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10.1 History of American Political Parties

Learning objectives.

After reading this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• What is a political party?
• What were James Madison’s fears about political factions?
• How did American political parties develop?
• How did political machines function?

Political parties are enduring organizations under whose labels candidates seek and hold elective offices (Epstein, 1986). Parties develop and implement rules governing elections. They help organize government leadership (Key Jr., 1964). Political parties have been likened to public utilities, such as water and power companies, because they provide vital services for a democracy.

The endurance and adaptability of American political parties is best understood by examining their colorful historical development. Parties evolved from factions in the eighteenth century to political machines in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, parties underwent waves of reform that some argue initiated a period of decline. The renewed parties of today are service-oriented organizations dispensing assistance and resources to candidates and politicians (Aldrich, 1995; Eldersveld & Walton Jr., 2000).

The Development of Political Parties

A timeline of the development of political parties can be accessed at http://www.edgate.com/elections/inactive/the_parties .

Fear of Faction

The founders of the Constitution were fearful of the rise of factions, groups in society that organize to advance a political agenda. They designed a government of checks and balances that would prevent any one group from becoming too influential. James Madison famously warned in Federalist No. 10 of the “mischiefs of faction,” particularly a large majority that could seize control of government (Publius, 2001). The suspicion of parties persisted among political leaders for more than a half century after the founding. President James Monroe opined in 1822, “Surely our government may go on and prosper without the existence of parties. I have always considered their existence as the curse of the country” (Hofstadter, 1969).

Figure 10.1

<<a href="/app/uploads/sites/193/2016/10/533c8686f8d280ce42699201aeb7f938.jpg">img src=”https://open.lib.umn.edu/app/uploads/sites/193/2016/10/533c8686f8d280ce42699201aeb7f938.jpg” width=”300″ alt=”A newspaper cartoon depicting conflicts that arose between the Federalists and Republicans, who sought to control the government.”/>

Newspaper cartoons depicted conflicts that arose between the Federalists and Republicans, who sought to control government.

Source: http://www.vermonthistory.org/freedom_and_unity/new_frontier/images/cartoon.gif .

Despite the ambiguous feelings expressed by the founders, the first modern political party, the Federalists, appeared in the United States in 1789, more than three decades before parties developed in Great Britain and other western nations (Chambers & Burnham, 1975). Since 1798, the United States has only experienced one brief period without national parties, from 1816 to 1827, when infighting following the War of 1812 tore apart the Federalists and the Republicans (Chambers, 1963).

Parties as Factions

The first American party system had its origins in the period following the Revolutionary War. Despite Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 10, the first parties began as political factions. Upon taking office in 1789, President George Washington sought to create an “enlightened administration” devoid of political parties (White & Shea, 2000). He appointed two political adversaries to his cabinet, Alexander Hamilton as treasury secretary and Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state, hoping that the two great minds could work together in the national interest. Washington’s vision of a government without parties, however, was short-lived.

Hamilton and Jefferson differed radically in their approaches to rectifying the economic crisis that threatened the new nation (Charles, 1956). Hamilton proposed a series of measures, including a controversial tax on whiskey and the establishment of a national bank. He aimed to have the federal government assume the entire burden of the debts incurred by the states during the Revolutionary War. Jefferson, a Virginian who sided with local farmers, fought this proposition. He believed that moneyed business interests in the New England states stood to benefit from Hamilton’s plan. Hamilton assembled a group of powerful supporters to promote his plan, a group that eventually became the Federalist Party (Hofstadter, 1969).

The Federalists and the Republicans

The Federalist Party originated at the national level but soon extended to the states, counties, and towns. Hamilton used business and military connections to build the party at the grassroots level, primarily in the Northeast. Because voting rights had been expanded during the Revolutionary War, the Federalists sought to attract voters to their party. They used their newfound organization for propagandizing and campaigning for candidates. They established several big-city newspapers to promote their cause, including the Gazette of the United States , the Columbian Centinel , and the American Minerva , which were supplemented by broadsheets in smaller locales. This partisan press initiated one of the key functions of political parties—articulating positions on issues and influencing public opinion (Chambers, 1963).

Figure 10.2 The Whiskey Rebellion

Farmers protested against a tax on whiskey imposed by the federal government. President George Washington established the power of the federal government to suppress rebellions by sending the militia to stop the uprising in western Pennsylvania. Washington himself led the troops to establish his presidential authority.

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WhiskeyRebellion.jpg .

Disillusioned with Washington’s administration, especially its foreign policy, Jefferson left the cabinet in 1794. Jefferson urged his friend James Madison to take on Hamilton in the press, stating, “For God’s sake, my Dear Sir, take up your pen, select your most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public” (Chambers, 1963). Madison did just that under the pen name of Helvidius. His writings helped fuel an anti-Federalist opposition movement, which provided the foundation for the Republican Party. This early Republican Party differs from the present-day party of the same name. Opposition newspapers, the National Gazette and the Aurora , communicated the Republicans’ views and actions, and inspired local groups and leaders to align themselves with the emerging party (Chambers, 1963). The Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, staged by farmers angered by Hamilton’s tax on whiskey, reignited the founders’ fears that violent factions could overthrow the government (Schudson, 1998).

First Parties in a Presidential Election

Political parties were first evident in presidential elections in 1796, when Federalist John Adams was barely victorious over Republican Thomas Jefferson. During the election of 1800, Republican and Federalist members of Congress met formally to nominate presidential candidates, a practice that was a precursor to the nominating conventions used today. As the head of state and leader of the Republicans, Jefferson established the American tradition of political parties as grassroots organizations that band together smaller groups representing various interests, run slates of candidates for office, and present issue platforms (White & Shea, 2000).

The early Federalist and Republican parties consisted largely of political officeholders. The Federalists not only lacked a mass membership base but also were unable to expand their reach beyond the monied classes. As a result, the Federalists ceased to be a force after the 1816 presidential election, when they received few votes. The Republican Party, bolstered by successful presidential candidates Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, was the sole surviving national party by 1820. Infighting soon caused the Republicans to cleave into warring factions: the National Republicans and the Democratic-Republicans (Formisano, 1981).

Establishment of a Party System

A true political party system with two durable institutions associated with specific ideological positions and plans for running the government did not begin to develop until 1828. The Democratic-Republicans, which became the Democratic Party, elected their presidential candidate, Andrew Jackson. The Whig Party, an offshoot of the National Republicans, formed in opposition to the Democrats in 1834 (Holt, 2003).

The era of Jacksonian Democracy , which lasted until the outbreak of the Civil War, featured the rise of mass-based party politics. Both parties initiated the practice of grassroots campaigning, including door-to-door canvassing of voters and party-sponsored picnics and rallies. Citizens voted in record numbers, with turnouts as high as 96 percent in some states (Holt, 2003). Campaign buttons publically displaying partisan affiliation came into vogue. The spoils system , also known as patronage, where voters’ party loyalty was rewarded with jobs and favors dispensed by party elites, originated during this era.

The two-party system consisting of the Democrats and Republicans was in place by 1860. The Whig Party had disintegrated as a result of internal conflicts over patronage and disputes over the issue of slavery. The Democratic Party, while divided over slavery, remained basically intact (Holt, 2003). The Republican Party was formed in 1854 during a gathering of former Whigs, disillusioned Democrats, and members of the Free-Soil Party, a minor antislavery party. The Republicans came to prominence with the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Figure 10.3 Thomas Nast Cartoon of the Republican Elephant

The donkey and the elephant have been symbols of the two major parties since cartoonist Thomas Nast popularized these images in the 1860s.

Source: Photo courtesy of Harper’s Weekly , http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NastRepublicanElephant.jpg .

Parties as Machines

Parties were especially powerful in the post–Civil War period through the Great Depression, when more than 15 million people immigrated to the United States from Europe, many of whom resided in urban areas. Party machines , cohesive, authoritarian command structures headed by bosses who exacted loyalty and services from underlings in return for jobs and favors, dominated political life in cities. Machines helped immigrants obtain jobs, learn the laws of the land, gain citizenship, and take part in politics.

Machine politics was not based on ideology, but on loyalty and group identity. The Curley machine in Boston was made up largely of Irish constituents who sought to elect their own (White & Shea, 2000). Machines also brought different groups together. The tradition of parties as ideologically ambiguous umbrella organizations stems from Chicago-style machines that were run by the Daley family. The Chicago machine was described as a “hydra-headed monster” that “encompasses elements of every major political, economic, racial, ethnic, governmental, and paramilitary power group in the city” (Rakove, 1975). The idea of a “balanced ticket” consisting of representatives of different groups developed during the machine-politics era (Pomper, 1992).

Because party machines controlled the government, they were able to sponsor public works programs, such as roads, sewers, and construction projects, as well as social welfare initiatives, which endeared them to their followers. The ability of party bosses to organize voters made them a force to be reckoned with, even as their tactics were questionable and corruption was rampant (Riechley, 1992). Bosses such as William Tweed in New York were larger-than-life figures who used their powerful positions for personal gain. Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt describes what he called “honest graft”:

My party’s in power in the city, and its goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes the plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft (Riordon, 1994).

Enduring Image

Boss Tweed Meets His Match

The lasting image of the political party boss as a corrupt and greedy fat cat was the product of a relentless campaign by American political cartoonist Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly from 1868 to 1871. Nast’s target was William “Boss” Tweed, leader of the New York Tammany Hall party machine, who controlled the local Democratic Party for nearly a decade.

Nast established the political cartoon as a powerful force in shaping public opinion and the press as a mechanism for “throwing the rascals” out of government. His cartoons ingrained themselves in American memories because they were among the rare printed images available to a wide audience in a period when photographs had not yet appeared in newspapers or magazines, and when literacy rates were much lower than today. Nast’s skill at capturing political messages in pictures presented a legacy not just for today’s cartoonists but for photographers and television journalists. His skill also led to the undoing of Boss Tweed.

Tweed and his gang of New York City politicians gained control of the local Democratic Party by utilizing the Society of Tammany (Tammany Hall), a fraternal organization, as a base. Through an extensive system of patronage whereby the city’s growing Irish immigrant population was assured employment in return for votes, the Tweed Ring was able to influence the outcome of elections and profit personally from contracts with the city. Tweed controlled all New York state and city Democratic Party nominations from 1860 to 1870. He used illegal means to force the election of a governor, a mayor, and the speaker of the assembly.

The New York Times , Harper’s Weekly , reform groups, and disgruntled Democrats campaigned vigorously against Tweed and his cronies in editorials and opinion pieces, but none was as successful as Nast’s cartoons in conveying the corrupt and greedy nature of the regime. Tweed reacted to Nast’s cartoon, “Who Stole the People’s Money,” by demanding of his supporters, “Stop them damned pictures. I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures” (Kandall, 2011).

