Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:09:59.117Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

State Formation and the Decline of Political Parties: American Parties in the Fiscal State*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

John J. Coleman
John J. Coleman
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The shifting salience of political parties is a central issue in American political development. From the debates over colonial “parties” to debates over the relevance of realignment theory in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have attempted to assess the impact of political parties on political development. One topic that has provoked particularly extensive debate is the status of parties since World War II. Scholars point to confidence gaps, realignment, and institutional displacement, among other factors, to explain the postwar decline of political parties. But there are problems: Analytical frameworks explaining decline cannot account for recent signs of party resurgence; frameworks explaining resurgence typically account for little of the decline. Those focused on one aspect of the party system (e.g., parties in Congress) rarely offer insights on other aspects (e.g., parties in the electorate). What is needed is an approach that places parties within their structural settings. If these settings change, parties may change.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Fall 1994 , pp. 195 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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

1. See Burnham, Walter Dean, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970)Google Scholar; Lowi, Theodore J., The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United Stales, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1979)Google Scholar; Skowronek, Stephen, Building A New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bensel, Richard F., Sectionalism and American Political Development (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)Google Scholar;McCormick, Richard L., The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Shafer, Byron E., ed., The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Silbey, Joel H., “The Rise and Fall of American Political Parties, 1790–1993,” in Maisel, L. Sandy, ed., The Parties Respond: Changes in American Parties and Campaigns, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

2. On confidence gaps see Broder, David S., The Party's Over: The Failure of Politics in America (New York: Harper, 1972)Google Scholar; Crewe, Ivor, Sarlvik, B., and Alt, James, “Partisan Dealignment in Britain, 1964–1974,” British Journal of Political Science 7 (1977): 129–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ladd, Everett Carll, Where Have All the Voters Gone? The Fracturing of America's Political Parties (New York: Norton, 1977)Google Scholar; Ladd, Everett Carll, “The Shifting Party Coalitions, 1932–1976,” in Lipset, Seymour Martin, ed., Emerging Coalitions in American Politics (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1978)Google Scholar; Nie, Norman H., Verba, Sidney, and Petrocik, John R., The Changing American Voter, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin and Schneider, William, “The Decline of Confidence in American Institutions,” Political Science Quarterly 98 (1983): 379–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schneider, William, “Antipartisanship in America,” in Bogdanor, Vernon, ed., Parties and Democracy in Britain and America (New York: Praeger, 1984)Google Scholar. On realignment see Burnham, Critical Elections; Sundquist, James L., Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1973)Google Scholar; Beck, Paul Allen, “A Socialization Theory of Partisan Realignment,” in Niemi, Richard G. and Associates, eds., The Politics of Future Citizens: New Dimensions in the Political Socialization of Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974)Google Scholar; Abramson, Paul R., “Generational Change and the Decline of Party Identification in America, 1952–1974,” American Political Science Review 70 (1976): 469–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trilling, Richard J. and Campbell, Bruce A., eds., Realignment in American Politics: Toward a Theory (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Petrocik, John R., Party Coalitions: Realignments and the Decline of the New Deal Party System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Petrocik, John R., “Realignment: New Party Coalitions and the Nationalization of the South,” Journal of Politics 49 (1987): 347–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ferguson, Thomas, “Party Realignment and American Industrial Structure: The Investment Theory of Political Parties in Historical Perspective,” Research in Political Economy 6 (1982): 1–82Google Scholar; Macdonald, Stuart Elaine and Rabinowitz, George, “The Dynamics of Structural Realignment,” American Political Science Review 81 (1987): 775–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brady, David W., Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. On institutional displacement see Huntington, Samuel P., “Congressional Responses to the Twentieth Century,” in Truman, David B., ed., The Congress and America's Future, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973)Google Scholar; Ladd, Everett Carll and Hadley, Charles D., Transformations of the American Party System: Political Coalitions from the New Deal to the 1970s (New York: Norton, 1975)Google Scholar; Phillips, Kevin P., Mediacracy: American Parties and Politics in the Communications Age (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975)Google Scholar; Ranney, Austin, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)Google Scholar: Dodd, Lawrence C. and Schott, Richard L., Congress and the Administrative State (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979Google Scholar;Kirkpatrick, Jeane J., Dismantling the Parties: Reflections on Party Reform and Party Decomposition (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1979)Google Scholar; Lowi, End of Liberalism; Nie, Verba, and Petrocik, Changing American Voter; Alessandro Pizzorno, “Interests and Parties in Pluralism,” in Berger, Suzanne, ed., Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformation of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Sabato, Larry J., The Rise of the Political Consultants: New Ways of Winning Elections (New York: Basic Books, 1981)Google Scholar; Blumenthal, Sidney, The Permanent Campaign, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982)Google Scholar; Polsby, Nelson W., Consequences of Party Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Offe, Claus, “hallenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics: Social Movements Since the 1960s,” in Maier, Charles S., ed., Changing Boundaries of the Political: Essays on the Evolving Balance Between the State and Society, Public and Private in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Baer, Denise L. and Bositis, David A., Elite Cadres and Party Coalitions: Representing the Public in Party Politics (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Not all of these authors see a monotonic decline of party; some see signs of resurgence in the recent past.

