Party Strength and the Shutdown

Mark Schmidt has a very much worth reading piece over at TNR in which he makes the counterintuitive case that the problem leading to the shutdown is party weakness, not party strength. I recommend it, but I'd take the same facts and put it in a different way. To some extent, this is just terminology, but I think that there's more to it than that; properly understanding party strength is necessary to understanding what's gone wrong with the GOP.

Here's a taste of his argument:

In fact, “partisanship” isn’t the cause of the shutdown. And we’d probably be better off if politicians—that is, Republicans—were thinking more about the interests of their own party....

[T]he modern Republican Party is not strong. It’s something more like a loose association of independent forces, including Tea Party–backed members, those with their own sources of campaign money from ideological backers, many with seats so safe that they can happily ignore all their non-conservative constituents, and outside agents like Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, who Businessweek recently described as the de facto Speaker of the House. Many of its politicians have deliberately cut themselves off from all the incentives that traditionally moderate and stabilize politics—earmarks, constituent service (many offices say they won’t help constituents maneuver the ACA), and infrastructure spending. With safe seats, and hearing little dissent at home, they are able to do so. Cutting themselves off from the incentive to build and maintain a strong and viable party is part of the same story.

Yes and no.

What I'd say is that the current Republican Party is both strong and dysfunctional.

The parties - both of them -- are strong in the sense that almost everything in US politics runs through the parties. 

That hasn't always been the case. In the nadir of party strength, which was roughly in the postwar era,* much of what happened in US politics didn't run through the parties at all. To begin with, we had an era of "candidate-centered" politicians, who recruited their own supporters who were personally loyal to them; found their own sources of money that were personally loyal to them; and, generally, did what they wanted. It wasn't just about campaigning for office: once elected, politicians generally turned to either personal loyalists or to partisan-neutral governing professionals. Think, for example, of Nixon surrounded by Haldeman and Ehrlichman (both of whom had no GOP ties but were pure Nixon creatures) and Kissinger. The neutral press dominated information flows. Even many of the early campaign consultants of the time worked for politicians from both parties.

That's all changed. Now most campaign professionals and a large number of governing professionals are party people -- not (usually) from formal party organizations, but people who have made their careers working within one political party, usually for a series of candidates and party-aligned groups. The party-aligned press is strong, especially on the Republican side. Candidates raise most of their money from party donors, often through party-aligned groups of one kind or another.

Because (or at least probably because) most of this party growth has taken the form of informal networks of party loyalists rather than under the control of formal party organizations, it's meant that our contemporary strong parties are not inherently hierarchical. Put it this way: if you want to run for Congress, you may be able to find a party faction or party-aligned group who will support you, even against a same-party incumbent...but you usually won't have a chance as a pure outsider to the party. Primary elections, then, often serve as tests of strength between different party groups or factions. Not, however, between party and anti-party groups.

(It's further confused because the participants often don't use that kind of language. Tea Partiers, who are not only GOP-aligned but pretty close to being the core of the Republican Party, often talk as if the Republican Party is an enemy, rather than saying that they -- the Tea Party -- are the true Republicans. But that, in my view, is in fact just semantics).

Schmidt talks about campaign finance and outside spending, but quite a bit of that outside spending is party money, in one way or another. He says that such money can "destabilize and decenter the process," but for the most part it was never stable or centered in the first place -- one of the big things that's happened over the last forty years or so is the rise of national political parties, which hardly existed for most of the nation's history.

So the best way to think about, say, the Koch brothers is that they are influential national Republicans who have some limited ability to influence the party, but must compete with others for influence.

OK, that's all about party strength. But what's happened to the GOP is that it's become broken and dysfunctional. In particular, there's a strong chunk of it that seems to be dedicated not to normal politics, but to making money by fleecing the rubes and easy marks that appear to have an enormous appetite for purchasing cultural/partisan products. And that, indeed, produces all sorts of perverse incentives.

Again...to some extent it's just semantics to want to call this dysfunction within a strong party rather than just calling it a weak party. But it matters because it's the very strength of the parties that makes it such a big deal when one of them is broken. And because extremely strong parties tend to suck in everything around them, so that the Crazy Caucus becomes a fringe, and then an important group, within the GOP, rather than just existing out there in the nowhere by itself.

I wish I had a solution for the broken GOP, but I don't. One thing, however, that this analysis suggests is that making the parties "stronger" isn't going to do it. Increased partisanship (what Schmidt wants) might well lead, in these circumstances, to an even bigger conservative marketplace, and even more perverse incentives. Increased hierarchy might give a John Boehner more influence...or just wind up meaning that demagogues and snake oil sellers feel compelled to take over formal positions if possible, and they might well succeed.

I do think that the path for a solution has to found in recognizing that the people, institutions, and groups causing the trouble are found within the (expanded, in my terminology) Republican Party, not outside of it. But alas that's about as far as I can get. If there's an obvious solution to the broken, dysfunctional Republican Party and the damage it's doing to the US, I sure can't see it.





*The timeline is complicated, and much of it is undocumented. Some apartisan elements in the system seem to have been strongest in the immediate postwar period and were already fading by the 1960s and 1970s; others, however, didn't show up until the that later portion of the era. By the 1980s, all the indicators (as far as I can see) were all pointing in the same direction (towards stronger parties), but in roughly the eight decades before that there are plenty of things working in opposite directions from each other.

Q Day 4: Springsteen and the Dems

Cobly asked three great questions about parties, and I wish I could get to them all, but he hooked me for sure with this one:

I know how he would answer this, but is Bruce Springsteen a member of the Democratic Party? I don't mean what his political beliefs are, those are clear. I mean does he fit into the broad definition of political parties, the networks and coalitions of people invested in the party's success even if they don't hold an office or a staffing job?

OK, first of all, there's the question of whether he's a Democrat in the old sense of "party in the electorate." For that, I think what matters is behavior: if one generally votes for Democratic candidates, then for all practical purposes one is a Democrat in this sense. Whether we want to call party identifiers who are just voters "members" of the party is, once you get that far, just a semantic question.

But what I think the question is getting at -- and what I think is more interesting, really, is about what I've taken to calling "party actors." And for that, I think the answer is probably a qualified yes (given that I really don't know what Springsteen actually does in overtly political terms, beyond appearing at big rallies during presidential campaigns).

To back up: American political parties in the active sense, in the sense that they do things and have positions and the like, are composed of party actors who fall into several categories: formal party staff and officials; politicians; activists; campaign and governing staff, including party-aligned consultants; party-aligned interest groups; and the partisan press.

Where does Springsteen fit in? He's obviously not, say, executive director of the New Jersey Democratic Party (a formal party organization). Nor is he a staffer for any Democratic candidate or New Jersey governor, or a legislative assistant for Robert Menendez. So we can think of him as an a particular type of activist.

We might, also, think of his music and whether that qualifies him as...I don't know. Partisan press? Not really. But perhaps, or perhaps we need another category for ideas and symbols at that level...not the policy level, but a more abstract one.

That is: if that's what he's really doing. There's a bit of a factual question here that I don't know about -- does Springsteen get involved in primary elections at all? Does he attempt to influence the party at the issue level, and if so is he actually influential?As an activist, is he in the subgroup that donates substantial chunks of money? Does he personally lobby Democratic politicians on issues he cares about? If so, does he do it in some organized fashion through some extension of the party network, or does he really do it alone, as a celebrity?

But of course we don't need to just ask these questions about one particular celebrity. Once we understand that an informal party network is important, we need to ask it of everyone within that network (indeed, we need to ask it of people within the formal party structure, too; there are cases, perhaps many of them, in which the formal party merely performs some fairly menial duties and all the real action is elsewhere). There's no assumption, at least for me, that either the different components of this expanded party are equally important, or that people within them will have equal influence, or that any of it will stay the same over time.

Elsewhere

Several items from the week...this isn't all, but again head over to Plum Line for the complete set, including plenty of links posts.

Yesterday at PP, I had one I liked about the NRA and the GOP. It's party networks stuff, so those of you bored by my interest in that might want to skip it. Earlier, I beat up on Dick Armey and FreedomWorks, which was good fun, and I bashed Tea Partiers for their incoherent position on the fiscal cliff.

At Plum Line, I took a shot at the GOP for insisting that Democrats take the blame for specific cuts, but I was far more annoyed at the Starbucks guy for his anti-politics attitude.

Lobbying and Member Incentives

Matt Yglesias saw "Lincoln" and got interested in patronage and the incentives it provided to, in this case, exiting lawmakers in a lame duck session.

It will surprise none of the regular readers here that I'm a fan of patronage, I'm sure. But Yglesias asks a good question: given the existence of extremely lucrative lobbying opportunities, can modern-day legislators be bought off influenced by the jobs which presidents can control?

It's an excellent question. One answer is that political parties do probably have at least some influence on the influence-peddlers. Suppose Barack Obama really wants Evan Bayh's vote on something during the lame duck session of the last Congress, and he knows that Bayh's chief interest is to wrap up the session as quickly as possible so that he can start cashing in. Obama and the Democrats can't dictate to anyone in the private section who they should hire. But anyone who wants Bayh because of his excellent relationships with the Democrats might think twice if Democrats made it clear that he had no excellent relationship with them. Surely, we know that House Republicans in the 1990s with their "K Street project" pressured lobbyists to hire Republicans; I don't know whether they extended that pressure to which Republicans to hire, but they certainly might have.

Another answer is -- wait, Dick Armey is getting $8M to quit FreedomWorks?!? That is: there appear to be excellent financial opportunities within the party network, at least on the Republican side. Granted, I don't know how much influence George W. Bush may have had while president on self-styled outsider groups such as FreedomWorks and Club for Growth, but it's certainly possible that the answer could at least be "some."

But the third answer is: good point. I don't really worry very much about quid pro quo corruption, but I do worry a lot about perverse incentives, and it sure seems iffy that Members of Congress who leave their jobs can get a large payout, and presumably for a lot less and much more comfortable work.

Still, there doesn't seem to be a stampede for the exits, so perhaps, for whatever reasons, it's not actually all that big an incentive after all. And the last few years notwithstanding, lame duck sessions are actually a much less significant deal than they were back in the 19th century, so the particular problem here might not be that big a deal.

I do have to say that I'm not sure I ever recall seeing a good academic article about post-Congressional careers over time (might be one I'm forgetting), and what if any effect it may have had on Congress. I will note (and perhaps cite irrelevantly) that the 19th century House was the pre-institutionalized House, and that Members back then often left for a promotion to local positions. If anyone knows of any study that sheds more light on these issues, I'd love to hear about it.

Party in the Presidency and Mitt Romney

Hey, I have a new article in the new Washington Monthly all about party networks, campaigns, and presidencies. Or, if you want the stuff that people other than myself are interested in: it's about how we know that Mitt Romney will govern as a mainstream Republican.

This comes out of something I've worked on for a while but never turned into a political science publication (there's a conference paper version. Make that two conference paper versions). It's about the partisan evolution of senior White House staff and other leaders within the Executive Office of the Presidency -- what some call the "Presidential Branch" of the US government. So here's some background.

First of all, remember that all of this only goes back to (more or less) Truman. Before Truman, there's hardly any White House staff; no National Security Council; no Council of Economic Advisers; no White House offices, period. The Bureau of the Budget, as it was then called, doesn't move from Treasury to the Exec Office of the Presidency until 1939 (becoming OMB under Nixon). It's a huge change in the US political system; it's a shift from a president to a presidency composed of hundreds and hundreds of people.

Within that, there's been a big change from a personal presidency to a partisan one. Under JFK, LBJ, and RMN, many if not most of the senior White House staff were people who had longstanding personal ties to the president, but little if any experience within party politics.* That starts changing, oddly enough, with Jimmy Carter; it turns out that while Carter famously brought many Georgians with him, there were actually a few more people with some sort of party ties in the Carter WH, at least among the people I looked at, than there were for Nixon. That increases for Reagan, and by the time George H.W. Bush is president his staff is dominated by people who have party ties.

I don't have data on campaigns, as opposed to Presidential Branches, going all the way back, although the great Casey Dominguez and I once wrote an article about the Gore and Bush campaigns from 2000.

So for the WaMo I looked at the Romney campaign. What I found was sort of twofold. The main story is definitely more of the same: many of the Romney people are relatively new to working for him. But there is a bit of a hint of a story that Romney has a somewhat higher concentration of personal loyalists than some recent presidents. Now, I don't want to make much out of this -- and I didn't in the WaMo story -- because, among other things, I'm really not sure how it works across campaigns, as opposed to presidencies. That is, for governing purposes we want to know how a Romney White House would compare to the Obama, Bush, or Clinton White Houses, not how the Romney campaign compares with those White Houses. And I don't have data on most of the other campaigns. But just as a general impression that could easily be wrong, I do have a sense that there's a bit more personal attachment to Romney than what you would have found in some previous campaigns, particularly Obama, Clinton, and George H.W. Bush.

Now, for the most part, the switch to partisan presidencies is structural, not personal. It's not as if Barack Obama is an especially partisan person; it's that the system he's in pushes presidents to be partisan and their administrations to be closely integrated with their party by recruiting mainly from their party network. Indeed, the incentives for presidents are almost certainly to go personal, because politicians generally have incentives to avoid constraints -- but, fortunately for democracy, they usually can't do that. Still, presumably there's some ability to affect things at the margins, and it's possible that a Romney White House could be somewhat less partisan and more personal than some other recent ones. It certainly won't be like Nixon or Kennedy, though.

Would that change policy outcomes? It's hard to say. Generally, it's not easy to tie specific policy choices (say, from presidents) to specific personnel choices. I think generally I'd advise thinking of it in terms, as I said, of constraints; the more a president "must" choose from party-approved people to staff an administration, the more the president will wind up sticking to orthodox party positions (and, to be sure, the better his ability to work with party loyalists outside of the White House).

Anyway, I think the piece came out okay, so I'll link to it again and invite you to check it out.



*I think that's true of LBJ, but my data are actually only from presidents who reached that office after first being nominated by their party, so I haven't actually examined him, Truman, or Ford systematically, although everything I do know of LBJ suggests he fits right in.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Sarah Chalke, 36. I watch all (or most, anyway) medical sitcoms, but no medical dramas. This probably indicates something profoundly unhealthy about me, I suppose.

To the good stuff:


1. Party networks in action: David Karol reads a Politico profile of Paul Ryan.

2. Eric Patashnik on trust funds and double-counting.

3. John Sides on how the conventions will affect WH 2012.

4. "Rising health care costs are an economic, not a budget, problem." Exactly. Rebecca Theiss backs it with a chart.

5. And Anna Clark looks at the reporting -- good and bad -- on Mitt Romney's birther joke.

Akin and Party Money

I have a post up over at PP about parties and the Todd Akin flap; it's always fun for me when there's news that actually allows me to talk about how parties work.

There's tons of talk about this right now, and judging from the twitter traffic there's one specific part of the topic that I didn't really cover specifically and should revise and extend on: party money. So Benjiy Sarlin says "Something Todd Akin likely considering: Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell raised ungodly sums of grassroots money," while Mark Blumenthal tweets "Akin’s last cash-on-hand was ~$500K. Asking now, can small donors beat NRCC/CW?"

