period I942-68. Presidential elections elicit greater partisan consistency among voters than do congressional or 'off-year' elections; and the decline of straight-ticket voting as reported by respondents to the Gallup questions22 has not been as sharp in presidential-year elections as in off-year elections.

For a shorter time period, and with two somewhat different questions, the CPS/SRC data in Figure 4 show essentially the same decline in partisan consistency, although the decline during presidential election years since I960 for those who say they voted a straight ticket for other state and local offices (than for governor) is relatively sharp in comparison with other trends shown in Figs 3 and 4. The decline in respondent reports of having always voted for the same party for president shows a pattern of sharp decline beginning in 1964, which is a later turning point than that for the data on reports of state and local voting patterns.23

22 The source for the Gallup data is the International Survey Library Association, Roper Public Opinion Research Center (ISLA).

23 The CPS/SRC data are from the codebooks of the election studies furnished by ICPR. The decline shown at the national level is reproduced in Wisconsin from 1972 to I974. In answer to the question, 'Since you have been voting, how often have you voted a straight ticket for one party ... always, most of the time, some of the time, or hardly ever?', 13 per cent in Wisconsin in 1972 said 'always', whereas 0o per cent chose this option in 1974. For additional evidence on straight or split-ticket voting see Walter De Vries and V. Lance Tarrance, The Ticket-Splitter: A New Force in American Politics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1972), and Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics.

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Fig. 4. CPS/SRC data on reports of straight-ticket voting for other state and local offices, and of having always voted for the same party for president, 1952-72 (per cent)

Overall, the available data on over-time partisan consistency show clearly the same trends found in the turnout and party identification data - trends away from public enthusiasm for the parties. To this point, the evidence is quite consistent. The drop-off in various partisan consistency data is somewhat sharper, however; and perhaps these data are more confirming of the thesis advanced by Broder, Burnham and others about the fate of the party institution.

The Relation of Party Identification to the Vote Before we leave the realm of electorally based indicators of party system support, we might consider one final datum. Although report of straight or split-ticket

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voting is useful evidence about the behavioral symptoms of a decline in the importance of party, we might well ask whether political party identification, even with an increase in inconsistency in its manifestations across offices, or over time for the same office, is nevertheless highly related to the way people make their voting decisions. The earlier voting literature suggested that party allegiance was the paramount predictor of the vote.24 Recent critiques of this earlier literature have emphasized the growing or perhaps neglected role of issues in affecting candidate choices.25 But, for our purposes, the question still remains as to whether party continues to serve as a primary, or indeed as the primary, cue in voting or whether its relative role has declined. I confine my attention here simply to the changing relationship of party identification to the vote. Figure 5 presents the tau-c correlation coefficients of party identification and the vote for various offices from 1952 to 1972, using data from the CPS/SRC election studies.

The general pattern conforms to the other types of electoral data presented earlier. There has been a noticeable decline in the closeness of party identification to the vote for all of the higher-level offices (excepting other state and local contests). Before 1960 the correlation was higher than '70 in all of these cases. Since 1960 the level of association has risen above '70 for only a few such contests in a few years; and in a number of contests, particularly in the last three presidential election years, the coefficients have dropped below -60. Thinking in terms of a coefficient of determination, we might say that, whereas in earlier years party identification might have been used to account for more than half of the explained variance in the vote for the higher offices, in recent years it has tended toward accounting for only a third of s,uch variance. Thus, the apparent behavioral impact of party has declined significantly, even though party identification might still serve as a weighty factor in the explanation of voters' candidate choices.26

Where we get a reversal of the pattern of decline in the closeness of party identification and the vote is for the vote in other state and local elections. Here we find

24 Campbell, et al., The American Voter. 25 See, for example, Gerald M. Pomper, 'From Confusion to Clarity: Issues and American

Voters, I956-1968', American Political Science Review, LXVI (1972), 4I5-28; Richard W. Boyd, 'Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the I968 Election', American Poli- tical Science Review, LXVI (1972), 429-49; Arthur Miller, Warren Miller, Alden Raine and Thad Brown, 'A Majority Party in Disarray: Policy Polarization in the 1972 Election', paper presented at the 1973 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, September 1973; David RePass, 'Issue Salience and Party Choice', American Political Science Review, LXV (I971), 389-400; V. 0. Key, Jr., The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, I966); J. 0. Field and R. E. Anderson, 'Ideology in the Public's Conceptualization of the I964 Election', Public Opinion Quarterly, xxxIII (I969), 380-98; Norman Luttbeg, 'The Structure of Beliefs among Leaders and the Public', Public Opinion Quarterly, xxxii (1968), 398-409; Steven R. Brown, 'Consistency and the Persistence of Ideology', Public Opinion Quar- terly, xxxiv (1970), 6o-8; John G. Pierce, 'Party Identification and the Changing Role of Ideo- logy in American Politics', Midwest Journal of Political Science, xiv (1970), 25-42.

26 One may of course devise more complex analyses of predictors of the vote that do not make much use of party identification directly or are more successful in predicting the vote than by using party identification alone. A recent example is Stanley Kelley, Jr. and Thad W. Mirer, 'The Simple Act of Voting', American Political Science Review, LXVIII (I974), 572-91.
















*90 *90 *90

Year

Fig. 5. CPS/SRC data of political party identification as correlated with vote for president, governor, senator, congressman and other state and local offices, 1952-72 (tau-c)

that the level of association has actually risen over the years for which we have accurate data. The rise is not particularly large; but the trend clearly does not conform to the hypothesized pattern. One might of course say in defense of the

hypothesis (that party is on the decline) that there has been a drop in this association since I966. And one might argue that what this pattern suggests is that the party identification/vote relationship was especially low in earlier years in comparison with the coefficients for the higher-level offices. What has happened sub- sequently is that the coefficients for these other state and local contests have simply come into line with the levels defined for the higher offices. Nevertheless, these data on other state and local offices do not conform to the general pattern. In contests for lower offices, the importance of party seems to be increasing, if marginally. And this constitutes the first clear exception that we have seen thus far in the general trend of public attitudes and behavior away from party.

With this one exception, the weight of the available evidence to this point is that party is declining as a feature of American public consciousness. These data are all electorally focused, however; and I would argue that they are in themselves not conclusive - because they do not pertain directly to the party system per se. Let us turn therefore to other kinds of evidence that focus upon party system support in ways not as likely to be contaminated by the more transient phenomena of electoral politics.

Year





Year







Trends in Public Support for the American Party System I99 Trends in Public Support for the American Party System I99 Trends in Public Support for the American Party System I99

MORE DIRECT MEASURES OF PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR THE PARTY SYSTEM

To attack the problem more directly we need to measure public orientation toward the party institution qua institution. We need observations on indicators designed specifically to tap these broader, system-level sentiments. In I964 I conducted a survey using an area cluster probability sample of adults in Wisconsin. A series of sixteen agree/disagree statements were utilized to measure party system orienta- tions directly along a number of dimensions. In the report of the project, the sixteen items were shown to be clustered along four separate attitudinal dimensions. These dimensions were labeled 'diffuse support for the party system', 'support for responsible party government', 'contributor support' and'cleavage function support'.27

The first and most general of these dimensions, 'diffuse support', included a variety of elements of evaluation: (i) whether the existing parties represented genuine alternatives of policy and leadership, (2) whether the parties operated in such a way as to exacerbate conflict rather than moderate it, (3) whether we would be better served by generally instituting nonpartisan elections through removing party labels from the ballot, and (4) whether a person ought to adhere to the general norm of nonpartisanship in voting by 'voting for the person rather than for the party'. For purposes of future observations of party system support, I regarded this dimension and its several parts as the most significant, although I have attempted to gather relevant evidence bearing on the other dimensions as well. In the following sections the focus will be upon the major elements of the dimensions identified originally for which I have trend data. Let us turn first to 'diffuse support'.

Diffuse Support

Following upon the initial survey in I964, I have been able to obtain measure- ments on three of the high loading items from the diffuse support dimension at four subsequent data points: I966, 1970, 1972 and 1974. In each of these cases, as in the original study, a state-wide, area cluster probability sample of Wisconsin adults was utilized. The three items for which observations were obtained at the five points are:

(I) 'It would be better if, in all elections, we put no party labels on the ballot.' (2) 'The parties do more to confuse the issues than to provide a clear choice on

issues.' (3) 'More often than not, the political parties create conflicts where none really

exists.'

As was pointed out in the report of the 1964 data, the aggregate levels of diffuse support were mixed; and support levels depended upon which indicators of party system evaluation one chose to consider. Of these three items, the first showed a relatively high level of positive feeling in 1964, whereas the other two indicated

27 Jack Dennis, 'Support for the Party System by the Mass Public', American Political Science Review, LX (I966), 600-15.




Diffuse Support




exists.'