3. SeeFerguson, , “Party Realignment,” and his “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization 38 (1984): 41–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bensel, Sectionalism; Terrill, Tom E., The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874–1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Jensen, Richard, “Party Coalitions and the Search for Modern Values: 1820–1970,” in Lipset, Seymour Martin, Party Coalitions in the 1980s (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1981)Google Scholar; and McCormick, The Party Period, 57, 210.

4. Coleman, John J. and Yoffie, David B., “Institutional Incentives for Protection: The American Use of Voluntary Export Restraints,” in Macchiarola, Frank J., ed., International Trade: The Changing Role of the United States (New York: Academy of Political Science, 1990)Google Scholar; Coleman, John J., “Economics, Recessions, and Party Decline: American Parties in the Fiscal State” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), 36–57Google Scholar; Bridges, Amy, “Becoming American: The Working Classes in the United States before the Civil War,” in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R., eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Martin Shefter, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Katznelson, Working-Class Formation.

5. Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski have independently used similar language in their discussion of the “developmental” and “fiscalist” alternatives during the 1930s and 1940s. Our approaches are also compatible in that we both argue that one cannot meaningfully talk about state structure without also talking about policy. See their ”Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s,“ Studies in American Political Development 5 (1991): 301–39, and my “Economic Conditions and Party Cohesion,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1991.

6. An important early effort along these lines came from Samuel P. Huntington, whose Tudor Polity argument illustrated (if not as its primary purpose) the limiting conditions imposed on American parties by the highly fractionalized structure of the U.S. state. For example, in a fashion that does not rely on the usual (albeit pertinent) observations about heterogeneous diversity, the Tudor Polity thesis tells us much about the difficulties in building programmatic parties in the United States. See his Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), chap. 2. The current effort also builds its frame-work from what Theda Skocpol terms a “Tocquevillian” approach to political economy—an approach that stresses the impact of state policies and structures on the representation of interests and, by extension, the party system. “In this perspective, states matter … because their organizational configurations, along with their overall patterns of activity, affect political culture, encourage some kinds of group formation and collective political actions (but not others), and make possible the raising of certain political issues (but not others).” See her “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the Stale Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Historian Richard L. McCormick {The Party Period) also provides an important contribution in this direction.

7. Shefter, Martin, “Party, Bureaucracy, and Political Change in the United States,” in Maisel, Louis and Cooper, Joseph, eds., Political Parties: Development and Decay (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1978)Google Scholar; Skowronek,Building; Milkis, Sidney M., The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Cf. Jensen, “Party Coalitions,” 76–77.

8. Skidelsky, Robert, “The Decline of Keynesian Politics,” in Crouch, Colin, ed., State and Economy in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Croon Helm, 1979)Google Scholar.

9. Poggi, Gianfranco, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

10. Wolfe, Alan, The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Late Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Offe, Claus, Contradictions of the Modern Welfare State, ed. and trans, by Keane, John (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), chap. 7Google Scholar.

11. Offe, Claus, “Competitive Party Democracy and the Keynesian Welfare State: Factors of Stability and Disorganization,” Policy Sciences 15 (1983): 238–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. That is, the revitalization is more evident in some portions of the party system (Congress) than in others (electorate).

13. Katznelson renders the concept similarly:

the state is, simultaneously, a unit of decision-making authority, a set of social relations of power and social control, a normative order, and a legal and institutional order that represents, shapes, and manages conflict, and that organizes a framework for the market economy while acting to alter market outcomes.

See “‘The Burdens of Urban History’: Comment,” Studies in American Political Development 3 (1989): 47.

