Episode 4: Where Did Political Parties Come From?

Welcome to New America’s new podcast, Democracy Deciphered. This podcast untangles the complex threads of today’s political landscape through real-time and historical analysis. 

What are the origins of political parties in the United States? How have they changed over time? Experts Lee Drutman of New America and Didi Kuo of Stanford University join us on this episode to discuss the evolving roles of political parties in America’s history and future.

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Transcript

Shannon Lynch: In his 1796 farewell address, President George Washington cautioned citizens of a young nation, warning them that political parties are, quote, "likely to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government."

In 2024, the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study that revealed nearly half of Americans believed members of the opposite party aren't just bad for our government, but that they are, quote, downright evil. Despite Washington's warning nearly 230 years ago, political parties have come to steer nearly every aspect of American government.

How did we get here and how might the party system change in years to come? Welcome to Democracy Deciphered the podcast where we analyze the history, present and future of American democracy. I'm your host, Shannon Lynch. Today's episode is about political parties.

I'm excited to be joined by two incredible experts on this topic. First, we have Lee Drutman, senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. Drutman is the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. He's the co-host of the podcast Politics in Question and a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies. Drutman writes regularly for FiveThirtyEight and has published numerous pieces in The New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, NBC Think and Foreign Policy. In 2021, Drutman was named one of Washington's most influential people by Washingtonian magazine.

Also with us today is Didi Kuo. Kuo is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She's a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and political parties. She is the author of The Great Retreat How: Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't. She's a former Eric and Wendy Schmidt, fellow at New America and is a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kuo received a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. Lee, Didi, thanks so much for being here.

Didi Kuo: Thank you, Shannon. So glad to be here.

Lee Drutman: So delighted to be having this conversation.

Shannon Lynch: Okay. Getting things started here. What did the Founding Fathers think of political parties?

Lee Drutman: Well, the Founding Fathers were of a generation that believed that political parties would be very backward. That was a big, big emphasis on coming together and not having divisions or it was a lot of stuff that the framers, founding fathers wrote about political parties being bad. However, once they actually had to govern, they decided that political parties were actually pretty useful and they formed them pretty quickly. Madison was writing somewhat against parties, and they'd be in Jefferson form a party at George Washington, who in his farewell address famously is against parties. But, you know, also with the Hamiltons really founding the one of the first political parties in the country, the Federalist Party, and Jefferson Madison from the Democratic Republican Party. So there is this sort of distinction between people who are theorizing about how government ought to work in this very unified, ordered way, and then people who are actually trying to govern and win elections, realizing that actually you kind of need political parties to make this thing called representative democracy work.

Didi Kuo: That's right. And to build on what we were saying, we really get an expansion of political parties from kind of the narrow group of people with common interests, advancing common goals in a legislature to something broader and intermediary in an era of Democratic expansion. So even though the founding fathers were wary of what factions would do to potentially increase conflict in a new country, they also realized as they eliminated property qualifications, at least for white men to vote in the early 1800s, that you needed other organizing capacities if you were going to have mass suffrage on the one hand and also representation on the other. And that's really when you got parties that, for example, promulgated like literature and newspapers to new voters that helped to mobilize new voters into elections, helped develop early campaigns. All of those aspects of parties developed as democracy itself expanded not just in the United States, but also in the other now advanced democracies.

Shannon Lynch: What were some of the early American political parties called and what interests, what common interests were they built upon?

Lee Drutman: The initial formation of the Democratic Republican Party was really in opposition to the Hamilton banking bill. And so there was this sort of an initial distinction that the Federalists were more about the Eastern banking interests and the Democratic Republicans were more about landed rural interests, although that's with some over simplification. By the 1820s, the US was a one party country with the federal was basically wiped out, which of course went to tremendous chaos in the election of 1824. Then in 1828, you have Jackson, Andrew Jackson party, which is the Democratic Party or the democracy, as they call it, which is what Dean talks about, this kind of first party of really trying to build on an expanding franchise and bring a lot of people into the process of democracy. And then you have the Whig Party organize in response as the opposition. And when we think of these parties historically, we sometimes try to impose an ideology on them. But in many ways, these parties were really not very ideological in any modern sense. They were sort of you could think of the Jacksonian Democrats as sort of this anti-establishment party more than anything and just very populist, but in a sort of incoherent way. I mean, again, the bank issue was probably the most important issue and that they were opposed to retarder in the second Bank of the United States. So they were opposed to the sort of Eastern moneyed interests and the Whigs a little bit more establishment for being cosmopolitan. But they were against in many ways. Organization and politics as well. So you have these weird sort of ideologies that are sort of against like power, but they're sort of opposed to each other. Kind of. You know, when I when I read back on these debates, it really doesn't map at all onto the modern concept of ideology part, because national politics was was not about all that much in that era.