Diffuse Support




exists.'






relatively low positive support for the parties. These I964 support levels are presented in Figure 6, together with the trends on these three indicators over time.

In I964, considerable support existed for the idea of keeping party labels on the ballot (67 per cent). By contrast, only 21 per cent denied that the parties confused the issues; and 15 per cent disagreed that the parties created conflicts where none really existed. Viewing the ten-year trends, we find that the situation in general has deteriorated. There has been a fairly sharp decline of support for keeping party labels on the ballot; thus the one clearly positive area of support in 1964 has become a markedly negative one by 1974. Only 38 per cent reject the idea of removing party labels in 1974 - a drop of almost 30 percentage points over the decade! This is a loss of very nearly half of the initial support level on the item.





80

70

60

50

80

70

60

50

80

70

60

50

Ca (D o 40 L-

0L

Ca (D o 40 L-

0L

Ca (D o 40 L-

0L Keep party labels on the ballot Keep party labels on the ballot Keep party labels on the ballot

30 30 30

--.7 --.7 --.7

7- I'l

7- I'l

7- I'l \ Parties don't

confuse issues \ Parties don't

confuse issues \ Parties don't

confuse issues

create conflict create conflict create conflict

10 10 10

66 68 70 72 74

Year

66 68 70 72 74

Year

66 68 70 72 74

Year

Fig. 6. Trends in diffuse support for the party system, Wisconsin, I964-74 (per cent) Fig. 6. Trends in diffuse support for the party system, Wisconsin, I964-74 (per cent) Fig. 6. Trends in diffuse support for the party system, Wisconsin, I964-74 (per cent)

0 64

0 64

0 64




For the two items where support was quite low to begin with, there has been a slight improvement, especially for party clarification or confusion of the issues. In 1972, there occurred a significant rise in positive sentiment on this item. This increase no doubt had to do with the fact that the presidential election was a highly issue-oriented one; and voter response to issues was clearly manifested. The ideological lines between Nixon and McGovern were sharply drawn at a time when issue sensitivity of voters was apparently at a high point.28 The rise in evaluation of the parties in these terms is therefore a natural concomitant.

We should bear in mind nevertheless that this modest rise does not contribute very much to overall positive support for the parties. In 1974 there is only a fourth of the sample who are positively supportive. And the figure is lower on the question of the parties creating unnecessary conflicts.

Our general conclusion is therefore that support for the parties on these three indicators has declined. If we sum positive support percentages across the three items, we find that the figure was 103 per cent in I964 but had dropped to 80 per cent by 1974 - a loss of more than a fifth of composite favorable sentiment over the ten-year period. These data seem to suggest a more serious loss of support than was true for most of the electorally derived indicators. But we should re- member that these items tap only a few areas of our interest in the question of party system support; we need to supplement them with other kinds of relevant trend information. Let us turn next to some of these collateral data.

General Partisanship Norms: Man versus Party One of the items included in the I964 Wisconsin survey, which was weighted on the diffuse support dimension, concerned whether 'the best rule in voting is to pick the man regardless of his party label'. The finding was that 82 per cent of the sample agreed with this anti-party norm. Due to limitations of funds and research opportunities, I was not able to follow up this and most of the other items in the original study. But I have been able to locate some pertinent Gallup data based upon responses to a very similar question to the one asked in I964. Table I presents these data.29

In the twelve-year period from 1956 to I968, an already consensual level of endorsement of the norm that one should vote for the person rather than for the party (74 per cent) moved even higher (to 84 per cent). The figure from the 1964 Wisconsin study (82 per cent) is quite in line with the trend suggested by the two Gallup observations. And in this shift one finds that a low level of positive party system support moves even lower. This is an area where public opinion is heavily weighted against the parties.

Patronage versus Merit Appointment of Administrators Another area of normative concern is what the role of party ought to be in the recruitment of government officials and other personnel - or, more simply, the

28 See Miller, et al., 'A Majority Party in Disarray'. 29 These data are from The Gallup Poll, Vol. II, p. I450; and The Gallup Opinion Index, No. 40

(1968), p. 26.








(1968), p. 26.








(1968), p. 26.




TABLE I Gallup Data on Trends in General Partisanship Norms: Man vs. Party, U.S. 1956 and 1968

Question: 'Generally speaking, do you think it is better to vote for the man or for theparty ?'

(per cent) 1956* I968t

Man 74 84 Party 22 12

No opinion 4 4

* George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), p. I450.

t Gallup Opinion Index, Report No. 40 (I968), p. 26.

question of party patronage. This has been a basic question about the resources available to the institution. Before widespread introduction of the merit system of administrative appointments, the victorious party's faithful were awarded the spoils of office. What, we might ask, has been the course of public approval or disapproval of patronage or of the merit system of appointments ? Fortunately, there are some data available, which, while not precisely comparable in question wording, are nevertheless useful for seeing where mass opinion has tended. The evidence on public endorsement of the relative desirability of the two modes of political recruitment is shown in Table 2.

What we find is quite straightforward. There has been a consensus for the more than thirty years between the first and the last of the surveys reported here. A modest increase in public willingness to admit patronage appears for the last of these surveys; yet civil service examinations are overwhelmingly preferred as the mode of filling government jobs. The excesses of an earlier partisan era, in which the spoils system was the prevailing appointive mechanism, have apparently left a bitter legacy for the party institution - a store of negative feeling that has continued strongly into recent years.30 The situation for the parties has not become worse; but, as with the norm of nonpartisanship expressed in voting for the person, there is a substantial store of public anti-party sentiment along this dimension as well.

30 Other related data show essentially the same result. For example, Gallup asked in 1936 'Should all postmasters hereafter be selected by Civil Service examinations ?' Eighty-six per cent said 'yes' and 14 per cent said 'no'. The same percentages occurred for 'Should the entire Post Office Department, including the Postmaster General, be put under Civil Service ?', also asked in

I936. In 1952 Gallup asked the following: 'It has been suggested that all United States tax col- lectors should be selected by civil service examination instead of being appointed by the leaders of the political party in power as at present. Do you favor or oppose this suggestion ?' Eighty-four per cent of those who had heard about corruption (82 per cent of the total) in the U.S. Bureau of Internal Revenue were in favor, whereas 7 per cent said they were opposed to this suggestion. These data are from The Gallup Poll, pp. 14, 40 and 1037. Also see The Gallup Poll, pp. 136 and 223, for data which show strong public opposition to government employees making contributions to political campaigns.




Man 74 84 Party 22 12

No opinion 4 4










Man 74 84 Party 22 12

No opinion 4 4










TABLE 2 Gallup Data on Trends in GeneralPartisanship Norms: Patronage vs. Civil Service, U.S. 1935-66

1935

Question: 'Should most federal government jobs be filled by appointment by the winning party or civil service examinations ?'*

Those who help put their Highest mark on civil

political party in office service examination

13% 87%

1936 Question: 'Should government positions, except those concerned with important matters of policy,

be given to those who help put their political party into office, or those who receive the

highest marks in civil service examinations ?'t

Those who help put their Highest marks on civil

political party in office service examinations

12% 88%

I942 Question: 'Some people say that when a man is elected to office, he should have the right to give jobs

in his department to those people who worked for him in his election campaign. Others say these jobs should be given to people who do the best on tests that show their ability. Generally speaking, which side do you agree with ?'t

Give jobs to Test DK NA campaign workers basis

IO% 850% 3% 2%

I966 Question: 'Most government jobs are filled by civil service examinations. Some are filled by the

politicalparty inpower as a rewardfor political service performed by the individual. It has been suggested that alljobs, except those at the highest policy making level, be filled by civil service. Would you favor or oppose such a law ?'?

Oppose Favor No opinion

I9% 70% II%

* Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, Public Opinion, 1935-1946 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni- versity Press, I951), p. 109.

t Cantril and Strunk, Public Opinion, p. IO9. Also see The Gallup Poll, p. 15. : International Survey Library Association. ? The Gallup Poll, p. 2022.

Party System Performance

Turning from the prescriptive level to perceptions of the actual operation of the parties, there are a number of further kinds of relevant questions we might consider. We could ask whether people think the party system accomplishes anything


1935




13% 87%






12% 88%




IO% 850% 3% 2%




I9% 70% II%






1935




13% 87%






12% 88%




IO% 850% 3% 2%




I9% 70% II%








as a representative structure, especially in putting people's demands before government officials. There are of course many other outputs or functions that parties perform, including recruitment, socialization and selection of leader candidates, the organizing of many aspects of elections and the like. For present purposes, however, we can focus on fairly general public assessments of the parties' operations and upon the mass representation function as the one most germane to the question of public legitimation. Let us begin with a question on representation - on which we have available relatively good trend data.