“Who Stole the People’s Money.” Thomas Nast’s cartoon, “Who Stole the People’s Money,” implicating the Tweed Ring appeared in Harper’s Weekly on August 19, 1871.

Source: Photo courtesy of Harper’s Weekly , http://www.harpweek.com/09cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon-Large.asp?Month=August&Date=19 .

The Tweed Ring was voted out in 1871, and Tweed was ultimately jailed for corruption. He escaped and was arrested in Spain by a customs official who didn’t read English, but who recognized him from the Harper’s Weekly political cartoons. He died in jail in New York.

Parties Reformed

Not everyone benefited from political machines. There were some problems that machines either could not or would not deal with. Industrialization and the rise of corporate giants created great disparities in wealth. Dangerous working conditions existed in urban factories and rural coal mines. Farmers faced falling prices for their products. Reformers blamed these conditions on party corruption and inefficiency. They alleged that party bosses were diverting funds that should be used to improve social conditions into their own pockets and keeping their incompetent friends in positions of power.

The Progressive Era

The mugwumps, reformers who declared their independence from political parties, banded together in the 1880s and provided the foundation for the Progressive Movement . The Progressives initiated reforms that lessened the parties’ hold over the electoral system. Voters had been required to cast color-coded ballots provided by the parties, which meant that their vote choice was not confidential. The Progressives succeeded by 1896 in having most states implement the secret ballot. The secret ballot is issued by the state and lists all parties and candidates. This system allows people to split their ticket when voting rather than requiring them to vote the party line. The Progressives also hoped to lessen machines’ control over the candidate selection process. They advocated a system of direct primary elections in which the public could participate rather than caucuses , or meetings of party elites. The direct primary had been instituted in only a small number of states, such as Wisconsin, by the early years of the twentieth century. The widespread use of direct primaries to select presidential candidates did not occur until the 1970s.

The Progressives sought to end party machine dominance by eliminating the patronage system. Instead, employment would be awarded on the basis of qualifications rather than party loyalty. The merit system, now called the civil service , was instituted in 1883 with the passage of the Pendleton Act. The merit system wounded political machines, although it did not eliminate them (Merriam & Gosnell, 1922).

Progressive reformers ran for president under party labels. Former president Theodore Roosevelt split from the Republicans and ran as the Bull Moose Party candidate in 1912, and Robert LaFollette ran as the Progressive Party candidate in 1924. Republican William Howard Taft defeated Roosevelt, and LaFollette lost to Republican Calvin Coolidge.

Figure 10.4 Progressive Reformers Political Cartoon

The Progressive Reformers’ goal of more open and representative parties resonate today.

Source: Photo courtesy of E W Kemble, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Theodore_Roosevelt_Progressive_Party_Cartoon,_1912_copy.jpg .

New Deal and Cold War Eras

Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program for leading the United States out of the Great Depression in the 1930s had dramatic effects on political parties. The New Deal placed the federal government in the pivotal role of ensuring the economic welfare of citizens. Both major political parties recognized the importance of being close to the power center of government and established national headquarters in Washington, DC.

An era of executive-centered government also began in the 1930s, as the power of the president was expanded. Roosevelt became the symbolic leader of the Democratic Party (Riechley, 1992). Locating parties’ control centers in the national capital eventually weakened them organizationally, as the basis of their support was at the local grassroots level. National party leaders began to lose touch with their local affiliates and constituents. Executive-centered government weakened parties’ ability to control the policy agenda (White & Shea, 2000).

The Cold War period that began in the late 1940s was marked by concerns over the United States’ relations with Communist countries, especially the Soviet Union. Following in the footsteps of the extremely popular president Franklin Roosevelt, presidential candidates began to advertise their independence from parties and emphasized their own issue agendas even as they ran for office under the Democratic and Republican labels. Presidents, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, won elections based on personal, rather than partisan, appeals (Caeser, 1979).

Candidate-Centered Politics

Political parties instituted a series of reforms beginning in the late 1960s amid concerns that party elites were not responsive to the public and operated secretively in so-called smoke-filled rooms. The Democrats were the first to act, forming the McGovern-Fraser Commission to revamp the presidential nominating system. The commission’s reforms, adopted in 1972, allowed more average voters to serve as delegates to the national party nominating convention , where the presidential candidate is chosen. The result was that many state Democratic parties switched from caucuses, where convention delegates are selected primarily by party leaders, to primary elections, which make it easier for the public to take part. The Republican Party soon followed with its own reforms that resulted in states adopting primaries (Crotty, 1984).

Figure 10.5 Jimmy Carter Campaigning in the 1980 Presidential Campaign

Democrat Jimmy Carter, a little-known Georgia governor and party outsider, was one of the first presidential candidates to run a successful campaign by appealing to voters directly through the media. After Carter’s victory, candidate-centered presidential campaigns became the norm.

Source: Used with permission from AP Photo/Wilson.

The unintended consequence of reform was to diminish the influence of political parties in the electoral process and to promote the candidate-centered politics that exists today. Candidates build personal campaign organizations rather than rely on party support. The media have contributed to the rise of candidate-centered politics. Candidates can appeal directly to the public through television rather than working their way through the party apparatus when running for election (Owen, 1991). Candidates use social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to connect with voters. Campaign professionals and media consultants assume many of the responsibilities previously held by parties, such as developing election strategies and getting voters to the polls.

Key Takeaways

Political parties are enduring organizations that run candidates for office. American parties developed quickly in the early years of the republic despite concerns about factions expressed by the founders. A true, enduring party system developed in 1828. The two-party system of Democrats and Republicans was in place before the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

Party machines became powerful in the period following the Civil War when an influx of immigrants brought new constituents to the country. The Progressive Movement initiated reforms that fundamentally changed party operations. Party organizations were weakened during the period of executive-centered government that began during the New Deal.

Reforms of the party nominating system resulted in the rise of candidate-centered politics beginning in the 1970s. The media contributes to candidate-centered politics by allowing candidates to take their message to the public directly without the intervention of parties.

• What did James Madison mean by “the mischiefs of faction?” What is a faction? What are the dangers of factions in politics?
• What role do political parties play in the US political system? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the party system?
• How do contemporary political parties differ from parties during the era of machine politics? Why did they begin to change?

Aldrich, J. H., Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Caeser, J. W., Presidential Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

Chambers, W. N., Political Parties in a New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).

Chambers, W. N. and Walter Dean Burnham, The American Party Systems (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975).

Charles, J., The Origins of the American Party System (New York: Harper & Row, 1956).

Crotty, W., American Parties in Decline (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984).

Eldersveld, S. J. and Hanes Walton Jr., Political Parties in American Society , 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000).

Epstein, L. D., Political Parties in the American Mold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 3.

Formisano, R. P., “Federalists and Republicans: Parties, Yes—System, No,” in The Evolution of the American Electoral Systems , ed. Paul Kleppner, Walter Dean Burnham, Ronald P. Formisano, Samuel P. Hays, Richard Jensen, and William G. Shade (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 37–76.

Hofstadter, R., The Idea of a Party System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 200.

Holt, M. F., The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Kandall, J., “Boss,” Smithsonian Magazine , February 2002, accessed March 23, 2011, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/boss.html .

Key Jr., V. O., Politics, Parties, & Pressure Groups , 5th ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1964).

Merriam, C. and Harold F. Gosnell, The American Party System (New York: MacMillan, 1922).

Owen, D., Media Messages in American Presidential Elections (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991).

Pomper, G. M., Passions and Interests (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992).

Publius (James Madison), “The Federalist No. 10,” in The Federalist , ed. Robert Scigliano (New York: The Modern Library Classics, 2001), 53–61.

Rakove, M., Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers: An Insider’s Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 3.

Riechley, A. J., The Life of the Parties (New York: Free Press, 1992).

Riordon, W. L., Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1994), 3.

Schudson, M., The Good Citizen (New York: Free Press, 1998).

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American Government and Politics in the Information Age Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What Are Parties and How Did They Form?

Lumen Learning and OpenStax

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe political parties and what they do
• Differentiate political parties from interest groups
• Explain how U.S. political parties formed

At some point, most of us have found ourselves part of a group trying to solve a problem, like picking a restaurant or movie to attend, or completing a big project at school or work. Members of the group probably had various opinions about what should be done. Some may have even refused to help make the decision or to follow it once it had been made. Still others may have been willing to follow along but were less interested in contributing to a workable solution. Because of this disagreement, at some point, someone in the group had to find a way to make a decision, negotiate a compromise, and ultimately do the work needed for the group to accomplish its goals.

This kind of collective action problem is very common in societies, as groups and entire societies try to solve problems or distribute scarce resources. In modern U.S. politics, such problems are usually solved by two important types of organizations: interest groups and political parties. There are many interest groups, all with opinions about what should be done and a desire to influence policy. Because they are usually not officially affiliated with any political party, they generally have no trouble working with either of the major parties. But at some point, a society must find a way of taking all these opinions and turning them into solutions to real problems. That is where political parties come in. Essentially, political parties are groups of people with similar interests who work together to create and implement policies. They do this by gaining control over the government by winning elections. Party platforms guide members of Congress in drafting legislation. Parties guide proposed laws through Congress and inform party members how they should vote on important issues. Political parties also nominate candidates to run for state government, Congress, and the presidency. Finally, they coordinate political campaigns and mobilize voters.

POLITICAL PARTIES AS UNIQUE ORGANIZATIONS

In Federalist No. 10, written in the late eighteenth century, James Madison noted that the formation of self-interested groups, which he called factions, was inevitable in any society, as individuals started to work together to protect themselves from the government. Interest groups and political parties are two of the most easily identified forms of factions in the United States. These groups are similar in that they are both mediating institutions responsible for communicating public preferences to the government. They are not themselves government institutions in a formal sense. Neither is directly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution nor do they have any real, legal authority to influence policy. But whereas interest groups often work indirectly to influence our leaders, political parties are organizations that try to directly influence public policy through its members who seek to win and hold public office. Parties accomplish this by identifying and aligning sets of issues that are important to voters in the hopes of gaining support during elections; their positions on these critical issues are often presented in documents known as a party platform , which is adopted at each party’s presidential nominating convention every four years. If successful, a party can create a large enough electoral coalition to gain control of the government. Once in power, the party is then able to deliver, to its voters and elites, the policy preferences they choose by electing its partisans to the government. In this respect, parties provide choices to the electorate, something they are doing that is in such sharp contrast to their opposition.

LINK TO LEARNING

You can read the full platform of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party at their respective websites.

