Why Parties Matter: Political Competition and Democracy in the American South (Chicago Studies in American Politics) - Hardcover

Aldrich, John H.; Griffin, John D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022649523X ISBN 13: 9780226495231

Verlag: The University of Chicago Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Since the founding of the American Republic, the North and South have followed remarkably different paths of political development. Among the factors that have led to their divergence throughout much of history are differences in the levels of competition among the political parties. While the North has generally enjoyed a well-defined two-party system, the South has tended to have only weakly developed political parties—and at times no system of parties to speak of.

With Why Parties Matter, John H. Aldrich and John D. Griffin make a compelling case that competition between political parties is an essential component of a democracy that is responsive to its citizens and thus able to address their concerns. Tracing the history of the parties through four eras—the Democratic-Whig party era that preceded the Civil War; the post-Reconstruction period; the Jim Crow era, when competition between the parties virtually disappeared; and the modern era—Aldrich and Griffin show how and when competition emerged between the parties and the conditions under which it succeeded and failed. In the modern era, as party competition in the South has come to be widely regarded as matching that of the North, the authors conclude by exploring the question of whether the South is poised to become a one-party system once again with the Republican party now dominant.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John H. Aldrich is the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke University. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. John D. Griffin is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and coauthor of Minority Report.

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Why Parties Matter

Political Competition and Democracy in the American South

By John H. Aldrich, John D. Griffin

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-49523-1

Contents

List of Tables, 
List of Figures, 
Part 1 Why Parties Matter, 
1 "Except in the South", 
2 Political Parties, Electoral Competition, and Effective Democratic Governance, 
Part 2 The Exceptional South, 
3 Democratic-Whig Parties in the Jacksonian Era, 
4 Parties in the Post-Reconstruction Era, 
5 Parties in the Jim Crow South, 
6 The Southern Turn to Republicanism, 
Part 3 The Democratic Fruits of Party Competition, 
7 Party Systems and Electoral Competition, 
8 Competitive Party Systems and Democratic Responsiveness, 
9 Competitive Party Systems and Democratic Effectiveness, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"Except in the South"

The South has long differed from the North in the United States, a set of differences that were already deeply rooted over the century and a half between the arrival of the British to the American colonies and the founding of the American Republic. The South had the same federal Constitution, of course, and the differences in state constitutions and governmental organizations between North and South were slight (Thorpe 1909). Indeed, even upon secession, the eleven states that formed the Confederacy adopted a constitution remarkably similar to the one from which they were seceding (Coulter 1950, 23; Jenkins 1999). Yet the paths of southern and northern political development after the founding differed dramatically, as secession attests.

The Party System, Elections, and Race

The most obvious regional difference in politics over much of the nation's history was that the North generally enjoyed a well-defined two-party system. In contrast, the South has had more weakly developed parties, as was true during the Democrat-Whig party era (1836–52), or, often, no "system" of parties at all, as was true during most of the Jim Crow era. The southern "party system" most often consisted of a single political party, and even that one party was typically not very well organized. For example, during the Confederacy, there were no political parties at all (one of the few major differences between the constitutions of the Union and the Confederacy). After Reconstruction and what southerners then called "Redemption," that is, when the southern white Democrats retook power, the South had a single-party system. From about 1900 to 1965, it was a lily-white southern Democratic Party, with much of the action concentrated in whites-only primaries. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were enacted and desegregation and Jim Crow ended, the Republican Party was not able to begin to make real inroads into the South, outside of presidential elections, for another fifteen years. Not until about 1980, that is, did a genuine two-party system develop in the South, and that development took even longer to mature. It wasn't until 2012 that the Republican Party was finally able to win unified majority control in North Carolina for the first time since Reconstruction, an event that sounded one final death note to the "solid South."

This macro view of the absence of a competitive two-party system in the South has some exceptions, exceptions that we exploit in these pages. One period is the 1830s to 1850s in which the (Jacksonian) Democratic Party and the Whig Party competed in both the North and the South. This nascent two-party system collapsed, primarily due to the failure of the Whig Party in 1852–54. That failure was owing in large part to the fact that the regional division of the Whigs proved simply too large to survive as the slave issue grew in importance during and after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). Once the Republicans emerged as the new alternative major party to the Democrats in the nation, the old two-party system in which both parties consisted of interregional alliances was gone. The Republicans were exclusively a northern party, and the South refused to be a part of a national two-party system that included a party that could win national majorities entirely without them.

Once more, at the end of Reconstruction, there was potential in the South for a two-party system, most prominently for an alliance between the remnants of the Reconstruction-era Republican Party (victorious as long as former Confederates were excluded from voting) and the emerging Populist Party. Such a coalition would tie together the remaining Republicans, especially the freed slaves, and poor whites who might well benefit from such an alliance and form an electoral majority. But more well-off white Democrats fought back (in some cases literally), re-disenfranchised former slaves, effectively sweeping a good number of poor whites out of the electorate along with them. In doing so, they enshrined a one-party system as a key piece in forging the Jim Crow South.

That these two different moments of at least potential two-party-ism in the South failed, and failed so spectacularly, as planter and middle-class white southerners first seceded and then essentially subverted democracy (or at least the intention of the Civil War Amendments) indicates just how large were the stakes involved — and how fragile the near successes of full-bodied, competitive mass party politics proved to be.

The great scholar of southern political parties, V. O. Key Jr., in his masterpiece, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), believed that the solid Democratic South was not even so much as a one-party system in the late Jim Crow era. He believed that, at least in the states (but not in the nation), the South instead "has no parties" (1949, 299) at all. And, he believed, the absence of a competitive multiparty system was closely associated with the complete failure of democracy in the South.

In our view, white southern Democrats were seeking to solve a difficult political problem. How could they win elections consistently, over a long period of time in a majoritarian electoral system, when they constituted no more than a minority? The strategy they chose was simple — subvert democracy. In particular, they chose to subvert the ability of any actual or potential competing political party to form and endure in opposition to the Democratic Party. In this, at least in the Jim Crow era, they chose a structure that looks a lot like an authoritarian political system using a single party as a vehicle for enforcing their authority on the public, albeit one embedded within a national democratic system (e.g., Garreton 1995; Lawson 2000; Mickey 2015).

The southern Democrat Party differed from its northern branch in many ways throughout the first two hundred years of the nation. In the post–World War II era, and especially the civil rights era, southern Democrats acted both in the state and in the nation very differently from their northern counterparts. Nationally, they voted differently, they fought to block much of the agenda of their own party, and they presented a picture of democratic politics in which political parties communicated extraordinarily diffuse signals about what they stood for to the public (except on Jim Crowism). By the 1960s, for example, the Democratic Party was the champion of civil rights for African Americans, and leaders of the southern Democratic Party stood in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022649523X
• ISBN 13: 9780226495231
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland