In the late nineteenth century, the major American parties were re-born, transformed by
national party leaders who revised the character of party organization. Most significantly,
national party elites wrestled control of the conduct of national campaigns from state and local
party organizations, and a new organizational mode emerged that looked more like the national
parties of the twentieth century than their Jacksonian Era predecessors. In doing so, these party
leaders rescued American parties from the parochial shortcomings of the Jacksonian
organizations, and created, for the first time, a truly national party-in-the-electorate.
During the Jacksonian Era, Martin Van Buren created a party structure that outlived the
period and persisted in form into the late nineteenth century. Over time, it built up a number of
legitimating practices, strategic innovations, and behavioral norms—all of which reinforced a
localist orientation—such that it is appropriate to call it by a comprehensive term, the Jacksonian
organizational mode. Campaign strategies that relied on local party franchises to mobilize voters
for national elections, a concept of party membership that privileged procedural regularity over
doctrinal acceptance, and pliant platform principles, characterized it. It remained surprisingly
durable throughout the mid-nineteenth century, and was imitated closely by the Republican party
when it was founded in the 1850s and solidified in the 1860s; hence, one can speak of a
Jacksonian mode long after the alignment of the Age of Jackson had passed and even see its
influence in the party formed to defeat the party of Jackson.
But while the Jacksonian mode proved durable, it contained contradictions and
weaknesses that eventually led to its demise. Between 1880 and 1900, national party elites
identified these weaknesses, and devised novel organizational means of conducting national
party politics. The new organizational mode that emerged in its place was marked by a more
dominant national party apparatus, national control over the terms of national campaigns,
national fundraising networks, and a pluralist understanding of party membership that
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Convention