1
In 1969 the DNC, acting under a mandate from the 1968 Chicago Convention, established the Commission on Party
Structure and Delegate Selection. Under the chairmanship first of Sen. George McGovern and, after 1971, of Rep. Donald
Fraser, the commission developed guidelines for the state parties' selection of delegates to the national conventions. Their
purpose was to weaken the prevailing party structure and to establish a more direct link between presidential candidates and
the voters. The DNC accepted all the commission's guidelines and declared in the call for the 1972 convention that they
constituted the standards that state Democratic parties, in qualifying and certifying delegates to the 1972 Democratic
National Convention, must make "all efforts to comply with." The new rules eventually caused a majority of states to
change from selecting delegates in closed councils of party regulars to electing them in direct primaries. Although the
Democrats initiated these changes, many were codified in state laws that affected the Republican Party almost as much. For
a discussion of the long-term forces underlying the McGovern-Fraser reforms, see Truman (1985)
2
“Soft” money is an imprecise but commonly used term. In general it refers to funds that are regulated by state campaign
statutes. “Hard” money, in contrast, is regulated by the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA),
first enacted in 1971. Shortly after the enactment of FECA, the Federal Election
Commission (FEC) recognized that the constitutional system of federalism required that parties be free to
raise and spend nonfederal money on state and local elections. The FEC established “allocation
regulations” to govern such “mixed” federal-state activities as full-ticket voter mobilization. Campaign finance regulations
thus made state parties important organizations within the nationalized party structure. This subordinate but critical position
may have been jeopardized by the enactment in 2002 of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (BCRA). In addition
to prohibiting the national parties’ use of nonfederal funds, BCRA also expanded the meaning of “federal election activity,”
so that the campaign finance practices of state and local parties came under much closer scrutiny. For example, it includes
all voter registration conducted within 120 days of a federal election, whether or not any registration activity refers to a
federal candidate. On campaign finance reforms and their effect on party development, see La Raja and Milkis (2004).
3
Some scholars, such as Michael McDonald, argue that using the voting-age population as the denominator in the
calculation of turnout rates is misleading, because it includes persons who are ineligible to vote (such as non-citizens and
felons) and excludes overseas voters. When the “voting-eligible” population is used to calculate turnout rates, turnout
appears somewhat higher. However, even with this correction, there is still an appreciable decline in voter turnout after
1968, and voter turnout hovers at around 55% from 1968-2000 (excluding the 1992 election, in which turnout was
stimulated by the Perot third-party candidacy). For McDonald’s analysis, see “Voter Turnout”:
4
Trust in government fluctuated considerably during the last four decades of the twentieth century, but the secular trend
clearly revealed the public’s declining confidence in the federal government. Between 1964, when the public’s enthusiasm
for the national state forged on the New Deal peaked, to 2000, the percentage of Americans who said they trusted the
government to do what is right "just about always" or "most of the time" declined from 78% to 44% “Trust in Government,”
Gallup Poll,www.gallup.com/poll/topics.
5
The 1940 Ramspeck Act may be considered the organic statute of this ideological patronage. It authorized the president to
extend the merit system to nearly 200,000 positions previously exempted by law, many of them occupied by supporters of
the New Deal. Roosevelt took early advantage of this authorization in 1941 By executive order he extended the coverage of
civil service protection to include about 95 percent of the permanent service (Milkis 1993:133-4; White 1945).
6
There is a real sense in which the Democrats and Republicans have become parties of administration – intent on the use of
national administrative power to further the intractable demands of policy activists. Indeed, in the aftermath of the New
Deal, partisan disputes about rights have become increasingly associated with the expansion of national administrative
power (even conservatives in the abortion dispute demand government intervention to protect the rights of the unborn). The
expansion of rights (the attempt to graft programmatic right onto individual liberties) has further shifted partisan politics
away from parties as associations that organize political sentiments in an electoral majority.
7
The weak partisan attachments of the electorate were exposed by the 1992 presidential campaign of H. Ross Perot, whose
19% of the popular vote was the most significant challenge to the two-party system since Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive
Party campaign of 1912. Perot’s campaign, dominated by thiry-minite “infomercials” and hour-long appearances on talk
shows, set a new standard for direct plebiscitary appeals that threatened to sound the death knell of the party campaign.”
Bill Clinton was a master at exploiting the American people’s disdain for partisanship. Indeed, his “third way” politics made
Perot-style plebiscitary politics respectable. See Milkis 2001.
8
Governor Michael Dukakis appeared to confirm this shift in values when he failed to defend himself against the charge of
George H.W. Bush and the Republicans that he was a “Massachusetts liberal.” Instead he told the Democratic national
convention in Atlanta on accepting its presidential nomination in 1988, “This election is not about ideology; it’s about
competence.”
9
The Reagan White House mounted a legislative campaign in 1981 that rivaled the early breakthroughs of the New
Freedom, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Matching effective rhetoric with skill as a legislative leader, Reagan
persuaded Congress to approve a dramatic departure in fiscal policy: more than $35 billion in domestic program reductions,
a multiyear package of nearly $750 billion in tax cuts, and a three-year, 27 percent increase in defense spending.
10
“
Party Identification 3-Point Scale 1952-2002
,”
The NES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior:
; “Party Identification 7-Point Scale 1952-2002,” The NES
Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior:
.
Convention