Didi Kuo: That's right. So there were some issues that both parties differentiated themselves on banking, tariffs, slavery. But you also had smaller, somewhat ad hoc third parties that developed also in the 19th century. The Know Nothings, for example, were opposed to immigration. The Free Soil Party wanted free labor and was anti-slavery, or at least against the expansion of slavery into new territories, but basically by the era of the Jacksonian Democrats and the mid 19th century, you had what the historian Richard McCormick has called the second party system, which was not only a two party system, but also sort of the beginnings of the parties. We still have today, the Democratic and Republican parties. Like we said, they're not they don't map on to the ideological sort of bases of the parties that we have now. But what was innovative in that period was the development of democratic strategies. So the Jacksonian developed the idea of nominating candidates, presidential candidates, conventions. They developed a real system of patronage. So this anti-elitist them that we talked about was institutionalized through the practice of spoils. So every time your party won the presidency, you'd be able to give out jobs. For example, jobs in the Postal Service to people districts that had voted for you. And also they innovated forms of campaign finance where you try to finance your campaign activities either to members of the party or later in the 19th century through new industrialists giving their money to the parties. So the parties themselves were not super ideological in this time, but you get the beginnings of democratic practices that parties are still associated with today.

Shannon Lynch: Okay. So how did the Republican and Democratic parties that we know today come to be and how did they evolve over time?

Didi Kuo: This is a hard question because it spans such an enormous period of history. But the parties came to be in sort of top down and bottom up ways. They were very local for, I don't know, at least 100 years or so. You had party presence in local areas? Definitely at the state level. And a lot of times the National Party, even though you had National party offices that had kind of been established by the 19th century, a lot of times the National Party was kind of phenomenal coming together every four years to work together to elect a president. Otherwise, the party was basically composed of state level party leaders who were in charge of things like candidate recruitment and nomination and charge of running local elections and providing patronage at the state level. So even though you did have also parties in the national legislatures competing over different policies, after the Civil War, you had a much stronger association of parties with specific issues and also with different regional strength. The Democratic Party, for example, was what Rob McKee has called sort of a party of subnational authoritarianism throughout the South, where they basically controlled a lot of local offices, tamp down on local democracy. And all like free black Americans, could not participate in democracy. But the party was held loosely in coalition with Democrats and other parts of the country. The Republican Party also was a coalition of factions that may not have had broad ideological agreement, but was able to unite different cross sectional interests. And the parties changed again in the era of the New Deal, when there were a lot of new ideas about democracy in the early 20th century, when the world was fighting a host of world wars as well, It kind of led to a renegotiation of what governments should do. These would be a newly industrial economy. And also these are the citizenry that requires kind of just more administrative capacity on the part of the state. So by the time you get through the sort of populist and progressive era into the New Deal, the federal government expands its programs, its social programs, and also it's kind of administrative oversight through the New Deal that also leads to institutional changes both in Congress and also in the courts and in the presidency, all of which kind of inaugurates a democratic. Hardy that has a New Deal coalition as its base and also a Republican Party that is kind of more officially the party of somewhat more limited government, even though they didn't necessarily oppose the New Deal outright, we is probably better able to speak to the roots of contemporary political polarization. All I'll say is that by the time you get to the 1970s, a postwar era of bipartisan compromise in which the Republican and Democratic parties were often not super polarized on a lot of policy issues begins to change. So in the 1970s and 80s, you get changes both on the right and the left that lead to higher levels of polarization over time. And I will pass the baton.