Here's the thing: "grassroots" money and "small donors" are, in most cases, mostly party money, and will therefore respond to party cues. So if the Republican Party network is united against Akin, then there are not going to be any positive cues, and there are not going to be any ungodly sums of money. On the other hand, if some party groups, including a significant subset of the GOP-aligned partisan press, stick with Akin, then he very well could benefit. In other words, while we shouldn't think of small money donations as entirely a function of other party actors' choices, it's likely that those other party actors are the more important variable here.

Unfortunately, unless I've fallen behind on the literature (possible! If so, please let me know, campaign finance and party network scholars!), we really don't know how much of the money spent in a typical House, Senate, or presidential race is in fact party money, properly understood. That's because it's an awful lot of work to figure out whether some individual donor is a party donor or not...well, that's not right; it's relatively straightforward for any specific individual donor, barring confusing coding by the FEC, but it's a lot of work to do that task for all donors.

We also don't really know a lot of the direction of influences here. For example, is a talk show host such as Sean Hannity perfectly free to choose what to do in this case, or does he really have no choice but to follow others within the party network? Or at least, are there strong incentives for him to fall in line, at least if others within the party network are unified? And do the same constraints influence the behavior of, say, Karl Rove? Or the Koch brothers? Don't assume you know the answer: it's possible that Republicans are happy to take cash from big money donors only if those donors are willing to support whatever the rest of the party decides. But it's certainly also possible that they are (at the very least) highly influential. We have quite a bit of good reporting on all of this, but few definitive answers. Same question about other groups within the party. For example, anti-abortion groups might be inclined to continue supporting Akin; what, if any, influence to other party actors have on them to keep their mouths shut? And what influence do anti-abortion groups have on other party actors? In practical terms: suppose organized anti-abortion groups support Akin but most other organized groups in the GOP want him out; how will that affect Akin's small-donor or "grassroots" fundraising?

It seems to me that party network scholars have begun to do a pretty good job of developing a conceptual framework and a vocabulary for answering some of these questions, but many of them are still unanswered (and of course that's the nature of it, since parties are not static, so answers that were correct fifteen years ago might be wrong by now). Usually, nominations are good chances to see how things work within parties, but extraordinary events such as this one can be very helpful.

"Establishment"

Andrew Sullivan took aim earlier this week at the notion that there's any "Republican establishment" out there to stand up to Newt Gingrich:

I'm not sure what this phrase means or represents any more - the Chamber of Commerce? John Boehner? The Bush family? But the concept of a responsible, sane, pragmatic party leadership able to corral or coax or manage a party's base is, it seems to me, a preposterous fiction on its face, as we are seeing. The Republican Establishment is Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and their mainfold products, from Hannity to Levin.

Andrew Sprung called this "a crowbar to the political scientists' notion of a Republican 'party establishment.'" I should take a minute to explain where I stand on this.

I try very hard not to use the word "establishment," precisely because I have no idea what it means. Nor do I think that "insider" vs. "outsider" is usually a useful category. In normal politics, people use those labels as part of the rhetoric of intraparty (and interparty for that matter) competition, which is interesting in terms of political culture and public opinion but tells us little about influence within parties. What I talk about are party actors, and (less often and more problematically) party leaders. I can't speak for all political scientists on this one, but that's who we should be talking about, in my view. These party actors include a lot of people: politicians, campaign and governing professionals, activists, formal party officials and staff, leaders of party-aligned interest groups, and the partisan press.

Some of those may be in the working majority of the party; some may not be. There's no theoretical reason to believe that everyone within any category will agree on anything, nor that people will agree across categories. That is, a party may have a situation in which the activists lean one way and the Washington-based politicians and others lean the other, but it's equally possible that activists will be split, or campaign professionals will be split, etc. Nor is there any theoretical expectation, in my view -- and here I differ from others who think about parties, I believe -- that one or another of these groups will be the most influential. In other words, I don't think that parties are "really" their politicians, or "really" the interest group which align with them, or "really" their formal organizations. Instead, I believe that any of those are possible, and that it's an empirical question which portion of the party is most influential in any particular time and place.

With me so far? What I'm saying is that influence within political parties is at least potentially contested, and nominations -- especially for the highest office -- are where those fights, fights which define what the party is, take place. Of course, sometimes there's no fight because everyone, or most everyone, agrees. When that's the case, it's very hard for us to see who is actually more influential. At other times, there are fights, and then we can get a better sense of who wields influence, but it can be extremely hard to study this stuff, because it's not a simple matter of casting votes or other easily counted indicators. Some party actors give money. Others make public endorsements. But some exert their influence in less visible ways, such as by spreading overall impressions of candidates within the party network. That's the kind of thing that's hard to get at without a lot of careful work. Remember, even the people involved may have inaccurate perceptions of who has the most influence.

Now, back to "Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and their mainfold products, from Hannity to Levin." Are they the most powerful players in the Republican Party? We don't know! We certainly know that if the GOP-aligned partisan press is united against a candidate in a nomination fight, that candidate will lose; after all, most GOP primary voters get most of their information from the partisan press, and believe what they hear. But that's not enough to tell us that Rush and Ailes are the critical players here. We don't know how much autonomy any individual talk show host, or even the head of Fox News, has, and it's very difficult at best to figure it out. I'm certain that they're not all-powerful, that there are at powerful constraints preventing them from just choosing on their own. After all, there's a death sentence that the party can pronounce on any of them: Not Conservative. RINO. But of course that's begging the question: who gets to declare someone else Not Conservative? Who can do it and have it stick?

So: certainly, Rush and Fox News are highly visible actors within the GOP, and certainly, they do a lot to originate or spread the ways that Republicans talk about things. Who exactly has the most influence within the party, however, is a much more complicated question. It's not best answered, in my view, by focusing only on the most visible actors, nor by positing that there's an "establishment/insurgent" split -- the latter just doesn't seem to fit very well.

When it comes to claims from me and others that (as Cohen et al. put it) The Party Decides, what we're saying -- at least what I'm saying -- is not that a party establishment trumps other party actors. It's that party actors are more important than the other players in the process: the (neutral) press; rank-and-file voters; and the candidates themselves, at least thought of as individual actors outside of the party (one way that the party controls things is through the transformation of self-interested candidates into party-oriented candidacies). That wasn't especially true for a variety of reasons, in my view, in the immediate post-reform era, at least on the Democratic side (that is, in the 1972 and 1976 cycles), which among other things reminds us that it doesn't always have to work that way. But by the 1984 cycle and going forward, it seems to be the case. It just isn't plausible these days for a candidate who is opposed by a sufficient number of sufficiently important party actors, whether individuals or groups, to get a nomination, no matter how able that candidate is at appealing to voters. The party, collectively, just controls too many resources that are needed to win nominations, whether it's money, or positive publicity, or personnel.

Again, that doesn't preclude intraparty fights, or predict who will win those fights. And it doesn't mean that the views of rank-and-file voters are irrelevant: those voters are often the constituents of party actors, who therefore care what they want (they also are used by party actors as clues to a candidate's electibility, for better or worse). Recall, too, that parties are permeable; it's generally very easy for rank-and-file voters to become party actors, although of course how influential they'll be depends on lots of things.  But when we try to figure out what's up in these contests, the place to start is by thinking about where the party is. Not the mythical "establishment," whatever that is, but all of the party -- that is, all party actors. That's going to get us a lot farther down the road than any other form of analysis.

Q Day 7: Party Boundary?

Thanks to everyone for the questions; sorry I didn't get to all of them. Maybe I'll come back to one or more later in the week. Meanwhile, wkdewey had an excellent question, but I'm going to skip most of it and focus only on the part that's especially interesting to me:

To what extent can OWS and ultra-lefty pundits like Glenn Greenwald be considered Democratic party actors?