(I) The Efficacy ofParties in Making the GovernmentPay Attention to the Demands

of the Public. In Figure 7, we find evidence on a question asked by CPS/SRC from

1964 to 1972. It presents the percentages, at each data point, of those who say parties help a good deal to make the government pay attention to what the people think. The figure also shows the evidence from similar questions for two other

70 -

60-

0 Elections help a good deal

50 -

40- -

Interest aroups help a good deal (1972 only)

30- -

Parties help a good deal

20 -

10-

0 I I I I 64 66 68 70 72

Year

Fig. 7. CPSISRCdata onparty system performance: contribution ofparties in making the government pay attention to what the people want, 1964-72 (per cent)





70 -

60-


50 -

40- -


30- -


20 -

10-

0 I I I I 64 66 68 70 72

Year






70 -

60-


50 -

40- -


30- -


20 -

10-

0 I I I I 64 66 68 70 72

Year





mechanisms of representation, elections and interest groups. (The question on interest groups was asked for the first time in I972.)

We see readily two things in these data. First, there is a decline in public perception of the capacity of both elections and parties to make the government pay attention. The rate of decline is approximately the same for both institutions over the eight-year period. The parties, however, remain about 25 percentage points below elections as a mechanism of representation at all data points. And we find, in the one instance where a comparison with interest groups is possible, that parties fall even below interest groups. But the difference is relatively small in the case of perceived interest group representation versus perceived party representation.

While science would be better served in this instance by a longer time series over which to generalize, we are able to conclude that, in the recent period at least, the hypothesized decline of party system support is clearly not disconfirmed. When we add this evidence to that already presented, we see that the weight is heavily toward a decreasing importance attached by the public to party.31

(2) Party Concern for People's Opinions. Another item on party performance from the CPS/SRC election studies is: 'Parties are interested in people's votes but not in their opinions.' Figure 8 shows the trend line for this question over the three most recent national elections.

Despite the brevity of the time span, one is able to detect the hypothesized drop in public support for the parties here as well. The overall position of the parties in a similar context is supported by the answer to another question asked only in 1968. This question was, 'Do you think that the parties pretty much keep their promises or do they usually do what they want after the election is over ?' Only 32 per cent of those who answered said that the parties keep their promises; 68 per cent said that the parties do what they want. This is a more than 2 to I ratio of unfavorable opinion on the parties.

(3) Comparisons of the Parties with Other Institutions on Perceived Benefits to Individuals. In a series of questions asked in 1972-4, we find additional evidence of party's low status in a context of representational performance. While these data

31 David Butler and Donald Stokes report comparable data for the British public's assessment of the efficacy of political parties in making the government pay attention in Political Change in Britain (New York: St Martin's Press, I969), pp. 32-7, 477, 485, and 500. The data collected by Butler and Stokes show an even lower level of support for the parties along this dimension than is true for the comparable data in the US. In Britain, 31 per cent said that parties help 'a good deal' in I963, 28 per cent in I964, and only 21 per cent in 1966. The comparable US figure for I964 is over 40 per cent and the I968 US figure is over 35 per cent. This comparison is with a system in which the parties are purported to be very important in organizing the government. Yet the British figures are clearly lower at every point! This finding for Britain is supported by recent NOP data collected for BBC TV's Panorama program (NOP 8063, September I974), which showed that 68 per cent of a national sample have little or no confidence in the ability of the present political parties to solve Britain's problems. Only 7 per cent said they were very confident that the present parties could solve Britain's problems (Britain Today, The Social Research Unit, NOP Market Research Ltd., p. 6). Thus, the American party system may not be the only one suffering from institutional decline at the level of public support.


















70 -

60 -

50-

40 -

C; 0.

30-

20 -

10 I 1 68 70 72

Year

Fig. 8. CPSISRC data on the parties' concern for people's opinions, 1968-72 (per cent who say that parties are not interested in people's votes)

do not constitute a substantial trend analysis, they are nevertheless instructive. Tables 3 and 4 present them. This evidence is drawn both from the CPS/SRC studies where my questions were asked and from the Wisconsin surveys cited earlier.

Table 3, part A, demonstrates that, even over a relatively brief, recent time span, the decline in support for parties found in other contexts is present for a general question on performance. We see that the mean rating has dropped from 3'9 to 3-5 in the two-year period on 'the good done for people like yourself'.

Part B of Table 3 shows the relative position of the parties in comparison with other institutions for which the same question was asked in each of the two years. At both points the parties occupy the very last place on positive support - which adds another dimension to our interpretation of the relatively low state of party system legitimacy.

Table 4 shows the response to a similar kind of question asked of a national sample in 1972 and again in 1973 by CPS/SRC. Parties are again, by some margin, the lowest in public support of the institutions included in the survey. And this relative position holds across both years. Given the low level of support for the parties in 1972, there is very little that can be lost. Yet, even in a brief period and

70 -

60 -

50-

40 -

C; 0.

30-

20 -

10 I 1 68 70 72

Year






70 -

60 -

50-

40 -

C; 0.

30-

20 -

10 I 1 68 70 72

Year









TABLE 3 Perception of Party System Performance: Benefits for Individuals, Wisconsin 1972 and I974



(A) Question: 'How much good have the political parties done for people like yourself?' (per cent)

I972 1974 (n = 84I) (n= 916)

No good at all I 10 15 2 IO 12

3 12 I5 4 28 26 5 19 17 6 8 6

Great deal of good 7 6 3 Don't know 6 Not ascertained I 6

(B) Comparisons with other institutions: mean ratings I972 1974 ? ?

Political parties 3'9 3'5 Elections 4-6 3'9 Interest groups 4-0 4'0 Congress 4'5 4'2 Supreme Court 4'1 3'9 Presidency 4'7 4'I Federal administrative agencies 4'3 4'2

TABLE 4 Perception of Party System Performance in General: Comparisons among Four Institutions, U.S. i972 and 1973

Question: 'Which of the parts of the government on this list has done the best job in the past couple of years ?'

(per cent)

1972 1973*

Congress 33'1 45'1 Supreme Court i6-I 26-2

President 47'0 25.2 Political parties 3'8 3'6

* I am indebted to Arthur Miller of the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, for use of the 1973 Fall Omnibus Study data reported here.


I972 1974 (n = 84I) (n= 916)


3 12 I5 4 28 26 5 19 17 6 8 6






(per cent)

1972 1973*





I972 1974 (n = 84I) (n= 916)


3 12 I5 4 28 26 5 19 17 6 8 6






(per cent)

1972 1973*




for a low initial percentage, there is a detectable decline in party system support - from 3-8 per cent saying in 1972 that the parties had done the best job in the past couple of years to 3-6 per cent in 1973. Although this difference does not meet the usual criteria of significance tests, it is in the direction that one would predict.






(4) Perception of Individual Capacity to Influence the Institution. Another performance characteristic that we might consider within the context of representation is the perceived capacity of individuals to influence the activities of the institution - in this case, the political parties. Table 5 shows the pattern of response in Wisconsin in 1972 and 1974 to the question, 'How much of a say do people like yourself have about what the political parties do ?'

TABLE 5 Wisconsin Data on Perception of Individual Capacity to Influence the Parties, I972 and 1974

(A) Question: 'How much of a say do people like yourself have about what thepoliticalparties do ?'

(per cent) 1972 1974

(n = 841) (n = 916)

No say at all I 21 26 2 15 21

3 17 14 4 21 21

5 14 10 6 5 3

A complete say 7 3 I Don't know 4 Not ascertained I 5

(B) Comparisons with other institutions: mean ratings 1972 1974

Congress 3'4 2-9 Supreme Court 2.2 2-2

Presidency 3'0 2'4 Political parties 3'2 2-8 Elections 4'0 3'5 Interest groups 3'2 3'3 Federal administrative agencies 3'2 3'0




(per cent) 1972 1974

(n = 841) (n = 916)

No say at all I 21 26 2 15 21

3 17 14 4 21 21

5 14 10 6 5 3








(per cent) 1972 1974

(n = 841) (n = 916)

No say at all I 21 26 2 15 21

3 17 14 4 21 21

5 14 10 6 5 3





We find, even in this brief period, a substantial drop in the percentage who believe they are efficacious in relation to the parties. The three most positive options (5-7) have 22 per cent in 1972, but only I4 per cent in 1974- a drop of a third among the relatively few who felt that they did have some substantial voice in what the

parties do. When we compare parties on the means in the bottom portion of the

table, we find again that the parties are relatively low in the cross-institutional context - at least among institutions of representation.

Taken as a whole, these items on public perception of the performance of the

parties, compared both across time and across institutions, show a low and de-

clining level of support. The decline in positive sentiment has been especially
















marked in the past few years. When compared with other institutions in evaluation of performance, the party system has in general the lowest rating of all. And it maintains this low status throughout the years for which data are available on

performance relevant indicators.

Contributor Support

Another area of considerable meaning for indicators of support is the behaviorally relevant one of personal contributions of time, money or effort to party activity.