Winning elections and implementing policy would be hard enough in simple political systems, but in a country as complex as the United States, political parties must take on great responsibilities to win elections and coordinate behavior across the many local, state, and national governing bodies. Indeed, political differences between states and local areas can contribute much complexity. If a party stakes out issue positions on which few people agree and therefore builds too narrow a coalition of voter support, that party may find itself marginalized. But if the party takes too broad a position on issues, it might find itself in a situation where the members of the party disagree with one another, making it difficult to pass legislation, even if the party can secure victory.

It should come as no surprise that the story of U.S. political parties largely mirrors the story of the United States itself. The United States has seen sweeping changes to its size, its relative power, and its social and demographic composition. These changes have been mirrored by the political parties as they have sought to shift their coalitions to establish and maintain power across the nation and as party leadership has changed. As you will learn later, this also means that the structure and behavior of modern parties largely parallel the social, demographic, and geographic divisions within the United States today. To understand how this has happened, we look at the origins of the U.S. party system.

HOW POLITICAL PARTIES FORMED

National political parties as we understand them today did not really exist in the United States during the early years of the republic. Most politics during the time of the nation’s founding were local in nature and based on elite politics, limited suffrage (or the ability to vote in elections), and property ownership. Residents of the various colonies, and later of the various states, were far more interested in events in their state legislatures than in those occurring at the national level or later in the nation’s capital. To the extent that national issues did exist, they were largely limited to collective security efforts to deal with external rivals, such as the British or the French, and with perceived internal threats, such as conflicts with Native Americans.

Soon after the United States emerged from the Revolutionary War, however, a rift began to emerge between two groups that had very different views about the future direction of U.S. politics. Thus, from the very beginning of its history, the United States has had a system of government dominated by two different philosophies. Federalists, who were largely responsible for drafting and ratifying the U.S. Constitution, generally favored the idea of a stronger, more centralized republic that had greater control over regulating the economy. [1] Anti-Federalists preferred a more confederate system built on state equality and autonomy. [2] The Federalist faction, led by Alexander Hamilton, largely dominated the government in the years immediately after the Constitution was ratified. Included in the Federalists was President George Washington, who was initially against the existence of parties in the United States. When Washington decided to exit politics and leave office, he warned of the potential negative effects of parties in his farewell address to the nation, including their potentially divisive nature and the fact that they might not always focus on the common good but rather on partisan ends. However, members of each faction quickly realized that they had a vested interest not only in nominating and electing a president who shared their views, but also in winning other elections. Two loosely affiliated party coalitions, known as the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, soon emerged. The Federalists succeeded in electing their first leader, John Adams, to the presidency in 1796, only to see the Democratic-Republicans gain victory under Thomas Jefferson four years later in 1800.

The “Revolution of 1800”: Uniting the Executive Branch under One Party

When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, its authors were certainly aware that political parties existed in other countries (like Great Britain), but they hoped to avoid them in the United States. They felt the importance of states in the U.S. federal structure would make it difficult for national parties to form. They also hoped that having a college of electors vote for the executive branch, with the top two vote-getters becoming president and vice president, would discourage the formation of parties. Their system worked for the first two presidential elections, when essentially all the electors voted for George Washington to serve as president. But by 1796, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist camps had organized into electoral coalitions. The Anti-Federalists joined with many others active in the process to become known as the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalist John Adams won the Electoral College vote, but his authority was undermined when the vice presidency went to Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, who finished second. Four years later, the Democratic-Republicans managed to avoid this outcome by coordinating the electors to vote for their top two candidates. But when the vote ended in a tie, it was ultimately left to Congress to decide who would be the third president of the United States.

In an effort to prevent a similar outcome in the future, Congress and the states voted to ratify the Twelfth Amendment, which went into effect in 1804. This amendment changed the rules so that the president and vice president would be selected through separate elections within the Electoral College, and it altered the method that Congress used to fill the offices in the event that no candidate won a majority. The amendment essentially endorsed the new party system and helped prevent future controversies. It also served as an early effort by the two parties to collude to make it harder for an outsider to win the presidency.

Does the process of selecting the executive branch need to be reformed so that the people elect the president and vice president directly, rather than through the Electoral College? Should the people vote separately for each office rather than voting for both at the same time? Explain your reasoning.

Growing regional tensions eroded the Federalist Party’s ability to coordinate elites, and it eventually collapsed following its opposition to the War of 1812. [3] The Democratic-Republican Party, on the other hand, eventually divided over whether national resources should be focused on economic and mercantile development, such as tariffs on imported goods and government funding of internal improvements like roads and canals, or on promoting populist issues that would help the “common man,” such as reducing or eliminating state property requirements that had prevented many men from voting. [4]

In the election of 1824, numerous candidates contended for the presidency, all members of the Democratic-Republican Party. Andrew Jackson won more popular votes and more votes in the Electoral College than any other candidate. However, because he did not win the majority (more than half) of the available electoral votes, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, as required by the Twelfth Amendment. The Twelfth Amendment limited the House’s choice to the three candidates with the greatest number of electoral votes. Thus, Andrew Jackson, with 99 electoral votes, found himself in competition with only John Quincy Adams, the second place finisher with 84 electoral votes, and William H. Crawford, who had come in third with 41. The fourth-place finisher, Henry Clay, who was no longer in contention, had won 37 electoral votes. Clay strongly disliked Jackson, and his ideas on government support for tariffs and internal improvements were similar to those of Adams. Clay thus gave his support to Adams, who was chosen on the first ballot. Jackson considered the actions of Clay and Adams, the son of the Federalist president John Adams, to be an unjust triumph of supporters of the elite and referred to it as “the corrupt bargain.” [5]

This marked the beginning of what historians call the Second Party System (the first parties had been the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans), with the splitting of the Democratic-Republicans and the formation of two new political parties. One half, called simply the Democratic Party, was the party of Jackson; it continued to advocate for the common people by championing westward expansion and opposing a national bank. The branch of the Democratic-Republicans that believed that the national government should encourage economic (primarily industrial) development was briefly known as the National Republicans and later became the Whig Party. [6] In the election of 1828, Democrat Andrew Jackson was triumphant. Three times as many people voted in 1828 as had in 1824, and most cast their ballots for him. [7]

The formation of the Democratic Party marked an important shift in U.S. politics. Rather than being built largely to coordinate elite behavior, the Democratic Party worked to organize the electorate by taking advantage of state-level laws that had extended suffrage from male property owners to nearly all White men. [8] This change marked the birth of what is often considered the first modern political party in any democracy in the world. [9] It also dramatically changed the way party politics was, and still is, conducted. For one thing, this new party organization was built to include structures that focused on organizing and mobilizing voters for elections at all levels of government. The party also perfected an existing spoils system, in which support for the party during elections was rewarded with jobs in the government bureaucracy after victory. [10] Many of these positions were given to party bosses and their friends. These men were the leaders of political machines , organizations that secured votes for the party’s candidates or supported the party in other ways. Perhaps more importantly, this election-focused organization also sought to maintain power by creating a broader coalition and thereby expanding the range of issues upon which the party was constructed. [11]

Each of the two main U.S. political parties today—the Democrats and the Republicans —maintains an extensive website with links to its affiliated statewide organizations, which in turn often maintain links to the party’s country organizations.

By comparison, here are websites for the Green Party and the Libertarian Party that are two other parties in the United States today.

The Democratic Party emphasized personal politics , which focused on building direct relationships with voters rather than on promoting specific issues. This party dominated national politics from Andrew Jackson’s presidential victory in 1828 until the mid-1850s, when regional tensions began to threaten the nation’s very existence. The growing power of industrialists, who preferred greater national authority, combined with increasing tensions between the northern and southern states over slavery, led to the rise of the Republican Party and its leader Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860, while the Democratic Party dominated in the South. Like the Democrats, the Republicans also began to utilize a mass approach to party design and organization. Their opposition to the expansion of slavery, and their role in helping to stabilize the Union during Reconstruction, made them the dominant player in national politics for the next several decades. [12]

The Democratic and Republican parties have remained the two dominant players in the U.S. party system since the Civil War (1861–1865). That does not mean, however, that the system has been stagnant. Every political actor and every citizen has the ability to determine for him- or herself whether one of the two parties meets his or her needs and provides an appealing set of policy options, or whether another option is preferable.

At various points in the past 170 years, elites and voters have sought to create alternatives to the existing party system. Political parties that are formed as alternatives to the Republican and Democratic parties are known as third parties , or minor parties. In 1892, a third party known as the Populist Party formed in reaction to what its constituents perceived as the domination of U.S. society by big business and a decline in the power of farmers and rural communities. The Populist Party called for the regulation of railroads, an income tax, and the popular election of U.S. senators, who at this time were chosen by state legislatures and not by ordinary voters. [13] The party’s candidate in the 1892 elections, James B. Weaver, did not perform as well as the two main party candidates, and, in the presidential election of 1896, the Populists supported the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lost, and the Populists once again nominated their own presidential candidates in 1900, 1904, and 1908. The party disappeared from the national scene after 1908, but its ideas were similar to those of the Progressive Party, a new political party created in 1912.

In 1912, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt attempted to form a third party, known as the Progressive Party, as an alternative to the more business-minded Republicans. The Progressives sought to correct the many problems that had arisen as the United States transformed itself from a rural, agricultural nation into an increasingly urbanized, industrialized country dominated by big business interests. Among the reforms that the Progressive Party called for in its 1912 platform were women’s suffrage, an eight-hour workday, and workers’ compensation. The party also favored some of the same reforms as the Populist Party, such as the direct election of U.S. senators and an income tax, although Populists tended to be farmers while the Progressives were from the middle class. In general, Progressives sought to make government more responsive to the will of the people and to end political corruption in government. They wished to break the power of party bosses and political machines and called upon states to pass laws allowing voters to vote directly on proposed legislation, propose new laws, and recall from office incompetent or corrupt elected officials. The Progressive Party largely disappeared after 1916, and most members returned to the Republican Party. [14] The party enjoyed a brief resurgence in 1924, when Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette ran unsuccessfully for president under the Progressive banner.

In 1948, two new third parties appeared on the political scene. Henry A. Wallace, a vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, formed a new Progressive Party, which had little in common with the earlier Progressive Party. Wallace favored racial desegregation and believed that the United States should have closer ties to the Soviet Union. Wallace’s campaign was a failure, largely because most people believed his policies, including national health care, were too much like those of communism, and this party also vanished. The other third party, the States’ Rights Democrats, also known as the Dixiecrats, were White, southern Democrats who split from the Democratic Party when Harry Truman, who favored civil rights for African Americans, became the party’s nominee for president. The Dixiecrats opposed all attempts by the federal government to end segregation, extend voting rights, prohibit discrimination in employment, or otherwise promote social equality among races. [15] They remained a significant party that threatened Democratic unity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Other examples of third parties in the United States include the American Independent Party, the Libertarian Party, United We Stand America, the Reform Party, and the Green Party.

