In the previous chapter we saw that command structures, in particular the army that is the backbone of the modern state, could be constructed out of the building blocks of patronage triangles. First the patronage triangles were arranged into pyramids that could span vertical distances of social space, and then transitivity was introduced. This command army is one key large-scale social structure of the modern state; a second is the modern party.
In this chapter, I will conduct a somewhat parallel examination of the structural origin of political parties. We are hampered here in that while there is little ambiguity as to what constitutes an army, there have been a number of different definitions of party that take us in very different directions. Out of conceptual inertia, sociologists frequently start with Weber’s (1978 I: 284–88; II: 938f) definition of parties as associations seeking to influence the distribution of power within some organization.1 In so doing, Weber was certainly being true to the colloquial usage of “party,” according to which factions are one sort of party. But even at the time he was writing, it should have been obvious that this definition was a poor one.
The clearest evidence of this is the widespread existence of single-party states. Such states are common among nations that achieved independence or underwent major revolutions in the twentieth century. They are characterized by the presence of a party in which membership is voluntary, and where the party’s actual influence on the government, while frequently formally recognized to some degree in law, exceeds all formal descriptions. Most notably, other parties are forbidden de jure or de facto. In such states, then, the party is not intended to struggle for power—indeed, any such struggle would delegitimate the party and the state’s claim to represent the general interest. Instead, it is clear that the party’s function is to mobilize citizens just as the army mobilizes soldiers (cf. Porter 1994: 199; Wilentz 2005: 516).
It seems that it is this mobilization that is crucial for parties, and for this reason, from a structural point of view, it is not immediately clear that we should divide organizations into “parties” and “social movements” (or “pressure groups”). Both involve the mobilization of persons to accomplish political ends (cf. Key 1964: 9, 11, 154). While it is tempting to distinguish the two by arguing that parties are “inside” the system and social movements “outside,” this may exaggerate the actual differences. For one thing, groups are often contesting precisely what is inside as opposed to outside, indeed, whether there can be a legitimate contest or not. Furthermore, many nonparties seen as social movements are composed of insiders to the governing elite while there are parties composed wholly of outsiders (compare Scientists against Nuclear Exchange to the Communist Party USA).
We also cannot support our distinction by reference to the particular goals being sought by the organizations. The social movement organization MoveOn works to support the election of particular candidates, while the Green Party seeks wide ranging social and environmental change. Finally, we cannot distinguish between parties and social movements on the basis of their degree of social organization: the single term social movement hides the radical difference between inchoate (and potentially illusory) trends and fashions (such as New Age spirituality) on the one hand and formally elaborated organizations such as the National Organization of Women on the other.
Is there, then, any difference between a social movement and a political party? There is one, and it is simply that party membership is almost invariably understood as exclusive. Whether or not the Communist Party in Russia had succeeded in outlawing all others, members could belong to no other party. The same is generally true of other parties. This exclusivity leads to an increased analytic clarity—just as the patronage pyramid is so clear because people can only have one patron, and the military structure clear because soldiers can have only one immediate commanding officer, so the party structure is clear because people belong to only one party. Like the military, this structure can be used to mobilize and coordinate large numbers of people.
Thus we see the fundamental parallel between the modern party and the modern army. The army is a social structure that seeks to mobilize a significant portion of the general population so that they can effectively carry out elites’ wishes against others usually (though not invariably) in different nations. The party is a social structure that seeks to mobilize a significant portion of the general citizenry so that they can effectively carry out elites’ wishes against others in the same nation.2 (We are free to expect that in many cases the wishes of the elites are greatly constrained by the actions or opinions of nonelites, but the definition works as stated.)
Given this clear parallel, there are reasons to expect that parties will tend to have the same structural principles as armies (forming transitive tree structures) and may even arise similarly. And, to anticipate, there is indeed evidence that antitransitive patronage structures form the core of early parties. But the particular form of mobilization required in competitive national-level party systems means that such vertical structural principles must be supplemented with horizontal relationships.
It is, unfortunately, difficult to assess the idea that we can analytically derive parties from the aggregation of vertical patronage-type relationships. For if we look at any party to determine where it came from, in almost every case the answer is, “other parties.” This is because most party systems have a relatively old lineage; even where the governmental system has changed dramatically, we are able to trace out relations of descent connecting later parties to organizations that played a role in an earlier constellation of the political field. There are, of course, exceptions: the late-nineteenth-century People’s Party in the United States (here see Goodwyn 1978; Hicks 1931; Pollack 1967; Woodward 1938, 1951) was built not out of elements of another party, but out of very different types of organizations such as the Farmer’s Alliance. Still, the evolution of such parties is highly constrained by the structure of the existing organizational environment (in the fashion discussed by DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977).3
We rarely witness the cataclysmic change of a party system that leads to the formation of a set of parties almost, if not entirely, from scratch. One such case is seen in the countries coming out of the breakup of the Soviet Union, particularly Russia. Within a matter of years, a one-party system in Russia transformed into a completely different multiparty system. Here there were two preexisting sources from which parties could be built, corresponding roughly to the “traditional/personalistic” and “modernist” theories of state formation, namely patronage relationships (on the one hand) and voluntary associations (on the other).
Regarding the former, the Soviet system of bureaucratic careerism had revolved around a particular form of patronage relationship in which the upwardly mobile required a patron among the higher-ups (see Willerton 1992: 6, 9, 11, 64, 76, 85, 115, 117, 224, 238; also Eyal, Szelényi, and Townsley 1998: 7). Once ascendant, the occupant would work to form a wheel around himself, which would not only make him locally secure, but be the inner ring in a widening coalition involving both vertical and horizontal ties. Further, most clients seem to have had only one patron, and hence the structure tended toward a pyramid or a set of pyramids of different sizes. These pyramids not only consolidated the support of a leader, but says Willerton (1992: 73, 233), “helped bridge the political distance between Moscow and the periphery.”
The latter form of preexisting structure was the organization. Most important was the Communist Party itself, but this could not unproblematically be the source of postcommunist parties. Second, there were what the Soviets generally called “unofficial” or “informal” organizations. This term included pretty much any form of voluntary organization one could think of—everything from teenagers’ rock bands to sports teams to artistic groups to nascent political organizations. Such organizations had been somewhat tolerated before Perestroika, as long as their activities were circumscribed, but with the loosening of the Gorbachev era, their number increased dramatically, to around thirty thousand by 1988 and perhaps twice that by 1989. These organizations were free to turn their attention to political reform, and many did—representatives of a number of such groups gathered in Moscow to create the Democratic Union as an opposition organization, while others served as the basis for new parties. Well before Yeltsin abolished the CPSU’s status as the only legal party in 1990, it was clear that a de facto multiparty system had developed (Luchterhandt 1992: 1044; Tolz 1990: 10f, 37ff, 56, 84; McFaul and Markov 1993: 2).
At the same time that protoparties were developing from the bottom up, they were developing from the top down, as the Communist Party began to split. Informal groupings of reformers solidified, as did some antireform groups, and both eventually spawned parties (Tolz 1990: 65, 68, 72–78; Luchterhandt 1992: 1039f, 1043). Given the zeal with which new parties were formed—up to one party a month in 1990 (McFaul and Markov 1993: 12)—and the seemingly insatiable demand for new forms of political mobilization and expression, one might be surprised to find that these new parties had very little effect on the emerging party system (almost none were present a decade later). As Fish (1995: 55–57, 109, 114, 137, 197, 204) emphasized, these new parties were unable to establish either vertical or horizontal transitivity. Taking the first, their “hyperdemocratic” organization meant that there were many leaders and few followers. This might seem a wonderful thing, but it meant in practice that there was no discipline and no coordination.4 Taking the second, the party system did not interface with any division of the population into groups with conflicting interests. Indeed, it is notable that membership and even leadership was not considered an exclusive relation. Thus there was little connection between what any particular group of leaders advocated and what a particular group of citizens wanted. The party was unable to organize, aggregate, and represent interests.
Rather than these new party organizations, it was the wheel system that seemed to be the most important institutional form for effective party formation. As the CPSU began to dissolve, members attempted to preserve pieces or make new factions out of the resulting debris (Luchterhandt 1992: 1043); in many cases these efforts to carry existing patronage structures out of the bureaucracy were almost as successful as similar attempts to carry money or heavy equipment out of state-run plants. In the words of Perkins (1996: 363), “The communist party had considerable organizational assets and, while the ideology may have been discredited, [these assets] were still available for cooptation by enterprising politicians.”
While a simple transplantation was not often possible (except for some of the highest-level leaders), the basic structural form was preserved—apexes transplanted their existing triangles as best they could and used the advantages of their position to build new relationships. For example, a survey of 1992–93 found that most of the new parties were headed by former Communist Party leaders and were factions that had previously existed within the Communist Party but now became parties of their own (McAllister and White 1995: 50f). (A description of the party field circa 1990 can be found in Lentini 1992.) In other cases, a “party” was simply those willing to support a particular politician—indeed, in the regional elections of 1994, most candidates did not even have a party affiliation (Kropp 1999: 295, 300f, 303).
In sum, while the preexisting informal organizations did contribute to the creation of a new party system, it was the existing patronage triangles disembedded from the old party system that were the dominant seeds of future crystallization (and we may say that the further east the republic, the less disjuncture there was between the old patronage pyramids and the new; see Tolz 1990: 44f). Thus we should not assume that when parties are allowed to form and compete for offices in elections they will arise in a textbook fashion: those who share common interests will band together and push forward a representative. Instead, it seems that people are likely to scramble to knit together whatever strong relationships are at hand, most important, patronage relationships.5
Of course, not all parties will form in a context in which patronage relationships are already so entrenched. Yet it may be that if we examine the nature of party formation more closely, we will find analogous structural developments at the core. That is, when we look at the case of a set of parties forming from scratch, we find that they are built out of particular relationships of persons and not out of formal organizations. We will begin with a purely analytic explication, which produces a useful typology of protoparties, and then determine to what extent this can be the basis for a historical derivation.
We are all familiar with one way in which parties are based on patronage relationships, namely the urban “political machine” of the late nineteenth century. Studying the classic case of Tammany Hall, Shefter (1976: 34, 41) argued that “the machine in its earlier stages more closely resembles a feudal hierarchy: the regime’s officials, the ward leaders, are given control over its resources—they are given patronage to distribute to their subordinates—in return for supporting the regime, but the distribution of benefits increases the bargaining power of these officials against the central regime because it enhances their influence within their petty domains. In order to overcome this paradoxical consequence of the distribution of patronage, Tammany’s leaders cultivated a series of alliances and engineered a number of changes in party organization, recruitment, and finance, that are akin to those fostered by patrimonial rulers in their efforts to centralize feudal regimes.”