14. Just how responsible the state was for the relative economic success of the postwar period has become a highly contentious issue. There is no way to resolve that debate here. But three important points can be made. First, an impressive body of literature does suggest that the state and the nature of governing coalitions at least partly shape economic outcomes. See, for example, Martin, Andrew, “The Politics of Economic Policy in the United States: A Tentative View from a Comparative Perspective,” Sage Professional Paper in Comparative Politics (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1973)Google Scholar;Hibbs, Douglas A. Jr, “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy,” American Political Science Review 71 (1977): 1467–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, Morris, “The Public Sector and Economic Stability,” in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, The Business Cycle and Public Policy, 1929–1980 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1980)Google Scholar; Cameron, David R., “Social Democracy, Corporatism, Labor Quiescence and the Representation of Economic Interest in Advanced Capitalist Society,” in Goldthorpe, John H., Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism: Studies in the Political Economy of Western European Nations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Cameron, David R., “The Politics and Economics of the Business Cycle,” in Ferguson, Thomas and Rogers, Joel, eds., The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1984)Google Scholar; Eisner, Robert and Pieper, Paul F., “A New View of the Federal Debt and Budget Deficits,” American Economic Review 74 (1984)Google Scholar: Alesina, Alberto and Rosenthal, Howard, “Partisan Cycles in Congressional Elections and the Macroeconomy,” American Political Science Review 83 (1989): 373–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nordhaus, William D., “Alternative Approaches to the Political Business Cycle,” in Brainard, William C. and Perry, George L., eds., Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2 (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1989)Google Scholar; and Budge, Ian and Hofferbert, Richard I., “Mandates and Policy Outputs: U.S. Party Platforms and Federal Expenditures,” American Political Science Review 84 (1990): 111–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To be sure, this conclusion is not universally held. Rose, Richard, Do Parties Make a Difference? (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmidt, Manfred G., “The Role of Parties in Shaping Macro-economic Policy,” in Castles, Francis G., ed., The Impact of Parties: Politics and Policies in Democratic Capitalist States (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982)Google Scholar; and Alt, James E., “Political Parties, World Demand, and Unemployment: Domestic and International Sources of Economic Activity,” American Political Science Review 79 (1985): 1016–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, appropriately urge caution.

Second, even monetarist critics of fiscal policy admit that fiscal policy can have short-run beneficial effects, and the short-run may be what is important in practical politics.

Third, even if the state had nothing to do directly with economic success, business elites and the public believed that the state had this capability. This sense that the state could manage the economy effectively may have encouraged the kind of investment and spending that does produce growth. See Shonfield, Andrew, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Collins, Robert M., The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Boltho, Andrea, ed., The European Economy: Growth and Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

15. Of course, within Keynesian theory, it does matter where the money goes: One wants the money to reside in the hands of those with relatively high marginal propensities to consume. On the comparison between Congress and the president, see Peterson, Paul E., “The New Politics of Deficits,” in Chubb, John E. and Peterson, Paul E., eds., The New Direction in American Politics (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1985)Google Scholar, and Peterson, Paul E. and Rom, Mark, “Macroeconomic Policymaking: Who Is in Control?” in Chubb, John E. and Peterson, Paul E., eds., Can the Government Govern? (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1989)Google Scholar.

16. Again, one can contrast this situation with the period before 1900. Not only were parties clearly the primary locus for control over trade policy, the gold versus silver versus greenback controversy was centered in the parties as well. See Peterson and Rom, “Macroeconomic Policy,” for an argument on the ascendance of monetary policy.

17. Hibbs, “Political Parties.”

18. That is, if one's industry were protected but still suffering, one would demand additional protection rather than open trade.