None of these alternatives to the two major political parties had much success at the national level, and most are no longer viable parties. All faced the same fate. Formed by charismatic leaders, each championed a relatively narrow set of causes and failed to gain broad support among the electorate. Once their leaders had been defeated or discredited, the party structures that were built to contest elections collapsed. And within a few years, most of their supporters were eventually pulled back into one of the existing parties. To be sure, some of these parties had an electoral impact. For example, the Progressive Party pulled enough votes away from the Republicans to hand the 1912 election to the Democrats. Thus, the third-party rival’s principal accomplishment was helping its least-preferred major party win, usually at the short-term expense of the very issue it championed. In the long run, however, many third parties have brought important issues to the attention of the major parties, which then incorporated these issues into their platforms. Understanding why this is the case is an important next step in learning about the issues and strategies of the modern Republican and Democratic parties. In the next section, we look at why the United States has historically been dominated by only two political parties.

CHAPTER REVIEW

See the Chapter 9.1 Review for a summary of this section, the key vocabulary , and some review questions to check your knowledge.

• Larry Sabato and Howard R. Ernst. 2007. Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections. New York: Checkmark Books, 151. ↵
• Saul Cornell. 2016. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 11. ↵
• James H. Ellis. 2009. A Ruinous and Unhappy War: New England and the War of 1812. New York: Algora Publishing, 80. ↵
• Alexander Keyssar. 2009. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books. ↵
• R. R. Stenberg, "Jackson, Buchanan, and the 'Corrupt Bargain' Calumny," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 58, no. 1 (1934): 61–85. ↵
• 2009. "Democratic-Republican Party," In UXL Encyclopedia of U.S. History, eds. Sonia Benson, Daniel E. Brannen, Jr., and Rebecca Valentine. Detroit: UXL, 435–436; "Jacksonian Democracy and Modern America," http://www.ushistory.org/us/23f.asp (March 6, 2016). ↵
• Virginia Historical Society. "Elections from 1789–1828." http://www.vahistorical.org/collections-and-resources/virginia-history-explorer/getting-message-out-presidential-campaign-0 (March 11, 2016). ↵
• William G. Shade. 1983. "The Second Party System." In Evolution of American Electoral Systems, eds. Paul Kleppner, et al. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 77–111. ↵
• Jules Witcover. 2003. Party of the People: A History of the Democrats. New York: Random House, 3. ↵
• Daniel Walker Howe. 2007. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 330–34. ↵
• Sean Wilentz. 2006. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: Norton. ↵
• Calvin Jillson. 1994. "Patterns and Periodicity." In The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations, eds. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin C. Jillson. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 38–41. ↵
• Norman Pollack. 1976. The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 11–12. ↵
• 1985. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 75–78, 387–88. ↵
• "Platform of the States Rights Democratic Party," http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25851 (March 12, 2016). ↵

organizations made up of groups of people with similar interests that try to directly influence public policy through their members who seek and hold public office

the collection of a party’s positions on issues it considers politically important

an organization that secures votes for a party’s candidates or supports the party in other ways, usually in exchange for political favors such as a job in government

a political style that focuses on building direct relationships with voters rather than on promoting specific issues

political parties formed as an alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, also known as minor parties

What Are Parties and How Did They Form? Copyright © 2022 by Lumen Learning and OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Rise of Political Parties

Nothing in the United States Constitution calls for American government to create political parties. Political parties emerged through the rancorous debate over the shaping of the United States Constitution and the subsequent issues that followed based on interpretation of the Constitution.  

In the Summer of 1787 during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, two factions emerged. Federalists wanted to see a strong national government in which state governments were subordinate to the national government; members of this faction in 1787 included Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Opposing the Federalists were the Anti-Federalists, who wanted a new government in which state governments superseded the national government. In many ways this debate echoes down to modern times. Leaders of the Anti-Federalists included Virginians Patrick Henry, who said regarding the Constitutional Convention, “I smell a rat in Philadelphia,” and George Mason who had authored the Virginia Declaration of Rights.  

The term "party" was not frequently used. The term used at the time was “factions,” which James Madison addressed in his Federalist #51. Interestingly, no one at the time wanted to be identified as a member of a faction. Factions were considered divisive and not in line with the idea of political leaders or rulers being men of virtue. During the early Republican period, Americans considered a virtuous leader who put aside self-interest in the cause of the common good as paramount to national success. George Washington best exemplified the virtuous leader in this period, and he was beloved in the original thirteen states, giving him great great prestige and influence.  

After the Constitutional Convention ended in September 1787, delegates returned to their states, and each state needed to hold a Ratification Convention to ratify or endorse the new Constitution. Once nine of the thirteen states ratified the Constitution, it would become the law of the land. Ratification was not guaranteed, and both sides geared up for a fight. Anti -Federalists argued they could not support the Constitution without a Bill of Rights to protect the people against government oppression. Federalists countered by saying the first order of the new government would be to write a Bill of Rights. Anti-Federalists, many of whom were lawyers, argued that one does not sign a document until all the parts are complete. 

Certain states had to ratify the Constitution, particularly the influential states: Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. To bolster their argument for a strong national government and to sway voters in the critical state of New York, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing under the pseudonym, Publius, drafted 85 essays to appear in New York newspapers explaining how the Constitution worked. Collectively these essays are called The Federalist Papers. These writings helped to convince New York and other states that were holding equally contentious ratification conventions to ratify the Constitution. When New Hampshire became the ninth state on June 21, 1788 to ratify, the Constitution became binding.  

The election of the first president occurred in 1789, and George Washington was unanimously chosen. During Washington’s administration, political parties formed and organized over differing views of how the Constitution was to be interpreted and the legacy of the American Revolution. The two leaders of the first political parties were Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, and Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State. Hamilton and his followers—mostly merchants, bankers and men who shared a mercantile view of America—were called Federalists. Those who followed Jefferson—mostly farmers, people from the South and those settling lands to the west—were known as Democratic-Republicans. At the time, Jefferson and his followers were referred to as Republicans, but in the 1830s, the party started calling itself simply the Democrats. (The new Republican party formed in 1854.)  

Since being considered a member of a political party was initially seen negatively, people referred to one another as either "Friends of Mr. Hamilton" or "Friends of Mr. Jefferson." For Hamilton, the Constitution could be stretched, based on Article I, Section 8, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and supported a loose constructionist interpretation of the Constitution. Jefferson viewed the Constitution in more narrow terms, arguing that the government could only do what it was specifically tasked to do under the tenants of the Constitution and making Jefferson a strict constructionist of the plan of government. Jefferson famously wrote, “That government which governs the least, governs the best.”  

Hamilton’s desire to create a National Bank to give the government financial stability and legs became the issue that prompted the formation of the political parties.. Hamilton argued that the Constitution gave the government the right to create a National Bank. Jefferson thought otherwise.  Caught in the middle of the acrimony was the President, who viewed the younger Hamilton and Jefferson as sons he never had.  

Hamilton’s views swayed over Washington who supported the bank and other Hamiltonian initiatives, holding a more national view of the United States. In this atmosphere, Jefferson grew increasingly frustrated and began a covert newspaper campaign to besmirch Hamilton. Jefferson, aided by James Madison, who had shifted his view point from nationalist to supporting states’ rights, hired poet Philip Freneau to edit a newspaper, The National Gazette and attack Hamilton and his followers in the publication.

The Hamiltonians responded by hiring editor John Fenno to create The Gazette of the United States to attack the Jeffersonians . The attacks in both papers were biting, sarcastic, and vicious. President Washington lamented, “A spirit of party has descended upon the nation.”   

In the area of foreign policy, Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians also split. Hamilton encouraged support for Great Britain during its numerous European wars with France. Jefferson, an ardent supporter of France, was nearly apoplectic since he believed America owed its independence to France and should uphold their alliance from during the Revolutionary War. In 1793, Hamilton convinced Washington to issue a Proclamation of Neutrality and avoid entanglement with the warring European powers. In frustration and anger, Jefferson submitted his resignation as Secretary of State. He felt that Hamilton had control of Washington, and that the president had become an ardent nationalist. Once outside of the administration, Jefferson continued to fuel the fire of partisan politics and even got personal. In a letter to the Italian statesman and  supporter of Republican government Philip Mazzei, Jefferson wrote, “Men who were Sampson’s in the field and Solomon’s in the Council have had their heads shorn by the harlot of England.” The letter was leaked to Washington who was not only angry, but hurt. Communications between Washington and Jefferson ceased.  

In 1796, Washington decided not to seek a third term. Before leaving office, George Washington delivered his “Farewell Address” which appeared in The Daily American Advertiser . Washington warned Americans about placing the interests of political parties ahead of national interest and the common good. 

Over the next decades, the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party continued to dispute over domestic and foreign policies. The Federalist Party's power declined, and the Whig Party rose to prominence in the early 19th Century. Political parties changed, morphed, disbanded, and re-platformed over time, continuing to debate interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the future of the country, and the meaning of liberty and civil rights. More than 200 years later, similar debates continue across the nation and in the capitol, Washington DC.  

Foreign Policy in the Early Republic

Washington's visit to Charleston

The New York Tribune in the Civil War

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Political Parties (Origins, 1790s)

By Brian Hendricks

Philadelphia, long considered the “cradle of liberty” in America, was also the “cradle of political parties” that emerged in American politics during the 1790s, when the city was also the fledgling nation’s capital. A decade that began with the unanimously-chosen George Washington (1732-99) as the first President of the United States ended with partisan rancor, as the economic policies of Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), tensions in America’s relationship with France, and the controversial Jay Treaty with England divided Americans into two distinct political parties which had little, if anything, in common. Philadelphia was the epicenter of this political earthquake.

However, partisan rancor in Philadelphia was not caused by the creation and presence of the federal government. Political factions and rivalries that had existed at the local level for many years were exacerbated by the fighting that emerged at the national level. Federalists who fostered an image of rule by the elites took the reins of government in a city and commonwealth where the disaffected “have-nots” had waged political war with the “haves” since the 1750s and 1760s, when Benjamin Franklin allied with many Quakers against the proprietorship of the Penn family–a family who (they believed) exploited the province for revenue.