That's a great question, and I'd like to spend a bit of time with it, beyond giving the most basic answer, which is: tough question.

OK, first. The formulation "party actors" is something that I've actually started using only recently. For me, it's a shorthand way of referring to everyone who is more active in the party than just plain voting. So it includes formal party officials and staff, candidates and elected officials, campaign and governing professionals, activists, donors, party-aligned interested groups, the partisan press, and perhaps more. Of course some are more involved with the party than others, and many (most?) have mixed status and mixed incentives. So a pollster -- one of those "campaign professionals" -- may be a party actor but is also running a small business, with all the profit incentives that go with that.

We need that because looking at only formal party organizations (the RNC, the DCCC, the Maricopa County Republican Party) clearly misses important things that are going on that are clearly party activity. If the US had membership parties in which everything done by the party was a function of what those members did, or perhaps all that mattered was what the party bureaucracy did, then this would be a lot simpler. But the real world of US parties is (organizationally) messy, and so we need to account for it.

The question is where the boundaries are, and this is where the question of someone such as Greenwald is interesting. I guess I'd look at a couple of things. One is simply self-identification: does an activist or a member of the press think of himself as a party member? But that's not good enough, because very few people read my stuff or Seth Masket's stuff or Cohen et al. or Casey Dominguez or any of the other party network scholars, and the press often misreports all of it, and at any rate one of the weakest portions of US contemporary parties is in the areas of ritual and their place in the popular political culture...the bottom line is that a lot of people out there sure appear to be partisans despite claiming that they are not. And so in addition to self-identification, we need behavior: if you act as if you are a party member, then that's strong evidence that you probably are one. And that's an empirical question, but often a difficult one to answer. Does someone wind up always supporting one party? Does she attempt to affect the course of that party (but not, really, the other one)? Does she mostly (when it comes to politics) speak with people from that party? As far as I'm concerned, there's no clear test that says "in" or "out" of a party, either for individuals or for groups, but put all of that together and you can get a fairly good sense of it.

So I'm not really going to answer the question, but that's the way I'd think about answering it.

GOP Field Conspires With Political Science Profs! (Part 2)

Political scientists (with some exceptions) are confident that political parties have grown stronger over the last few decades. One development that makes the parties stronger is the revival of the partisan press. Very quick summary: in the 19th century political information was generally controlled by partisan newspapers. In the 20th century, the partisan press faded and was replaced by mass media that valued neutrality and objectivity, reaching its zenith in the network news era of the 1950s through the 1970s in which most people got information from a source that didn't even have an editorial page to wall off news reporting from. Then, from about the 1970s on, we've had a revival of the partisan press in several forms, probably beginning with op-ed pages and syndicated partisan columnists, but featuring (OK, you know this part) such things as Fox News and MSNBC, talk radio, and the partisan blogosphere.

Here's the question, however: what are the incentives governing the partisan press? How does it fit in with the rest of the party -- that is, both formal party organizations and the larger party network?

There are basically three plausible stories. One is that the partisan press, just like the 20th century objective press, follows professional journalist norms and financial incentives, each of which creates biases which are (roughly speaking) outcomes of other processes rather than deliberate ideological choices. For example, we can expect that if a candidate wins a huge landslide in Iowa in three weeks that the neutral, objective media will play up the chances of the #2 or #3 candidate, rather than declaring the nomination contest over -- even if the contest appears to be over by all objective standards. That's because everyone involved -- reporters and correspondents, editors and producers, and upper management -- has incentives to keep the battle going on and appearing competitive for as long as possible. So: does Fox news have the same incentives? Will that drive its actions?

A second story is that the partisan press serves as the PR wing of the parties, and takes its marching orders from them. This can be complicated, of course, when the parties themselves are split over something, but when party actors agree on something, then we can see whether the partisan press takes their lead from them.

And then a third story is that the partisan press are party actors, but that they are freelancers -- that no one tells Beck and Rush and Hannity and the rest (and their Democratic counterparts) what to say, and so the most successful ones become independent, important party actors in their own right.

The problem is that these are extremely difficult stories to untangle empirically, especially if (as I think is the case) each story is partially true. Fortunately, the next couple of months should prove highly useful, if indeed we have a situation in which the bulk of Republican party actors ("establishment" and otherwise) strongly oppose Newt Gingrich, but his act continues to play well in the polls and then with Republican voters in the early states.

Indeed, the entire election cycle will be interesting. How did Fox News cover, and therefore contribute, to the demise of Herman Cain? How is it treating Newt right now? To what extent does the Republican partisan press move in unison? What happens to those who appear to be opposing the bulk of party actors?

Party and media scholars are getting plenty of data to work with. If I see any interesting results, I'll pass it on (and if I'm missing any important findings from what's out there so far, please let me know; I try to keep up with the party literature, but not so much with the media literature).

Q Day 4: Party Actors?

Related questions about parties nominations and elections. First, from an anonymous commenter:

How important are advisers and aides to politicians in the nomination process? You often argue about the expansive and amorphous nature of parties, but I am wondering if a 'candidate' is not also similarly expansive and amorphous.

Exactly correct!  Why, for example, is Congress polarized? We have about four answers: 1. District based: lopsided districts mean that primaries are more important than general elections, and primary electorates as hard partisans, so Members reflect median of (extremist) primary voters; 2. Congress based: Congressional party cartels use various legislature-based resources to force moderates in their party to stick with the party majority; 3. Politician self-selection: the people who actually run for office are a partisan, polarized group; and 4. Staff effects: candidates recruit staff and other aides from a partisan pool, and those assistants wind up influencing policy positions on everything that's not dictated by the politician (who may only care about a few things) or constituents (ditto). I've done some research on this, and believe that #4 is a real and overlooked factor. See too the next questions.

Next: @louisirosenthal tweeted: "who, exactly, are those party "actors" that telephone christie, perry, etc. to encourage a prez run? karl rove? big donors?"

I've started using the phrase "party actors" lately...I want to distinguish between "the party" or what I've called the Expanded Party -- that is, the combination of formal party organizations and party networks -- from people who are just voters and nothing more. Included in party actors are:

Party professionals
Campaign professionals, including campaign staff and party consultants;
Governing professionals: Hill staff and other partisans involved in governing;
Formal party organization officials, such as a Chair of a party's county commitee;
Formal party organization staff, such as an executive director of a state party;
Activists;
Donors;
Party-aligned interest groups;
Party-aligned media

In my view of parties, people compete for influence both within and between these catagories...in other words, it could be that politicians dominate (but that there are continuing factions among politicians), or it could be that activists and donors dominate, or any other combination. Note too that some of this is fluid; today's activist can be tomorrow's politician, and the Missouri GOP press secretary may be some Republican Senator's legislative director next year. Put them all together, and you have a political party.

And then back to comments, for another anonymous commenter:

Just finished The Party Decides, seeing as it was mentioned all over the blogosphere, and found it pretty fascinating. I was wondering what of that theory -- that party actors engage in essentially a large-scale coordination game in order to decide nominees -- it presents is applicable to lower tier nomination contests in the US -- statewide, congressional, local -- and what is idiosyncratic to the presidential process? Is there any good books/research that covers similar ground in those types of contests to that book?