In the I964 Wisconsin study, I found a clearly separable dimension of evaluation of the party system which I labelled 'contributor support'. While I have not as yet been able to follow through time my I964 questions on this dimension, I have been able to find a number of other recent trend data drawn primarily from the Wisconsin surveys, Gallup polls and CPS/SRC election studies. Let us consider first the question of actually joining a political party in the sense of paying dues or having a membership card.

(i) Party Membership. The Wisconsin data shown in Figure 9 are the percentage who say that they belong to a political party, i.e., pay dues or have a membership card. We see a relatively steady percentage who are dues-paying or card-carrying members of the Wisconsin parties from I964 to 1974, with perhaps a small increase in 1974. Such membership is a very small, activist fraction of the total popu-

50 -

40 -

30 -

c-1

20 -

10 -

64 66 68 70 72 74

Year

Fig. 9. Wisconsin data on contributor support: dues-paying party membership, 1964-74 (per cent members)

14



Contributor Support




50 -

40 -

30 -

c-1

20 -

10 -

64 66 68 70 72 74

Year


14



Contributor Support




50 -

40 -

30 -

c-1

20 -

10 -

64 66 68 70 72 74

Year


14




lation, however.32 And from the point of view of the mass public it does not constitute a very significant level of party system support. But it does suggest the possibility that, whereas support for the parties has slipped among the wider public, about the same or perhaps even a bit more support exists among activists than ten years ago. This could mean (and we would need other data to support it) that the parties may become more of an elite phenomenon as (and if) they continue to lose their mass appeal. These few data are not conclusive, however; we will have to await further analysis to settle the question. We do have some evidence on related questions, however.

(2) Willingness to Contribute Effort in Campaigns. Figure IO presents, first, a Gallup series using the question, 'Would you be willing to work as a volunteer for

your political party during the campaign or not ?' The percentages saying they are willing to volunteer are plotted at four points from I952 to I968.

What we find is a fairly stable distribution on this item in the period 1952-68, with perhaps a very small decline. This decline is not, however, of the magnitude found on the other kinds of questions reported above. Indeed, this may be an area where the parties are close to holding their own in public support.

(3) Financial Support. This effect is more than confirmed in the other portion of Figure I o. Here we find one of the few trends in favor of the parties that has appeared thus far in our search for relevant indicators and time series observations. There has actually been a long-term improvement in the per cent who say they would, if asked, be willing to contribute $5 to the campaign fund of the political party they prefer. The figure in 1943 was less than 30 per cent; by 1968 it had climbed to over

40 per cent. Now one must bear in mind that the real value of $5 had considerably declined in this period, so that the cost of giving such a sum to a party had become increasingly less painful. But perhaps the amount asked for is only symbolic to most Americans in any case. Thus, perhaps the increase does indicate a genuine improvement in support for the parties at a financial level.

If this is a true advance in institutional support, it is quite out of step with almost all of the data presented above and presents an interesting anomaly. Could it be that, while the general public displays ever lower support for the parties in most respects, there is nevertheless more willingness to fund the parties than ever before ? If this is not simply a function of the depleted value of money in the inflated

32 The CPS/SRC election studies contain a related, but less pure measure of party member-

ship. They asked, 'Do you belong to any political club or organization?' Unfortunately for our

purposes, many other kinds of political organizations exist in America besides political parties, ranging from Students for a Democratic Society, through the League of Women Voters or Common Cause, to the John Birch Society. Even with this source of error, we see that the combined political organization membership total is relatively small, and there is no clear upward trend in the figures for the period 1952-72. These data are:

Per cent who say they belong (US)

1952 1956 1960 1962 1964 1968 1970 1972

2.4 2-8 3'2 3-6 4'0 3'3 5'3 2-8












1952 1956 1960 1962 1964 1968 1970 1972

2.4 2-8 3'2 3-6 4'0 3'3 5'3 2-8












1952 1956 1960 1962 1964 1968 1970 1972

2.4 2-8 3'2 3-6 4'0 3'3 5'3 2-8




70 - 70 - 70 -

60 - 60 - 60 -

50 - 50 - 50 -

Give money Give money Give money

40 - 40 - 40 -

30 - 30 - 30 -

20 - 20 - 20 -

10 10 10

I I I I I I 45 50 55

Year 45 50 55

Year 45 50 55

Year 60 65 70 60 65 70 60 65 70

Fig. o1. Gallup data on contributor support: willingness to give money and to do volunteer work for a political party, I943-68 (per cent willing to contribute and to do volunteer work)

contemporary economy, then funds could continue to flow into party coffers while support for the institution in most other respects waned. Observers could well be deceived in their estimates of the viability of the party system if they looked only to party income and expenditures as their indicators of institutional health. On the other hand, so long as money can be collected from some significant portion of the mass public, and the parties continue to engage a substantial degree of elite and activist support, then the institution is far from dead. Institutions often live on after their functions have been performed, changed or even disappeared, given some established source of funding and a set of ongoing organizational structures to collect and spend the money. The party system's decline is not a necessary and immediate consequence of its generally losing public favor, therefore. But over the long term one would expect such organizational resources of the parties to collapse if mass support in other respects continues to erode. After a suitable lag in which organizational capital becomes liquidated, the parties could





c a)

a, a-

c a)

a, a-

c a)

a, a-

0 40

0 40

0 40




therefore be supplanted by other mechanisms of mass representation and of leadership recruitment, socialization and selection, despite some continuation of public financial support.

One possibility of course for stemming the general loss of support that we have seen is for the parties to be reformed, so that they perform better and conform more closely to norms that people approve of. Support could begin to rise once again. To take account of this possibility from the public's perspective and to observe some further dimensions of present support for the parties, let us turn next to the question of reforming the parties.

PARTY SYSTEM REFORM OR MAINTENANCE

Should the parties be maintained as they are at present, or should they be changed significantly? Broder argued in a work cited earlier that the parties are in need of serious reform and indeed that they should be changed to conform more to a 'responsible parties' conception of organization. Let us consider these questions from the standpoint of the public and its preferences. First, let us take up the question of reform in general.

Reform of Parties in General

For a fairly brief time series in Wisconsin - 1972 and I974, with somewhat com-

parable data for 1970 - I have asked some questions on party system reform in general. Table 6 presents these data for the parties and also for other political institutions.

For 1970 (Table 6A), we see that the parties have the lowest level of support for maintaining them as they are (47 per cent) of any of six political institutions. In the 1972 and 1974 data, if we take options 5-7 as those that mean that the parties should be maintained as they are, then 44 per cent are supportive in this sense in

1972 and 31 per cent in I974. The drop between 1972 and 1974 is especially sharp (Table 6B).

Comparing the mean rating of parties with the means for other institutions in

1972 and 1974 (Table 6C), we see that the parties were not the least supported in

1972, but they came to be tied for last place with interest groups in I974. These two institutions, parties and interest groups, were perceived to be in greatest need of reform.33

So far as general reform or maintenance in their present form is concerned, therefore, the parties do not fare well. At two points, 1970 and 1974, they are

regarded by the Wisconsin respondents as most in need of reform among all of the institutions compared; the trend toward wanting to change them is fairly marked in this recent period. At a general level, therefore, there is the suggestion of considerable and growing public desire to reorient the institution from its present course.





























331 will deal with the question of public support for the system of interest group representation in detail in a forthcoming work.






TABLE 6 Wisconsin Data on Party System Reform, 1970-74 TABLE 6 Wisconsin Data on Party System Reform, 1970-74 TABLE 6 Wisconsin Data on Party System Reform, 1970-74

(A) ' We sometimes hear these days thatparts of the Americanpolitical system ought to be abolished or reformed. What I want to ask next is how you feel about each of the things listed on this card. First, in your opinion, should the U.S. Congress be abolished, reformed, or kept as it is ? Do you feel the U.S. Supreme Court should be abolished, reformed, or kept as it is ? ... the Office of the President ?... the nationalpoliticalparties ?... national elections ?... national interest groups ?'

Wisconsin 1970 (per cent, n = 619)

National Supreme Office of National National interest

Congress Court President parties elections groups

Abolished I I 4 I 7 Reformed 28 33 19 41 40 26 Kept as it is 66 6o 77 47 56 56 Don't know 5 5 3 7 3 13 Not ascertained I I I I I I











(B) 'We sometimes hear these days thatparts of the American political system ought to be changed quite a lot, or even done away with. Others say the system should be kept exactly as it is. Using this scale - 'I' means keep it as it is and '7' means change it completely (show card); to what extent should the political parties be kept as they are or changed?'