On the national level, the signing of the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787 and the subsequent ratification battles in the states created two distinct factions–“Federalists” who supported the document and “Anti-Federalists” who opposed it. The First Congress , which initially convened in New York in 1789 before moving to Philadelphia in 1790, consisted of men from both factions and reached agreement on a Bill of Rights and the establishment of Cabinet departments.  But the proposals set forth by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton created schisms that only widened during Washington’s administration. One such proposal involved the assumption of state war debts by the federal government. This plan angered those from states who had already paid off a large portion of their debts. Virginia Congressman James Madison (1751-1836), who had written many of the “ Federalist Papers ” along with Hamilton to promote the ratification of the Constitution, was one of those who sternly opposed Hamilton’s measures.  Pennsylvania denounced the “funding scheme” as well, especially when speculators who became aware of the plan galloped across the countryside and bought up debt certificates from unsuspecting Pennsylvania veterans.

Early Divisions

When Hamilton later proposed the creation of a national bank, Madison was joined in his battle by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who was alarmed at the growth and encroachment of the new central government and the bank’s questionable constitutionality. “A distinctive Anti-Federalist agenda emerged,” wrote Saul Cornell in The Other Founders . “The goal of Anti-Federalists was to limit the powers of the new government and bolster the states so that they would continue to be in a position to protect the liberty of their citizens.”  By 1792, those opposed to Hamilton’s programs had coalesced into the Democratic-Republican Party (also styled as “Jeffersonians”).  The elections in that year saw many gains by the nascent party and a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The fissure between Jefferson’s party and Hamilton’s was caused by more than banks and debts. The Washington administration’s foreign policy made the gap even wider, as Hamilton’s Federalists favored closer ties with the British while the Jeffersonians favored France and the French Revolution . When war between the two European superpowers began in 1793, the Jeffersonians advocated honoring the alliance with France that was made during the American Revolution. Washington, hoping to avoid a war that the country could ill afford, sided with Hamilton and implemented a policy of neutrality, which many Jeffersonians interpreted as favoring Britain.  Republicans had also criticized Washington and Vice President John Adams (1735-1826) of having monarchical tendencies, so the link to England was easily made.

During this time in 1793, Democratic Societies began to form across the country.  One of the most prominent of these groups was the Pennsylvania Democratic Society, founded in Philadelphia by such prominent citizens as Alexander Dallas (1759-1817), who later served in James Madison’s cabinet. The societies extolled the virtues of the French Revolution and were inspired by Citizen Edmond Genêt , an ambassador from the new French republic to the United States.

Domestic issues also fostered growth among the societies. The Pennsylvania Democratic Society in Philadelphia vehemently opposed Hamilton’s excise tax on whiskey in 1794, which impacted many farmers in western Pennsylvania, and sought to elect officials who would repeal the excise law.

Whiskey Rebellion, French Revolution

Three events soon damaged the credibility of the societies. The French Revolution became more violent, culminating in the beheading of King Louis XVI. Citizen Genêt alienated President Washington by belligerently outfitting American privateers to engage in combat with British ships.  And farmers in western Pennsylvania resorted to violence to oppose the excise tax (referred to as the “ Whiskey Rebellion ”).  When Washington denounced the societies as disruptive and unrepublican, they experienced a rapid decline. Yet they served as a framework for the opposition party that emerged by the end of the decade.

An organized opposition party was not new to Pennsylvania. A quasi-party system had been developed in the aftermath of the ratification of its 1776 State Constitution . While the constitution fostered greater democracy by granting voting rights to all men regardless of property ownership, it was inadequate due to the lack of effective checks on the legislature, which soon overreached in its authority to confiscate property and overrule the judiciary. This last element was in direct contrast to the democratic spirit which prevailed in Pennsylvania when the document was drafted, and two parties – a “Constitutionalist” formation and a “Republican” faction which opposed the constitution – emerged. In 1790, Pennsylvanians adopted a new constitution that provided for greater parity among the branches, along with a bicameral legislature and a governor with veto power.

Nationally, the increasing partisanship of the 1790s was mirrored in the press, as Federalists and Republicans waged political war – which often included personal invective – in the pages of the country’s newspapers. In Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, Hamilton and Jefferson not only waged war but hired editors to create and manage partisan newspapers. John Fenno (1751-98) did the Federalists’ bidding in the Gazette of the United States , which originated in New York in 1789 and moved with the government to Philadelphia one year later.  The Jeffersonians countered with the National Gazette of Philip Freneau (1752-1832) and the Aurora , which was edited by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769-98).

The Jay Treaty, signed between the United States and Britain in 1794 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1795, further widened the gap between the parties. While the treaty prevented war with Britain, Jeffersonians severely criticized it as a capitulation to England. The treaty did not address certain grievances, particularly the British practice of seizing American ships and the impressment of American seamen. But as a result of the treaty, along with the seeds planted by the Democratic Societies shortly beforehand, Jeffersonian Republicans observed major gains in Pennsylvania in 1796 due primarily to the aftermath of the Jay Treaty, and the Republican movement had, by this time, crystallized into a genuine opposition party.

Pennsylvania’s political evolution in the 1790s was a microcosm of the nation, as opposition to the Federalists steadily grew throughout the decade.  The “have-nots” on the Western frontier and among Philadelphia’s urban poor were disillusioned with Hamiltonian policies that foreclosed their farms, taxed their whiskey, and favored the British monarchy over the French republic. By the middle of the decade, moderate Jeffersonians led by Thomas McKean (1734-1817), a signer of the Declaration of Independence and former Federalist, had taken control of the reins of Pennsylvania’s government.

Brian Hendricks is a Ph.D. candidate in early American history at Southern Illinois University. His research focuses on the election of 1796 and the growth of political parties in New York and Pennsylvania.

Copyright 2013, Rutgers University.

Congressional Pugilists

Library of Congress

In the first decade of political parties in the United States, a 1798 cartoon depicts fighting in Philadelphia's Congress Hall between Congressman Matthew Lyon, a Jeffersonian Republican, and Roger Griswold, a Federalist. An insulting reference to Lyon by Griswold triggered the spat. The text reads: "He in a trice struck Lyon thrice / Upon his head, enrag'd sir, / Who seiz'd the tongs to ease his wrongs, / And Griswold thus engag'd, sir."

Federalist Landscape

Library Company of Philadelphia

Among the many ramifications of Alexander Hamilton’s economic policies were his plans for a national bank and the subsequent creation of the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, shown here in 1844, when the building was home to the Girard Bank. This institution was followed by a Second Bank of the United States during the presidency of James Madison, and the Second Bank–the focal point of bitter partisan warfare between Andrew Jackson and his opponents – existed until 1836.

Related Topics

• Philadelphia and the Nation
• Cradle of Liberty

Time Periods

• Capital of the United States Era
• Center City Philadelphia
• Mayors (Philadelphia)
• Red City (The)
• Alien and Sedition Acts
• Democratic-Republican Societies
• Capital of the United States (Selection of Philadelphia)
• Political Conventions
• U.S. Congress (1790-1800)
• Philadelphia and Its People in Maps: The 1790s
• U.S. Presidency (1790-1800)
• Socialist Party

Related Reading

Burns, Eric. Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism . New York:  Perseus Books, 2006.

Charles, Joseph. “Hamilton and Washington:  The Origins of the American Party System.” The William and Mary Quarterly , Third Series, Vol. 12, No. 2 (April, 1955):  217-267.

Charles, Joseph. “The Jay Treaty: The Origins of the American Party System,” The William and Mary Quarterly , Third Series, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1955): 581-630.

Cornell, Saul. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Tinkcom, Harry. The Republicans and Federalists in Pennsylvania, 1790-1801: A Study in National Stimulus and Local Response . Harrisburg, Pa.: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1950.

Related Places

Congress Hall , Sixth and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia.

Franklin Court Printing Office , Market Street between Third and Fourth Streets, Philadelphia.

Backgrounders

Connecting Headlines with History

• More Pennsylvania voters shun major parties (WHYY, October 30, 2014)
• The First American Party System: Events, Issues, and Positions (NEH)
• History of the U.S. House of Representatives
• The Federalist Papers
• Podcast: Political Parties and the Constitution (National Constitution Center)

Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy

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Political Parties in the United States Essay

The two-party system in the United States has been historically dominant for a variety of reasons. Firstly, most prominent political issues in the United States, starting with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, typically had two sides to them, lending themselves to the two-party split (Harrison 281). Secondly, the two-party system has been fueled by the winner-take-all nature of the elections in the U.S., as opposed to the proportional representation system present in many other countries (Harrison 282). Thirdly, the election system has been created by the members of the two dominant parties, which makes it difficult for any third-party candidate to gain traction (Harrison 284). These can be summed up as the main reasons for the historical prevalence of the two-party system.

A certain argument can be made regarding whether there is currently a sixth-party system. The fifth-party system is said to have ended in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon (Harrison 277). The previous party systems have been characterized by the dominance of one party over the other. In comparison, the main aspects of the post-Nixon election period are “intense party competition” and “a divided government” (Harrison 277). These distinctions could indicate that there is currently a sixth-party system.

The new developments in technology have notably shifted the political landscape in the U.S. Both parties employ big data to gather information about the attitudes of their voters in order to better potential target supporters (Harrison 291). Moreover, with the parties making an effort to communicate with the population via social media and mobile apps, the focus of political networking seems to have shifted to these new channels (Harrison 291). These are the changes in how the parties interact with their constituents.

Recent polls have shown low approval for President Joe Biden. Certain “fundamentalists” have claimed that based on these findings and other fundamentals, such as previous election results, the most likely outcome of the Congress elections would be a Democratic loss (Silver). However, despite being based on statistics, this approach has several flaws. Although certain Democrats disapprove of Biden (The Economist), it is unlikely that they would vote for Republicans in Congress (Silver). Moreover, other statistical evidence points out that “presidential approval and the race for Congress have diverged, not converged” (Silver). These are the main reasons why “fundamentalists” could be right or wrong regarding their prediction.

Works Cited

Harrison, Brigid C., et al. American Democracy Now . 6th ed., McGraw-Hill Education, 2019.

Silver, Nate. “ Biden Is Very Unpopular. It May Not Tell Us Much about the Midterms. ” FiveThirtyEight , 2022. Web.

“Why Young Democrats Disapprove of Joe Biden.” The Economist , 2022. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, December 14). Political Parties in the United States. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-parties-in-the-united-states/

"Political Parties in the United States." IvyPanda , 14 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/political-parties-in-the-united-states/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Political Parties in the United States'. 14 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Political Parties in the United States." December 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-parties-in-the-united-states/.

1. IvyPanda . "Political Parties in the United States." December 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-parties-in-the-united-states/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Political Parties in the United States." December 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-parties-in-the-united-states/.

