In This Chapter

Chapter Outline

Political Parties and Elections

1. In modern history, political parties have been the chief points of contact between governments and groups and forces in society. By organizing political parties, social forces attempt to gain some control over government policies and personnel.

Parties and Elections Have Been Vital to American Politics and Government

1. Political parties are organizations seeking to influence the government by electing their members to important government offices. Parties can be distinguished from interest groups on the basis of their orientation. A party seeks to control the entire government by electing its members to office and thereby controlling the government’s personnel. Interest groups usually accept government and its personnel as a given and try to influence government policies through them.
2. Political parties as they are known today developed along with the expansion of suffrage and actually took their shape from the electoral process.
3. Parties are important in the electoral process for recruiting and nominating candidates for office.
4. Parties help mobilize voters.
5. Political parties help to organize Congress. Congressional leadership and the committee system are both products of the two-party system.
6. The president serves as an informal party head by seeking support from congressional members of the party and by supporting their bids for re-election.

America Is One of the Few Nations with a Two-Party System

1. In a two-party system, only two parties have a realistic opportunity to compete effectively for control of the government.
2. Typically, the national electoral arena has been dominated by one party for a period of roughly thirty years. At the conclusion of this period, the dominant party has been replaced by a new party in an electoral realignment (the point in history when a new party supplants the ruling party, becoming in turn the dominant political force). Each of theseperiods is referred to as a “party system.”
3. The Democratic Party originated when the Jeffersonian party splintered into four factions in 1824, and Andrew Jackson emerged as the leader of one of these four groups.
4. The Republican Party grew as antislavery groups formed a new party to oppose the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.
5. The United States has experienced five realigning eras, which occur when the established political elite weakens sufficiently to permit the creation of new coalitions of forces capable of capturing and holding the reins of government.
6. American third parties have always represented social and economic protests ignored by the other parties, despite the fact that the United States is said to have a two-party system.
7. Third-party prospects for winning elections are hampered by America’s single-member-district plurality election system. In this system, an electorate is allowed to select only one representative from each district, the normal method of representation in the United States.
8. Individuals tend to form psychological ties with parties; these ties are called party identification. This identification often follows demographic, ideological, and regional lines.

Voters Decide Based on Party, Issues, and Candidate

1. Three factors influence voters’ decisions at the polls: party, issues, and candidate.
2. Party loyalty predisposes voters in favor of their party’s candidates and against those of the opposing party.
3. Issues and policy preferences are a second factor influencing voters’ choices at the polls. Voters may cast their ballots for the candidate whose position on issues they believe to be closest to their own. The impact of issues and policy preferences on electoral choice is diminished if competing candidates do not differ substantially or do not focus their campaigns on policy matters.
4. Candidates’ attributes and personality characteristics always influence voters’ decisions. The more important candidate characteristics that affect voters’ choices include race, ethnicity, religion, gender, geography, and social background. Voters also pay attention to candidates’ personality characteristics.
5. The salience of these three bases of electoral choice—party, issues, and candidate—varies from contest to contest and from voter to voter.
6. Although the United States has developed a system of universal suffrage, the percentage of eligible individuals who actually vote in America, or turnout, is very low. The low turnout is related to complex election regulations, including registration rules, and party strength.

The Electoral Process Has Many Levels and Rules

1. The following types of elections are held broadly in the United States: primary elections, general elections, and runoff elections.
2. Primary elections are elections used to select each party’s candidates for the general election. In a closed primary, only registered members of a political party may vote in a primary election to select that party’s candidates. Some states have open primaries, in which all registered voters are allowed to decide on the day of the primary in which party’s primary they will participate.
3. The primary is followed by the general election—the decisive electoral contest. The winner of the general election is elected to office for a specified term.
4. The referendum process is the practice of referring a measure proposed or passed by a legislature to the vote of the electorate for approval or rejection.
5. The recall is an electoral device that allows voters to remove public officials from office by popular vote prior to the expiration of their terms.
6. Americans do not vote directly for presidential candidates. Rather, they choose electors who are pledged to support a party’s presidential candidate.

Money Is the Mother’s Milk of Politics

1. Campaign funds in the United States are provided by small direct-mail contributions, large gifts, PACs, political parties, candidates’ personal resources, and public funding.
2. Campaign finance is regulated by the Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1971. The McCain-Feingold bill, a bipartisan attempt to restrict soft money contributions and issues advocacy, was passed by Congress in 2002.
3. The role played by private money in American politics affects the relative power of social groups. As a result, less affluent groups have considerably less power in the political system.