19. On voting and the importance of the macroeconomy in the postwar period, see Fiorina, Morris P., Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Jensen, Richard, “The Last American Party System: Decay of Consensus, 1932–1980,” in Kleppner, Paul, ed., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 233Google Scholar; MacKuen, Michael B., Erikson, Robert S., and Stimson, James A., “Macropartisanship,” American Political Science Review 83 (1989): 1124–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abramson, Paul R., Aldrich, John H., and Rohde, David W., Change and Continuity in the 1988 Elections (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1990), chap. 10Google Scholar; and Jacobson, Gary C., The Politics of Congressional Elections, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)Google Scholar. This split-level view of the president and the Congress helps explain why scholars have had more success linking economic and personal financial conditions with presidential voting than with congressional voting and why incumbent-based elections and ombudsman services have become staples of the congressional literature. For a discussion of these issues, see Kuklinski, James H. and West, Darrell M., “Economic Expectations and Voting Behavior in United States House and Senate Elections,” American Political Science Review 75 (1981): 436–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kiewiet, D. Roderick, Macroeconomics and Micropolitics: The Electoral Effects of Economic Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Chappell, Henry W. Jr, and Keech, William R., “A New View of Political Accountability for Economic Performance,” American Political Science Review 79 (1985): 10–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis-Beck, Michael S., Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Mayhew, David R., Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Burnham, Walter Dean, “Insulation and Responsiveness in Congressional Elections,” Political Science Quarterly 90 (1975): 411–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fiorina, Morris P., Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Alford, John R. and Brady, David W., “Personal and Partisan Advantage in U.S. Congressional Elections, 1846–1986,” in Dodd, Lawrence C. and Oppenheimer, Bruce I., eds., Congress Reconsidered, 4th ed. (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1989)Google Scholar; and Parker, Glenn R., “Members of Congress and Their Constituents: The Home-Style Connection,” in Dodd, Lawrence C. and Oppenheimer, Bruce I., eds., Congress Reconsidered, 4th ed. (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1989)Google Scholar.

20. I discuss this tendency in “Economic Conditions and Party Cohesion,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Washington, September 1991), and “Constraints on Political Party Responses to Recession: The Role of the State and Policy,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Washington, September 1993).

21. Polsby, Nelson W., “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 62 (1968): 144–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Chamberlain, Lawrence H., The President, Congress and Legislation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940)Google Scholar.

23. Karl, Barry D., The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 124Google Scholar; cf. Conkin, Paul K., The New Deal, 2nd ed. (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1975), 86ffGoogle Scholar.

24. John Joseph Wallis, “Laws, Legislatures and Relief: Some Determinants of Institutional Change in the New Deal” (manuscript, Department of Economics, University of Maryland). Weir and Skocpol note that “the strength of local bases of power and congressional determination to block the institutionalization of stronger federal executive controls were the essential barriers to constructing a permanent, nationally coordinated system of social spending in the late 1930s.” See Weir, Margaret and Skocpol, Theda, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,” in Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 135Google Scholar.

25. These terms are borrowed from LeLoup's description of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Macrobudgeting refers to setting and voting on total governmental spending and revenue amounts before working out the precise distribution of funds to specific programs and departments. Microbudgeting allocates money to programs and departments without reference to any total spending or revenue limits. As Gilmour suggests, the 1974 reforms are probably better thought of as introducing “iterative budgeting,” in which macro and micro goals are determined simultaneously rather than allowing one goal to subordinate the other. See LeLoup, Lance T., “From Microbudgeting to Macrobudgeting: Evolution in Theory and Practice,” in Rubin, Irene, ed., New Directions in Budget Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988)Google Scholar, and Gilmour, John B., Reconcilable Differences? Congress, the Budget Process, and the Deficit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

26. Conkin, The New Deal, 92–93.

27. See the discussion in Stein, Herbert, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

28. Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932–1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 245Google Scholar.

29. See Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 256, and Freidel, Frank, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 249–57Google Scholar. It seems fairly certain that the New Dealers were influenced by Keynes in a peripheral way; many of the ideas that came to be known as Keynesian had in fact been circulating in different guises over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. On Keynes and the New Deal, see Hall, Peter A., “Conclusion: The Politics of Keynesian Ideas,” in Hall, Peter A., ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Bradford A. Lee, “The Miscarriage of Necessity and Invention: Proto-Keynesianism and Democratic States in the 1930s,” in Hall, The Political Power; Stein, The Fiscal Revolution; and Karl, The Uneasy State, 158–59.

30. Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, 100–23; Burk, Robert F., The Corporate State and the Broker State: The DuPonts and American National Politics, 1925–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 267Google Scholar.

31. Congressional Record [hereafter CR], Appendix, 16 November 1937, p. 49.

32. Indeed, Roosevelt's difficulties were bipartisan: “In January 1937, for the first time in more than a century, one party controlled three fourths of the votes in House and Senate. And yet this Congress killed or brutally emasculated almost every Administration effort to expand the New Deal”; Polenberg, Richard, “The Decline of the New Deal, 1937–1940,” in Braeman, John, Bremner, Robert H., and Brody, David, eds., The New Deal: The National Level (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Polenberg, Richard, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Still, in this environment, with the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats joining forces, the “first allegiance [of Congressmen] was to party, not coalition. In the months to come, partisan warfare would negate coalition efforts time and again” Patterson, James T., Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), 210Google Scholar.