• Ethics in Technology for the Information Age
• Electoral College's Advantages and Disadvantages
• Converged Media: Legal, Economic, and Behavioural Impact
• Is the UK still a two-party system?
• Two-Party System Relevance: 2010 Australian Federal Election
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The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: September 29, 2023 | Original: November 6, 2018

Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.

This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century . Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.

“It was not that they didn’t think of parties,” says Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and biographer of six of the Founding Fathers. “Just the idea of a party brought back bitter memories to some of them.”

George Washington ’s family had fled England precisely to avoid the civil wars there, while Alexander Hamilton once called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. James Madison , who worked with Hamilton to defend the new Constitution to the public in the Federalist Papers, wrote in Federalist 10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”

But Thomas Jefferson , who was serving a diplomatic post in France during the Constitutional Convention, believed it was a mistake not to provide for different political parties in the new government. “Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties,’’ he would write in 1824 .

In fact, when Washington ran unopposed to win the first presidential election in the nation’s history, in 1789, he chose Jefferson for his Cabinet so it would be inclusive of differing political viewpoints. “I think he had been warned if he didn't have Jefferson in it, then Jefferson might oppose his government,” Randall says.

With Jefferson as secretary of state and Hamilton as Treasury secretary, two competing visions for America developed into the nation’s first two political parties. Supporters of Hamilton’s vision of a strong central government—many of whom were Northern businessmen, bankers and merchants who leaned toward England when it came to foreign affairs—would become known as the Federalists. Jefferson, on the other hand, favored limited federal government and keeping power in state and local hands. His supporters tended to be small farmers, artisans and Southern planters who traded with the French, and were sympathetic to France.

Though he had sided with Hamilton in their defense of the Constitution, Madison strongly opposed Hamilton’s ambitious financial programs, which he saw as concentrating too much power in the hands of the federal government. In 1791, Madison and Jefferson joined forces in forming what would become the Democratic-Republican Party (forerunner of today’s Democratic Party ) largely in response to Hamilton’s programs, including the federal government’s assumption of states’ debt and the establishment of a national banking system.

By the mid 1790s, Jefferson and Hamilton had both quit Washington’s Cabinet. Meanwhile, the Democratic-Republicans and Federalists spent much of the first president’s second term bitterly attacking each other in competing newspapers over their opinions of his administration’s policies.

When Washington stepped aside as president in 1796, he memorably warned in his farewell address of the divisive influence of factions on the workings of democracy: “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

“He had stayed on for a second term only to keep these two parties from warring with each other,” Randall says of Washington. “He was afraid of what he called ‘disunion.’ That if the parties flourished, and they kept fighting each other, that the Union would break up.”

By that time, however, the damage had been done. After the highly contentious election of 1796, when John Adams narrowly defeated Jefferson, the new president moved to squash opposition by making it a federal crime to criticize the president or his administration’s policies . Jefferson struck back in spades after toppling the unpopular Adams four years later, when Democratic-Republicans won control of both Congress and the presidency. “He fired half of all federal employees—the top half,” Randall explains. “He kept only the clerks and the customs agents, destroying the Federalist Party and making it impossible to rebuild.”

While the Federalists would never win another presidential election, and disappeared for good after the War of 1812, the two-party system revived itself with the rise of Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party by the 1830s and firmly solidified in the 1850s, after the founding of the Republican Party . Though the parties’ identities and regional identifications would shift greatly over time, the two-party system we know today had fallen into place by 1860—even as the nation stood poised on the brink of the very civil war that Washington and the other Founding Fathers had desperately wanted to avoid.

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9.1 What Are Parties and How Did They Form?

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe political parties and what they do
• Differentiate political parties from interest groups
• Explain how U.S. political parties formed

At some point, most of us have found ourselves part of a group trying to solve a problem, like picking a restaurant or movie to attend, or completing a big project at school or work. Members of the group probably had various opinions about what should be done. Some may have even refused to help make the decision or to follow it once it had been made. Still others may have been willing to follow along but were less interested in contributing to a workable solution. Because of this disagreement, at some point, someone in the group had to find a way to make a decision, negotiate a compromise, and ultimately do the work needed for the group to accomplish its goals.

This kind of collective action problem is very common in societies, as groups and entire societies try to solve problems or distribute scarce resources. In modern U.S. politics, such problems are usually solved by two important types of organizations: interest groups and political parties. There are many interest groups, all with opinions about what should be done and a desire to influence policy. Because they are usually not officially affiliated with any political party, they generally have no trouble working with either of the major parties. But at some point, a society must find a way of taking all these opinions and turning them into solutions to real problems. That is where political parties come in. Essentially, political parties are groups of people with similar interests who work together to create and implement policies. They do this by gaining control over the government by winning elections. Party platforms guide members of Congress in drafting legislation. Parties guide proposed laws through Congress and inform party members how they should vote on important issues. Political parties also nominate candidates to run for state government, Congress, and the presidency. Finally, they coordinate political campaigns and mobilize voters.

POLITICAL PARTIES AS UNIQUE ORGANIZATIONS

In Federalist No. 10, written in the late eighteenth century, James Madison noted that the formation of self-interested groups, which he called factions, was inevitable in any society, as individuals started to work together to protect themselves from the government. Interest groups and political parties are two of the most easily identified forms of factions in the United States. These groups are similar in that they are both mediating institutions responsible for communicating public preferences to the government. They are not themselves government institutions in a formal sense. Neither is directly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution nor do they have any real, legal authority to influence policy. But whereas interest groups often work indirectly to influence our leaders, political parties are organizations that try to directly influence public policy through its members who seek to win and hold public office. Parties accomplish this by identifying and aligning sets of issues that are important to voters in the hopes of gaining support during elections; their positions on these critical issues are often presented in documents known as a party platform ( Figure 9.2 ), which is adopted at each party’s presidential nominating convention every four years. If successful, a party can create a large enough electoral coalition to gain control of the government. Once in power, the party is then able to deliver, to its voters and elites, the policy preferences they choose by electing its partisans to the government. In this respect, parties provide choices to the electorate, something they are doing that is in such sharp contrast to their opposition.

Link to Learning

You can read the full platform of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party at their respective websites.

Winning elections and implementing policy would be hard enough in simple political systems, but in a country as complex as the United States, political parties must take on great responsibilities to win elections and coordinate behavior across the many local, state, and national governing bodies. Indeed, political differences between states and local areas can contribute much complexity. If a party stakes out issue positions on which few people agree and therefore builds too narrow a coalition of voter support, that party may find itself marginalized. But if the party takes too broad a position on issues, it might find itself in a situation where the members of the party disagree with one another, making it difficult to pass legislation, even if the party can secure victory.

It should come as no surprise that the story of U.S. political parties largely mirrors the story of the United States itself. The United States has seen sweeping changes to its size, its relative power, and its social and demographic composition. These changes have been mirrored by the political parties as they have sought to shift their coalitions to establish and maintain power across the nation and as party leadership has changed. As you will learn later, this also means that the structure and behavior of modern parties largely parallel the social, demographic, and geographic divisions within the United States today. To understand how this has happened, we look at the origins of the U.S. party system.

HOW POLITICAL PARTIES FORMED

National political parties as we understand them today did not really exist in the United States during the early years of the republic. Most politics during the time of the nation’s founding were local in nature and based on elite politics, limited suffrage (or the ability to vote in elections), and property ownership. Residents of the various colonies, and later of the various states, were far more interested in events in their state legislatures than in those occurring at the national level or later in the nation’s capital. To the extent that national issues did exist, they were largely limited to collective security efforts to deal with external rivals, such as the British or the French, and with perceived internal threats, such as conflicts with Native Americans.

Soon after the United States emerged from the Revolutionary War, however, a rift began to emerge between two groups that had very different views about the future direction of U.S. politics. Thus, from the very beginning of its history, the United States has had a system of government dominated by two different philosophies. Federalists , who were largely responsible for drafting and ratifying the U.S. Constitution, generally favored the idea of a stronger, more centralized republic that had greater control over regulating the economy. 1 Anti-Federalists preferred a more confederate system built on state equality and autonomy. 2 The Federalist faction, led by Alexander Hamilton , largely dominated the government in the years immediately after the Constitution was ratified. Included in the Federalists was President George Washington , who was initially against the existence of parties in the United States. When Washington decided to exit politics and leave office, he warned of the potential negative effects of parties in his farewell address to the nation, including their potentially divisive nature and the fact that they might not always focus on the common good but rather on partisan ends. However, members of each faction quickly realized that they had a vested interest not only in nominating and electing a president who shared their views, but also in winning other elections. Two loosely affiliated party coalitions, known as the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans , soon emerged. The Federalists succeeded in electing their first leader, John Adams , to the presidency in 1796, only to see the Democratic-Republicans gain victory under Thomas Jefferson four years later in 1800.

The “Revolution of 1800”: Uniting the Executive Branch under One Party

When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, its authors were certainly aware that political parties existed in other countries (like Great Britain), but they hoped to avoid them in the United States. They felt the importance of states in the U.S. federal structure would make it difficult for national parties to form. They also hoped that having a college of electors vote for the executive branch, with the top two vote-getters becoming president and vice president, would discourage the formation of parties. Their system worked for the first two presidential elections, when essentially all the electors voted for George Washington to serve as president. But by 1796, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist camps had organized into electoral coalitions. The Anti-Federalists joined with many others active in the process to become known as the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalist John Adams won the Electoral College vote, but his authority was undermined when the vice presidency went to Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, who finished second. Four years later, the Democratic-Republicans managed to avoid this outcome by coordinating the electors to vote for their top two candidates. But when the vote ended in a tie, it was ultimately left to Congress to decide who would be the third president of the United States ( Figure 9.3 ).

In an effort to prevent a similar outcome in the future, Congress and the states voted to ratify the Twelfth Amendment, which went into effect in 1804. This amendment changed the rules so that the president and vice president would be selected through separate elections within the Electoral College, and it altered the method that Congress used to fill the offices in the event that no candidate won a majority. The amendment essentially endorsed the new party system and helped prevent future controversies. It also served as an early effort by the two parties to collude to make it harder for an outsider to win the presidency.

Does the process of selecting the executive branch need to be reformed so that the people elect the president and vice president directly, rather than through the Electoral College? Should the people vote separately on each office rather than voting for both at the same time? Explain your reasoning.

