emphasized the national party’s attempt to define and enforce coherent national principles.
Part of this story, although the part taken to be the whole in many accounts of the period,
involves the efforts of anti-party reformers to destroy the parties’ dominance of American
political life, but a more revealing aspect of the story involves the efforts of a loosely-affiliated
cohort of nationally-minded party leaders who sought to revive the parties rather than to destroy
them. Although the Jacksonian mode was defended by party regulars who used the party
apparatus to resist change, the new mode was the progeny of party regulars who sought to make
their organizations more relevant to changed conditions. Internal party reform co-opted motifs
widely accepted in the reform community, but did so to perfect rather than to destroy the parties.
Michael McGerr attributes the decline in party loyalty to the repudiation of party by
“liberal reformers,” whose influence in the media and government undermined parties’ central
position in American culture;
Walter Dean Burnham suggests that progressive anti-party
reforms weakened the parties’ mobilization capacities, enabling many voters to simply drop out
of politics without significant social repercussions;
and Stephen Skowronek attributes the
success of anti-party reforms (including civil service reform) to the emergence of a self-
conscious class of bureaucrats who grew frustrated with the parties pre-eminence in shaping state
activity.
Agrarian populism and labor agitation within the parties
1
This is contrary to most accounts of party reform, which emphasize the role of outside reformers such as the
Mugwumps and the Progressives, as forces undermining political party viability. Examples are widespread, but
include Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Martin Shefter, “Party, Bureaucracy, and Political
Change,” in Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993); Jerrold G. Rusk, “Comment: The American Electoral Universe: Speculation and Evidence,” American
Political Science Review, 68:3 (September 1974), 1028-1049.
2
Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
3
Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science
Review, 59 (March, 1965).
4
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
5
See Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Martin Shefter, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization
and Disorganization of the American Working Class,” in Shefter, Political Parties and the State, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
3
Convention