33. Kane's depiction of the “fedbashing” relationship between Congress, the president, and the Fed—in which the president and Congress attack Fed performance but with no real interest in expropriating the Fed's power, and the Fed goes along with the “abuse” to protect its political perks—seems to fit the basic contours of the rise and fall of the Fed issue in the post-New Deal recessions. See Kane, Edward J., “External Pressure and the Operations of the Fed,” in Peretz, Paul E., ed., The Politics of Economic Policy Making (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1987)Google Scholar; Kane, , “Fedbashing and the Role of Monetary Arrangements in Managing Political Stress,” in Willett, Thomas D., ed., Political Btisiness Cycles: The Political Economy of Money, Inflation, and Unemployment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Kettl, Donald F., Leadership at the Fed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

34. CR, 14 February 1938, p. 1901.

35. Among other things, the act made the president formally responsible for gathering agency requests into some kind of overall budget and presenting a revenue and spending package to the Congress. See Stewart, Charles H. III, Budget Reform Politics: The Design of the Appropriations Process in the House of Representatives, 1865–1921 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 197–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Sundquist, James L., The Decline and Resurgence of Congress (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1981), 200Google Scholar.

37. CR, 12 January 1937, p. 182. In the House, Representative John Murdock (D–Arizona) argued that the Congress needed to examine what the economy needed before indulging in “bookkeeper's economy” (CR, 20 May 1937).

38. CR, 12 January 1937, p. 186.

39. See Savage, James D., Balanced Budgets and American Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), chap. 6Google Scholar.

40. CR, 16 May 1937, p. 1077.

41. CR, 12 January 1937, pp. 181, 182, 185.

42. CR, 4 May 1937, p. 1073.

43. Dodd, Lawrence C. and Schott, Richard L., Congress and the Administrative State (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979), 81Google Scholar.

44. Dodd and Schott, Congress, 84–85.

45. This protection was still in place even if the normal pattern was for the committee to do the work of the party. The committee could act as a check on party power.

46. Conkin, The New Deal, 84; Brinkley, Alan, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 94–100Google Scholar.

47. However, it was not yet national policy to achieve full employment by permanent fiscal policy or even to think seriously about the budget as a tool to reach a specific national income (Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, 115–16).

48. CR, 28 April 1937, p. 3897.

49. CR, 15 December 1944.

50. See the discussion in Polenberg, Richard, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 23–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, Letter from Henry Morgenthau to John J. Cochran, [January 1938], “Misc Committee File,” Folder HR75AF14.4, National Archives.

52. CR, 28 April 1937, p. 3897.

53. CR, 22 May 1940, pp. 6581–82.

54. Members of Congress in both chambers in the early 1940s proposed plans similar in inient to the Tydings proposal. The Special Committee on Fiscal Planning, for example, would bring together powerful members from the House Appropriations and Ways and Means committees. Other such plans included the Joint Committee on the Budget (CR, 21 January 1943, p. 269) and the Joint Committee on Budgetary Control (CR, 18 January 1943, p. 212).

55. CR, 29 April 1941, p. 3377. Tydings, as part of the general movement in Congress stressing the need for independent information, also proposed the formation of a Joint Committee to Study, Analyze, and Evaluate Requests for Appropriations.

56. The sense of congressional weakness was not limited to those on Capitol Hill or the administration's enemies; the New York Times editorialized that the Congress was disorganized and impotent (New York Times, 3–15–43). The Washington Post echoed these sentiments, contrasting the choices as modernization of Congress or abdication of power (Washington Post, 1–23–44).

57. It is clear that many voters make precisely this decision. In the 1988 House congressional elections, 47 percent of self-identified Democrats defected to support a Republican incumbent while 52 percent of Republicans defected to support an incumbent Democrat (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde, Change and Continuity, 270).