Growing regional tensions eroded the Federalist Party’s ability to coordinate elites, and it eventually collapsed following its opposition to the War of 1812. 3 The Democratic-Republican Party, on the other hand, eventually divided over whether national resources should be focused on economic and mercantile development, such as tariffs on imported goods and government funding of internal improvements like roads and canals, or on promoting populist issues that would help the “common man,” such as reducing or eliminating state property requirements that had prevented many men from voting. 4

In the election of 1824, numerous candidates contended for the presidency, all members of the Democratic-Republican Party. Andrew Jackson won more popular votes and more votes in the Electoral College than any other candidate. However, because he did not win the majority (more than half) of the available electoral votes, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, as required by the Twelfth Amendment . The Twelfth Amendment limited the House’s choice to the three candidates with the greatest number of electoral votes. Thus, Andrew Jackson, with 99 electoral votes, found himself in competition with only John Quincy Adams, the second place finisher with 84 electoral votes, and William H. Crawford, who had come in third with 41. The fourth-place finisher, Henry Clay, who was no longer in contention, had won 37 electoral votes. Clay strongly disliked Jackson, and his ideas on government support for tariffs and internal improvements were similar to those of Adams. Clay thus gave his support to Adams, who was chosen on the first ballot. Jackson considered the actions of Clay and Adams, the son of the Federalist president John Adams, to be an unjust triumph of supporters of the elite and referred to it as “the corrupt bargain.” 5

This marked the beginning of what historians call the Second Party System (the first parties had been the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans), with the splitting of the Democratic-Republicans and the formation of two new political parties. One half, called simply the Democratic Party, was the party of Jackson; it continued to advocate for the common people by championing westward expansion and opposing a national bank. The branch of the Democratic-Republicans that believed that the national government should encourage economic (primarily industrial) development was briefly known as the National Republicans and later became the Whig Party 6 . In the election of 1828, Democrat Andrew Jackson was triumphant. Three times as many people voted in 1828 as had in 1824, and most cast their ballots for him. 7

The formation of the Democratic Party marked an important shift in U.S. politics. Rather than being built largely to coordinate elite behavior, the Democratic Party worked to organize the electorate by taking advantage of state-level laws that had extended suffrage from male property owners to nearly all White men. 8 This change marked the birth of what is often considered the first modern political party in any democracy in the world. 9 It also dramatically changed the way party politics was, and still is, conducted. For one thing, this new party organization was built to include structures that focused on organizing and mobilizing voters for elections at all levels of government. The party also perfected an existing spoils system, in which support for the party during elections was rewarded with jobs in the government bureaucracy after victory. 10 Many of these positions were given to party bosses and their friends. These men were the leaders of political machine s , organizations that secured votes for the party’s candidates or supported the party in other ways. Perhaps more importantly, this election-focused organization also sought to maintain power by creating a broader coalition and thereby expanding the range of issues upon which the party was constructed. 11

Each of the two main U.S. political parties today—the Democrats and the Republicans —maintains an extensive website with links to its affiliated statewide organizations, which in turn often maintain links to the party’s country organizations.

By comparison, here are websites for the Green Party and the Libertarian Party that are two other parties in the United States today.

The Democratic Party emphasized personal politics , which focused on building direct relationships with voters rather than on promoting specific issues. This party dominated national politics from Andrew Jackson’s presidential victory in 1828 until the mid-1850s, when regional tensions began to threaten the nation’s very existence. The growing power of industrialists, who preferred greater national authority, combined with increasing tensions between the northern and southern states over slavery, led to the rise of the Republican Party and its leader Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860, while the Democratic Party dominated in the South. Like the Democrats, the Republicans also began to utilize a mass approach to party design and organization. Their opposition to the expansion of slavery, and their role in helping to stabilize the Union during Reconstruction, made them the dominant player in national politics for the next several decades. 12

The Democratic and Republican parties have remained the two dominant players in the U.S. party system since the Civil War (1861–1865). That does not mean, however, that the system has been stagnant. Every political actor and all citizens have the ability to determine for themselves whether one of the two parties meets their needs and provides an appealing set of policy options, or whether another option is preferable.

At various points in the past 170 years, elites and voters have sought to create alternatives to the existing party system. Political parties that are formed as alternatives to the Republican and Democratic parties are known as third parties , or minor parties ( Figure 9.4 ). In 1892, a third party known as the Populist Party formed in reaction to what its constituents perceived as the domination of U.S. society by big business and a decline in the power of farmers and rural communities. The Populist Party called for the regulation of railroads, an income tax, and the popular election of U.S. senators, who at this time were chosen by state legislatures and not by ordinary voters. 13 The party’s candidate in the 1892 elections, James B. Weaver, did not perform as well as the two main party candidates, and, in the presidential election of 1896, the Populists supported the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lost, and the Populists once again nominated their own presidential candidates in 1900, 1904, and 1908. The party disappeared from the national scene after 1908, but its ideas were similar to those of the Progressive Party, a new political party created in 1912.

In 1912, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt attempted to form a third party, known as the Progressive Party , as an alternative to the more business-minded Republicans. The Progressives sought to correct the many problems that had arisen as the United States transformed itself from a rural, agricultural nation into an increasingly urbanized, industrialized country dominated by big business interests. Among the reforms that the Progressive Party called for in its 1912 platform were women’s suffrage, an eight-hour workday, and workers’ compensation. The party also favored some of the same reforms as the Populist Party, such as the direct election of U.S. senators and an income tax, although Populists tended to be farmers while the Progressives were from the middle class. In general, Progressives sought to make government more responsive to the will of the people and to end political corruption in government. They wished to break the power of party bosses and political machines, and called upon states to pass laws allowing voters to vote directly on proposed legislation, propose new laws, and recall from office incompetent or corrupt elected officials. The Progressive Party largely disappeared after 1916, and most members returned to the Republican Party. 14 The party enjoyed a brief resurgence in 1924, when Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette ran unsuccessfully for president under the Progressive banner.

In 1948, two new third parties appeared on the political scene. Henry A. Wallace , a vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, formed a new Progressive Party, which had little in common with the earlier Progressive Party. Wallace favored racial desegregation and believed that the United States should have closer ties to the Soviet Union. Wallace’s campaign was a failure, largely because most people believed his policies, including national healthcare, were too much like those of communism, and this party also vanished. The other third party, the States’ Rights Democrats, also known as the Dixiecrats , were White, southern Democrats who split from the Democratic Party when Harry Truman , who favored civil rights for African Americans, became the party’s nominee for president. The Dixiecrats opposed all attempts by the federal government to end segregation, extend voting rights, prohibit discrimination in employment, or otherwise promote social equality among races. 15 They remained a significant party that threatened Democratic unity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Other examples of third parties in the United States include the American Independent Party, the Libertarian Party, United We Stand America, the Reform Party, and the Green Party.

None of these alternatives to the two major political parties had much success at the national level, and most are no longer viable parties. All faced the same fate. Formed by charismatic leaders, each championed a relatively narrow set of causes and failed to gain broad support among the electorate. Once their leaders had been defeated or discredited, the party structures that were built to contest elections collapsed. And within a few years, most of their supporters were eventually pulled back into one of the existing parties. To be sure, some of these parties had an electoral impact. For example, the Progressive Party pulled enough votes away from the Republicans to hand the 1912 election to the Democrats. Thus, the third-party rival’s principal accomplishment was helping its least-preferred major party win, usually at the short-term expense of the very issue it championed. In the long run, however, many third parties have brought important issues to the attention of the major parties, which then incorporated these issues into their platforms. Understanding why this is the case is an important next step in learning about the issues and strategies of the modern Republican and Democratic parties. In the next section, we look at why the United States has historically been dominated by only two political parties.

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15.2: Parties- How and why did they form?

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Learning Objectives

• Describe political parties and what they do
• Explain how U.S. political parties formed

Collective action is common in societies, as groups and entire societies try to solve problems or distribute resources. There are many interest groups, all with opinions about what should be done and a desire to influence policy. Essentially, political parties are groups of people with similar interests who work together to create and implement policies, to further an agenda, and to gain control of government and the policy-making process. They gain control over the government by winning elections. Party platforms often guide members of Congress in drafting, supporting, and voting for legislation. Parties guide proposed laws through Congress and inform party members how they should vote on important issues. Political parties also nominate candidates to run for state government, Congress, and the presidency. Finally, they coordinate political campaigns and mobilize voters.

In Federalist No. 10, written in the late eighteenth century, James Madison noted that the formation of self-interested groups, which he called factions, was inevitable in any society, as individuals started to work together to protect themselves from the government. Interest groups and political parties are two of the most easily identified forms of factions in the United States. These groups are similar in that they are both mediating institutions responsible for communicating public preferences to the government. They are points of access/linkage institutions available to the public, though they are not themselves government institutions in a formal sense. Neither is directly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution nor do they have any real, legal authority to influence policy. Where interest groups often work indirectly to influence our leaders, political parties are organizations that try to directly influence public policy through members who seek to win and hold public office. Parties accomplish this by identifying and aligning sets of issues that are important to voters in the hopes of gaining support during elections; their positions on these critical issues are often presented in documents known as a party platform , which is adopted at each party’s presidential nominating convention every four years. If successful, a party can create a large enough electoral coalition to gain control of the government. Once in power, the party is then able to deliver, to its voters and elites, the policy preferences they choose by electing its partisans to the government. In this respect, parties provide choices to the electorate, something they are doing that is in such sharp contrast to their opposition.

Winning elections and implementing policy would be hard enough in simple political systems, but in a country as complex as the United States, political parties must take on great responsibilities to win elections and coordinate behavior across the many local, state, and national governing bodies. Indeed, political differences between states and local areas can contribute much complexity. If a party stakes out issue positions on which few people agree and therefore builds too narrow a coalition of voter support, that party may find itself marginalized. But if the party takes too broad a position on issues, it might find itself in a situation where the members of the party disagree with one another, making it difficult to pass legislation, even if the party can secure victory.

It should come as no surprise that the story of U.S. political parties largely mirrors the story of the United States itself. The United States has seen sweeping changes to its size, its relative power, and its social and demographic composition. These changes have been mirrored by the political parties as they have sought to shift their coalitions to establish and maintain power across the nation and as party leadership has changed. The structure and behavior of modern parties largely parallel the social, demographic, and geographic divisions within the United States. To understand how this has happened, we look at the origins of the U.S. party system.

How Political Parties Formed

National political parties as we understand them today did not really exist in the United States during the early years of the republic. Most politics during the time of the nation’s founding were local in nature and based on elite politics, limited suffrage (or the ability to vote in elections), and property ownership. Residents of the various colonies, and later of the various states, were far more interested in events in their state legislatures than in those occurring at the national level or later in the nation’s capital. To the extent that national issues did exist, they were largely limited to collective security efforts to deal with external rivals, such as the British or the French, and with perceived internal threats, such as conflicts with Native Americans.

