Within the subfield of American Political Development, the localized structure of the
party organizations has been commented on by—and in some cases assumed by—most students
of nineteenth century American state development. John Aldrich’s work presents the emergent
party structure as the solution to a collective action problem presented by uniting diverse existing
state organizations behind a national electoral strategy. In order to attain the maximum benefits
of collective action and to minimize the cost to individuals of participating, the Jacksonian
founders had “to knit together those already in place in local politics, the national party had to
yield them autonomy. Each local unit needed the freedom to establish its own definition of
benefits in the collective good.”
Strategic imperatives alone do not provide legitimacy of the
sort that the major political parties enjoyed in the late nineteenth century; long usage gave the
procedural practices of the parties legitimacy, and as they helped the parties control the nascent
American state, the norms of the Jacksonian mode infiltrated state procedures as well.
Hence, Amy Bridges conclusion that “it was in the antebellum years that city politics
came to have an independent existence, turning on its own issues rather than on national
should be read in the context of the specific Jacksonian party structure that overlay
national politics during that time; a significant reason that local (especially urban) party
organizations pursued goals so different from those at the national level was that the Jacksonian
party organizations allowed them to do so. Also, the localist structure reinforced patronage
practices and the system of presidential deference to congressmen, the practice of geographical
representation in the cabinet, and partly accounts for the supremacy of Congress over the
presidency as the locus of party power.
The policy implications of this structural design play a prominent role in the analysis of
6
John Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America, (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995), 10-15.
7
Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics, (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984), 1.
5
Convention