Even were this generalizable, however, it would not demonstrate that political parties are based on patronage relationships, for three reasons. The first is simply that the sort of urban patronage system discussed by Shefter is a historical consequent of the development of a party, not its antecedent. The second is that the presence of feudal-like retinues supported by patronage does not necessarily imply the concatenation of vertical patronage relationships that, as we saw in chapter 7, proved so important in the construction of armies. The third, and most important reason, is that in an important sense the urban machines are generally seen, and rightly so, as antithetical to the nature of the modern party. Their “corruption” was intrinsically related to the way in which they mobilized people not so much to compete against other parties, but instead to avoid competition.
As the “sage of Tammany Hall,” the wonderfully named George Washington Plunkitt explained, the machine was founded “on the main proposition that when a man works in politics, he should get something out of it” (Riordon 1982 [1905]: 3, 38, 91). The politician accumulates various good things that could be dispensed at will to constituents, assuring their support. With their support, he could establish his fiefdom more securely, and hence the process was a reinforcing one. In the ideal world (at least for Plunkitt), all politics would be amiable in that the politician would never have to worry about someone from a challenging party.
When things are running smoothly, the machine politician’s position is relatively secure. In unsettled times, however, he may confront a set of dedicated and hostile rivals. We can follow general usage and call such contending groups within a party “factions.” The terms party and faction have often been used interchangeably. In English there was no clear distinction between the two words until the nineteenth century, although “faction” generally had a more pejorative sense (Hofstadter 1970: 10; for example, see Madison in Federalist #10; Cooke 1961: 57). But as parties became accepted as fundamental aspects of a democratic system, “party” lost its sense of illegitimacy while “faction” retained it. More important, “party” has come to connote a formal organization, while faction generally connotes an informal one. From a structural standpoint, however, a more important distinction is that we have no trouble understanding that there can be factions within parties, but we would have a harder time accepting the idea that there are parties within factions.
Indeed, considering the case of factions within parties can help us determine what we mean by factions. Such factions are likely to be noticeable where party competition is relatively low. Another good example is Japanese politics in the postwar period. The parties were generally considered conglomerates of “factions” (“ha”) that formed around a patron possessing seniority, skill, and resources with which he could provide positions and funds to his followers (Scalapino and Masumi 1964: 15, 18f, 54, 79, 32; Ike 1972: 25f, 81ff).
There are three crucial things to note about the factions in this case. First, they are defined by vertical connections, not necessarily horizontal alliances (contra Scott 1972). Second, they generally partake of the same exclusivity as do patronage triangles, in that one can be a member of only one faction (Wolf 1977: 174f and references therein). Horizontal relationships usually only exist between factions in the form of loose alliances (which will be discussed below). The third important thing to note is that the factions involve only elites, or active participants. Thus a faction may be seen as a set of led elites who struggle to increase their degree of control over some relatively small group (also see Landé 1977a: xxxii; Boissevain 1964).
The organization of the faction around dominant personalities has led to interest in its connection to patronage structures, leading to the reasonable hypothesis that a faction is a patronage structure embedded within a group (paradigmatically a party) (see Nathan 1977 [1973]: 383f). But we have seen in the machine that patronage structures may be embedded in a group without leading to factionalism: the bureaucrat who appropriates his or her office and uses it as the basis for personalistic amassing of power becomes a patron, but does not form a faction. Only when the patron uses his or her clientele to best another patron do we speak of a faction. Following Weber (1946 [1918]), we may consider “politics” the struggle to influence the distribution of power. Thus we may provisionally propose that factions are politicized patronage structures and inquire as to what conditions lead to such a transformation.
Why would we see such a politicization of a patronage structure (for an example, see Nicholas 1977)? In some cases, the patronage structure exists within a larger corporate body (for example, a state). Politicization is likely to arise when there are areas of this corporate body that are considered to be available for domination by a patronage pyramid. Such “fallow areas” appear when a corporate body is created for the first time via the amalgamation of existing patronage triangles, when an existing corporate body makes a relatively sudden extension of its jurisdiction, or when for exogenous reasons the structure previously controlling this area is rendered substantially less effective. In either case, the unsettling of previous relations and the promise of new good things is likely to provoke an increase in conflict. But why would not the various patrons divide up the spoils according to their relative strength?
The answer is that in some cases the good things that the group can produce or deliver to members turn out to be relatively nondivisible. Many patrons can exist within a government bureaucracy and dispense jobs to their clients without needing to come into conflict with other patrons. Even if one patron consolidates a position at the head of the organization, she may allow others moderate amounts of various resources as consolation prizes. This, however, assumes that the goods that the patrons have access to are divisible. But other goods are “winner-take-all”—those who are not members of the victorious faction get nothing.6 This is, speaking roughly, generally the case in stronger organizations—the power of the organization can be considered fungible and hence is itself a compelling prize, as opposed to the relatively minor matters of material rewards within the organization. Every patron must attempt to mobilize his or her clients so as to be victorious, and every client will try his or her best to make sure that he or she ends up on the winning side. Put somewhat differently, while there may be some preexisting inequality that allows patrons to transfer good things to followers, the faction exists to the extent that the good thing that attracts the followers depends on the faction prevailing, and success in turn (at least to some extent) depends on the adherence of followers.7
In chapter 6 we noted that the patron-client relationship differed from “boss” and “big man” relationships in that it assumes a dependence on preexisting inequality (as opposed to generating the inequality). Because of this dependence, the patron is generally limited in terms of the number of clients he can support—past some point, he runs out of surplus to return to them. A shift to winner-take-all goods lessens the dependence of the relationships on preexisting inequality and hence removes such inherent limits. Like the “sponsor,” the faction leader who has a large number of followers can support all the more (see Major 1964: 637; though see Ike 1972: 82). Thus the faction system is formally similar to the endogenous popularity tournament in necessarily being based on self-fulfilling prophecies.
As a result, faction systems share some of the instabilities of popularity tournaments. While each follower can generally be part of only one faction, followers frequently cast sidelong glances at other factions to determine whether now is the time to bolt to a stronger group. It is for this reason that in “factional” politics actions and statements are continuously examined for their signification—every act or decision is pregnant with implications for the only thing that matters, namely, winning or losing.
The politicization of factional struggle has important structural correlates. First, there is a necessity of horizontal (or somewhat horizontal) alliances between faction leaders (barring the interesting cases in which there are only two faction leaders to begin with). The reason for this is clear to see: generally only one faction or alliance can control the group. A leader can give her followers nothing if she is not among the winners, yet she cannot generally triumph over all others alone. As a result, alliances are necessary, and the general outlines of the process of alliance formation can be understood along the lines discussed in chapter 2. When faction leaders can unproblematically deliver the support of their followers, the structural dynamics of the faction system can be analyzed in terms of the horizontal leader-leader ties of alliance and not the leader-follower ties.
When political scientists have done this, they have repeatedly noted a tendency for two major segments to develop in factional systems (Nathan 1977 [1973]). In the Japanese case discussed above, processes identical to those we investigated in chapter 2 invariably led to two alliance systems of factions; the leading alliance (whichever it happened to be at the time) was known by the sensible name “the Main Current” and the other the “anti-Main Current” (Scalapino and Masumi 1964: 59). Similarly, in local politics, it is common that where a mayor or governor has widespread appointment powers two factions form, roughly the “ins” and the “outs” (for the example of Greek villages in the mid twentieth century see Campbell 1964: 224). Historians of early American politics struggled for generations with an attempt to define the “court” and “country” politics in terms of the expected relationship to class distinctions, only to realize that the only thing that “court” meant was “in,” and “country” was everyone else.
Why this tendency toward bifurcation? We have seen in chapter 2 one elegant explanation, namely balance theory. If people operate according to these logical rules, they will have no choice but to sort themselves into one or two cliques. But we also saw that no political actor worth his or her salt would follow such crippling rules as a general heuristic. Some situations, however, can force action to be objectively consonant with balance theory even though participants have no subjective heuristic that is correlative to the balanced situation (Barth 1981:22). Imagine that there are a number of different factions, each with size Ni and that they can make alliances; victory depends only on the size of the alliance. Thus the largest faction (call it 1) will gain control over all the goods produced or gathered by the group . . . unless faction 2 can make an alliance with some other faction 3 (if we assume that N2 + N3 > N1). At this point, faction 1 attempts to gain the support of faction 4 (or, perhaps thinking ahead, faction 5 as well), and the process repeats. When all factions are incorporated into one of two groups, the larger will take control. While the losers would presumably like to join the winning alliance, the winners will have little incentive to thereby dilute the amassed goods. Hence a one-alliance system is unlikely, as is a three-alliance system. Any third group is likely to be swallowed back into the binary opposition, though perhaps changing the losing faction to a winning one. If one faction’s victory is so complete as to completely obliterate the other, the same forces that led to factions in the first place generally lead to a split in the victorious faction.
It is worth emphasizing that this logic requires that the goods involved be winner take all. Thus it makes perfect sense that in a political system such as that of the United States, in which any congressional district elects one person (and where the chief executive is chosen almost directly by the voters at large), that this logic will generally lead to two parties (Duverger 1963 [1954]; cf. Key 1964: 208f, 274).8 Not all political systems are winner-take-all, and hence it is not at all surprising that parliamentary systems with proportional representation tend to have many parties.
We have seen two different ways in which we can imagine a change in a situation in which a small number of elites monopolize some set of good things associated with governance. Both begin with triangles of “patronage,” but involve different forms of elaboration (see figure 8.1). In the first (the machine), relations of patronage are extended outside the elite, but the nature of the goods involved remains divisible. Because anyone holding some resource can break off a chunk of it, there is always some to go around (even if people rarely feel that they have enough). Consequently, the overall level of competition is muted, even though a larger proportion of the population may be involved. In the second (the faction), elites are forced to make exclusive commitments to one patron because control over the organization is requisite for the delivery of any good thing to oneself or to one’s allies. While fewer nonelites participate than in the machine, there is greater competition between patrons.
Figure 8.1. From patronage to party?
Despite these differences, these formations have one thing in common, and that is that they tend to be restricted in scope. The machine is a local phenomenon, and factions tend to either to be local, or to be possible when a very small elite is able to monopolize all positions of power (for example, the inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party). Both fall short of the mass party of the modern nation state.9
Analytically, we might expect that either the machine or the faction might be the basis for the development of the mass party—the highly mobilized party that operates at a national, not merely local, level. We will go on to explore the process whereby factions are first formed, and then extended to nonelites, thus forming a party. Can the party evolve first by the development of a machine (or its equivalent) for divisible goods, and then a switch to indivisible goods? Historically, we know that the machine is not a precursor to the modern party but rather the outgrowth of it. Indeed, by definition a machine exists within a party; outside of a party such a social structure would simply be a patronage pyramid. Such pyramids may indeed find themselves suddenly confronting an indivisible good. This route, however, does not always strike us as “party formation”—instead, we are more likely to term it “civil war.”