Lee Drutman: I accept the baton. Right. So the 60s, 70s, there's a real shift in the political landscape. We're really it's it's a great broadening of the political landscape and a lot of issues that had previously been local and subnational issues, particularly civil rights, become national issues. There's a cultural shift that a younger generation is much more liberal. There's fights over over civil rights, over feminism. Abortion becomes a national issue, and prayer in schools becomes a national issue. And there is the transformation of the American South from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican stronghold. So you have nationalization of politics, the sorting of the political parties as things become nationalized around these culture war issues, and starting in the 90s, you have these constant knife's edge, very close national elections and. As with the very close national elections, but increasingly safe local elections, you have the Republican Party becoming more homogeneously conservative on a cultural issues and the Democratic Party becoming more homogeneously urban, liberal and some parties, separate and sort National contests are constantly close, and the stakes of national elections become extremely high stakes. And you get, you know, essentially what I consider to be a flattening of national politics. You have all these local parties and different coalitions, and you could be an Alabama Democrat in the youth in New York, Democrat. You could be a California Republican or you could be an Oklahoma Republican. These are all and or you could be a New York Republican. All these things, basically, if you're a Republican in one place, you're Republican in every place. And if you're a Democrat in one place, you're a Democrat in every place. There's no distinction between the local, the national. And that takes what had been a really multi-dimensional state multi-party system within our two party system and very much makes it a fully sorted two party system. And when you have that binary condition, you get this really intense partizan polarization, and that gets reinforced when it's the same coalition fighting back and forth election after election. And it also gets reinforced in the sense that the parties are actually incredibly internally diverse in many ways, even though they're not overlapping. And the way that the parties hold their coalitions together is to say, well, you know, we may have our disagreements, but the other side wins. That would be the end of democracy. If the other side wins, that would be the end of America. And so whatever disagreements you have, those are internally suppressed because you have a common enemy. And that drives this this dual dynamic. So I don't.

Didi Kuo: Although I should we should also add that, you know, polarization is even though it's not a recent phenomenon like polarization is always present in any party system because the parties need to differentiate themselves. It's worth noting, and Lee has definitely written about this in his book, that in the 1950s and 60s, the party system in the United States was criticized for being too often polarized, for lacking polarization. And even today, the kind of extreme partizanship that we witness, either by party elites who demonize the other party or in the electorate by people who are strong party identifiers and show a great deal of antipathy towards non partizans. It kind of masks like a great deal of cynicism about parties overall. Like most Americans say, they don't really like the parties, even those who strongly identify with one. And more and more people are identifying as political independents. A plurality of voters identify as independents. For a long time, political scientists thought that independents were just, you know, people who don't like labels, but they will pretty loyally vote for one party or the other when in reality we had lower turnout than a lot of other advanced democracies. And there's more recent evidence that shows that independent voters are more cynical about politics overall, potentially less likely to participate in politics. And and also, there's a scholar, Leighton Hirsch, who's written about political hobby ism showing that many people who are kind of the most vociferous partizans are maybe not even participating actively in politics. There's all sorts of ways you can quote unquote, engage in politics now through social media or things that feel kind of like digital activism that we don't necessarily think of as an exact replacement for traditional political activity. So I would just say that despite the fact that we have a really polarized political climate and the parties seem highly differentiated, it's also the case that more and more people are alienated by this kind of partizanship and that a lot of people who are really vocal partizans may not even be that politically involved.

Lee Drutman: Yeah, I think that's a really important point and I do want to finger that and note that the issue of people just disengaging from the political process because what they see doesn't appeal to them and they don't feel that anybody really speaks for them or represents them, creates this tremendous level of cynicism and a fundamental pattern of Democrat. Chrissy, is that when you have parties that are weak, hollow, don't have a real connection to a lot of citizens, you have a very weak and fragile democracy. And that is something that we are seeing right now in the United States. And I also want to add and to hear the point about polarization not being inherently a problem, because elections fundamentally do have to be about contrasts. So, you know, I think that the word polarization comes to stand in for a lot of things. So it is important to to be precise. And some people, some scholars have even suggested that we should use the word sectarianism to describe what's happening in our politics. That polarization doesn't really capture that the extent of polarization doesn't tell you about how people feel about each other. And so you can have people who disagree very much on the issues, but still are willing to respect each other. Whereas you can have people who don't disagree as much on the issues but just really dislike each other. And by international comparative standards, the U.S. party system has relatively modest ideological polarization. What it has is a very high level of partizan dislike, and that's where you get into this danger zone.