58. The congressional involvement was more inadvertent than crusade. The proposal to look into reorganization was apparently part of an attempt by William Whittington (D–Mississippi) to prevent the reporting out of another bill from the committee. Indeed, Cochran had a difficult time getting members to agree to work over this issue during the November and December recess, which was critical if the Congress was to be the first to place a reorganization plan on the table. Only one of eighteen committee members responded affirmatively and without qualification to Cochran's request (Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, Tray HR74A-F13.4, 13998, Whittington Resolution, National Archives). Although it is not clear why the committee, particularly the Democrats, went along with a recommendation that they had little interest in, most probably saw this as a valence issue—how could you explain a vote against investigating ways to save money and cut down on bureaucracy? The standard works on executive reorganization (Karl, Executive Reorganization; Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government; Milkis The President) ignore the early congressional effort.

59. Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, Tray HR74A-F13.4, 13997, Whittington Resolution, National Archives.

60. CR, 29 April 1936, pp. 6376, 6378.

61. CR, 29 April 1936, pp. 6375–87.

62. CR, 29 April 1936, p. 6379.

63. The Roosevelt administration had a long history of differences with the incumbent Republican auditor, John R. McCarl. Therefore, the issue of audit versus control was a live one. In particular, the administration was upset that McCarl used a general policy guideline of pre-audits, which meant that he was involved in the business of preventing government transactions from taking place. The administration felt that the comptroller's proper role was to provide Congress with analysis of executive actions that would help revise programs where needed. Aside from the frustration of having program content affected by the comptroller's actions, the administration also had some constitutional difficulties with the comptroller's role: Was the comptroller involving the legislative branch in the administration of laws? This provision in the reorganization bill was intended to prevent the comptroller from pre-auditing programs.

64. Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government, 21.

65. Dodd and Schott, Congress, 338–39.

66. Karl, The Uneasy Slate, 157; see also Milkis, The President.

67. Sundquist, The Decline and Resurgence, 52–54.

68. See Milkis, , The President. The quoted passage is taken from an earlier version of this work: “The New Deal, The Decline of Parties and the Administrative State” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 1981), 4Google Scholar.

69. Cf. Shefter, “Party, Bureaucracy.”

70. In “Party Leadership, Policy Reform and the Development of the Modern Presidency: The Impact of the Roosevelt and Johnson Presidencies on the American Party System” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1984), Milkis extends the argument to Lyndon Johnson. In Johnson, Milkis sees much the same disbelief in the practicality of the responsible party model and a desire to institutionalize his changes in American politics. See also Milkis, The President.

71. Milkis, The President, 5, 9–10. Ultimately, as I have suggested, the weakened position of parties in the policy process led the public to focus less on the parties and contributed to the emergence of a candidate-centered politics. See also Wattenberg, Martin P., The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1988 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

72. See Skowronek, Stephen, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

73. CR, 24 February 1941, p. 1337. 4–29–41.

74. CR, 5 November 1941, p. 8513.

75. CR, 19 February 1942, p. 1487.

76. CR, 19 February 1942, pp. 1489–90.

77. Hansen was one of the most prominent American advocates of a version of Keynesianism that argued that capitalist economies had reached a permanent stagnation point.

78. CR, 12 March 1943, p. 1977.

79. A fascinating body of literature has emerged since the mid-1980s assessing the formation and limits of America's welfare state and social Keynesianism. See, for example, Katznelson, Ira, “Rethinking the Silences of Social and Economic Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 101 (1986): 307–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see the essays by Weir, Orloff, and Skocpol; Orloff; Amenta and Skocpol; Weir; Finegold; and Quadagno in Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

80. CR, 24 February 1941, pp. 1335–38.

81. CR, 2 April 1942, pp. 3296–97.

82. CR, 1 October 1942, p. 7696.

83. Dodd and Schott, Congress, 66–71; MacNeil, Neil, Dirksen: Portrait of a Public Man (New York: World Publishing, 1982), 76Google Scholar.

84. A firestorm was touched off in early 1946 when Vice President Henry Wallace issued his own version of legislative reorganization. Wallace wrote in Colliers that he was upset to see President Harry S Truman's bills “killed, shelved, or emasculated by Democratic Congressmen.” He argued that party discipline, though not a purge, needed to be enforced. In his vision, majority leaders and the president would pick the test issues against which members would be measured. His call, which amounted to a call to oust party members who deviated on the big issues, precipitated an avalanche of criticism on Capitol Hill. Senator Alexander Wiley (R–Wisconsin) was not alone in dragging out the specter of Hider, Himmler, and Stalin. Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R–Iowa) declared that Wallace's, “strange and unusual political pronouncement … is not reflective of our general political attitudes or our determination to maintain freedom of thought and freedom of action in both political parties in our state” (CR, 19 03 1946, pp. 2400–2401)Google Scholar.