As an instructive example, we can consider Elizabethan England, often loosely considered a hotbed of factionalism, given the constant court intrigues and shifting appeals to various patrons. Yet as Adams (1982) emphasizes, “a faction was not the same thing as a clientage; nor was it the exercise of patronage; nor was it the taking of sides on a major political issue: a faction was a personal following employed in direct opposition to another personal following.” Such factional politics were quite rare; Adams identifies only two periods in the sixteenth century, the first relatively brief.10 The second (during the 1590s) was a result of one influential lord (Essex) attempting to monopolize all patronage. This in effect made a previously divisible good winner-take-all. Since even minor acts of patronage came to symbolize one’s connection to the winning side, all government acts became increasingly politicized. In the interim, Queen Elizabeth was skilled at making sure that different patronage pyramids had roughly equal fortunes, and thus that goods were in some sense divisible (see MacCaffrey 1961: 98ff; Neale 1958: 70f; Somerset 2003: 338f—43, 476, 500–503).11
But this new concentration destabilized the relation between pyramids. In a brilliant analysis, Bearman (1993) examined these changes in patronage structures by examining the appointment of rectors to local parishes.12 The increased dominance of the court—in part due to the weakened ability of the church and local magnates to act independently of the crown—forced local elites to align their strategies with those of the center, the ultimate source of all good things. Thus patronage transfers became aligned into long chains, somewhat like the lengthy cycle of the tē exchange discussed in chapter 3. Interestingly, we also see a change whereby rectors stopped being appointed for nonreligious reasons and were instead appointed on the basis of their religious convictions and history. These changes were not independent—it was the new chains of patronage that became the organizational frame for gentry Puritanism, the force that was to oppose the king in a civil war (Bearman 1993: 95–101, 132f). In a pattern that will reappear, stark, principled religious differences became a useful way for theorizing the bifurcation between competing patronage pyramids.
Thus the success of the late-Elizabethan program was a delicate one—by amassing all patronage in the center, it depended on the continual adjustments on the part of the crown to keep all contenders satisfied with what they had. But if the crown were to stop enforcing a division of patronage, it would provoke patrons to ally into factions to capture the center.13
And such an identification with a single faction was precisely what characterized the approach of James I, and which led to a breakdown of the political system and, in part, to the Civil War (Neale 1958: 84). This breakdown corresponded to an increased politicization of patronage politics. On the one hand, there was fiercer competition between pyramids, and on the other, this competition was linked to an extension of the electorate and hence an increase in political mobilization (Pocock 1980: 9).14
Put more generally, we may say that one route to party formation is likely to be bloody, and this is when patrons with already mobilized followers confront a shift, from divisible to indivisible, in the nature of goods for which they compete. As the nature of the game shifts to zero-sum, there is no balance of power or equilibrium to ensure that this is accepted by all. As Hobbes (1909 [1651]: 95) wrote in his explanation of the English Civil War, “If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other.” If one does not have nonelite followers, one must make alliances between other elites and try to establish a faction. But if you actually have a pyramid—a set of patronage relations in which the lower down offer support for agonistic activities—why turn your pyramid into a party? Why not turn it into an army?15
When, on the other hand, there is a switch to an indivisible good before substantial mobilization, the process of extension can happen in a regulated fashion. As we will see, there are clear reasons to expect that mobilization happens via a set of expanding (and sometimes contracting) circles of inclusions, and that these extensions will happen in a reasonably controlled or balanced fashion.16 It is this process that is more commonly understood as the process of party formation. To trace it out, we must return to factions.
We begin to trace out analytically the process whereby parties can form out of other social structures. Although I will draw on several cases, I focus on perhaps the best documented example of party formation on the national level, that of the United States of America. By 1800 no one doubted that national parties existed in the United States. But in no sense did this party system exist a mere twelve years previous. While most new party systems—indeed, even the Russian one discussed briefly above—drew at least in part on previously existing parties, this was impossible in the new United States of the 1789 constitution.
It is not that national-level politics had not previously existed. Even before the Declaration of Independence, the colonies assembled a Continental Congress, and there were predictable divisions in votes pertaining to (at first) how to respond to parliamentary policies, then later how to prosecute the war, and finally, how to negotiate with other nations and set national and international policies.17 But because the American revolutionary movement had involved a few corresponding conspirators and a wider set of local elites stumbling into revolution—and not a dedicated political party (Chambers 1963b: 17; Henderson 1974: 19)—political organization at the federal level was relatively rudimentary at the birth of the new nation. To the extent that there was organized political dissent, it was largely geographic: elites who shared interests on the basis of a shared economic fate might be expected to vote together. But there was little way to change others’ minds and hence no reason to form party structures.
Whence, then, came these national level parties? Substantively, as we shall see, they came from a combination of (on the one hand) divisions between regions and (on the other) alliances of elites across these regions, most important, alliances between Virginians and New Yorkers. Analytically, we may say that parties came from a fusion of two structural principles, a vertical one in which relationships were used to coordinate and command and a horizontal one involving the alignment of local oppositions. Above we derived the possibility of faction—politicized vertical relationships of patronage—arising to coordinate small-scale political contestation. But it is also possible for politics to occur mainly through horizontal relationships of alliance and sameness. We begin by examining the political structures of New York and Virginia before independence to illustrate these two types, and then follow the construction of a national-level party structure.
To anticipate, my argument will be that (1) the building blocks of parties are of two types, horizontal relationships of alliance and vertical relationships more akin to patronage; (2) either of these may be sufficient to coordinate local or relatively nonmobilized politics, and indeed we see reasonable approximations to these polar cases in certain colony party systems; (3) establishing a national level party requires melding these relationships, although the process may depend on the preexisting degree of national unification. I begin by considering how factions can serve as the basis for local parties.
We know that, although there might be factions within parties, we did not find parties within factions. This is because the party, unlike a faction, involves the mobilization of nonelites, and hence often has an abiding presence as a formal organization. Not only will mobilization spur a tendency to extend the faction further downward toward nonelites, it also leads elites to convert existing (anti-transitive) patronage relations into something more closely approaching a command structure (for the development of parties out of patronage relationships in Rome, see Taylor [1968: 7–11, 23, 63]). The extent to which control is also bottom-up as opposed to only top-down is of great interest to political scientists concerned with democratization, but this may turn out to be secondary from a structural point of view.
Such an extension of mobilization may have a number of precedents. Commonly proposed ones include competition between factions (which we shall discuss in greater detail later) and the pursuit of long-term as opposed to short-term interests (here see Goodman 1964). However, neither of these is necessary for party formation: all that matters is that elites believe that the mobilization of commoners will accomplish something that cannot be accomplished without a party, and they are willing to risk losing some control to accomplish these ends.
There are relatively simple cases in which mobilization takes place wholly through the extension of vertical patronage structures—political participation seeps downward like water down an icicle, progressively extending its reach. In such cases, social scientists holding to various favored theories of democracy are likely to be confused at the apparent dislocation between parties and the interest-groups assumed to compose the society. A well-documented example is Toulouse, France, in the nineteenth century (Aminzade 1977; also see Mayer 1966). It might first seem inexplicable that the royalist party was largely composed of workers. This seeming incongruity was due to the patronage relations connecting workers to the elites—relations which, as in the archetypical ones seen in chapter 6, involved commitments of the superordinates to support the subordinates, especially in times of economic downturn, and for the latter to offer what support they could, including military support. In more peaceful times, this support was electoral and hence the patronage relationships formed the skeleton of a party.
The formation of parties in New York also approximates this pattern. Unlike many other states such as Virginia, New York politics were not based on region.18 While there were conflicts of interests between those more attached to land and those more attached to trade, this sort of division cut across geographical regions (Bonomi 1971; Varga 1960: 253f; also Egnal 1988: 53). Since the various divisions overlapped only imperfectly, New York politics was characterized by a morass of constantly shifting alliances between factions. Such shifts in alliances were encouraged by the sensitivity of fortunes to political processes: land was often subject to multiple claimants, governors were in the position to grant large tracts to their favorites, and trade was also sensitive to legal judgments.19 New York was not the only colony where such internal disputes were important, but this sensitivity to local politics was coupled with the absence of a stable division between the elites, leading to a particularly contentious political environment (see Katz 1968: 57, 145).
The political elite of New York was a relatively stable set of families—in the mid eighteenth century they were the van Rensselaer, Livingston, van Cortlandt, Schuyler, Beekman, Philipse, Morris, and DeLancey families, all tied by multiple marriages and occasionally business partnerships.20 While most of these possessed considerable landholdings, the Morrises and the Livingstons were more fundamentally tied to land than the Philipses or van Cortlandts (Becker 1909: 9f, 13; Leder 1961: 21, 24, 79, 121; Bonomi 1971: 60–69, 143–46; see Shorto 2004: 57, 132, 139 on van Rensselaer).21 Families, we recall, approximate the nested sets that imply hierarchy, though there are here the complications due to bilineality—since degrees of common closeness are ambiguous, they are responsive to willful decisions and hence encourage sophisticated maneuvering in which some allies are dropped and past enemies befriended.
Throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, politics was a succession of shifts in which one allied set of families would come into power, and the others would be purged from their positions. It was this position of being “in favor” with the governor that structured politics—what was called the “popular” party was often just a residual category of whoever was not “in” at the time. Because of this wonderful personalism, even an analytic overview must follow particular persons and families (Becker 1909: 8; Egnal 1980: 46f; Egnal 1988: 51; Leder 1961; Bonomi 1971: 76–79, 82, 86).22
While New York’s political history was a succession of reversals whereby outs became ins, there was an overall direction to its evolution in terms of increased mobilization. Indeed, the very back and forth nature of politics spurred this development. An enterprising “out” could paint himself as an antielitist and mobilize nonelites against the “ins.”23 Such popular mobilization had unplanned-for results, including a general drift of the parties “leftward.” This slow drift received a sudden push with the general radicalization of politics coming in the wake of the Stamp Act riots of 1765 and the organization of the extremist “Sons of Liberty.” Associated with this group was Captain James DeLancey. The DeLanceys—more rooted in trade than in landownership—had been hit hard by the depression of the 1760s and were responsive to the idea of an economic protest aimed at Britain. The Livingstons, on the other hand, were affected less by the mounting debts to British shippers and more by a tenant uprising in 1766. Suddenly the idea of stirring up the people seemed a decidedly unpleasant prospect to such landowners (Champagne 1963: 62; Egnal 1988: 173–76).