I972 1974

(n = 841) (n = 96)

Keep as they are 7 25 i6 6 8 6 5 II 9 4 21 19

3 13 20 2 8 13

Completely change them I 7 I0 Don't know 5 Not ascertained 2 6

(C) Comparisons with othler institutions: mean ratings I972 1974 X X

Congress 4'7 4'3 Supreme Court 4'5 4'5 Presidency 5 I 4'0 Political parties 4'5 3'9 Elections 4'4 4'0 Interest groups 4-1 3'9 Federal administrative agencies 4-2 4'0


I972 1974

(n = 841) (n = 96)


3 13 20 2 8 13





I972 1974

(n = 841) (n = 96)


3 13 20 2 8 13







Specific Reforms In the course of the past decade, especially in the wake of Watergate and its associated ills, a great variety of proposals for reform has been advanced. These are reforms which apply both to the two major parties taken separately - as in the Democratic Party's McGovern-Fraser and O'Hara Commissions34 - and to the party system as a whole - as in proposals for the reform of campaign financing. One has difficulty in locating time series data on such proposals because most of them are fairly recent. Yet from time to time such data are generated, and I have been able to locate some of these, which are reported here. I leave aside for now a number of items that pertain mostly to elections or to election campaigns (to which I will return in a subsequent work on trends in public support for elections) and only marginally to the parties per se.

(I) Choosing Presidential Candidates by National Primaries. One kind of reform often proposed is to eliminate or minimize the role of the national party conventions. Many people are upset by the circus atmosphere and the political shenani- gans that are often displayed at the conventions. In addition, serious critics charge that the conventions are not really democratic but depend on the actions of a relatively small band of activists in each party. A concrete proposal that has come forth as a result of the criticisms of the conventions is that their ostensible main function be removed, and that presidential candidates henceforth be selected by the voters in national primary elections. Figure I I shows the trend of public opinion on this proposal across three data points.

A clear majority favors such a radical change; and this pro-primary percentage rises to over 70 per cent between 1964 and 1968. Support for the present organization of the party system at this level is therefore weak and apparently declining. Students of political parties tell us that the national party conventions constitute one of the few instances in a four-year span where there actually comes into tang- ible existence something one might call a national political party. To eliminate its main function might also have the effect of reducing the parties even more than

they already are to a series of rather disconnected state and local organizations, unless the national committees were given more powers and resources than they presently enjoy to compensate for this loss. The public at least is quite prepared to let all of this happen; indeed, many people are probably quite restive about the control that party leaders have over presidential nominations.

(2) Responsible Parties. Another kind of reform, actually a series of reforms, has to do with what has come to be called 'the establishment of responsible party government'. This has been a more enduring and general program of reform for the party system in America than have most of the others and perhaps therefore deserves some special attention. From the time of the well known APSA committee

report in 1950 until today (as, for example, in Broder's call for responsible parties in The Party's Over), this has been a recurrent theme in discussions among in- formed observers about what we ought to do about the party system. Essentially, the idea is that each of the parties ought to become a more unified organization that

34 See, for example, Stewart, One Last Chance, p. 50 ff., for a discussion of these reform efforts.

















Trends in Public Supportfor the Americani Party System 215 Trends in Public Supportfor the Americani Party System 215 Trends in Public Supportfor the Americani Party System 215

90 -

80 -

70 -

o 60 -

50 -

40 -

30 56 60 64 68

Year

Fig. I i. Gallup data on reform of the party system: proposal to choose presidential candidates by national primary rather than by party conventions, 1956-68 (per cent who prefer primary)

would offer a clearly competing program of policy to the voters at election time; and, when the election was over, the victorious party should carry out its program in a way that involves the principles of centralization, discipline and ideological homogeneity among office holders. The British party system was for a long time the model for this series of proposals - even though recent students of British politics have begun to doubt whether these principles are fully established in Britain either.35

In the I964 study in Wisconsin, I identified an attitudinal dimension through factor analysis which was focused upon this aspect of party system support. In the data reported there, I found in general rather low public approval of the idea that the parties should be made more responsible. For example, only 23 per cent agreed that 'A senator or representative should follow his party leaders even if he doesn't want to.'36 We might ask, however, what the trends have been. With the

35 See Robert J. Jackson, Rebels and Whips (New York: St Martin's Press, I968); Leon D. Epstein, 'British MPs and Their Local Parties: The Suez Cases', American Political Science Re- view, LIV (1960), 374-90; and Austin Ranney, Pathways to Parliament (London: Macmillan, 1965).

36 'Support for the Party System by the Mass Public', p. 605. Donald Devine provides data that suggest that my figure of 23 per cent saying that members of Congress should follow their party

90 -

80 -

70 -

o 60 -

50 -

40 -

30 56 60 64 68

Year






90 -

80 -

70 -

o 60 -

50 -

40 -

30 56 60 64 68

Year









general decline in public approval of the parties noted in most of the data reported above, has there been new or renewed public interest in changing to more 'responsible parties'? Unfortunately, the data available for answering this question are rather fragmentary; but they at least give us some hints about the drift of the public mind.

(a) Are there real differences ? One of the assumptions underlying the responsible parties model is that the parties do pose real alternatives of leadership and policy in order that discipline, ideological unity and centralization have meaning. We might ask first the factual question as to whether the public thinks that the present parties pose important differences or not.

70 -

60 -

50 -

40 -

30 -

20 -

0

10 -

0 I I I I I 40 45 50 55 60 65

Year

Fig. 12. Gallup data on the importance of which party runs the country, 1942-65 (per cent who

say 'a great deal')

leaders is close to what has obtained in the past. He quotes Gallup data from 1946 that show only 21 per cent in favor of congressmen voting strictly with their party and 25 per cent in a I958 SRC survey so agreeing. The Political Culture of the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. 175.



70 -

60 -

50 -

40 -

30 -

20 -

0

10 -

0 I I I I I 40 45 50 55 60 65

Year


say 'a great deal')




70 -

60 -

50 -

40 -

30 -

20 -

0

10 -

0 I I I I I 40 45 50 55 60 65

Year


say 'a great deal')





Figure 12 shows that most people do not believe that having one or the other of the two major parties in office makes much difference. On the other hand, there is a trend favoring a perception of real differences, at least up to 1965. Thus, the condition for responsible parties is, or was, more nearly being met over this period, if we are able to trust a trend line based upon only three data points. But we should emphasize that even by I965 the great majority of people did not attach great importance to party differences. Thus one might say that a prior condition of responsible parties was not yet met, looking at the matter from the standpoint of existing public perceptions at that time.

(b) The present two-party system. This is not to say that people want to abolish the two-party system. There are suggestive, single-point data that would indicate that the public favors the continuation of the present two-party system, and also favors the present variety of partisan competition in the United States. Donald Devine reports results on both of these points. (I) In answer to the question, 'Would you say it is important that the United States have a strong two-party system, or not too important?', a 1964 Minnesota Poll sample had 89 per cent favoring the two-party system. (2) In answer to the question 'On the whole how do you feel about the present set-up of the political parties in the United States? Do you find that you are usually satisfied with the stands taken by one or the other of the present big parties, or would you like to see a strong new party entirely different from either of the present parties?', 78 per cent of a 1944 Fortune Poll said they favored the present arrangements.37 Twenty-four years later, Gallup posed a quite similar question: 'Would you like to see a new political party established whose principles were more in line with your point of view or are you generally satisfied with the choice of parties we have now ?' Sixty-seven per cent said they were satisfied with the present parties.38 Just as was true a quarter of a century before, there is a strong majority in favor of the status quo so far as the content of partisan choices is concerned.

And whatever data are available on the specific question of realigning the present parties into liberals and conservatives also suggest that the public are unwilling to have such ideological purity. Gallup asked a question about this from 1937 to 1947, and there was an increasing majority against the idea. In August, 1937, 52 per cent opposed such realignment of the parties; in April 1938, 55 per cent were opposed; in September 1938, 65 per cent; in January 1946, 67 per cent; and in April 1947, 72 per cent.39

(c) Approval of divided government. Perhaps the crowning blow to those who seek 'responsible parties' is the evidence available about the public's willingness to have divided government. In a Minnesota Poll survey in 1954, it was asked, 'Suppose it develops, after the November elections, that the country's going to be run for the next two years by a Republican President and a Democratic Congress. As you see it, would that be a good thing or a bad thing for the country ?' Forty-six

37 Devine, The Political Culture of the United States, p. 174. 38 Gallup Opinion Index, No. 40 (1968), p. 27. 39 Devine, The Political Culture of the United States, p. 175.













2I8 DENNIS 2I8 DENNIS 2I8 DENNIS

per cent answered that it would be a bad thing as against 33 per cent who said it would be a good thing. In the following year, a similar question was asked by the Minnesota Poll, and 36 per cent said divided government is bad as against 44 per cent who said it is good. In 1958, in another Minnesota Poll, 37 per cent said good and 28 per cent bad. In 1959, Gallup posed this question and found that 45 per cent said divided government is good while 35 per cent said bad.40 In other words, since 1955, if these data are indicative, more have preferred divided government at the national level than have opposed it. There is therefore not great support for the idea of party cohesion in this sense either.