The best book from this perspective on sub-presidential is Seth Masket's No Middle Ground, which looks at nominations in California -- although for local nominations, it's much less a question of complex coordination and much more a question of establishing and then sustaining a cartel that controls nominations (and I hope that Seth will jump in if I have that not quite right; it's been a while since I read it). In general, we have several studies of how Expanded Parties attempt and succeed in controlling nominations; what we have less of an idea of is a full account of how it varies in different places and times and why.  As with the presidential stuff, there's a competing "candidate-centered" school of thought that focuses on candidates, voters, and to a lesser extent media. My impression is that to date the party-centered story is (again, within political science) more accepted at the presidential nomination level than at the subpresidential level, which could be for many non-substantive reasons, but could also be (although I don't think it is) because subpresidentials are less party-centered and more candidate-centered. Again, while I tend to think the answers tend to be more party- than candidate-centered, it is also the case that there are a hell of a lot of party nominations in the US, and we by no means have enough research to say whether and how they vary as to the degree of expanded party influence. (And I do hope that Seth chimes in on this one).

GOP Party Actors and Information

Another in the great series of "Power Outsiders" surveys from Mark Blumenthal and Pollster is up today. This time, it's bad news for Michele Bachmann; seems as though Pollster's collection of various party actors in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina are not exactly taken with her. You really do want to click through for the word bubble of their single-word descriptions. OK, I'll give you one tease -- my favorite is "Munchausen."

As regular readers know I'm a big fan of this project, which was inspired by the party network literature within political science (which I've contributed to, so it's of particular interest to me). Findings such as those by Cohen et al. have convinced Blumenthal that it's a good idea to find out what various party actors in early states are thinking. He's right!

So far, Pollster's surveys have quite reasonably been focused on horse race type questions. I've been wondering about what else I'd like to know, and I've thought of two overlapping concerns about information. One is where and how these party actors learn about candidates. Is it through personal contact with the candidates? With the candidates' staffs? Though word of mouth from other locals? From national contacts? From local or national officials or opinion leaders? What is the role of the neutral press and the party-aligned media in all of this? And that leads to my second set of questions: how do these active political players treat the party-aligned media? I'd guess that they virtually all watch Fox News and perhaps read conservative blogs and that they certainly don't watch MSNBC or read liberal blogs...but do they also seek out the neutral press, despite almost certainly believing that it has a strong liberal bias? How do they feel about talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh? Assuming they like Rush and many of the others: do they think of them as important and trusted sources of information, or great (but not necessarily factually reliable) entertainment?

I suppose I'm also interested in questions about "establishment" and other such things, but I'm not sure that a survey can get at it. Indeed, I'm pretty sure how such questions would turn out. More or less 100% of respondents would recognize three groups: a party establishment more interested in perks than policy and all too ready to compromise with liberals; an insurgent or anti-establishment group of strong conservatives who represent the real energy of the party and who would win all elections and govern wisely if only they could grab hold of the party; and a crazed group of wacko true believers who have gone 'round the bend. And I'm also guessing that 100% of respondents would place themselves  in the middle of those three groups. At least that's what I always hear when I listen to GOP party actors, no matter how RINO or how wacko others probably see them. So if that's all one could get, then better to track information flows, which really could I believe tell us something interesting.

Top-Down, Bottom-Up, and Party Networks

For those who read my response to Nate Silver's comments on Herman Cain, I definitely recommend reading Silver's follow-up, with a response to me and others.

Silver makes several excellent points -- as I said, read the whole thing. Perhaps the most important is just how difficult it is to resolve these things empirically because we have so few cases. As I pointed out in the previous go-round, we're talking at absolute best about twenty nomination contests, but it's really quite a bit fewer than that.

Silver argues that the difference between his results and my criticisms is, at core, about different ways of understanding the process. I think that's mostly right, and the rest of this post is about those understandings. So if you're looking for a review of how political scientists think about the nomination process, keep reading; if you want Herman Cain stuff, though, I'm afraid I don't have much today, just a bit at the bottom.

Silver argues for a bottom-up interpretation of the process. In this version, rank-and-file voters are autonomous agents. They're like those focus group participants that the networks sometimes turn to after debates. They start as undecided, spend time watching the candidates, and then make decisions informed by what they see and hear. While voter behavior isn't exactly my specialty (you want award-winning blogger Sides for that), in general I'd say that's not consistent with what we know about voting. To be sure, it's more realistic for primary elections than for general elections, and I don't rule out some role for unmediated interactions between candidates and voters. Indeed, I've argued that the role of primaries and caucuses now has become somewhat similar to what it was before reform. Back then, party leaders used primaries for information about how possible nominees would do with mass electorates (perhaps the most famous example is how JFK used the West Virginia primary in 1960 to "prove" that Southerners would vote for a Catholic). I think that's how it works now; for example, in 2004 I suspect that party leaders were willing to adapt to Howard Dean, but once he demonstrated a limited appeal to voters in Iowa they quickly turned on him and marginalized his campaign.

He calls the alternative "top-down." I have no particular problem with that, but I do need to clarify several things. First of all, not all political scientists agree with a "party decides" version of what happens in presidential nomination politics. Older research on (the reformed) nomination system emphasized candidates, the media, and voters. Voters still weren't really Silver's autonomous actors, but they were influenced mainly by candidates through their campaign, and by the press. So questions about media norms and biases were important. For example, one important story from that perspective was that "Jimmy Carter" rather than "undeclared" was the winner of the 1976 Iowa Caucuses, even though the latter had more votes, because the networks wanted to interview the winner and you can't interview an empty chair; and that decision matters because voters in New Hampshire are swayed by the positive publicity that Carter gets as a result. Or, in 2000, John McCain gets positive publicity because of some combination of his open-door policy (which appeals to the self-interest of reporters to get access) and the self-interest of the press to portray nominations as close, exciting contests, rather than just accept that a candidate with a large lead is very likely to be nominated (and, again, voters turn to McCain because of that positive publicity). Also important were questions about how campaign spending affected vote choice.

That perspective is still common, but party network researchers have introduced a new perspective, which finds that political parties play a far more central role in the process. Party network research begins by understanding parties to be not just formal party organizations (such as the Democratic National Committee or the California Republican Party) but also what I call an "expanded party" that includes campaign and governing professionals, party-aligned interest groups, candidates and their campaign organizations, and activists. Note, first of all, that this party broadly defined is not exactly the same thing as "insiders," and is certainly not limited to Washington-based partisans. Second, at least as I interpret it, this perspective is neutral with regard to which people actually do have more influence within the party -- it could be activists, it could be party-aligned interest groups, it could even be the formal party organizations. The answer will depend on lots of things, including political regulation (such as campaign finance laws), electioneering technologies, and...well, we don't really know.

At any rate, it seems clear to most of us working in that sub-sub-field that parties, properly understood, play major roles in nominations. For state and local nominations, see Seth Masket's No Middle Ground. And for presidential nominations, you should read The Party Decides by Mary Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller (you can also read my own contributions; here's -- albeit gated -- a short article I did with the great Casey Dominguez, and here's my narrative of the 2004 Democratic process).

My response to Nate Silver is that there is, in fact, considerable empirical evidence that expanded parties play a major role in nomination politics. Parties affect voters through fundraising, through how party-aligned and neutral media portray the candidates, and through direct cues to voters. On the other hand, parties haven't always controlled the process (the evidence is that they mostly didn't in the immediate post-reform cycles), and things can always change. And even within the current system, I wouldn't rule out direct voter effects. That is, if one of the things that various party members take into account is how candidates do with rank-and-file voters, then early good polling certainly could be a factor in winning party support, which translates into resources (money, prime spots on Fox News) that then produce higher vote totals in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Now, I don't think that's even remotely likely with Herman Cain, because in my view party people would be nuts to trust someone with no record in public office. But it certainly is possible, I suppose; that's what I call Cain (and the others -- Bachmann, Paul, Johnson, Huntsman, etc.) implausible, not impossible, nominees.

