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This is a guest post by University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket. He blogs regularly at Mischiefs of Faction and Pacific Standard and tweets at @smotus.
Seemingly every day, we are told that American political parties are fragmented, divided, and weak. Many recent journalistic accounts describe the Republican Party, in particular, as “badly divided.” Matt Bai, at least, also sees an ideological war going on within the Democratic Party, which has, in his words, “veered back toward its more populist and pacifist instincts, venting its suspicion of the emerging military-digital complex, along with outright contempt for the wealthy and for conservatives generally.”
I think this characterization isn’t quite right. Today’s Democratic and Republican parties aren’t so much fragmented as networked. Here is what that means.
American political parties have become much more complex in recent decades. The demise of those political machines and the rise of the civil service meant that party leaders couldn’t just hand out public jobs to their supporters; they had to attract volunteer labor from ideological activists, which became easier as the parties moved toward the ideological extremes. Campaign finance laws prevented prominent party leaders from handing sufficient funds to their preferred candidates. Money is now raised in small amounts from a wider range of donors and coordinated across many different organizations.
The modern American party is a network in this sense: It is a collection of different sorts of political actors — candidates, officeholders, activists, major donors, media figures, and others — working together to determine who gets nominated for office and thus what direction the government moves. These different actors are connected to each other in a variety of ways, including the exchange of information and the transfer of campaign money, all of which involve picking candidates and backing them at the presidential, congressional, or local level.
Are the formal party leaders, such as congressional leaders or the chairs of the DNC and RNC, as powerful as they once were? Probably not, because the parties don’t have the sort of top-down organizational structure that they once did. But that doesn’t mean that the parties are weaker or fractured. It just means that their organizational decisions occur as more of a dialogue (or a debate) than a diktat.
Now, it is entirely possible that a party network may be more prone to extremism than a party hierarchy. Ideological activists play a much larger role in the modern party system, and many candidates now come from their ranks.
Yet just because a networked party may be more extreme doesn’t make it any less effective. What’s more, trying to fix a party by running more resources through the traditional leaders isn’t likely to change much. Routing campaign money through the formal parties instead of outside groups, as Pildes suggests, may well help to improve the traceability of money, but it won’t disempower the outsiders.
Right now, groups and individuals seeking influence channel campaign donations through complex funding networks because that’s the only way the law allows them to do it. If the law allowed them to donate vast sums directly through the formal parties, they would do so that way. The resulting party networks might give the appearance of less fragmentation, but it’s not like the groups and individuals driving polarization would be removed from the equation. In general, the network structure is highly adaptable to changes in rules, and the groups and activists that are part of the network today aren’t likely to surrender their influence very easily.
