Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T21:11:22.013Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Toward Functionalism in Political Science: The Case of Innovation in Party Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Theodore Lowi
Theodore Lowi*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the life of all organizations there seems to be a general tendency toward a state of affairs called “equilibrium” by the favorably disposed and “rigidity” by the disaffected. Once the internal processes of an organization have become routine and its relations to the outside world have become stabilized, a kind of inertia seems to set in. The prevailing patterns are seen as good by the members. Identification involves a good deal of resistance to change. But if this is true of organizations, certain conditions also provide incentives for innovation.

All stable organizations are in a continual process of adaptation. Innovation is that part of the process which is deliberate, self-conscious adaptation. Activities are innovative if they are attempts to change the organization and its environment in keeping with policies thought out in advance of the attempt. Innovation is not to be confused with liberalism or reform. The antonym for innovation is “consolidation,” not conservatism. Liberalism and conservatism are postures toward the kinds of changes required. To have no policy at all for changing things or to have a policy against changing things is to be neither liberal nor conservative; it is to be non-innovative or consolidative.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 1963 , pp. 570 - 583
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1963

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

* Lippmann, Walter, A Preface to Politics (Mitchell Kinnerly, New York, 1914), p. 26Google Scholar. Clinton Rossiter led me to Lippmann's essay. I am indebted to him and to Fred Greenstein, Andrew Hacker and Alan Altshuler, for critical readings of earlier drafts.

1 Ibid., p. 4.

2 Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1936), p. 118 ff.Google Scholar

3 It will be clear presently that I am limiting myself to the Americant variant. To include multiple party systems I would probably broaden the formulation to “the minority second party.”

4 See among others, Merton, Robert, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, 1957), esp. ch. 1Google Scholar.

6 Schattschneider, E. E., Party Government (New York, 1942), p. 1Google Scholar.

6 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 2d ed. (New York, 1947), p. 269Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

7 Op. cit., pp. 50–53.

8 Ibid., p. 84.

9 Ibid., p. 85.

10 Ibid., pp. 48–50.

11 Ibid., p. 2 ff.

12 Democracy and the American Party System (New York, 1956), pp. 504–513Google Scholar.

13 Constitutional Government and Democracy, (Boston, 1947), pp. 297–298Google Scholar. Cf. Almond, and Coleman, , Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar, introductory essay by Almond.

14 A significant exception is E. H. Rhyne's “Political Parties and Decision-Making in Three Southern Counties,” this Review, Vol. 52, (1958), pp. 1091–1107. Weaknesses in the “community power structure” aspect of his design seriously limit the paper, but the purpose of the study makes it a signal achievement. Key's Southern Politics is significant as a study of the consequences of one- and no-party systems, inviting speculation on the differences in systems where parties are in operation. Also, some of the Congressional roll-call analyses, most notably Julius Turner's Party and Constituency and David Truman's Congressional Party, get at relevant questions.

15 (New York, 1958), ch. 8.

16 Campbell, Angus, et al., The American Voter (New York, 1960), ch. 11Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., ch. 20

18 Ibid., p. 29.

19 Thus, I chose surveys as remote as possible from important election campaigns. This also helps avoid the homogenizing effects of presidential campaigns.

20 Cf. Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man (New York, 1960), ch. 8Google Scholar.

21 American State Politics (New York, 1956), p. 223Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., p. 219.

23 Short of further research, I view it as no coincidence that so many of the more compulsive politicians have arisen in weak, usually one-party, systems or through new parties or social movements attached to parties.

24 For example, after the 1960 national election, a good part of the Republicans' strong showing was attributed to intensive registration campaigns in the cities. Cf. E. H. Rhyne, op. cit., p. 1105: “It is possible that the very strength and closeness of the party competition may contribute to the exclusion of issues from elections and of elections from decision making.”

25 See Ranney and Kendall, op. cit., ch. 7.

26 The data are taken from my study, At the Pleasure of the Mayor (to be published 1963 by The Free Press.)Google Scholar These trend lines are percentages of all the top political appointees in each of the administrations who possess the attribute in question. The “top“ was denned as heads of all charter departments and agencies; i.e., the “cabinet level.”

27 One exception, the drop-off of Italian appointments with Mayor Mitchel, cannot be explained. The other, an increase of Italian appointments under Mayor O'Brien, is a mere arithmetical exception. O'Brien was a one-year “care-taker” who made less than half the number of his predecessor, and most of these were Walker hold-overs. Thus the same number of Italian appointments results in almost twice the percentage.

28 This is why I argued earlier, in disagreement with Lippmann, that the role of “inventor” is more situational than characterological. Here we see the ordinary party leader cast, perhaps against his will, in the role of innovator. Virtually any political participant may be an innovator if he is given the proper incentives.

29 Lowi, op. cit., ch. 8; and cf. Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.

30 The stronger upperclass character of the Republican administrations is reflected in the fact that among the salaried commissionerships members of the Social Register in Republican administrations outnumbered those in Democratic administrations 22% to 11%. Furthermore, while many of the Republican Social Registerites were not active party members, the Democratic Social Registerites were almost always functionaries. Before 1933, when 50 of the 60 Social Register Democrats were appointed, this meant that they were fully subordinate to the Irish bosses.