Shannon Lynch: Okay, understood. So both of you have kind of touched on this a bit, but can we talk a little bit more about some of the problems that a two party system presents?

Didi Kuo: We you just definitely said like a bunch of things that are problematic in the two party system today. One is just the lack of choices and the fact that two parties masks a huge set of factions and interests that are held together under the umbrella of the two party system by necessity. But in a multi-party system would have more kind of internal coherence within a party. And by that, I mean if you have like, say, even just this economic versus cultural distinction that we has discussed, then you can imagine if you look in countries in Europe, for example, that you could have parties that just represent issue areas of concern to voters like in Greens parties that are about environmental stuff or like parties that represent the interests of minorities or women, or you could have parties like the center right and center left parties that are really more differentiated on economics or on somewhat broader policy programs. So the second issue, I suppose with two parties is not only that two parties kind of mask a lot of internal heterogeneity, but also voters may not feel like they have enough choices in elections. For a while there was a conventional wisdom in political science that the two party system is the one most likely to be centrist. So if you think of a world of the scholar Anthony Downs and the way political competition works, both parties will try to compete over the what he called the median voter. So if you have a really divided society, maybe it's good to have the parties really try to find some kind of middle ground. But in recent years, we've seen this. Our two party system in particular become much more likely to kind of elevate the stakes of every election such that the parties don't really seek to find middle ground, but instead seek to aggressively differentiate themselves or to talk about the other party in negative terms in order to win votes. So that's kind of a sort of inversion of the conventional wisdom. And more and more people say that they don't feel particularly represented by either party and they'd like a third party. It's just very difficult given our institutional setup and our electoral rules in particular, to have competitive third parties.

Lee Drutman: Yeah. And what's fascinating about the Downs median voter theorem is that in 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy on the very facing page in which he has that central bell shaped Gaussian distribution of the parties convergence a very facing page. He has a bimodal distribution of voters in which the center collapses. And it very clearly says if this ever happens, then a two party system will fall apart. He also says that for a two party system to work, you need considerable consensus and overlap in the electorate. So there's also a downside in theory that says when you have a two party system with without a very big center, the thing is going to collapse and break apart into civil war, which actually turns out to be more right. I think although I guess we'll see if we can avoid civil war, but there certainly is the threat. The other problem with, I think, a two party system. Is when you have the same confrontation over and over again and you put people into these two camps, you create tremendous in-group outgroup animosity. And Partizanship has become this kind of mega identity, as only Mason puts it, in which people really view that vote the competition over whether their party wins or loses, or in many ways whether the other party that they disagree with wins in these existential terms. And in this binary us versus them dynamic, it just triggers all of these very deep us versus them friend versus foe circuits that we have in our brain. Whereas in party systems where the coalitions change from election to election, there is this effective bonus affective bonus, which is what is called political science terms and means that people feel good about the parties that they were in coalition with in the last election, even if they were if they're now in opposition to them. And the same goes in reverse, is that if you're in opposition with another party, then you might feel good about them, even if now you're opposing sides. So these coalitional benefits tend to last. And also you don't have the same urban-rural polarization. Jumping right in has has documented that in in party systems with two parties, when you have this conflict around cultural issues, you have. Yeah, urban rural conflict and that is very polarizing. Whereas in multi-party systems you can have few parties on the left, one of which might be a more related party and a few parties on the right, one of which might be a more urban oriented party. So it. It makes it more likely that people are going to be surrounded by different opinions. And the politics is fundamentally about how do we live with with differences and when the differences become magnified and exacerbated and caricatured by distance. You can very easily fall into this level of dehumanization about your political opponents, which then takes you into this danger zone in which violence becomes a legitimate way to settle disputes in which in which elections that your side doesn't win and start to come to be seen as illegitimate and maybe demanding violence. And that is this dangerous ground that I fear that we are flirting with right now in the United States.