And remember, what I'm calling "party people" in that last paragraph includes a lot of folks, not all of whom have identical interests or points of view. It includes activists who might be "purists" and just want the best candidate on their issues, regardless of what happens in November; pollsters and media specialists who might be heavily influenced by financial incentives; GOP candidates who mostly care about winning and little else; organized groups who may care about both winning and a record of loyalty on their issues; and many more.

So my advice to those trying to figure out what to make of early polling is to think about what each of the people in those groups would make of early polling. Because the odds are that it will eventually drive voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and the rest of it if and only if enough of the party gets on board.

Catch of the Day

Matt Yglesias nails Howard Fineman for claiming that Barack Obama has "gone Washington" in his recent round of White House staff hirings.  Yglesias:

What’s striking about the change between Rahm Emannuel and Bill Daley at the top is that the two guys share the exact same biographical qualities of being DC insiders who are also people Obama knows from Chicago. Beyond Emannuel, the key departed members of the Obama White House Mark One were Axelrod, Larry Summers, and Peter Orszag. Axelrod’s being swapped out for David Plouffe and Summers & Orzag were never “Georgians.” The entire argument that a change is happening really needs to rest on the Gibbs for Carney swap.

But wait, there's more! Robert Gibbs was in fact an early sign-on to the Obama presidential campaign, but he's a Washingtonian, not an Obama person. Gibbs, as anyone who has heard him talk knows, is certainly not from Chicago. Anyway, he didn't arrive in Washington with Obama. He started out interning and then campaigning for Rep. Glenn Browder of his native Alabama, then worked for Rep. Bob Etheridge, for the re-election campaign of Senator Fritz Hollings, and for the election campaign of Senator Debbie Stabenow. He was DSCC press secretary for the 2002 cycle, then went briefly to John Kerry's presidential campaign, and only after leaving that effort did he wind up with Barack Obama's senate campaign. In other words, he's an absolutely typical example of elite party networks. Sure, at this point he's probably personally dedicated to Obama, but guess what? Jay Carney will be, too. If Gibbs shows any long-term loyalty, it's not to Obama, but to the Democratic Party.


This kind of loyalty to the party network is, in fact, one of the hallmarks of the partisan presidency, which has been in place for about the last thirty years and shows no signs of waning. In the postwar presidency, White House staff tended to be people who had been brought into politics by the president and had few party connections or, in many cases, loyalty; these days, such people are rare in the White House.


Anyway, Fineman is totally wrong here. Nice catch!

How Parties Work, Hill Staff Edition

I could call Dave Weigel's story about incoming GOP Members of the House hiring lobbyists as their Chiefs of Staff a "Catch of the Day," and it is that.  Great catch!

But I'm really interested in parties, and how they work.  And what's interesting about all these new House Chiefs of Staff isn't, to me, that they were lobbyists; it's that they are part of the GOP party network. 

Just as people elect a presidency, and not a president; just as elections are about candidacies, and not candidates; the careers of Members of Congress are shaped in part by the people that they hire.  Those people are generally party professionals.  They move from Hill jobs, to White House and agency jobs, to think tanks, to lobbying (often for party-aligned interest groups), perhaps even to jobs with formal party organizations, and back.  They know how Republicans (or, on the other side, Democrats) think.  They know which information sources Republicans rely on, what positions on issues of public policy Republicans take, who the various important groups within the party network are, and what those groups care about. 

That's what a new Member of Congress gets when he or she hires someone from the party network, and in turn it places that Member deeper within the party.  Of course, there are plenty of limits to this -- Members are constrained by the particular interests and political context of their districts, by whatever personal ideology or beliefs they may have, and by promises (about issues or about behavior) they made in the campaign.  But the influence of party, as exercised in part simply by who helps a Member exercise his duties, is strong.

I'd say one other thing.  Party network scholars have begun to trace out how all of this works.  What we're just beginning to document (and eventually understand) is the role of intraparty factions and groups.  I strongly suspect that choices in staff for incoming Members are, among other things, choices among factions -- and that potential staff know how to signal Members about which factions or groups they represent.  Does hiring a particular chief of staff mean a commitment on abortion and other social issues?  On Tea Party friendliness?  On support for the Speaker and the party leadership?  Again, I suspect there's some of that going on, but I don't really know.  I do hope Weigel does some follow-up reporting (and others join in).  Playing gotcha with this stuff is good fun, but I do think there's a fair amount one can tell about where individual Members and the House Republican conference as a whole are headed by the personnel choices they make.

Understanding Fox News

Responding to a debate between Michael Tomasky and Ross Douthat over whether liberals should appear on Fox News, Andrew Sullivan makes an important point:

Just as important, it seems to me is if Fox could give, say, Ron Paul his own show, and actually allow an internal conservative debate about issues, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, or foreign policy, or the social issues, such as abortion, or even have a supporter of gay equality who isn't an easily dismissed leftist stereotype on prime time - like a Jon Rauch or a Ted Olson? Why not give Frum a show to counter the party line with smart conservative policy proposals and discussions? What's needed on Fox - and what you'll never see - is solid conservative attacks on and critiques of other conservatives, on matters of principle or policy. That's the difference between an opinion channel and a propaganda channel.

The point is that it's a real mistake to call Fox a conservative channel.  It's not.  It's a partisan channel.

Now, precisely how to think about Fox News and the Republican Party is a bit trickier. 

To begin with, bluntly, Fox is part of the Republican Party.  American political parties are made up of both formal organizations (such as the RNC) and informal networks.  Fox News Channel, then, is properly understood as part of the expanded Republican Party, just like Hill staff of GOP Members of Congress, or pollsters who only work for Republicans, or activists who volunteer for Republican campaigns, or think tanks that generate legislation for Republicans to support.  Son in the first place, Fox is simply part of the communications arm of the party.

The tricky part is that FNC isn't only a component of the Republican Party.  It's also a business, so it may have profit motivations beyond its partisan goals (both on the organizational and individual level, of course).  It's also, in format, a cable news network, and there are a variety of norms that come with that -- norms that may be important to both individual correspondents and producers on the one hand, and consumers on the other.  Fox may be part of the communications arm of the Republican Party, but it's not the same part as the RNC's web page, or ads for GOP candidates.

(Note that these sort of competing pulls affect all party actors.  Campaign pollsters are partisans, but they're also running a small business, and they also have professional standards they may care about upholding.  Formal party organizations are obviously partisan, but they're also bureaucracies, and those who study parties have long noted that within these organizations bureaucratic incentives can trump party goals).

Thinking of Fox as Republican, rather than conservative, helps organize the Tomasky/Douthat debate over whether liberals should appear on Fox.  Fox, of course, is free to call itself whatever it wants, but liberals shouldn't fool themselves about what it really is.

That doesn't mean that the case for boycotting Fox is clear for liberals.  Liberals participate in AEI public panels, even though they realize that AEI too (in Tomasky's words) "wants liberalism to perish from the face of the earth."  They do so because (or at least to the extent to which) AEI also upholds norms of civility and scholarship.  I don't think I need to spell out how that applies to FNC.

Beyond that, I don't think the decision to go on is one of principle, but one of tactics.  Is this particular Fox program one with a history of upholding broadcasting norms of giving people a fair chance to make their case (in which case Douthat's argument for reaching out to Fox's audience makes sense), or are guests used to provide a thin cover of "balance" but otherwise given no reasonable chance?  Would a full boycott (if such a thing was possible) discredit FNC among casual viewers who currently don't understand what they're watching?  (In my opinion, that's easy: it wouldn't). 