Thus the Livingstons, previously considered to be the more “popular” party, were now seen as conservative in contrast to the DeLanceys. Captain DeLancey gained street credentials by refusing a seat on the appointed council (claiming he preferred the approval of the people to that of the governor) and was clearly poised to bring his family into the center of patriotic politics. When the 1768 elections gave the DeLanceys control of the assembly, however, they simply kicked out the Livingstons and the Morrises (Bonomi 1971: 235f—63; Becker 1909: 18f, 42, 46, 5, 59f).
Thus the DeLancey faction became the “in” group, while the Livingston group were the outs, forced to appeal to the citizenry with popular policies. It was a poor time to be an “in”—as the revolution drew nearer, the DeLanceys, the previous darlings of the Sons of Liberty, became the loyalists, and the Livingstons the patriots, if only because to justify their opposition to the governor they needed to appeal to more and more provocative principles (Champagne 1963: 77ff; Egnal 1980: 56; Egnal 1988: 281; Bonomi 1971: 265f, 276f; Becker 1909: 86; Randall 1993: 265). Only the Livingstons’ alliance would survive to have an impact on New York’s later politics.
It was thus largely an accident of timing that the Livingston-Schuyler-Morris faction survived the War as “Patriots” as opposed to the DeLanceys and Philipses.24 And it was this vertical organization that was available for New Yorkers who sought to form national-level parties in the new nation, and one of the reasons why New Yorkers played such a pivotal role.
We must stress the importance of this preexisting structure and not the mere cycle of mobilization via “outs” becoming “ins.” Pennsylvanian politics also involved an alternation between ins and outs that mobilized the electorate in a particularly ideological fashion (see Egnal 1980: 44f; Nash 1968; 2005: 29; Wendel 1968: 290–304; Dargo 1980: 102f; Argersinger 1992: 36). This very ideological development, however, came at the expense of structural elaboration. New York’s political elite was, from a relatively early date, predominantly composed of lawyers. But in Pennsylvania, elites were much less likely to be lawyers, and more likely to be merchants, doctors, and (increasingly) printers.25
While printing is perhaps the ideological occupation par excellence,26 making a career in law generally required the support of a lawyer patron (the word might be explicitly used by an applicant),27 since in a world without law schools and with only sporadic examinations, the only way to become a lawyer was to clerk for one and get his endorsement (Hamlin 1939: 6, 12, 36, 41, 96f, 120ff; Stahr 2005: 15, 19). It was frequently the case that aspiring Federalists had studied law with a more established Federalist (e.g., Hamilton’s lieutenant Robert Troup studying with John Jay or Monroe with Jefferson [Fischer 1965: 310, 419; also see Kirschke 2005: 15]).28 Thus the New York political system was in the hands of professionals who tended to be concentrated in a tiny portion of the state, and who lacked any organic relation to class or sectional interests, as did the Virginia planters, or to the fraternity of elite schools, as did the Massachusetts clergy, or to religion, as did the Pennsylvania Quakers and Anglicans. They were primed to organize themselves in hierarchical factions, as opposed to blocs of those sharing a common regional interest.29
With the DeLanceys out of the picture, the Livingston-Schuylers faction seemed to have hegemony and indeed were in a good position to benefit from the increased centralization of the national government (and hence were “federalists”).30 Any challenger would need a new type of power base. It was George Clinton, who became governor in 1777, who did this by becoming the apex of a political party not on the basis of his landholding (as did the great families) but his potential political patronage (Hendrickson 1985: 234f; Bernstein 1970: 66f, 250).31 With this he could break up the monopoly whereby (in his words) “all the great opulent families were united in one confederacy” (Young 1967: 4f, 122, 169, 172, 575). Clinton’s attack on the established families implied an attack on their centralizing policies (and hence he must become an “antifederalist”), and it was this set of oppositions that New York brought to the new nation of 1788.
Thus New York’s political evolution has much in common with the analytically elegant case whereby patronage structures turn into parties. Such a process is, however, restricted to the local context and is perhaps relatively unusual even there. After all, unlike those forming an army from patronage relationships, a party leader cannot generally shoot rank-and-file members for failure to do as they are told. Generally there will be an appeal to other interests. Those attempting to form a party at the national level (with a few exceptions such as the great Roman generals like Caesar) cannot rely on the distribution of patronage because it is simply too expensive. Hence as the electorate increases, there is a tendency for the rewards going to clients to shift from divisible patronage to indivisible goods. The increase in the number of supporters is, in turn, generally due either to an extension of the effective franchise or a switch to mobilization at the national level—in other words, due to a previous shift toward less divisible goods (see Bourne 1986: 139ff, 160 on nineteenth-century England).
We first derived the party on the basis of insiders finding that the struggle over the distribution of “good things” had transformed into a winner-take-all game. We saw that there would be a tendency for factions to establish horizontal alliances, as there was little profit to remaining aloof and independent. Something very similar happens in the context of party formation regarding alliances between local elites, often heads of local patronage pyramids. But party formation goes beyond the simple self-fulfilling dynamics of the “go with the winner” game. The payoff is winner-take-all and involves redirecting organizational resources to satisfy preexisting interests. Thus mobilizing nonelites requires the ability to craft policy, a plan to jointly satisfy different interests. We can refer to the ability to mobilize different groups of nonelites through such a proposed direction of organizational resources as an “alignment” of interests. Interests are not homogenized nor necessarily compromised; rather, their collective fulfillment is conceived of as a distinct possibility.
As interests are aligned, so are previously independent struggles or sets of oppositions. Through horizontal relationships of affiliation (e.g., side A is to side C as side B is to side D), these oppositions become oriented in the same direction, potentially before any vertical social relationships exist to coordinate action. Such alignment may be facilitated by a common identity that establishes a presumption of future concord instead of the opposite, but such an identity is never an explanation of party behavior, but rather an outcome to be explained.
In the case at hand, New York’s factional system, by dividing into federalists and antifederalists, was clearly poised to align with similar divisions in other states. But how to join the vertical structure of a faction-based party to another one? There was no easy way to make such an organizational innovation. It proved easier for a more rudimentary party system to be the basis for such alliances if it could foster horizontal connections.
Let us return to the “null case” of a set of elites monopolizing all goods (the cartel). The simplest evolutionary step from here is, as Spencer and Durkheim would have said, simply to multiply the number of units but not their relationships. That is, instead of a set of elites “here” monopolizing all good things (wherever “here” is), we have elites in this area monopolizing their resources, and elites in that area monopolizing theirs (this is a “segmentary” form of organization). This is a common occurrence where politics is in the hands of large landowners. By definition, each landowner will dominate a particular area. Virginia well approximates this pattern.
As a plantation society Virginia, despite its large population, had a relatively small and involuted elite. While marrying was often strategic, prominent Virginians like Washington and Jefferson were unlikely to be true outsiders joining a prominent family for the first time (as might be the case in New York), but instead were well-connected members of the elite simply looking to cement their positions or replenish their purses. This elite, even more importantly, was spread out so that there was relatively little contestation in any area. As a result, politics were traditionally in the hands of local notables, and elections were, in Ammon’s (1963: 162, 165) words, “popularity contests in which issues had been distinctly secondary.” While it is possible to overstate the claim—aristocrats had to campaign for office and, like George Washington in 1755, could lose elections—this elitist character tended to lead to a low level of competition (for example, simply setting out drinks on election day might constitute a fine campaign) (Randall 1993: 2–6, 92, 119, 494; Cunningham 1957: 250; Wills 2002: 12; Fischer 2004: 12; Ellis 2004: 35).
At the same time, there were occasionally conflicts between personalistic factions. For an example that may have turned out to be quite weighty for the later evolution of national politics, Patrick Henry was allied with John Tyler (father of the future president). As a result, a local rival of Tyler’s, Edmund Randolph (patron to the Jeffersons) allied with the Washington circle including Madison and Monroe (Risjord 1978: 81–86, 357).
But when there were serious conflicts they generally mapped onto regional differences. Geography is one of the most common bases for political contest, especially between elites, because geography is generally a stand-in for interests. (When nonelites are not excluded from politics, the elite/nonelite division may cut across geography.) There are debates as to precisely where one should draw the lines, but one can make a general distinction between the northern area, which was dominated by a few large landowners who rented to tenants with no voting rights, and the southern areas, which had more small landowners. Since the main political problem was a shortage of money (and widespread debt), one key political issue for the new state of Virginia was whether to redeem or even simply pay interest on the outstanding state and federal securities that had been bought, at depreciated values, by the rich of the northern regions. Thus the two main parties were one representing the debtors (led by Patrick Henry) and the other the creditors (led in part by James Madison) (Egnal 1988: 92; Main 1955: 97f, 109ff; Risjord 1978; Hendrickson 1985: 166).
In sum, politics thus approximated a fusion of the electioneering techniques of the machine and the noncompetitive regional block voting that characterized early national-level voting in the Continental Congress. The most important relationships characterizing a party were largely horizontal relationships between fellow elites who shared sectional interests; as all those in a region had similar interests, their relationships tended to take on the simple form of a clique. Now let us see how these protoparties—debtor and creditor—became aligned with those in other states. The debate over the ratification of the federal constitution in 1787 led to a simplification of politics (one is either for or against) as well as new names for the sides (“federalist” and “antifederalist”), which allowed for a further increase in the level of political organization and mobilization. Leading the federalists in Virginia was James Madison, and leading the antifederalists was Patrick Henry. Although many of the issues were new, the regional divisions remained relatively constant (Ammon 1953: 287; Risjord 1978). And it was this set of oppositions that Virginia brought to the board.
What was key was not that region structured Virginian politics but that the elite were spread out—this not only increased the horizontality of politics but (as we shall see) made Virginia a better springboard for building national-level structures. This extreme horizontality can best be highlighted by making a comparison to Massachusetts, which was also hierarchically organized with little competition for political positions. As in Virginia, politics in Massachusetts were structured by regional divisions, but politics had long been monopolized by well-educated Bostonians—indeed, other representatives often had a difficult time attending sessions of the legislature (Alexander 2002:12f; Zemsky 1971; Dallinger 1897: 10; Egnal 1980: 48, 57; Patterson 1973: 24–27, 42–45, 117, 144f, 187f, 247; Goodman 1964: 74; Banner 1970: 7; Sharp 1993: 59; Fischer 1965: 13).
As a result, while Virginian politics involved shifting alliances between rough equivalents scattered across the state, each a king in his own domain, in Massachusetts it was difficult to maintain autonomy and yet strike bargains. Indeed, both leading figures coming out of Massachusetts were remarkable for their relations: John Hancock was friends with everyone (at the minor cost of principles), and John Adams friends with no one. Virginia led to more common success stories of clearly locatable party leaders such as Madison and Jefferson. Indeed, it was these who were to successfully create new alignments and the first true political party in the nation.
