RESPONSIBLE PARTY GOVERNMENT

In this book, we have argued for a fundamental rethinking of how political parties operate in Congress. Traditional conceptions of parties, stretching back to the theory of “responsible party government” (e.g., Ranney 1951; American Political Science Association 1950), focus on the ability of party leaders to command loyalty from their rank and file. In this view, parties matter only if they can vote as cohesive blocs, as they do in most Western European countries. Scholarship in this tradition focuses on the sociological and institutional devices by which loyalty might be maintained, on the tension that members feel between party loyalty and service to their constituents, and on documenting the extent to which parties are indeed able to hold their lines.

The key result in this long line of research is negative. As forcibly argued over 60 years ago by E. E. Schattschneider (1942: 131–2): “when all is said, it remains true that …the parties are unable to hold their lines in a controversial public issue when the pressure is on. [This is] the most important single fact concerning the American parties. He who knows this fact, and knows nothing else, knows more about American parties than he who knows everything except this fact” (italics in original).

The prevalence of this Schattschneiderian view led generations of researchers, from mid century to the 1990s, to turn their analytic focus away from the parties to individual legislators, standing committees, interest groups, and other possible actors on the legislative stage.