By the way, to me the word "propaganda" has more of a pejorative connotation than I would want to use in these circumstances...there's nothing at all wrong with parties having means of communicating with supporters and interested others.  Indeed, there's a long history of partisan newspapers in the United States; that's the main way that people learned about current events in the 19th century.  As one who supports strong (although not necessarily hierarchical or ideologically consistent) political parties, I'm mostly happy about the reemergence of the partisan press, even if its quality isn't what it might be, and I like the 20th century "neutral" press, too.

Influence Within Parties: Money, Technology, and Regulation

I want to steer you all to a couple pieces out today: Jamelle Bouie in defense of political parties, and Henry Farrell on money flows and influence within the Republican Party.  See also Henry's earlier post on the same subject. 

I wrote a longish, fairly technical piece on campaign financing late last week, which I really hope specialists on money in politics (and/or parties) will look at.  The gist of it is that it's more complicated than it seems to figure out whether money should properly be counted as coming from parties, interest groups, or unaffiliated individuals.  Out of that, however, I'll say that if the GOP has evolved a work-around because campaign finance laws prohibit them from using formal party organizations (such as the RNC) for certain types of coordination, and because the current RNC is too dysfunctional, then I don't think that the outcome will necessarily be weaker parties.  Instead, it might just be stronger parties that lean more on informal networks than on formal structures. 

I think the discussion should be focused, then, on two questions.  How influential are the parties are compared to their competitors, and who within the parties has the most influence.  Unfortunately, these questions get complicated very quickly when one accepts that a lot of players -- interest groups, candidates -- have an ambiguous relationship with the party, properly understood.  Interest groups can be both independent actors and party members.  So can candidates, or at least their candidacies.  That is, party networks can infiltrate both interest groups and candidacies so thoroughly that they act as if they are party components, not rivals.  So parties can weaken as politicians get stronger if those pols are able to operate as rivals to party, but parties can also gain strength from strong, party-aligned candidacies. 

Even in those circumstances, however, there's still the question of which party components have influence.  And here, I think Henry Farrell is right to look at how money flows, and the regulatory and technological (or organizational) changes that affect them.  My sense of it is that loosing regulation through Citizens United and other judicial and FEC decisions is probably relatively less important: in my view, these decisions may change how money is collected and spent (which might matter!), but it probably doesn't really change how much truly independent interest groups will spend.  They've always had loopholes large enough that they could spend what they wanted.  On the other hand, the kinds of mobilization of very large networks of small (and smallish) donors through cable network and activist web site agitation strikes me as really different from pre-2004 campaign cycles, and I do think it's meaningful that it has spread from presidential candidates to Senate and even House contests.  If I'm right and that money is basically partisan money, then it's likely to tie candidates even closer to their parties. 

One of the big questions -- and we don't know the answer -- is what percentage of all money spent in Congressional campaigns is truly party money; how much is from independent interest groups (that is, groups not aligned with either party); and how much is personal, generated by individual candidates from sources that are not particularly tied to party networks.  My guess is that in Congressional elections the third category peaked 30-50 years ago and has been declining ever since, but that's just a guess. 

I do think that Henry's questions about coordination are important, but I don't think that he has it quite right.  All types of parties are going to be interested in coordination, but different types of parties, with different regulation regimes, different components, different institutions, different....hmmm...strength, in the sense of how closely various components are tied to the party, are going to be able to coordinate more or less efficiently.  (Even if individual actors within the party network claim to have little interest in coordination, the logic of elections, beginning with the need to agree on nominees, push everyone in that direction, at least if they want to be influential players).  Stability matters too: rapid changes, whether or the rules of the road or in electioneering technology, probably make coordination a lot harder. 

That's not to say that all forms of coordination yield the same outcomes.  Using Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (or using Kos) as a means of coordination for large numbers of small and smallish donors can impose all sorts of constraints on the party, and it's well worth paying attention to what those might be. 

More About Money In Politics

I see that Glenn Greenwald has documented some of the outside group spending that David Brooks apparently overlooked in his NYT column.  That's all well and good, but I think that this is a case where the standard treatment of the subject, including that in political science texts, obscures more than it enlightens. 

The problem is that people categorize campaign money based on the legal entities under which it is raised or spent.  So we talk about different organizations that can spend money: the candidates, party committees, and outside groups; and then we talk about candidates raising money from individuals, PACs, parties, and from their own self-financing.  All of which is true if the questions we want to answer are about legal categories.  However, more often we have questions about politics that using the legal categories prevent us from answering.

Sometimes, that's easy to see.  A lot of "independent" groups are obviously party groups that have simply organized a particular way in order to exploit the way the campaign finance laws were written and interpreted.  For example, Michael Crowley cites the Republican Governors' Association's plans to spend money as evidence that Brooks "lowballed" the proportion of campaign spending by outside groups, but c'mon: it's the Republican Governors' Association.  In terms of the political importance of that money, I don't care whether it counts as party spending or "independent" spending -- it's obviously party money. (Actually, I'm not sure whether in fact the RGA should count by legal standards as party spending or as an independent outside group; I'd look it up, but I don't care, since in practical terms it's clearly party money).

Now, take a slightly tougher case: the money that Karl Rove associated groups are spending.  Those are clearly "independent" by law.  But...he's Karl Rove!  Everyone knows that he's a Republican operative.  In order to avoid trouble with the FEC (sorry -- should have told you to put down your drink before reading that silly clause....heh, trouble with the FEC) he may have to work "independently," but again: he's Karl Rove!  Of course he can figure out how to spend his money in ways helpful to Republicans without coordinating with formal party organizations. 

In fact, what we often want to know about money in politics is whether it is from parties (including the entire party network, not just formal party organizations); unaffiliated interest groups; individuals who are independent of either of those types of organizations; or the candidates themselves.  Some of that is fairly easy to do (see RGA or Karl Rove, above).  Some is very difficult.  My buddy Casey Dominguez has done some work at sorting PACs and individuals by whether they behave as part of a party network over time, and she's found that much of the money in the system should properly be considered party money (she and I are currently beginning work on another paper on the same topic).  There's also OpenSecrets, which uses the information in campaign finance filings to properly attribute individual contributors to the correct interest group.

There are times when it really is important to know how much money is from outside groups.  For example, it's certainly interesting to know about money from undisclosed sources.  Even here, however, I'm not sure how important it is.  Disclosure is most helpful as a signal to voters about which candidates are supported by which interests.  When groups with bland, feel-good names but secret donors get involved in elections, then voters can't receive that signal (note that the way this actually works is opposing candidates and neutral reporters dig through disclosure info and find things to publicize).  And yet...what more would voters really learn if they knew the specific origin of money being spent by the Chamber of Commerce? 

The bottom line is that we do want to know who is giving to and spending on behalf of candidates, and we should have a campaign finance system that lets us know that. 

What I'd really like to see is simplification...a lot of why these outside groups exist is because the current laws restrict how party, interest group, and unaffiliated money can be raised and spent.  On the other hand, I'd also like to see partial public financing, so that all major-party candidates can run at least minimal campaigns.  Floors, not ceilings, plus full and fully enforce enforced disclosure -- that's a campaign finance system I could strong support.