We have seen that local-level party systems can arise through the politicization and extension of patronage pyramids; in environments with significantly less elite conflict, we may instead see regional division into relatively stable “blocks.” But national-level party systems involve the coordination of such local systems and, indeed, their fusion into a single structure that involves both vertical coordination and horizontal alignment of interests (on the similar case of Canada, see Chhibber and Kollman 2004: 92, 184f).
We have, as we recall, been investigating combinations of horizontality and verticality since chapter 5. But this sort of horizontal alliance is something substantively quite different from the horizontality that arises merely as an absence of vertical relationships. When deriving command structures, we could do rather well by treating all relationships as fundamentally vertical. Although the more complex command structures did involve horizontal relationships between subsections, this was a minor analytic complication, because the key organizational principle—the transitivity—was fundamentally a vertical one.
In this case, however, we are finding that the organizational glue can come from a secondary set of relationships, namely alliances between subsections (and thus we begin to leave the class of simple structures behind). In many cases, such alliances do not lead to anything remotely like a superparty, spanning and organizing the local parties. Rather, sets of horizontal relations connect elites who remain rough equals and produce the multihub structure we examined in chapter 2. There is, we recall, no reason to imagine that the connections in such a structure are transitive, and good reasons to think that they are not. (Strategic actors will tend to befriend their enemy’s friends, for one.) But transitivity can, as Mann (1986; see chapter 6) pointed out, be introduced via ideology.
We can pursue the example of the development of the English civil war. Bearman found that the key structural changes that presaged the split in the English elite were in place a full half-century before the outbreak of violence, yet what was missing was “a mechanism for concatenating local factions into the national arena.” “This mechanism was provided by religious heterodoxy” (Bearman 1993: 177). Religious dispute is indeed an obvious contender for a coordinating mechanism—that is, a heuristic for action that would allow for de facto coordination in the absence of explicit central control. While in general alliances do not imply any transitivity beyond what is advantageous to participants at the time, the heuristic of ideology will tend to impose stark divisions—the sorts of things that may be of great interest to structural entrepreneurs—with rapidity.
Let us return to the balance theory as discussed in chapter 2 to flesh out this point. Political scientists have discovered that one way that vaguely informed persons can act politically in a relatively sophisticated manner is to use what has euphemistically been called a “likeability heuristic,” but might be properly called a “hate their guts” heuristic (see Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991). If we hate the same person or persons, and do whatever we imagine will really make their lives miserable, we are likely to find ourselves acting in reasonable concert. Anything that helps divide all contenders into two camps can be used to provide for coordination of local disputes. In chapter 2, we saw that local groups might seize on the oppositions of outsiders as a way to express and coordinate their own patterns of hostility (in the ways that local gangs might seem to affiliate with the Bloods or the Crips, but only to show whom they were against [Decker and van Winkle 1996: 87]). Religious controversy is well suited to a stark bifurcation that can be used to coordinate local competitions.
But so can other forms of abstract ideology. For example, charting the political career of a famous radical in the French revolution, M. G. A. Vadier, Lyons (1977: 80–82, 89) demonstrates that his choice of political side in a rapidly bifurcating field was grounded in a battle between his family and another (the Darmaing) for control over his locale—“a long-standing family rivalry, on which political labels like Jacobinism and federalism were now superimposed.” As the Darmaings became the latter, Vadier became the former. Vadier’s success was marked by his rise to a position of authority sufficient to allow him to execute as “counterrevolutionaries” the Darmaings and others who had snubbed his family before the revolution.
Thus parties can develop through such alignment of local oppositions. This alignment is generally far from complete—even in well-developed and competitive party systems, there can be substantial slippage between what a party represents in one locality and what it represents in another (Schwartz 1990: 10, 280). That is, the transitivity involved may encompass only a small portion of the “programs”—the plans and interests—of the members of a “party.” However, both the horizontal transitivity of ideological agreement and, for us perhaps more important, the vertical transitivity of the command structure, tend to increase (at least initially) with the level of competition between parties.
In the most important theoretical statement on party formation in recent years, Martin Shefter (1994: 6, 30) starts from the empirically supported assumption that elites “will construct a strong, broadly based party organization only if it is necessary for them to do so in order to gain, retain, or exercise power.” Being nobody’s fools, elites realize that mobilization of nonelites will threaten their own positions, and so if possible, they would prefer to collude with other elites (even enemies) rather than begin a cycle of escalating mobilization.32
But when competition heats up, it will be very tempting for elites to try to increase the breadth and depth of mobilization. For example, in close electoral races elites will have a reason to extend the franchise in directions they believe will disproportionately increase their support (for post-Independence Virginia see Pole [1966]). This was, says Shefter, historically especially true for countries that had a meritocratic civil service, because the only goods that could be linked to support for one faction were necessarily of the form of “winner-take-all” goods, thereby spurring the development of a competitive structure. In contrast, where there was no true civil service, goods were more divisible (i.e. “corruption” could flourish in its manifold guises), and hence party formation was rudimentary (Shefter 1994: 11, 14, 21, 30–35). Thus the switch to indivisible goods tends to increase mobilization as elites compete, and mobilization tends to decrease the reliance on divisible goods because it is too expensive to pay off each supporter individually. Such mobilization can involve concatenation both in horizontal and in vertical directions.33
And indeed, it was competition, specifically competition for the presidency, that led toward the emergence of national-level parties in the United States. These parties gratifyingly involved not only the fusion of vertical relationships (as seen in the politics of New York) and horizontal relationships (as seen in the politics of Virginia), but indeed the fusion of these two structures. Further, the key organizational innovation involved melding two forms of transitivity. On the one hand we see the vertical transitivity that would result were elites able to cascade patronage triangles into a pyramid and then enforce transitivity of relationships. On the other hand we see the horizontal transitivity that would arise when horizontal relations of alliance are systematized either on the basis of ideology or on the basis of commonality of interest (or both). We can begin by sketching the state of national politics before the new government.
The acceptance of the new constitution of 1787 led to the triumph of the federalists—those who wanted to increase the power of the national government. The insiders of the Washington and Adams administrations retained the name Federalist, even though they now had no organized opposition. But merely strengthening the power of the center did not eliminate regional differences in interest; in fact, it highlighted them and in large part reversed them. For the new Federalists found their support in states that had previously led the antifederalist side (such as Rhode Island and other small states like Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Delaware, as well as their larger compatriot Massachusetts), while it was the South (excluding South Carolina)34 that tended toward the opposition (see the data compiled by Charles 1956: 95; also Buel 1972: 72; Fischer 1965: 222; Hoadley 1980; Slez and Martin 2007). This was in part because the large southern states that had wanted a stronger union did not necessarily want to pay off the debts of the profligate ones such as Massachusetts and South Carolina.35
But this plan (termed the “assumption” of debts) was promoted as key to the survival of the union by the new secretary of the treasury under Washington, Alexander Hamilton. More than any single person, Hamilton pushed forward party formation on the national level. Although a bastard in the technical sense, Hamilton made his way into elite New York society in part through letters of introduction to the Livingstons. The Livingston in question was William (whose grandmother was a Schuyler), whose daughter Sarah was to marry John Jay.36 Thus Hamilton was introduced into the relatively tightly knit dominant faction which, as we recall, had taken the patriot side. Through their assistance Hamilton got an appointment as captain in the Army; from there he became Washington’s aide. It was in this capacity that he met and married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of General Philip Schuyler (Schuyler’s wife was a van Rensselaer, herself the daughter of a Livingston; see Flexner 1978: 55; Hendrickson 1985: 33f, 63, 255f).
As he moved to a position of political centrality, Hamilton was able to join the hierarchical nature of many family ties with political collaboration (as opposed to the latter being the free correspondence of equals). His “creatures” (as they were sometimes disapprovingly termed) might be those working under him in the Treasury or those who owed him in some other way, as well as those allied with the Schuylers. Indeed, Hamilton’s very choice of the Treasury as his power base (which may seem to modern readers a relatively minor position in contrast to the presidency) came from his sense that true control would flow downward with the money (Lodge 1898: 136; Risjord 1978: 407, 413; Buel 1972: 103; Flexner 1978: 443).
There were many elites who favored Hamilton’s proposals for reasons of interest or conviction, but Hamilton believed he (and the country) would need more organization to coordinate the opposition to his opposition. Hamilton’s rudimentary party organization, however, was based on the relationships discussed above—a personalistic set of those whom he could convince, who owed him something, or who had already thrown in their lot with him—and was sporadic, arising only when there was a particular contest to be won. He was unable to delegate grunt-work (for example, supervising poll watching) to others and might end up doing it himself (Cunningham 1957: 164; Charles 1956: 23; Risjord 1978: 362; Reichley 1992: 85; Chambers 1963a; 1963b: 29, 40; 1972: 41f; Young 1967: 137; Kaminski 1993: 252). But still, this sort of organization could push the party system beyond simple geographic bloc voting.
Hamilton’s contribution to party formation, however, came less in whom he mobilized than in whom he provoked. For it was the interests threatened by Hamilton’s program that led to the counterorganization that was to be the Republican Party (though see Aldrich and Grant 1993). The opposition initially had its coherence only through regional bloc voting, the southern states tending to oppose the Federalist administration. The first organization of the opposition party was, as a result, a coalition of loosely associated notables with a name (the Republican Party) but no real social structure. This core made alliances with others, especially the Clintonians of New York, who opposed the Federalist administration for largely independent reasons (Risjord 1978: 406f, 412; Chambers 1963b: 57, 66; Hendrickson 1985: 15, 202; Cunningham 1957; Ammon 1953: 297; Charles 1956: 80ff, 88, 95; Reichley 1992: 45; Fischer 1965: 202; Young 1967: 578; Ketcham 1990: 326; Chibber and Kollman 2004: 81).
Let us return to New York’s local politics. While the Schuylers and Livingstons had been united against the DeLanceys, once the DeLanceys were out of the picture, relations between the first two families became tenser. Although first protected by the Livingstons, once married into the Schuylers Hamilton threw all his weight on their side in a number of patronage battles. This provoked the leader of the Livingstons, Robert R., to take control of the charge against Hamilton’s policies. Hamilton’s disregard of the Livingstons opened an opportunity for Aaron Burr, Hamilton’s doppelganger and nemesis. Burr made an alliance with Livingston and the two met with Madison and Jefferson in their 1791 tour across New York, apparently laying the groundwork for the opposition that was to become the Republican Party (Lodge 1898: 80f; Risjord 1978: 415; Hendrickson 1985; Cunningham 1957: 81, 91; Young 1967: 160f, 571; Ketcham 1990:287; also see Randall 1993: 525).