31 Political Parties (New York, 1954), p. xxviiGoogle Scholar.

32 The prejudice against allowing ‘adopted citizens’ to mingle in politics was deep; and Tammany claimed to be a thoroughly native body. As early as May 12, 1791, at Campbell's Tavern, Greenwich, the Tammany Society had announced that being a national body, it consisted of Americans born, who would fill all offices; though adopted Americans were eligible to honorary posts, such as warriors and hunters. An ‘adopted citizen’ was looked upon as an ‘exotic’ “ Myers, Gustavus, The History of Tammany Hall (New York, 1917), p. 30Google Scholar. This attitude persisted at least until the eve of the great Irish immigrations, when, in 1840, Tammany Hall instituted a naturalization bureau. This was a major innovation in American political history.

33 See Lowi, op, cit., esp. ch. 8.

34 This not only includes a new brand of political practice after 1900—the politics of interest groups and social movements (see ibid.) A selected list of governmental innovations includes: city-wide Board of Education (1902), Board of Standards and Appeals (1916)—at first, the Charter called for a membership drawn directly from the major land-use interests—Department of Markets (1917), abolition of the office of Coroner (1917), abolition of the Park Board (1933), Deputy Mayor, City Planning Commission, Department of Finance and replacement of county sheriffs and registers by one City Sheriff and one City Register under civil service. Without these changes and the policies associated with them, there would probably have been no partisan issues in the past sixty years in New York.

35 Lubell, Samuel, in The Future of American Politics (Garden City, 1956), esp. ch. 10Google Scholar, is one of the few writers who has stressed the importance of electoral position. The parallel between his formulation and mine ends fairly quickly, however. Lubell concentrates on the majority party but is quite vague about the reasons for the majority's being the “key to the political warfare of any particular period.” Second, Lubell sees the rise of the second party to majority status as due almost entirely to direct defection from the majority. Third, when group and faction leaders do defect from the majority, Lubell sees them as though they keep their coalitions intact and take their followings along to change the voting patterns as well. Finally, the change in status merely shifts the question of who wants to turn the clock back. A real turning back of the clock is as innovative as anything else, but one also wonders if this is all there was in each of the major transitions in the past 70-odd years.

36 Bailey, Stephen K., The Condition of Our National Political Parties. Fund for the Republic Occasional Paper, p. 4Google Scholar.

37 Rossiter, Clinton, Parties and Politics in America (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1960), p. 110Google Scholar.

38 Herring, E. Pendleton, The Politics of Democracy. (New York, 1940), p. 84Google Scholar.

39 The chapter of Republican party history omitted in the text is that of 1896–1912 which, as I suggest above, was a strictly consolidative period, the Republicans never really having lost majority status since the Civil War. The Republican response to the hungry agitation of the 1890s was the final consolidation of a political capitalism in what was probably the closest America has ever come to a “power elite.” Tariff and imperialism were the positive orders of the day, the latter despite McKinley's opposition. Theodore Roosevelt sounded like an innovator and probably did take the first steps toward infusing a sense of positive justice into the national purpose. Roosevelt perhaps anticipated Wilson, but his failure to move his party with the progressive spirit, which later provided him with his instrument for devastating his party, seems to me more significant than his relatively marginal successes in antitrust, food and drug labeling and the Hepburn Act. Roosevelt is a good example of the extraordinary problem of the innovator in a consolidating, majority party. Roosevelt's big stick amounted to no more than a big oar. International aggrandizement seems to have been a safety valve for a man whose energies were bottled up at home.

40 V. O. Key, Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups, op. cit., p. 35.

41 Cf. Truman, David, The Governmental Process (New York, 1951), p. 83Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., p. 76.

43 Of course, the President's discretion was limited to comparative costs of the foreign and domestic commodities, but no one expected a very careful calculation. According to Schattschneider, statistics were “the handmaiden of the subconscious process of wish fulfillment.” Politics, Pressures and the Tariff (New York, 1935), p. 68Google Scholar. Thus, tariffs came to involve a more or less continuous interplay among officialdom and literally hundreds of organized commodity groups.

44 Note on Table I that 1896 was not a popular triumph for the Republicans although control in both Houses was clear. In 1912, Wilson's proportion of the total popular vote was hardly over 45 per cent, but the devastating split in the Republican party amounts functionally to the same thing as an overwhelming defeat. Note also Wilson's Senate and House majorities. The years 1920 and 1932 speak for themselves.

45 Perhaps it is a minor tragedy that the war ended in between Presidential elections, because this surely prevented the Republicans from winning everything in 1946. Instead, they only came close and have been coming close ever since.

46 Ranney and Kendall, op. cit., p. 505.

47 In 1960, before the United Nations and the world (and Premier Khrushchev), Henry Cabot Lodge praised our great “Welfare State”!

48 As the 1932 election suggests, an innovating party may not display its true nature in the campaign that elevates it to the majority; in fact, its actual orientation may not even be clear to its own leaders until it achieves power, begins to ratify some of its major commitments and begins to consolidate its position. Once this process gets underway, the departures from the past will be noted by the new minority party and a bona fide dialogue begins. The Democrats did not begin their response to the Republicans of 1920 until at least 1928, and the orientation of the New Deal—an acceptance of the 1920s' definition of policy according to organized sectors, with the additional principles of positive government and of class distinctions within sectors and across sectoral lines—became fully clear only a good while after the 100 Days.

49 Friedrich, Carl, Constitutional Government and Democracy (Boston, 1950), p. 417Google Scholar.

50 Loc. cit.

51 Op. cit., p. 261.

52 Fellding, Harold, “Functional Analysis in Sociology,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 28 (02, 1963), p. 7Google Scholar.

Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.