85. CR, 25 July 1946, p. 10079.

86. CR, 10 June 1946, pp. 6344–6549.

87. Hardeman, D.B. and Bacon, Donald C., Rayburn: A Biography (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987), 346Google Scholar.

88. According to one opponent: “We can refute the thesis of the managerial revolution (hierarchy, organization, streamline, etc.) and maintain the instrument of representative government” (CR, 25 July 1946, p. 10055).

89. Dodd and Schott, Congress, 89–90.

90. Harris, Joseph P., Congressional Control of Administration (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1964), 107–8Google Scholar.

91. I have not attempted here to review every debate that was relevant to the formation of the fiscal state, but rather to focus on several that were especially important for defining the position of party. As I noted above, the economic strategy of the fiscal state was to solve, or better, preempt, problems through arm's-length procedures like manipulating spending and taxing, providing cash, transfer payments, loan guarantees, and “bailouts,” and defining rules and restrictions concerning cash flows, bank finances, stock transactions, and the like.

92. Cf. Karl, The Uneasy State, 181.

93. Witte, John F., The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

94. Sundquist, The Decline and Resurgence, 143–44, 147.

95. Ibid., 63.

96. Ibid., 63.

97. Ibid., 39–45.

98. See Sundquist, The Decline and Resurgence. A similar idea, standby tax powers, was rejected in the generally more accommodating 1960s. By these actions, members of Congress were not arguing that they should control economic management, but rather were displaying their customary protective action regarding what are viewed as distributive benefits. See Fisher, Louis, President and Congress: Power and Policy (New York: Free Press, 1972), 155–73Google Scholar.

99. See Gourevitch, Peter A., Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 162Google Scholar. See also Collins, The Business Response.

100. Hall, “Conclusion,” 390.

101. Margaret Weir, “Ideas and Politics: The Acceptance of Keynesianism in Britain and the United States,” in Hall, The Political Power.

102. In the mid-1970s the Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment bill loomed as another possibly significant alteration in the state. By the time the bill had passed it had been watered down to the point where it was no threat to the basic fiscal state framework laid down over forty years before, and it was ignored soon after passage.

103. Gilmour, Reconcilable Differences?

104. See Schick, Allen, Congress and Money: Budgeting, Spending, and Taxing (Washington: Urban Institute, 1980)Google Scholar, for a comprehensive early assessment; see Schick, , The Capacity to Budget (Washington: Urban Institute, 1990)Google Scholarfor an update.

105. White, Joseph and Wildavsky, Aaron, The Deficit and the Public Interest: The Search far Responsible Budgeting in the 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Gilmour, Reconcilable Differences?

106. Testimony by three budget experts before the House Committee on Rules, Sub-committee on the Legislative Process, illustrates most of these complaints. See the testimony of Louis Fisher, Rudolph Penner, and Henry Aaron before the Committee on Rules, Sub-committee on the Legislative Process, U.S. House of Representatives, 21 March 1990.

107. Peterson and Rom, “Macroeconomic Policy making.”

108. For discussions, see LeLoup, Lance T., “Congress and the Dilemma of Economic Policy,” in Schick, Allen, ed., Making Economic Policy in Congress (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1983)Google Scholar; John W. Ellwood, “Budget Control in a Redistributive Environment,” in Schick, Making Economic Policy; Schick, “The Distibutive Congress,” in Schick, Making Economic Policy; Witte, John, “The President versus Congress on Tax Policy,” in Pfiffner, James P., ed., The President and Economic Policy (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1986)Google Scholar; Susan B. Hansen, “The Politics of Federal Tax Policy,” in Pfiffner, The President and Economic Policy; Kamlet, Mark S. and Mowery, David, “Influences on Executive and Congressional Budgetary Priorities, 1953–1981,” American Political Science Review 81 (1987): 155–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kamlet, Mark S., Mowery, David, and Su, Tsai-Tsu, ”Upsetting National Priorities: The Reagan Administration's Budgetary Strategy,” American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 1293–1308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White and Wildavsky, The Deficit.

109. The New Republic. 14 May 1990, p. 20.

110. Hirschman, Albert O., Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

111. Cf. Offe, “Competitive Party Democracy.”