Burr became the most industrious Republican leader in New York during the 1796 election, and Burr and Hamilton then faced each other in New York elections as leaders of their respective state parties—indeed, their hatred of one another spiraled to the point at which Burr later manipulated Hamilton into a duel and killed him.37 But for the time being, there were clashing factions in New York based on preexisting cleavages between elite families contending for control over patronage (Hendrickson 1985: 535, 574, 218, 325, 4; Randall 1993: 570; Cunningham 1957: 107, 117, 177, 245; 1963: 53, 149ff, 206, 213).
It was this consolidation of local rivalries that allowed Republicanism to gain a foothold in New York. In contrast to some other states, here the Republicans drew heavily on the previous antifederalist ranks;38 while these antifederalists opposed the Hamiltonian scheme for assumption of state debts, it was not because this was against the interests of their state or because they were opposed to rewarding speculators (Young 1967: 169, 172, 174, 194ff; Kaminski 1993: 197). Instead, as we have seen, they were pushed to be Republicans because they were not Federalists. Indeed, the overriding need to maintain local oppositions led to quite interesting changes—the leading Virginian anti-federalist and opponent of Madison, Patrick Henry, found himself becoming a Federalist as the leading Virginia federalist, James Madison, became a Republican. In a very real sense, their party affiliations were unchanged in anything other than name.
The first noticeable national-level organization, then, involved the alignment of largely disconnected political oppositions in different localities. Even though there was no “apex” coordinating (say) Burr’s actions in New York and Madison’s in Virginia, or even any formal organizational presence,39 the two could trust that their acts were mutually supporting because they had agreed that they had common enemies.
On the federal level, then, the Republicans developed as a largely horizontal network of elite politicians (especially in the legislature) with its core in Virginia. That is, it began from the network of rough equals that was the backbone of Virginian politics, as opposed to the hierarchy characteristic of New York. Hamilton was not averse to directly contacting people he wanted to influence—he was known to corner people in halls and make impassioned arguments for his favored policies. But he did not do what the Virginians Madison and Jefferson did—namely journey to a different state to talk to equivalents and determine whether they could work in some reasonable concert. Hamilton might beg Washington to call Patrick Henry out of retirement to turn his fearsome rhetoric against the Madisonians in the Virginia assembly, but he did not attempt to discover who the most formidable rising elites were and strike a bargain with them. It was such bargains that allowed for truly national parties to emerge.
We have seen the emergence of political parties as horizontal alliances of existing elite oppositions, some of which were already tied to well-developed factional structures. On the local level the elaboration of party structure unfolded differently. First, it was generally not that people affiliated with the opposition to Federalism because of their opposition to Hamilton’s programs. In states with large frontier areas, this whole controversy seemed relatively distant from divisive concerns. But wherever local elites were affiliated with Federalism—which seems to have been more often than not—there was a natural incentive for their enemies to identify as Republicans, just as we saw with the spread of the Bloods and the Crips as national gangs. A good example here is Vermont, in which a regional division (between those wanting to form an independent state and those wanting to remain part of New York) was mapped on to the Federalist/Republican controversy, even though there was little in the Republican ideology relevant to the debate. Conversely, where elites identified with Republicanism for sectional reasons, their enemies might need to embrace federalism (Goodman 1975: 85; Risjord 1978: 473; Cunningham 1957: 72, 4; Buel 1972: 73, 86; Hillman 2003: 11f, 16–18, 30; Fischer 1965: 203, 206f; Ketcham 1990: 234; Nash 2005: 241).
We saw in the case of early modern England that religious ideology could be an enzyme for such an alignment. Just as effective in establishing a coordination of local oppositions was the French Revolution, not because it was a model that anyone wanted to emulate, but because it served as a mascot that could be used to simplify and express party divisions. The serious political issue of whether the United States should ally itself with England, or with France, or with neither, could be used as an ideological litmus test to bifurcate the populace (Ammon 1963: 159; Appleby 2003: 21; Hendrickson 1985: 234; Buel 1972: 52, 97f, 102f, 236; Risjord 1978: 431; Lodge 1898: 135; Chambers 1963b: 39f, 43, 49, 63, 105, 109; Cunningham 1957: 64f; Bell 1973: 139).
While ideology might be used to describe the emerging coalitions, there was little reason to believe the ideology motivated these. The Republicans, drawing their strength from the South, might rail against monarchic oppressions of the rights of man and glorify the French commitment to liberty, equality, and brotherhood, while it was the Federalists who (having less to lose) favored the cause of abolition (Appleby 2003: 29; Wilentz 2005: 163). Similarly, the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798 were a blatant attempt by the Federalists to use the powers of government against their political opponents and represented a serious blow to the Republicans. The Republicans retreated to their strongholds of southern state governments and became firm advocates of the rights of the state governments in contrast to the federal (Cunningham 1957: 126f, 137).40 When the Republicans came into power, the Federalists did the same and now became the ideological advocates of states’ rights (Banner 1970). What ideology was good for, then, was to align local conflicts that only imperfectly overlapped with each other.
Further, ideology was a way for actors to break through the constraints of regional bloc voting. We saw above that regional alignments were paramount before the new constitution and dominated the logic of parties immediately afterward. Protagonists might variously refer to the opposition as “democrats,” “republicans,” “Whigs,” or, significantly, “the Southern party.” But the new constitution of 1787–88, with its strong executive, increased the “winner-take-all” nature of political action at the federal level. Accordingly, it behooved all factions to court disgruntled fractions of other factions and to organize so as best to triumph in the key political battle, the contest for the presidency. This meant that the majority within one state would court the minority in another; neither local vertical ties of patronage nor horizontal ones of region could express this political logic. “Principle” was all that was left.
They are drilled and disciplined with the regularity of an army, and their plans can be counteracted only by equal organization.
—Federalist pamphlet of 1805 commenting on Republicans
Competition between the Federalists and Republicans, especially competition for the presidency, led to them to approach in form to what we would now understand as a “party”—a national-level social structure to mobilize and coordinate the actions of non-elites so as to win elections.41 Only the presidential election required the alignment of local conflicts, as the important state elections were generally those for the state assembly (which in most cases would then elect a governor), and these elections were on the district level, not statewide. Even where elites in different localities were internally divided (which would break the regional alignments), something else was needed if these conflicts were to be aligned in any stable way.
The Republicans, originally an opposition out of power, led the way in moving toward party organization. They made up for their lack of numbers in local meetings by coordinating their actions beforehand; their candidates might explicitly campaign, a practice still on the border of respectability. The Federalists, reasonably complacent in their monopoly of power, initially did much less in the way of organizing (see Goodman 1975: 58; Chambers 1963b: 32; Risjord 1978: 498, 512; Cunningham 1957: 114, 148, 205, 207, 250f, 258).
But Federalists were eventually forced to copy Republican organizational innovations, prompting the Republicans in turn to increase their attempts at mobilization and organization, for example, by moving toward a more formal committee system and a more democratic structure.42 Even more important, a subtle shift was taking place in the eyes of many actors by which parties ceased to be merely a means to get elected (and then follow one’s conscience) and instead became the end in themselves, requiring the subordination of personal preferences (Fischer 1965: 33, 52f; Cunningham 1957: 114, 159f; Cunningham 1963: 131, 141, 156, 161, 174, 283, 301f).
Competition also increased electoral participation, which was in effect an extension of the franchise: the previously apathetic gained interest, and the competitors were more willing to interpret voting qualifications loosely if it might help them. And organized parties could then as now transport the wavering or the disabled to the polls (Goodman 1964: 136f; Banner 1970). This increased mobilization in turn forced an increase in competitiveness in most areas.
Although competition spurred party efforts, and thus from an outsider’s perspective we may see it as “friendly” to the growth of parties, from the perspective of parties it was competition that was the true enemy, and much of their effort went not into competing but into attempting to neutralize competition through, for example, the disenfranchisement of likely opponents (as in New York in the 1780s). Most important, the rules for the selection of representatives to the electoral college were set by the states, and so the party in control of the state legislature could rewrite laws to favor itself. In 1800, anticipating the election, Virginia made its procedure for choosing electors “winner-take-all” to ensure that no pockets of Federalist support could contribute to Adams’s candidacy. Massachusetts transferred the selection of electors to the state legislature, though in this case, it was to maximize the Federalist vote. In Pennsylvania and New York such machinations were avoided only because each party had sufficient strength to block any innovation (Young 1967: 67; Cunningham 1957: 144–47, 150f, 184, 195; 1963: 192; Goodman 1964: 141f; also Formisano 1981: 54 for New Jersey).43 But competition could not be contained, and it drove the evolution of parties in structural terms.
The structure that both parties were gravitating to was a hybrid, a set of command hierarchies joined at the top through more horizontal ties. At the state level, there was generally a set of hierarchically nested committees that were used to channel nominations upward and coordinate actions (generally geared to getting out the vote) downward: state committee over district committees, district committee over county committees, and county committee over town committees, to use the example of the Federalist Party of New York. At the national level, parties were used not to win election but to coordinate the activities of elected officials and to control the nomination process, usually via an informal caucus. Thus the overall structure was paradigmatically a set of organized pyramids coordinated by a less formal oligarchy at the top (Fischer 1965: 60–63, 72–76, 83; Cunningham 1957: 151–61; Cunningham 1963: 180, 99–102, 125–29, 167, 174, 177, 201, 301f; Banner 1970: 248–51).
The rapid mobilization was not without costs—the Republicans implicitly promised more than they could deliver as the price of gaining popular support: as one Federalist maliciously predicted, “When the gentry find that there are more PIGS than TEATS, what a squealing there will be in the hog pen.” Indeed, serious splits arose in the key middle states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware over patronage. As the Federalist Party crumbled and a new party system developed, both the hierarchical discipline of party and the extent of mobilization were increased. This led to a decrease in the importance of region, with parties competing seriously in nearly every state (Fischer 1965: 25; Dallinger 1897: 44; McCormick 1975: 111f; Reichley 1992: 50, 59; Hofstadter 1970: 209f; Chambers 1963b: 191, 197, 200; Cunningham 1963: 183, 203, 215, 221, 283; Ketcham 1990: 466; also see Goodman 1964: 147, 153).
In sum, competition was sufficient if not necessary to lead elites to feel pressure to mobilize commoners, which led to the extension of party forms. Because the issues of contention at the national level were in part regional ones, party formation was somewhat stunted in states in which there was near unanimity of interests. Such places could be extremely powerful bases of support from which one might intervene in federal level politics—there is no better basis for democratic action than an antidemocratic district. But if dissent between elites could be found in a number of regions, there was always the possibility of aligning these so as to strengthen the emerging party system. The precise nature of the party system (two national-level parties) of course has much to do with the particular institutional forms that were the backdrop for action, but we may draw general lessons about the elaboration of parties as social structures.