Putting these various strands of evidence together, we could say that little public support has existed for a relatively long time for some of the central ideas of the responsible parties doctrine. People are clearly unwilling to reorient the present parties to make them more ideologically pure. They do not, on the other hand, see much difference in what the present parties stand for. Thus, the aggregate result is that the public prefers the present partisan confusion. Nor are people much attracted to the canons of party discipline, in which representatives would all conform to the same party line. And they are relatively willing to have divided government, where the presidency and Congress are controlled by opposite parties. When we add these findings to the fact that most people would be quite willing to weaken the role of the national conventions - and thus take away a great part of what little national focus the present parties may now have - we are able to see very little support for the responsible parties reforms. Obviously, these are rather fragmentary and not very up-to-date data. There may have been some dra- matic recent shift which these data do not capture. But, given the data we have in hand, we must conclude that if party system reform is desired - and our recent data suggest that it is - the public is unlikely to want it to be constructed to conform to a responsible parties blueprint.

SUMMARY

To this point I have presented a variety of available observations on what I take to be several types of most relevant indicators of support for the party system in the United States. I have paid special attention in this analysis to the trends in public opinion regarding the parties over time. Given the fragmentary nature of the available indicators, when they are considered in combination they do reveal some fairly common general tendencies. First, these data show that public support for the parties, both in historical and cross-institutional perspective, is rela-

tively weak. Attitudes toward the parties and the evaluations of the importance of the party institution show, with few exceptions, a general state of low public regard and legitimation. More importantly, even the areas such as party identification or a preference for keeping party labels on the ballot, relatively strong points of support a decade ago, have shown a significant decline since that time. The

40 These data were obtained from the International Survey Library Association, Roper Public Opinion Research Center, Williamstown, Mass. They are from Minnesota Polls I3I (October 1954), I40 (August 1955), and 177 (December 1958) and AIPO 6I6 (21 July 1950).



SUMMARY






SUMMARY







decline is greater for some aspects of public evaluations of parties than for others. But this downward trend, especially beginning in the years 1960 to 1964, is fairly uniform across the various areas that we have touched upon. There are a few exceptions to these trends - such as one aspect of contributor support, willingness to contribute money. Yet, even at the point of measurement when people are most willing to contribute, those who are positively supportive are far from a majority. Thus, the improvement here does not really offset the many other kinds of losses the party institution has suffered in public regard over the past decade.

CORRELATES OF PARTY SYSTEM SUPPORT

So far we have looked at party system support in terms of the total population's response, without regard to possible subpopulation differences or to other variables associated with party system support indicators. While I shall not try to undertake any full exploration of causal variables or other associated variables here, I think a few brief statements about the overall patterns of relationships might be in order. For this purpose, I have taken the indicators of party system support from my Wisconsin surveys and combined them in two different ways to serve as the dependent variables. The three items reported above in Figure 6 have been combined into a score of party system support that is available at all five points between 1964 and 1974 for correlation and regression analysis. These three items have been supplemented in 1972 and 1974 by three additional items that measure support for the parties in terms of perceived party system performance (see Table 3 above), individual efficacy in relation to the institution (see Table 5), and desire for reform or maintenance of the party system in its present form (see Table 6B). Summing the latter three items with the three items available at all five points, we have a combined party system support score available in 1972 and I974.41

The two scores will be employed as follows. First, an analysis of the three-item score together with the independent variables available in most or all of the five Wisconsin surveys will be presented. Second, additional independent variables pertaining to general alienation and sense of relative deprivation in relation to the combined party system support score for 1972 and 1974 will be presented. Third, some general political system correlates of party system support will be discussed.

Demographic and Related Correlates of Party System Support Table 7 presents the standardized regression coefficients for social status variables, for self-image or identification variables and for frequency of religious attendance. The social status variables include educational attainment, occupational prestige, income, age, sex, race and size of place of residence. Self-image variables included are liberal/conservative ideological identification, social class identification and political party identification.

41 These six items are all fairly well related to each other at each available data point. The average value of the twenty-seven inter-item correlations (Pearson r) available in the five surveys is -38.
















TABLE 7 Demographic and Self-Image Predictors of Party System Support, Wisconsin I964-74a

(standardized regression coefficients) Predictor Variable I964 1966 1970 1972 1974

Education .20* .20* . 02 '07 '05 Occupationb .02 -07 -o6 -06 '03 Income .02 -14* '07 .02 '03

Age -.I2* 04 -'04 *i6* '15* Sex (F)e -'02 -03 -'04 -o0I -o01 Race (W)d '03 -oI - -09* 0-oo Size of place -04 - 07 -00oo -03 Religious attendance -02 '03 .oI . 02 '04 Liberal/conservative identificatione -'09 -04 - *02 '03 Party identificationf .oo '03 0oI 02 -'07 Social class identification - - - .o* -03

R2 = *o8 07 '02 '05 '03 n= 702 607 619 841 916

* Significant at -oi level or better. a The three-item, party system support score is the dependent variable. b Occupational prestige is scored according to the Otis Dudley Duncan scale. See his contributions

to Albert J. Reiss, Jr., Occupations and Social Status (New York: Free Press, I961). c Females scored I, males scored o. d Whites scored I, blacks scored o. e Strong conservative scored 7, strong liberal scored I. f Strong Republican scored 6, strong Democrat scored o.





R2 = *o8 07 '02 '05 '03 n= 702 607 619 841 916







R2 = *o8 07 '02 '05 '03 n= 702 607 619 841 916



In general, we find relatively little of the total variance in party system support accounted for by these various predictor variables. One could say that party system support is not greatly affected by any of these factors. But there are a few

significant relationships (at the -oI level of significance or better). Education shows significant associations in the first two surveys, income in the second, age in the first and last two, race and class identification in 1972, and liberal/conservative ideology in 1964. On the other hand, size of place, religious attendance, sex and party identification never reach the assigned level of significance in their direct effects.

Age is perhaps the most interesting of the associated variables in that, in 1964, the younger the person, the more supportive he or she was likely to be. But this

relationship was reversed in 1972 and I974. In the latter years the older respondents were more likely to be supportive of the party system.

We note also that when the party identification index is folded (scored for in-

tensity of identification while ignoring direction) the relationship of age (P) is reduced to -I2 and 'og for 1972 and 1974 respectively. The Pf weights for in-

tensity of party identification become -17 and '23 respectively.42 This, by the way, 42 Zero-order Pearson coefficients for intensity of political party identification versus the three-

item party system support scale are:

1964 1966 1970 1972 1974

*20 '14 '17 '20 '25









1964 1966 1970 1972 1974

*20 '14 '17 '20 '25









1964 1966 1970 1972 1974

*20 '14 '17 '20 '25




is a fairly constant relationship over time: ps for intensity of party identification for 1964, I966 and 1970 are .22, '15 and *I7 respectively. We should bear in mind, however, that intensity of party identification is conceived here as simply another indicator of party system support. But what we find does suggest the possibility that, in recent years, the reinforcement effects of aging may, through normal life- cycle reinforcement of partisan allegiance, affect people's store of goodwill toward the party system, at least marginally. We would of course want to see further data from subsequent years before attributing great significance to these relationships or before saying whether or not this is truly an aging effect and not a genera- tional phenomenon. But these data are at least suggestive of some directions for further exploration.

The Relation of Deprivation and Alienation to Party System Support In I972 and 1974 I was able to include a larger battery of independent variables as well as additional party support items. I focused especially upon the concept of relative deprivation and developed various measures designed to tap several dimensions of relative gratification or deprivation.43 I also included questions designed to get at two aspects of general alienation or non-alienation: sense of internal or external control, and trust in people or misanthropy.44

The assumption was that people's own sense of well-being would be related to their evaluations of political institutions: that they would be likely to translate a general sense of frustration into political terms, including how they might feel about the party system. I also assumed that their more direct experiences with these institutions would affect their evaluations of them. In addition, their evaluation of the political system more generally should carry over to relative approval of particular institutions such as the parties. Let us take the first of these, sense of gratification (deprivation) and integration (alienation), and then deal with the political system correlates of party system support afterwards.

We see in Table 8 that the deprivation/gratification variables show a number of significant relationships, when controlling for a great many other independent variables including the demographic and self-image variables shown above in Table 7. Three relative gratification variables show up here reasonably well. One is the measure that I have termed 'general fraternal gratification', another is 'fraternal power gratification', and the third is called 'negative reference group gratification'. Let us look briefly at each of these.

