George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and the “New” American Party System
Sidney M. Milkis and Jesse H. Rhodes, Department of Politics, University of Virginia
The relationship between the executive branch and the American party system has never
been easy. The architects of the Constitution established a nonpartisan presidency which, with
the support of the Senate and judiciary, was intended to play the leading institutional role in
checking and controlling “the violence of faction” that the Framers feared would rend the fabric
of representative government. Even after the presidency became a more partisan office during
the early nineteenth century, a development resulting from efforts to hold the executive office
more accountable to Congress and state and local interests, its authority continued to depend on
an ability to remain independent of party politics, especially during national emergencies. The
parties, in contrast, were deliberately welded to the Constitution by Jeffersonian and Jacksonian
reformers to thwart executive ambition and to keep power close enough to the people for
representative government to prevail. Rooted in local associations, the parties were perceived as
bulwarks of decentralization, providing a vital link between the offices of government and the
people and balancing the interests of the national government with those of state and local
communities (Milkis 1999: Chapter 2).
By the end of the 19
th
century, the localized, highly mobilized party system posed a
formidable obstacle to progressive reformers who considered the expansion of national
administrative power essential to economic and political reform. Progressive and New Deal
reformers looked to a “modern” presidency, emancipated from the suffocating grip of the
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Convention