Didi Kuo: It certainly doesn't help that the right has gone the direction that it has. So there are plenty of scholars of polarization who argue that it's not the case that the right and the left have become more ideological at the same rate. But instead we've had asymmetric polarization where the right has gone further right in the past few decades, but especially recently. And Donald Trump when he was elected in 2016. It was a surprise when he became the nominee for the Republican Party because he is so not a traditional conservative Republican. Of course, you think of Mitt Romney being the nominee in 2012, for example, it's been a reflection of broader trends in the world, or at least in some of the other advanced industrial democracies, that in times of kind of economic instability or crisis alongside bigger dramatic social and cultural changes like higher levels of immigration and deindustrialization, that the right it's not always the case that the right is the beneficiary of those things. But in this political moment, there has been a rise of far right leaders, whether you want to call them populist or illiberal, who who are much more cynical about the value of democratic institutions and processes. And I think that when you have a kind of the kind of underlying polarization that we is discussing, the kinds of attitudinal changes in the electorate in razor thin elections, that definitely makes democracy more vulnerable when there is a leader who can hijack a an otherwise more moderate party to serve not only more extreme political ends, but also to to talk about democracy in such demonizing ways. So all of the things, at least as I write about contemporary polarization, but when we think about the real risks like devolving into potential political violence like those we saw on January 6th, that is also the product of specific leaders who are more extreme than your average, kind of like center right politician.

Shannon Lynch: Okay, so given these problems, what are some of the reforms that have been proposed to move away from this two party system that we currently have?

Didi Kuo: So there are many reforms that have been proposed, and we have a super specific one that he's developed in his book, so I'll let him discuss that. But in general, I would sort of bucket ties the reforms in a across a few buckets. One is a set of institutional reforms that change either our electoral system or the way that we sort of translate people's votes into legislative seats. And sometimes these institutional reforms, most of them are rooted in the idea that our institutions themselves are producing this polarization, either through a counter majoritarian tendency, some kind of mismatch between what it is that people want and what it is that the institutions actually create incentives for. Another set of reforms has to do with the parties and the kind of political environment in which they operate. So campaign finance reforms, for example, would really get at who whose interests are represented by the parties and like who gets to sort of have a voice in politics. There are also, I think, a final set of anti polarization reforms that. Had to do with like, building ties. So there are some people that say to depolarize, we need more bridging institutions and sometimes that's just like kind of a community or individual level that people need to do more to interact with people who are not like them. And that can teach us how to how to cooperate or the things we have in common. Institutionally, within Congress, this might mean establishing more opportunities for bipartisan engagement. And then there's also I don't know if I would necessarily put this in the category of bridging reforms, but there are people who want to reform party primaries so that they become nonpartisan, for example. So there's a there's a set of reformers that wants to take parties out of the picture or have people learn what we have in common and kind of disregard party. And I'm sure there are just so many other reforms. But in general, you can start to break them down, at least in those ways.

Lee Drutman: I also sometimes think about this in terms of pro parties and anti party reforms and party reforms like open primaries, nonpartisan primaries, these sort of things that are trying to take parties out of politics and then the pro parties reforms that. Right. Right. I'm a big advocate of which say parties are the central institutions of modern representative democracy. Modern democracy depends on the health of the political parties. So let's make parties healthy institutions. And I think that that is the right way to think about reform. But I think the problem and the challenge is that for political parties to do the things that political parties need to do and to do the intermediation and the engagement and the listening and the mobilization and the vetting in a way that's responsible and healthy and representative. You need more than two parties in a country as diverse and pluralistic as ours. And so my tagline is more parties, better parties. And I think the two fundamentally go together. And the more specific reforms that I propose are proportional representation. Multi-member districts of of modest size allocated through a list PR system and for elections where single winners are sort of endemic. You have fusion voting where multiple parties can cross nominate the same candidate. Now it doesn't tackle everything, and there are some broad cultural issues to think about. There's the minoritarian aspects of our Congress, particularly the Senate, and with the Supreme Court. All of these things are hard, complicated issues. But to me, the first thing we've got to do is break out of this binary as against them, us versus them thinking. And I think it's really exacerbated and turbocharged by the way in which our elections are two party contests for narrow control of power.

Shannon Lynch: Well, this has been a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for being here with me today.

Lee Drutman: Thanks for having me.

Didi Kuo: Thank you for having me.

Heidi Lewis: This was a New America Studios production. Shannon Lynch is our host and executive producer. Our co-producers are Joe Wilkes, David Lanham, and Carly Anderson. Social media by Maika Moulite. Visuals by Alex Briñas. Media outreach by me, Heidi Lewis. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Democracy Deciphered wherever you like to listen.