We have seen that modern parties combine three structural features. First of all, they are forms for mobilizing large numbers of persons. Second, they involve hierarchical organization—hierarchical at least in the sense of inclusive levels, whereby cities are within counties (say), counties within states, and states within the nation. Third, they rely on some external interest constellations (that is, interests that existed prior to members joining the party). Not all forms of political organization have these features, and indeed, parties tend to evolve from other forms that are different. In particular, “blocs” exist when there are stable interest constellations but not well-developed coordinative structures. Such blocs tend to approach the clique structure that we investigated in chapter 2, as they arise from the simplest forms of equivalence. Because commonalities of interest are generally based on stark social divisions (such as region or landholding status) there is relatively little middle ground and hence relatively little competition. No one can be swung either way.
In such cases, then, there is little reason for political mobilization to be high—representatives may be entrusted with all political action, as their interests can be counted on to resemble those of the represented. We saw this approximated in Virginia. But political mobilization can also be low where, rather than representing interest constellations, political organizations involve the hierarchical relations of a narrow elite. Here, members of a faction may have no common interests prior to their joining the faction; the commonality of interest comes only in the winner-take-all nature of the goods for which they struggle. In such cases, there is far more structural elaboration than in bloc voting, as factionlike maneuvering can lead to multilevel hierarchies, but political actors need not act as representatives of others. We saw this approximated in New York.
Figure 8.2 schematizes this using a tripolar scheme similar to that used in chapter 6, for once again there are somewhat incompatible structural forms. Each vertex is labeled according to a rough symbolization of structural principles. The bloc form differs from factions and parties in its lack of elaborated organization; the faction in terms of the insulation of the political actors from the lay polity. The party is distinguished by its degree of mobilization—its hierarchical reach down to local-level actors who can be inspired and coordinated. (This figure differs from that presented earlier in the chapter, which pertained only to the relationship between elite and nonelite, as opposed to being a template for the dispersion of possible structures.)44
Figure 8.2. Three structures
It is the fusion of the features of the bloc and the faction that leads to a real party—a combination of organizational elaboration and a linkage between elite and mass interests. This latter is labeled “act as representatives” in the figure as this is the paradigmatic form of linkage in contemporary parties. But in patronage parties—and to a large extent this holds true for single party states—the connection between elite and mass interests comes because of the party’s ability to grant access to various materially advantageous opportunities in return for loyal support, as opposed to a share in the overall direction of policy.
The arrows indicating trajectories of party formation are impressionistic, but suggest that in most cases of national party formation the first movement from a faction will be toward the incorporation of the horizontal ties characteristic of a bloc system, while the first movement from a bloc will be toward the incorporation of the vertical ties characteristic of a factional system. We saw an example of the latter in the U.S. case, which is one of federal integration of previously established local polities, and an example of the former in the Russian case, which is one of disintegration of a strong nationalized system. But the logic does not seem to be restricted to these cases.45
The diagram above is, however, somewhat deceptive because it implies that the true party structure at the apex leaves factional and bloc systems necessarily behind. But this is not so. Just as there are virtues to loosening control in army structures, so there are reasons why party formation stops short of eliminating factional and bloc structures. Taking the latter first, we might wonder why it is possible that certain subregions are effectively single-party states. One might expect competition to lead whatever party is currently out of power to attempt to break away one section from the ruling coalition by offering a more tempting package of policies.
But there are limits, however broad, to the capacity for such maneuvering at the state or local level given that the party must ensure a certain pattern of horizontal ties or—equivalently—represent certain sectional interests. Thus the compositional differences across locales—for example, the fact that there simply are a large number of farmers in one area as opposed to another—coupled with the pattern of cross-locale alignments can dampen local competition. While every party would like to be all things to all persons, one cannot always both be profarmer in Nebraska and antifarmer in Massachusetts if there are federal-level decisions on farm policy that need to be made.
Thus the party is necessarily in-between two extremes. One extreme would be completely independent lower-level configurations, and the other would be a monolithic structure the contours of which are independent of locale. This in-betweenness is a necessary consequence of the fact that the integration of local structures happens not only by imposition of a common superordinate (e.g., a national committee) but through alliance, coalition, and compromise. As Key (1964: 334) says, “If politics did not make strange bedfellows, there could be no national party.”46
Thus we do not see a single transition from a patronage faction to a modern party via increasing mobilization, perhaps due to competition. Rather, the party develops as a melding of preexisting blocs, generally based on region (or related divisions such as ethnicity and religion that are key to constellations of interests), and factions, generally based on preexisting vertical relations. Even more important, it is difficult to simply fuse the two forms of bloc and faction. For one, movement toward increasing organization due to competition tends to undermine the bloc form, as the attempt to make advantageous alliances leads to new interest constellations that cut across the preexisting blocs. Yet when secure, factions may attempt to move toward a bloc system as a way of decreasing competition. Thus while blocs are defined as the basis of common interests, they are compatible with a noncompetitive political system that does little for the populace.
On the other hand, blocs tend to blunt factional politics, in that any increase in the relevance of shared interests among political actors for decisions takes the wind out of complicated maneuvering. Indeed, it may well be that the insulation of a political elite can play a crucial role in the development of parties by allowing for the complex organization of faction that would be unlikely where representatives simply vote the interest of their bloc. It is this organization that can then allow for the mobilization of the populace on a large scale once transitivity is introduced.
Such transitivity is introduced into parties in two forms. The first is a simple one of command processes—the arranging of sets of vertical relations so that subordinates do not have an independence that allows them to undermine the directives of superordinates. The weakness of command in contemporary American parties is still noted by observers, but it has vastly increased since the first party system (for an example of the development of transitivity of command in the early parties, see Banner 1970: 254f).
Thus it is not simply the structure of command, but the specifically transitive nature of the relationships, that allows for imperative coordination. Further, the transitivity is not just one that implies disciplined cadres (although this is a nontrivial aspect of the party). It also allows for the flow of information upward that can be vital for the coordination of efforts across localities. But as Key (1964: 316) emphasized, while the party is, in structural terms, a hierarchy of nested inclusion such as the tree we derived from unilineal kinship, the higher levels cannot coordinate the lower ones simply “by the exercise of command,” but instead require “a sense of common cause.”47
And this brings us to the second form of transitivity, namely that coming from ideology (see Mann 1986 as discussed in chapter 6). Here the transitivity between relationships is established indirectly; more exactly, we may say that it is mediated by a cultural abstraction. Rather than struggle to force c to accept a relationship with a because a has the relationship with b and b with c (that is,aRb and bRc implies aRc) we simply let a,b, and c define their relationships with one another on the basis of their common ideology i (aHi, bHi, cHi, where H is a new relation of “holding”).48 In line with the arguments made in chapter 1, this is a form of cultural pattern that is dual to the social divisions. This sort of transitivity is not that of the command hierarchy—it is that of the clique. Such wholly horizontal relationships thus enter political structures either (in the case of relatively rudimentary mobilization) through bloc voting, or (in the case of greater mobilization) ideology. In both cases, preexisting commonalities of interest are necessary for such horizontal transitivity to develop quickly.49
These two forms of transitivity have something in common, something that we also found in military structures, and that is that they must be limited in order for the organization to maintain flexibility (also see Key 1964: 283, 341). If parties are driven to attempt to split all blocs, to enter into every locality and compete there, they must, first of all, allow for local independence of movement, just as must armies. And for the very same reason, they must also allow for ideological disconnection—to be passionately committed to one’s own justice and coolly indifferent to that of others. The first form of flexibility must distress the partisan, and the second the philosopher, but it is hard to imagine that things could be otherwise.
1 Weber further distinguished “patronage parties” that attempt to accrue control over material advantages for their members from “ideological parties” that represent either broader groups or constellations of ideal interests. We will see later that this distinction, while inexact, gets at a crucial structural bifurcation.
2 Although the Communist Party in the Soviet Union did not compete with other parties, it was organized to combat internal enemies. Also, it is worth emphasizing that by “elites” I do not mean to imply that these must be social elites–they may be political elites who lack other positions of distinction.
3 However, where the party system is weak, the reliance on such external structural forms can be determinative of the nature of the party system. Both Italian and Spanish fascism were built on preexisting structures, the former on local agrarian organizations that provided collective goods and the latter on the army. As a result, the former could be used for radical mobilization and transformation, while the latter simply allowed typical caciques to boss others around (Riley 2005: 300–305).
4 The exception seems to have been the Democratic Party of Russia, headed by Nikolai Travkin (see his interview in McFaul and Markov 1993: 67, 73f).
5 Similarly, during the Second World War Japanese parties were dissolved as the country moved to military rule, but the informal personal connections between politicians that were retained then formed the nucleus of the parties emerging in the newly democratized postwar political field (Ike 1972: 77).
6 The importance of this distinction for analyzing systems of political patronage has been emphasized by Clark (1975: 328) and especially (1973b).
7 At the same time, a sudden shortage of patronage may force machine-type patrons to mobilize their followers for more violent action, not so much because the good has become winner-take-all but because there is a good chance of loser-take-none (see Auyero and Moran 2007:1356f).
8 Of course, in the United States there are dozens of other parties, everything from the American Fascist Party to the World Socialist Party to the American Beer Drinker’s Party. These have not, as a rule, been consequential over any long period of time. The exceptions, such as the Green, People’s, and the Farmer-Labor parties, prove the rule, in that they only worked at the state level where they could capture a governorship, and make a brief splash at the national level for a single election. Such parties generally only survived where a national party was, for its own reasons, willing to funnel them patronage (Key 1964: 274f).
9 These three types of party (faction, machine, and mass) are also adumbrated by Perkins (1996) in similar terms.
10 This (1548–52) was during the period after Henry VIII’s death in which the new king was ten years old and rebellion broke out, a situation in which a number of contenders might reasonably hope to dramatically influence the character of the new government.
11 Indeed, one key problem was that Essex followed the rule of balance–my enemy’s friend is my enemy–and thus increasingly isolated himself. He was actually to rise in rebellion when his difficult nature led to him being refused a key patronage appointment (see, e.g., Lacey 1971: 214).
12 Analyzing Scotland in the next century, Sunter (1986: 68f) argued that such appointments were “the most hazardous of all forms of patronage” in terms of the controversy they evoked.
13 The alert reader will notice that the main point of this chapter is a generalization of the arguments made here by Bearman.
14 Something quite similar happened in 17th-century France. The use of patronage as a governance strategy had led to a constant drain from the crown in favor of the great provincial nobles. In the late 16th century the fiscal weakness of the center led to a dramatic reduction of this trickle-down of patronage. (At the same time, the general replacement of military with administrative obligations discussed in the previous chapter led to a politicization of clientship.) The key state-building ministers (Richelieu in particular) worked not simply to stem the outflow but to create their own, largely parallel, clienteles in the provinces. Just as in England, this focused discontent on the center and led to the noble uprising known as the Fronde (which was to a large but not complete degree an alignment of feuding noble clienteles), though in the long run it increased the central state’s power by furthering the replacement of indirect with direct rule (Kettering 1986: 144, 176, 182f, 190f, 209, 235; Ranum 1993: 121, 183f, 272, 344f).