One may distinguish among several possible types of self-perception of relative deprivation or gratification. First, consider the criterion of point of reference. A person may have a sense of well-being or deprivation either from comparing where she or he stands in relation to her or his own goals and past accomplish-

43 I will deal with these variables in greater detail in a subsequent work with Leonard Berkowitz.

44 For discussion of various measures of general and political alienation, see Ada Finifter, ed., Alienation and the Social System (New York: Wiley, 1972). The construction of the three measures of general alienation that I used were reported in the original (1974 APSA) version of this paper.


















TABLE 8 Predictors of Party System Support, Wisconsin I972 and 1974a

(standardized regression coefficients)

Predictor Variable I972 1974

Demographic Size of place .02 -.02 Age .IO* '13* Education '04 '04 Occupational prestige .oo -02 Income -0oo '03 Sex -05 -02 Race -.02 '03 Religious attendance '02 'o6

Self-Image Social class identification o05 -o07 Political party identification -0oI -o06 Liberal/conservative ideological identification '05 '0I

Deprivation/Gratification Absolute gratification -'03 *02 General fraternal gratification '17* '14* Fraternal power gratification *16* II* Negative reference group gratification .IO* .II* Income gratificationb '04 '05 Social status gratification -0o5 02 Social class gratification -'02 '02

Alienation Internal control A -06 -04 Internal control B .09* -o6 Trust in people '06 '07

R2= 'I7 .12 n= 841 916

* Significant at -05 level or better. a The combined party system support score is the dependent variable. b Different items were used in 1972 and 1974.

ments (self-anchored or absolute gratification or deprivation), or from comparing her or his own position with how well other people are doing (relative egoistic gratification or deprivation), or from comparing how well her or his reference

group is faring in relation to other groups (relative fraternal gratification). For the last of these, other groups may serve as either positive or negative points of reference. In other words, fraternal comparisons could be made with either positive or negative reference groups; and one's relative sense of well-being could be measured in either terms, therefore. In addition, we might distinguish among several types of content of gratification or deprivation. Social, economic and political frustrations or satisfactions are readily included, as is a more general cate-








R2= 'I7 .12 n= 841 916











R2= 'I7 .12 n= 841 916







gory which is unspecified according to any of these three types of content. Furthermore, within the social well-being category, one might also subspecify satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one's social class position from more general feelings about the respect and social recognition accorded to one without specific reference to various kinds of social distinctions or statuses that one occupies.

Now the three types of significant relationships that we find include relative gratification variables that make use of these distinctions. In all three cases, the type of relative gratification involved is fraternal. The first is general fraternal gratification; this means that, if people feel that persons like themselves are doing relatively well in life, they are more likely to evaluate the party system positively. Similarly, if they feel that other groups do not have more political influence than their own group (or, if they do perceive that other groups have greater influence, they think that this is legitimate), then they are more supportive of the parties. And, thirdly, if they do not feel particularly aggrieved that other groups (than their own reference group[s]) are getting more than their share of money, social recognition and attention from the government, then they are more party system supportive.45 These three variables, along with age (discussed earlier), seem to hold the greatest promise for explanations among those available of relative institutional support.

This of course leaves aside the direct experiences that people may have with the parties and with the political system. We have already seen that the public perception of political party system performance is rather negative. And we have built performance into our combined party system support measure, given its relatively high association with the other measures. A further question, however, concerns the relationship of party system support to feelings about the wider political system. Let us turn to that question.

Political System Evaluations as Correlates of Party System Support As Easton has distinguished, a political system has at least three levels in the most general sense. One is the political community or division of political labor shared in common among a people. Second is the regime or system of government, especially the goals, norms of behavior and basic structures that define the nature of the system or the form of government. Third is the level of the governing authorities. The latter might be further subdivided for present purposes into leaders - the people who occupy the chief governmental offices - and the policies or programs which these leaders provide or promote.

Now a number of measures of public feeling about these various system objects have been included in Wisconsin surveys, especially in those conducted in I972 and I974. Table 9 presents the Pearson r correlations of a number of these measures with the combined party system support score.

What we see in Table 9 is that party system evaluations are definitely connected to feelings about various aspects of the broader political system. People who exhibit a strong sense of belonging to the American national community, who are

45 The construction of the gratification (deprivation) measures is reported in the original ( 974 APSA) version of this paper.


















TABLE 9 Political System Evaluation Correlates of Combined Political Party System Support Score, Wisconsin I972 and 1974

(Pearson r) 1972 I974

(n= 841) (n= 916)



(n= 841) (n= 916)



(n= 841) (n= 916)

(a) 'The way this country is going, I feel I don't really belong here.' (reversed)

(b) 'One of the things I am most proud of about America is its system of government.'

(c) 'How much confidence do you have in... the federal government ?'

(d) 'Many basic changes should be made in the way this country is organized if we are ever to achieve liberty and justice for all.' (reversed)

(e) 'We need to change fundamentally the way our governmental system presently operates.' (reversed)

(f) 'One basic change that we need in our society is in the kinds of people who make the most important decisions.' (reversed)

(g) 'Many of the existing policies and programs of the government at all levels need to be revised immediately.' (reversed)















?*8 '17

.27 ' 29

nla '37

nia '35

nia '32

nla '33

n/a '33

?*8 '17

.27 ' 29

nla '37

nia '35

nia '32

nla '33

n/a '33

?*8 '17

.27 ' 29

nla '37

nia '35

nia '32

nla '33

n/a '33

proud of the American system of government, who have confidence in the federal government, who prefer not to change the present system of government (regime), who are content with both present governmental performance or, more specifically, who are content with both present governmental leadership and policy, are more likely to be highly supportive of the political party system.

The Centrality of Parties in Public Evaluations of Political Institutions

Furthermore, not only is this connection relatively strong between evaluations of the parties and of the wider political system, but the 1974 Wisconsin survey provides evidence that the parties constitute a central object in defining attitudinal dimensions of institutional evaluation that are general across institutions. These dimensions include institutional performance, individual efficacy in relation to the institution, institutional maintenance or reform, and simple trust or confidence in the institution. The relative position of the parties on these dimensions is shown in Table Io, which reproduces a small portion of a quite voluminous (163 variable, 34 factor) principal component analysis.

The table shows that evaluations of the political parties are weighted at the very top on three of these institutional evaluation dimensions and second highest on a fourth. Only for the two 'power' dimensions is party weighted low; but it does load on both dimensions. Thus, while the parties exhibit low levels of public support relative to other institutions (as we have seen above), they are nevertheless, on this evidence, at the center of people's sentiments about political institutions. The parties are therefore perhaps a vital organ of the body politic, if a diseased one, in terms of public support and legitimation. In this sense, the institution is a











TABLE I The Centrality of Party in Dimensions of Evaluation of Political Institutions, Wisconsin I974

Portion of Rotated Factor Matrix*

(component weights) Supreme Political Interest Federal admin.

Components Congress Court Presidency parties Elections groups agencies

I. Institutional Performance 'How much good for people like yourself has - done?' -62 40 -62 -68 '59 *46 '46

II. Individual Efficacy 'How much of a say do people like yourself have about -65 .72 *66 75 .63 *6i *68 what - does ?'

III. Institutional Confidence 'How much confidence do you have in --?' 46 "40 *41 *70 53 -68 -68

IV. Institutional Maintenance 'To what degree do you think - should be kept as '73 .63 *62 *67 "57 .46 56 it is or changed?'

V. Institutional Power I -i8 . 26 17 '52 '51 '74 '77 Institutional Power 2 '77 '69 .17 .38 .22 '05 '17

'How powerful is ?'

* Relevant weights on each component are arranged across the rows of this table.










'How powerful is ?'











'How powerful is ?'


tN o o

a

41

I

t

I

tN o o

a

41

I

t

I

tN o o

a

41

I

t

I

to tab to tab to tab




most significant one because of the centrally defining place it occupies in public perceptions of and dispositions toward the structures of government in general.

CONCLUSION

What we have found is that the American party system has undergone a marked erosion of its legitimacy among members of the mass public in the past ten to fifteen years. In several respects such support has moved to dangerously low levels. This shift should be seen in both historical and cross-institutional perspective. The state of party system legitimation has, within the span of measurement, never been very high on any of the available indicators, and it suffers by comparison with other institutions. Whatever growth of favorable sentiment had occurred before I960 has become seriously diminished since that time. Were electorally derived indicators our only way of measuring these changes, these shifts would not be so apparent. But when we bring to bear a variety of questions asked about the party system per se, then we see broad confirmation of the infer- ences drawn by several recent observers from the more limited, electoral indicators.

Only in a few cases - notably in public willingness to contribute small sums to

party campaign funds and in the small increase in the association between party identification and votes in non-gubernatorial state and local elections - do we discover any evidence offsetting the general trend. Indeed, if we sum up the cases where we have shown unfavorable trends against the parties, we find seventeen such instances. By contrast, only three counter trends were discovered; and three cases were presented where the data showed no very clear trend in either direction. The evidence for recent party system delegitimation in America is therefore over-

whelming.

