The Polarizers

Rosenfeld, Sam

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226407395.001.0001

Cited by 12 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The rise of pure independents, split-ticket voting patterns, and ad hoc legislative coalitions, while all temporary phenomena, suggested to many contemporaries that, far from verging on revival, the party system's days were numbered. 147 Even if reformers had reformed the party along the lines laid out in the charter proposal, it is unlikely that greater opportunities for participating would have revitalized the Democrats in the short or medium term. Thus McGovern-Fraser reformers encountered the intractable dilemma that confronts all political entrepreneurs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Path to Polarization: McGovern-Fraser, Counter-Reformers, and the Rise of the Advocacy Party

Hilton

2019

Stud. Am. Pol. Dev.

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American politics has been transformed by the emergence of the advocacy party—a form of organization in which extraparty interest groups, advocacy organizations, and social movements substitute for the diminished institutional capacity and popular legitimacy of the formal party apparatus. Many scholars have rightly pointed to the presidential nomination reforms made by the Democratic Party's post-1968 Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission) as a key contributor to polarization by increasing the influence of ideological activists. However, I argue that polarization is not the direct result of the actions of McGovern-Fraser reformers, but rather the outcome of their pitched battle with intraparty opponents of reform, who, while failing to prevent changes to presidential nominations, were ultimately successful in defeating the party-building dimension of the reformers’ project of party reconstruction. The product of their intraparty struggle was a hybrid institutional amalgam that layered new participatory arrangements over a hollow party structure, thus setting the Democratic Party on a path toward the advocacy party and its polarizing politics.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%