15 Put somewhat differently, to say that goods are divisible is as much to say that a strong state does not exist, allowing for the development of semi-independent patronage triangles to mobilize nonelites, as we saw in chapter 6. Also see Ranum (1993: 12).
16 There does, however, seem to be a “ratchet” effect whereby it is harder to contract than to expand. For example, in 1790 in Poland there was an attempt to contract the electorate to landholding nobles only–the result was that four hundred commoners were ennobled in a matter of weeks (McLean 2005b: 22).
17 Initially debate at the national level seemed to be between the “radicals” and “conservatives,” but as a genuine commitment to an ideological program is an aid to political maneuvering in very few cases, moderates assumed central roles and the main axis of division became that between the North and the South (Henderson 1974; Jillson and Wilson 1994: 114, 62, 173; Risjord 1978: 268, 377, 394; Chambers 1963b: 85, 116; Cunningham 1957: 93).
18 Although New York, unusually, possessed two vital cities, Albany and New York City, this was not the basis for a bifurcation in politics. (Many of the upstate landowners actually made most of their money from trade in New York City, where they dwelt most of the time.)
19 While Virginian land speculation involved land to the west of the established colonies, and hence first royal and later national policies, in New York land claims were for coastal land and turned on colony-/state-level decisions.
20 The passion for intermarriage between these families is shown in the fact that in the 1970s, influential in Albany and New York politics was Brigadier General Cortlandt van Rensselaer Schuyler (Shorto 2004: 4). It is difficult to describe the high degree of consistency and in-breeding of this large clique; suffice to say that while working in the Livingston College of Rutgers University, I would be more likely to see the names Livingston and Rutgers in the documents examined here than in departmental mail. I have also profited from the genealogical compilations made public by Marshall Davies Lloyd, as well as from consultation with my friend and dean of the Rutgers Honors Program, Muffin Livingston Lord.
21 Despite having a stable set of elite families, New York politics were relatively egalitarian, at least in that it was possible for young men of low birth or little funds to affiliate with these families and assume central political roles.
22 Of course, there were real divisions in economic interests between families that led to splits on crucial issues, especially to what extent the French should be mollycoddled so as not to upset the fur trade.
23 The most important example of this is seen in the mid 18th century in which a new governor (Cosby) arrived and, not atypically, sided with the outs (the Philipse and DeLancey faction) and made them ins. But Cosby also began a vendetta against the chief justice of New York, Lewis Morris, replacing him with a DeLancey. Morris responded with a full-fledged political assault, galvanizing a party behind him. He (opportunistically) broadened the issue to a fundamental one of populist philosophy and embarked on new forms of mobilization such as founding a political newspaper and organizing a petition campaign. This appeal to the populace was apparently a successful tactic as he and his allies gained seats in the next election while Philipse and DeLancey lost theirs (Bonomi 1971: 74f, 87–90, 105, 107f, 110, 133, 149; Leder 1961: 249–53, 284; Varga 1960: 265). Morris had earlier responded similarly in a number of occasions, first by escalating a conflict with the new governor of New Jersey via a full-scale politicization against the proprietary regime which he had till then supported, and then again by opposing an antiproprietary governor by suddenly becoming a populist and switching his power base from council to assembly (Sheridan 1981: 23ff, 70).
24 In a nice illustration of some of the themes emphasized here, when Livingston joined the patriot side, his more radical tenants were pushed into loyalism (Nash 2005: 246f; also see 241).
25 Here I principally rely on Fischer’s (1965) exhaustive biographies of the leading Federalists, both the old generation of revolutionary war veterans and the new generation that entered into real competition with the Republicans. I omit the most prominent to emphasize the “average” elite: including the prominent would only increase the direction of the trends reported here. I also count as “lawyer” only those who at least in part practiced (Fischer 1965: 207, 209). In New York, even in the older generation two-thirds of the Federalists were lawyers, and in the newer generation all of 89% were. In Pennsylvania, only around half the Federalists were lawyers. (Were we to look at Republicans, the patterns across states would probably be the same; once George Clinton brought a set of “new men” into prominence in New York, however, this changed somewhat). These patterns are also seen in the make-up of states’ delegations to the House in the first three Congresses. While New York had no doctors or ministers, doctors and ministers held on average 7% and 16% of Pennsylvania’s seats respectively. I thank Adam Slez for making these data available to me.
26 Although the clergy also may be seen as an ideological occupation in that it was indeed a bully pulpit for many ministers, the effective range of persuasion was usually limited to the local.
27 See the letter from William Laight to Alexander Hamilton, March 14, 1797, reprinted in Hamilton (1910: 162f). Doctors, as Banner (1970: 188) stresses for Massachusetts, lacked the hierarchical organizational backbone to their practice; further, because medicine was itself an avenue for upward mobility, doctors were less likely to have clientage or affinal connections to high-status men who would support their political careers.
28 Such patronage did not assure loyalty–many of the antifederalists in New York had been sponsored by those in the Livingston or Schuyler families but later turned against them (for examples, see Young 1967: 43ff).
29 Somewhat similarly, in early modern France it was the Parlementarians who formed a closely knit group of persons concentrated in a small area who had the greatest capacity to organize as a contending faction (also see Ranum 1993: 16).
30 For purposes of clarity, “federalism” will indicate the attempt to strengthen the union in contrast to “antifederalism,” and “Federalism” the party of Washington and Hamilton in contrast to “Republicanism.”
31 Although Clinton’s electoral success owed a great deal to his military reputation, he had studied law with William Smith, one of the leaders of the Livingston faction (Kaminski 1993: 13).
32 I here consider only what Shefter would call “internal mobilization” and leave to the side the case of “external mobilization” that is provoked by challenges by outsiders who are generally unable to use patronage. For example (returning to the case of 19th-century France), Aminzade (1987) argues that the republican party, unable to grant patronage as could the royalists, was forced to promise collective goods delivered to structural equivalents and hence push toward a modern party system.
33 In a brilliant analysis, Chhibber and Kollman (1998: 336, 338; 2004) show that in polities with single-member districts there is a strong tendency for a more national party system to emerge as the national-level government takes charge of a greater proportion of societal surplus.
34 As Kipling would say, and you must not forget South Carolina, best beloved.
35 And now you see why you must not forget South Carolina.
36 Jay was already related to the Philipses, and had previously proposed to two of DeLancey’s daughters (Bernstein 1970: 23).
37 Similarly, Burr pioneered methods of mobilizing and it was his organizational importance that led to his being offered the vice presidency. Because the 1800 election turned on the electors from New York who would be chosen by the legislature, which would depend on the vote from New York City, everything turned on this local election. Burr formed a committee with a militarylike structure–a retinue of dedicated followers and then nested circles of inclusion–that reached into the electorate in an unparalleled way. Burr actually had drawn up a list of every voter in the city with information as to his political leanings and past behavior and personally scoured the streets drumming up voters, which a Federalist newspaper found extremely degrading . . . until a Republican paper noted that Hamilton was doing the same (Lomask 1979: 238ff., 244; Sharp 1993: 233).
38 Indeed, the word Republican was clearly used to characterize the antifederalist (Clintonian) side in New York as early as 1787 (for example, the New York City Federal Republican Committee), far earlier than Jefferson’s usage of the 1790s, which is often taken to indicate the birth of the party (see Kaminski 1993: 125, 147, 152, 170, 187, 225, 229).
39 As early as 1788 antifederalists had employed “committees of correspondence” to spread information and opinion from area to area. But these societies–like the more radical “democratic societies” that also were briefly popular in imitation of French circles–were oriented to mobilizing public opinion, not winning specific elections. The Jeffersonians also used the social club of the “Sons of St. Tammany” in New York and similar societies (such as the Federalists’ Washington Benevolent Societies) spread to other states, but it was quite some time before even the New York society was actually used for coordination (Fischer 1965: 111f, 114; Young 1967: 202f, 398f).
40 Patrick Henry, the antifederalist who had strenuously opposed the new powers of the federal government, argued “ideologically” against this increase in local autonomy that might benefit his opponents.
41 The epigraph at the beginning of this section comes from Cunningham (1963: 141); also see Banner (1970: 245).
42 As Hamilton wrote to his friend Bayard, “We must consider whether it be possible for us to succeed, without, in some degree employing the weapons which have been employed against us, and whether the actual state and future prospects of things be not such as to justify the reciprocal use of them” (Hamilton 1910: 335).
43 Interestingly, these tactics may have actually increased mobilization–by switching to a winner-take-all system the parties needed to mount statewide campaigns, which required an elaboration of their formal structure and greater centralization, and which made them more formidable competitors (for Massachusetts, see Banner 1970: 237).
44 Once again, there is a rough correspondence of our three dimensions to differentiation, involution, and dependence, though in this case (as in chapter 4) we deal with a dispersion of structures in which there is no possible source of differentiation other than involution or dependence (as there would be were “individuals” available for heuristics guiding relationship formation). In contrast to chapter 4, however, here we find differentiation to increase only where there is both involution and dependence. The faction lacks the dependence on preexisting structure characteristic of both blocs and parties; the bloc lacks the involution and emphasis on vertical triadic relationships and their transitivity characteristic of both the faction and the party. Because of the low degree of mobilization of commoners present in either faction or bloc, they have less differentiation than the true party.
45 Thus in postwar Japan, parties in rural areas followed the Virginian pattern of horizontal organization of local notables, while urban areas were based on transitive extension of personal machines–one’s friends and relatives “plus their friends and relatives” (Ike 1972: 99f).
46 Even better, as Allan Silver has said, “politics is strange bedfellows” (see Kopelowitz and Matthew 1998).
47 Indeed, Key (1964: 328f) explicitly argued that the party, while formally treelike, is quite different from a military hierarchy because “the linkage is from the bottom up rather than from the top down.” “Party organization constitutes no disciplined army. It consists rather of many state and local points of power, each with its own local following and each comparatively independent of external control.” This is, however, generalizable to many armies as well.
48 More technically, we may follow Breiger (1974) in considering relations between participants R expressed as a matrix to be equal to HH T, where the superscript T indicates the transpose.
49 It is also important that these forms of horizontal transitivity allow for a generalization to continuous degrees of overlap, as opposed to all-or-nothing equivalence. Finally, a parliamentary system can allow for the emergence of national parties less tied to local alignments and hence with somewhat crisper ideologies.