All Politics is Local, Except When...Oh, Wait

I hate to make this blog an all-Bai, all-the-time, debunk-o-fest, but really, sometimes he just asks for it -- and today's article is also a good peg on which to hang a couple of important points, which I'll get to below.  Anyway, today he takes his special Bai-eriffic mix of solid reporting skills and analytic disaster to the three-ring circus in Delaware's Senate race, in which he finds that Christine O'Donnell isn't actually campaigning there, at least not in person.  That's interesting!  With all the O'Donnell hoopla, I didn't actually know that, although I'll admit I'm pretty O'Donnelled out, and not following the details all that closely.  But somehow or another he manages to use the O'Donnell story to tell us that Tip O'Neill's famous aphorism that "all politics is local" is "as much a part of history as he is" without mentioning anywhere that Christine O'Donnell is getting clobbered.  In a great Republican year, in an open seat, Nate Silver now gives her a 1% chance of winning, ranking her even with whatever Republican is taking on Daniel Inouye in Hawaii.  In other words, all politics in Deleware is local, in the sense that nominating some nationally-based movement conservative has been an apparent fiasco for Republicans there.  Tip O'Neill didn't mean that nothing happened at the national level, just that anyone who wanted to win had better pay attention to what their districts wanted.  I could see an argument that O'Donnell doesn't prove that Delaware is hostile to national movement conservatives who don't have a history of talking about witchcraft and the rest of it, but she's hardly evidence that O'Neill's advice is dated.

Oh, I said I had some important points in addition to the Bai-bashing, didn't I?  Better get to them, as much fun as Bai-bashing is.  I mean, really -- this is the New York Times, not WJM-TV or WNYX radio.  They shouldn't be getting things this wrong this regularly.  Now, where was I?...oh, yeah, the important points.

First, Bai is actually quite right that national politics is new, and different.  In the strong-party nineteenth century, the national parties were basically non-existent.  National parties were little more than loose alliances of a whole bunch of state and local parties, which were entirely autonomous, and had little to do with each other unless they had to nominate a presidential candidate.  As parties weakened in the twentieth century, what was weakening were those state and local organizations.  There was no national party to be weak or strong.  That's no longer true.  Over the last fifty years or so, both the Democrats and Republicans have been putting together true national parties. 

Second, and as I've talked about many times before, these national parties (just like the modern versions of state and local parties) are only partially found in formal organizations, such as the Republican National Committee or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.  Those formal organizations may sometimes be important, but they're not the whole party.  Often, what matters far more are informal networks including campaign professionals, governing professionals and issue experts, the partisan press, activists, party aligned-interest groups, and candidates.  That's what Bai is talking about when he sees outsiders such as Rush Limbaugh tout O'Donnell, or national online groups such as MoveOn supporting Ned Lamont against Joe Lieberman in 2006.  Bai is correct that this is a new and interesting development, but he's wrong to think that there's no political party operating in these cases (and here he's just plain ordinary wrong, I suppose, but still...).  It is party action, but it's national and not local, and it's not happening in the buildings with the words "Democrat" or "Republican" on the door.  But it's party action nonetheless, even if as yet we only partially understand all of its implications. 

A Party Networks Perspective on Tea Parties and Republicans

Want a little whiplash?  Start by reading Jonathan Rauch's fascinating NJ story about the decentralized, leaderless structure of the Tea Party Patriots.  And then head over to the NYT expose on the big-shot GOP consultant making a killing off of the Tea Party Express.  Is the Tea Party a grassroots, egalitarian social movement, or a GOP astroturf front group?  Both?  Neither? 

You can imagine how difficult it is for anyone to talk about the effects of Tea Partyism, given how difficult it is to define what the Tea Party is in the first place.  Given that, I've seen two worthwhile things recently.  One is Nate Silver's Big Think piece, which as you can expect from him is particularly good in its race-by-race analysis (his "Dimension 1").  The other I've referred to before, but I'll quote it this time; it's from Ed Kilgore's wrap-up of the GOP primary season:

The role of the Tea Party movement in this rightward shift was significant, but it was not ubiquitous. And if, like me, you think the Tea Partiers are simply a mobilized bloc of conservative Republican voters, focusing on their role as if it were some sort of independent force is a chimera. What we have actually witnessed this year is the final victory in a Fifty Year War waged by the conservative movement for control of the Republican Party. 

I think Kilgore is largely correct in this, and I think party network scholars should have something to say about it.  The core thesis of the party networks approach is that American political parties (I call them "expanded parties") are best understood as composed of both formal party organizations and informal party networks, which include activists, campaign and governing professionals, party-aligned interest groups, the partisan mass media, and politicians.  From this perspective, it's easy to see that the Tea Parties are an organizational form within the expanded Republican Party, not an alternative to the party.  Moreover, it suggests that it's a mistake to think of one set of Republicans as an "establishment" and another -- which after all features the most recent Republican Vice Presidential nominee, along with the former Majority Leader of the House, plenty of sitting Members of Congress, and a host of long-time Republican activists and operatives -- as outsiders.  That may well be the case in some internal confrontations, but in others the lines may be between local groups and national Republicans, or between moderates and conservatives, or just between two competing candidates.

What else can we say, if we see Tea Parties this way?  One is (as Kilgore urges) to be very careful about attributing causation to Tea Parties.  Imagine, for example, that there were no Tea Parties at all.  Does that require imagining a world in which Congressional Republicans go along with whatever Barack Obama wants, a world in which Glenn Beck organizes no rallies, or a world in which rank and file Republicans have no interest in midterm elections?  We have a good test case for that: 1994.  And that's even before Fox News could play a coordinating role in GOP politics.  Indeed, I think it's safe to say that with any mainstream Democrat in the White House and with Democratic majorities in Congress, Republican reaction (regardless of how it was organized) would have been swift, strong, and intense.  Beyond that, another factor, that Sarah Palin is herself an independent force in GOP politics -- to the extent that her endorsements by themselves may have the capacity for significantly helping a favored candidate -- is probably entirely separable from Tea Partyism.  Again, it's easy to imagine no Tea Parties at all but a Palin endorsement still serving as a powerful cue to conservative activists, especially in multicandidate, low information primary elections.

That does not mean, however, that the "how it was organized" that I glossed over just now is necessarily irrelevant.  Yes, one could expect vigorous opposition to the Democrats.  And it's hardly surprising that conservative opposition would also (as it did after 1960, 1976, and 1992) would also take the form of criticizing past GOP elected officials for not being sufficiently conservative; that's what conservatives do.  But our expanded parties can take many forms, and to some extent the form they do take may make a huge difference.  It could well be the case that the Tea Party Patriots are mobilizing some grass roots activity that wouldn't have happened otherwise; it could be the case that particular organization forms are providing a local alternative to national Republican Party elites.  Without the particular organizational form(s) Republican opposition to Obama has taken, it's certainly possible that Bob Bennett and Lisa Murkowski would be safely cruising to reelection, and that Mike Castle would be about to deliver a Republican seat in Delaware.  On the other hand, it could be the case that Tea Partyism -- that is, Tea Partyism specifically, and not general GOP distaste for Democrats in government (and specific unease about the terrible economy) was responsible for recruiting some strong candidates, who will go on to be important GOP pols for the next decade or more.

What I do think is that it's a mistake to think of this as a national battle between Republicans against Tea Partiers, or between an establishment and insurgents, or between conservatives and moderates (Delaware notwithstanding, there just aren't a lot of Republican moderates left, although of course it's possible that Tea Party candidates may be even more conservative than their opponents).  It's certainly a mistake to think that Tea Parties in general, or specific Tea Party organizations, are responsible for conservative unhappiness with Barack Obama and the Democrats.  One other word of caution: American political parties are not as decentralized and local as they once were, but they are still not (only) national hierarchical organizations; it's very possible that these events differ, possibly quite a bit, across different states.  Maybe in some places there really is an establishment vs. outsiders story, but other places may differ.  Indeed, I suspect that some of these battles are between locals and the national party -- but sometimes the national party that matters are national movement conservatives trying to capture a local moderate party, while sometimes its national pragmatic operatives against local purists.  And sometimes, both might be happening at the same time.  Of course, all of this means that it's difficult to generalize about "the effects of the Tea Parties."  That's fine; sometimes the best we can do is to wait for further data, or to just describe as best we can without trying to draw big causal connections.