Political parties have long been the subject of opposing assessments. From a negative perspective, parties are criticized because they promote conflict and dissension. Lord Bolingbroke (1965), writing in the 1730s, saw parties as deserving suppression, to be replaced by a leader who could supply the moral authority to promote national unity. On the eve of World War I, perhaps viewing himself as such a leader, Kaiser Wilhem II announced that he no longer recognized parties, only Germans. In much less extreme fashion, James Madison's distaste for parties went along with a recognition that they were inevitable and hence needed to be controlled.

All the U.S. Founding Fathers, who, perhaps understandably, were uncomfortable with the kinds of rudimentary parties with which they were familiar, shared Madison's concerns in some form. It took another eighteenth-century Englishman, Edmond Burke, to recognize the value of parties when, removed from a milieu of paralyzing conflict, they could operate as civil competitors (Mansfield, 1965). At the birth of the United States, despite the ill-feeling toward political parties, the Founding Fathers soon found parties necessary to govern and, later, to peacefully transfer power (Hofstadter, 1972:viii).

It was not until the early twentieth century that political theorists began to give parties a central role in guaranteeing democratic government. In one such assessment, James Bryce (1921:119) wrote that, “parties are inevitable. No free large country has been without them. No one has shown how representative government could be worked without them.”