The Parties and Watergate One conclusion implicit in these findings is that the loss of public support and the

generally low institutional status of the parties is not simply a function of the

Watergate crisis. Watergate and its attendant loss of public confidence in the President and in government, and the rise in general alienation, have been simply one more blow in what was already a deteriorating condition.46 Our data demon- strate that the decline of public esteem for the parties has been a longer-term phenomenon, which began well before Watergate and even before the Vietnam War protest period. These great events and the inability of the parties to make

significant inputs to their resolution no doubt hastened the decay of public favor. But such effects are only part of a more general pattern.

Perhaps one final datum demonstrates as simply as any the point that Water-

gate did not seriously affect the course of political party legitimacy. One of my 46 Recent Harris data confirm the rise in general alienation among the mass public in the

period of Watergate: Question: 'I want to read you some things some people have told us they have felt from time to

time. Do you tend to feel or not feel - (read list)?' See page 227 for footnote table.


CONCLUSION




whelming.










CONCLUSION




whelming.












questions, asked in four recent surveys, concerns simple trust or confidence in the institution of party and in other institutions of the American political system. This

question has been variously worded, but the result is almost invariably the same. This is shown in Table I overleaf.

The general population has, as measured by this inquiry, relatively little confidence in the parties in comparison with other institutions. The two U.S. samples were taken in Fall 1972 and Fall 1973, before and after the Watergate crisis began to take hold of public consciousness.47 The big change here is of course for the presidency, which drops from 41 per cent to 24 per cent choosing it as the institution in which they have greatest confidence. The parties, which are already almost without support here, do not benefit at all by the presidency's losses.

47 Two Harris surveys illustrate the difference at the two points. A Harris release of 19 October 1972, entitled, 'Majority Dismiss Watergate and G.O.P. Fund Charges', showed that, 'by 50 to 25 per cent, the voters did not feel that White House aides ordered the bugging'. By an even more substantial 66 to 16 per cent, nearly two in every three voters also did not believe that 'President Nixon was involved or had knowledge of the Watergate affair'. On 30 April 1973, a Harris poll release entitled '63 Per Cent Feel White House Has Not Told Truth about Watergate' provided the following information about the distribution of public sentiment: 'By a margin of 63 to 9 per cent the American people feel that the "White House has not been frank and honest on the Watergate affair" but "has withheld important information about it".'

'The trend on whether the President "personally knew about Watergate" shows a sharp fall- off in the number who express confidence the Chief Executive was not involved: "Do you feel that President Nixon personally knew about the attempt to wiretap Democratic headquarters or not?"'

Percentage of voters Sept. 1972 Oct. 1972 April 1973

Nixon knew II 16 32 He did not know 66 66 34 Not sure 23 I8 34















Table for footnote 46. Percentage of voters agreeing

1966 1972 1973 1974

I. 'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' 45 68 76 79 2. 'Special interests get more from the govern- n/a n/a 74 78

ment than the people do.' 3. 'The tax laws are written to help the rich, not n/a 74 74 75

the average man.' 4. 'The people running the country don't really 26 50 55 63

care what happens to you.' 5. 'Most elective officials are in politics for all n/a n/a 60 62

they personally can get out of it for themselves.'

6. 'What you think doesn't count much any- 37 53 6i 60 more.'

7. 'You feel left out of things going on around 9 25 29 32 you.'

Source: 'Public Disaffection at Record High', The Harris Survey, released 27 June I974.


1966 1972 1973 1974










1966 1972 1973 1974












TABLE I I Public Confidence in the Political Parties, U.S. 1972 and 1973, and Wisconsin 1970 and I974



(A) U.S. I972 and 1973 Question: 'Which part of the government on the list do you most often trust to do what's right

[Congress, Supreme Court, President or Political Parties] ?'

(per cent) 1972 I973

Congress 31'7 35-8 Supreme Court 25'5 39'2 President 41'4 23'7 Political Parties I'4 I'3

(B) Wisconsin I970 and 1974

Question: ' Which one on this card do you have greatest faith and confidence will do what is right ?' (per cent, n = 619)

1970

The U.S. Supreme Court 15 The President 32 The U.S. Congress 26 The national political parties I The people who vote in national elections 14 The nationally organized interest groups 4 None 2 Don't know 5 Not ascertained I

Question: 'Now how much faith and confidence would you say you had in each of these to do what is right? Using this scale (show card), where "i" means no confidence at all and "7" means complete confidence, how much confidence do you have in ... the Political Parties ?'

(per cent, n = 9 6) 1974

No confidence at all i 7 2 9

3 I9 4 34 5 16 6 8

Complete confidence 7 3 Not ascertained 4

(C) Comparisons with other institutions, Wisconsin 1974: mean ratings X

Congress 4'6 Supreme Court 4'8 Presidency 4'3 Political parties 3'8 Elections 4'3 Interest groups 3'7 Federal administrative agencies 4-1







1970



(per cent, n = 9 6) 1974


3 I9 4 34 5 16 6 8










1970



(per cent, n = 9 6) 1974


3 I9 4 34 5 16 6 8







In the Wisconsin data, this effect is reproduced even when a longer list of institutions is used. In I970 (Table I IB) the parties are seen to be firmly in last place in any contest for public trust; in 1974 (Table I C) they are threatened only by political interest groups in the competition for least trusted institution. Taken together, these various strands of evidence suggest that Watergate did not substantially worsen the situation for the parties. That situation was already relatively dismal in cross-institutional context. And, in terms of relative percentages, the 1974 Wisconsin data show that 35 per cent place themselves at the negative end of the confidence scale (options 1-3), whereas only 27 per cent are found at the positive end (options 5-7) in their ratings of the parties.

The findings on institutional trust merely confirm what we have found again and again as we have laid out the available data on public dispositions toward the parties. Reformers of campaign financing, internal party representativeness, rules and procedures, or those who are stimulated by Watergate to do something more generally about 'the condition of our political parties', should take account of the harsh fact of low public legitimation of the institution. The data suggest that the mass base of institutional support is especially weak at this time; and this condition is worsening with each passing year. A mighty effort will therefore be required to re-establish for the parties the modicum of confidence and commitment that they once enjoyed, even a decade ago. Without such effort, we may be called upon in the not so distant future to witness the demise of a once prominent institution of American government and politics. At the very least, it is clear that this structure of mass representation and competition now commands only a small store of public adulation, which is in process of becoming smaller.

The implications of a substantially attenuated role of political parties in American politics in future years are not as yet completely clear. At the least, one would expect some major institutional adjustments to occur to take over the functions that parties presumably now perform. So far as representation of demands of the mass public is concerned, one might anticipate the development of alternative institutions - for example, more general purpose political interest groups. Some present interest group organizations might provide the basis for building such an alternative mechanism, such as Common Cause, The People's Lobby of California, the League of Women Voters or possibly the complex of organizations comprised by Ralph Nader's consumer protection and associated agencies.

On the side of recruitment, selection and socialization of leader candidates, we already observe a marked incapacity of the parties to perform these functions in any comprehensive way in the American system. Candidates are very often self- recruited and self-selected; and they are able with increasing frequency to build personal bases of electoral support and also their own campaign organizations, without more than symbolic reference to the wishes and participation of the party organizations. One might expect this sui generis tendency of American candidates to become accelerated as the parties progress toward a state of vestigiality.

Now both kinds of changes, as well as others, such as toward a more comprehensive application of nonpartisan elections, could have some short-term, dys- functional systemic effects. Without even the present availability of party resources














in campaigns for public office, many potential candidacies would be prevented, particularly for those who on other grounds lack a secure financial base. The present movement toward government funding of campaigns for higher-level offices would ameliorate these effects somewhat, but such reforms would not necessarily prevent this result if the wider malaise of the parties continued.

Considering the situation of the voter, one might guess that, without the development of considerably greater sophistication than now exists (even taking into account the upsurge of the American public's aggregate level of issue aware- ness and ideological consciousness of the past decade - as indicated in recent work on electoral behavior), mass confusion at the polls could be the immediate result of the removal of party as a voting cue and thus as the basis of a benchmark orientation. So far as public interest representation is concerned, the problem of replacing parties with general interest groups is the quite traditional one that people's interests could become even more unequally represented in the centers of power than they already are.

What this adds up to, at least in the short term, is the high probability of stress on other aspects of the political system should the parties fail. Whatever adapta- tions are made to take up the slack in the system, there are likely to be relatively immediate shocks on the process of recruiting and choosing leaders, on organizing elections and upon the capacity of the system to represent effectively the wants of ordinary people.

Research on these questions is of course still at a very early stage. We have yet to give a fully satisfactory description of these changes - much less a good account of the antecedent or consequent variables. Given the possible implications for the real world political system of these changes, perhaps scholarship in this area will now be accelerated.











trends in public support for the american party system

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