Soon after the United States emerged from the Revolutionary War, however, a rift began to emerge between two groups that had very different views about the future direction of U.S. politics. Thus, from the very beginning of its history, the United States has had a system of government dominated by two different philosophies. Federalists , who were largely responsible for drafting and ratifying the U.S. Constitution, generally favored the idea of a stronger, more centralized republic that had greater control over regulating the economy. [1]   Anti-Federalists preferred a more confederate system built on state equality and autonomy. [2]

The Federalist faction, led by Alexander Hamilton, largely dominated the government in the years immediately after the Constitution was ratified. President George Washington, who was initially against the existence of parties in the United States, warned of the potential negative effects of parties in his farewell address to the nation, including their potentially divisive nature and the fact that they might not always focus on the common good but rather on partisan ends. However, members of each faction quickly realized that they had a vested interest not only in nominating and electing a president who shared their views, but also in winning other elections. Two loosely affiliated party coalitions, known as the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, soon emerged. The Federalists succeeded in electing their first leader, John Adams, to the presidency in 1796, only to see the Democratic-Republicans gain victory under Thomas Jefferson four years later in 1800.

The “Revolution of 1800”: Uniting the Executive Branch under One Party

When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, its authors were certainly aware that political parties existed in other countries (like Great Britain), but they hoped to avoid them in the United States. They felt the importance of states in the U.S. federal structure would make it difficult for national parties to form. They also hoped that having a college of electors vote for the executive branch, with the top two vote-getters becoming president and vice president, would discourage the formation of parties. Their system worked for the first two presidential elections, when essentially all the electors voted for George Washington to serve as president. But by 1796, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist camps had organized into electoral coalitions. The Anti-Federalists joined with many others active in the process to become known as the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalist John Adams won the Electoral College vote, but his authority was undermined when the vice presidency went to Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, who finished second. Four years later, the Democratic-Republicans managed to avoid this outcome by coordinating the electors to vote for their top two candidates. But when the vote ended in a tie, it was ultimately left to Congress to decide who would be the third president of the United States.

In an effort to prevent a similar outcome in the future, Congress and the states voted to ratify the Twelfth Amendment, which went into effect in 1804. This amendment changed the rules so that the president and vice president would be selected through separate elections within the Electoral College, and it altered the method that Congress used to fill the offices in the event that no candidate won a majority. The amendment essentially endorsed the new party system and helped prevent future controversies. It also served as an early effort by the two parties to collude to make it harder for an outsider to win the presidency.

Does the process of selecting the executive branch need to be reformed so that the people elect the president and vice president directly, rather than through the Electoral College? Should the people vote separately on each office rather than voting for both at the same time? Explain your reasoning.

Growing regional tensions eroded the Federalist Party’s ability to coordinate elites, and it eventually collapsed following its opposition to the War of 1812. [3]  The Democratic-Republican Party, on the other hand, eventually divided over whether national resources should be focused on economic and mercantile development, such as tariffs on imported goods and government funding of internal improvements like roads and canals, or on promoting populist issues that would help the “common man,” such as reducing or eliminating state property requirements that had prevented many men from voting. [4]

In the election of 1824, numerous candidates contended for the presidency, all members of the Democratic-Republican Party. Andrew Jackson won more popular votes and more votes in the Electoral College than any other candidate. However, because he did not win the majority (more than half) of the available electoral votes, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, as required by the Twelfth Amendment. The Twelfth Amendment limited the House’s choice to the three candidates with the greatest number of electoral votes. Thus, Andrew Jackson, with 99 electoral votes, found himself in competition with only John Quincy Adams, the second place finisher with 84 electoral votes, and William H. Crawford, who had come in third with 41. [5]

This marked the beginning of what historians call the Second Party System (the first parties had been the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans), with the splitting of the Democratic-Republicans and the formation of two new political parties. One half, called simply the Democratic Party, was the party of Jackson. The branch of the Democratic-Republicans that believed that the national government should encourage economic (primarily industrial) development was briefly known as the National Republicans and later became the Whig Party. [6]

By comparison, here are websites for the Green Party and the Libertarian Party that are two other parties in the United States today.

The Democratic Party emphasized personal politics, which focused on building direct relationships with voters rather than on promoting specific issues. This party dominated national politics from Andrew Jackson’s presidential victory in 1828 until the mid-1850s, when regional tensions began to threaten the nation’s very existence. Tensions between the northern and southern states over slavery, led to the rise of the Republican Party and its leader Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860, while the Democratic Party dominated in the South. Like the Democrats, the Republicans also began to utilize a mass approach to party design and organization. Their opposition to the expansion of slavery, and their role in helping to stabilize the Union during Reconstruction, made them the dominant player in national politics for the next several decades. [7]

The Democratic and Republican parties have remained the two dominant players in the U.S. party system since the Civil War (1861–1865). That does not mean, however, that the system has been stagnant. Every political actor and every citizen has the ability to determine for him/herself whether one of the two parties meets his/her needs and provides an appealing set of policy options, or whether another option is preferable.

At various points in the past 170 years, elites and voters have sought to create alternatives to the existing party system. Political parties that are formed as alternatives to the Republican and Democratic parties are known as third parties , or minor parties. [8]

In 1912, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt attempted to form a third party, known as the Progressive Party, as an alternative to the more business-minded Republicans. The Progressives sought to correct the many problems that had arisen as the United States transformed itself from a rural, agricultural nation into an increasingly urbanized, industrialized country dominated by big business interests. Among the reforms that the Progressive Party called for in its 1912 platform were women’s suffrage, an eight-hour workday, and workers’ compensation. The party also favored some of the same reforms as the Populist Party, such as the direct election of U.S. senators and an income tax, although Populists tended to be farmers while the Progressives were from the middle class. In general, Progressives sought to make government more responsive to the will of the people and to end political corruption in government. They wished to break the power of party bosses and political machines, and called upon states to pass laws allowing voters to vote directly on proposed legislation, propose new laws, and recall from office incompetent or corrupt elected officials. The Progressive Party largely disappeared after 1916, and most members returned to the Republican Party. [9]  The party enjoyed a brief resurgence in 1924, when Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette ran unsuccessfully for president under the Progressive banner.

In 1948, two new third parties appeared on the political scene. Henry A. Wallace, a vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, formed a new Progressive Party, which had little in common with the earlier Progressive Party. Wallace favored racial desegregation and believed that the United States should have closer ties to the Soviet Union. Wallace’s campaign was a failure, largely because most people believed his policies, including national healthcare, were too much like those of communism, and this party also vanished. The other third party, the States’ Rights Democrats, also known as the Dixiecrats, were white, southern Democrats who split from the Democratic Party when Harry Truman, who favored civil rights for African Americans, became the party’s nominee for president. The Dixiecrats opposed all attempts by the federal government to end segregation, extend voting rights, prohibit discrimination in employment, or otherwise promote social equality among races. [10]

They remained a significant party that threatened Democratic unity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Other examples of third parties in the United States include the American Independent Party, the Libertarian Party, United We Stand America, the Reform Party, and the Green Party.

None of these alternatives to the two major political parties had much success at the national level, and most are no longer viable parties. All faced the same fate. Formed by charismatic leaders, each championed a relatively narrow set of causes and failed to gain broad support among the electorate. Once their leaders had been defeated or discredited, the party structures that were built to contest elections collapsed. And within a few years, most of their supporters were eventually pulled back into one of the existing parties. To be sure, some of these parties had an electoral impact. For example, the Progressive Party pulled enough votes away from the Republicans to hand the 1912 election to the Democrats. Thus, the third-party rival’s principal accomplishment was helping its least-preferred major party win, usually at the short-term expense of the very issue it championed. In the long run, however, many third parties have brought important issues to the attention of the major parties, which then incorporated these issues into their platforms. Understanding why this is the case is an important next step in learning about the issues and strategies of the modern Republican and Democratic parties. In the next section, we look at why the United States has historically been dominated by only two political parties.

Questions to Consider

• Why were the early U.S. political parties formed?
• What techniques led the Democratic Party to national prominence in the 1830s through 1850s?

Terms to Remember

party platform– the collection of a party’s positions on issues it considers politically important

personal politics– a political style that focuses on building direct relationships with voters rather than on promoting specific issues

political machine– an organization that secures votes for a party’s candidates or supports the party in other ways, usually in exchange for political favors such as a job in government

political parties– organizations made up of groups of people with similar interests that try to directly influence public policy through their members who seek and hold public office

third parties– political parties formed as an alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, also known as minor parties

• Larry Sabato and Howard R. Ernst. 2007. Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections. New York: Checkmark Books, 151. ↵
• Saul Cornell. 2016. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America . Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 11. ↵
• James H. Ellis. 2009. A Ruinous and Unhappy War: New England and the War of 1812 . New York: Algora Publishing, 80. ↵
• Alexander Keyssar. 2009. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States . New York: Basic Books. ↵
• R. R. Stenberg, "Jackson, Buchanan, and the "Corrupt Bargain" Calumny," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 58, no. 1 (1934): 61–85. ↵
• 2009. "Democratic-Republican Party," In UXL Encyclopedia of U.S. History , eds. Sonia Benson, Daniel E. Brannen, Jr., and Rebecca Valentine. Detroit: UXL, 435–436; "Jacksonian Democracy and Modern America," http://www.ushistory.org/us/23f.asp (March 6, 2016). ↵
• Calvin Jillson. 1994. "Patterns and Periodicity." In The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations , eds. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin C. Jillson. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 38–41. ↵
• Norman Pollack. 1976. The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 11–12. ↵
• 1985. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections . Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 75–78, 387–388. ↵
• "Platform of the States Rights Democratic Party," http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25851 (March 12, 2016). ↵
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CIVIC EDUCATION Primary 2 (Basic Two) Second Term. How political parties are formed

• How political parties are formed

WEEK: Seven

CLASS: Basic Two

SUBJECT: Civic Education

TOPIC: How political parties are formed

OBJECTIVES : At the end of the lesson, pupils should be able to:

1. explain the meaning of political party

2. say how the political parties are formed in the community

HOW POLITICAL PARTIES ARE FORMED

A political party is a group of people who come together in other to control the government of a country. Examples of political parties in Nigeria are APC, APGA, PDP etc.

A political party is formed when people come together to support a particular party leader. Political parties choose a candidate that will represent them for a particular office in the government. They also canvass for elections through rallies.

INSTRUCTIONAL  MATERIAL : Pictures, charts and textbook

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• The community leaders title holders
• The Importance of Title Holders in Nigeria
• Traditional Leadership
• The way leaders are chosen in the locality
• Advantages of Choosing a Leader
• Disadvantages of choosing a leader
• Problems created by bad political leaders
• The Importance of Political Leaders in the Community
• Category Primary 2
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Political Parties

What are parties and how did they form, learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe political parties and what they do
• Differentiate political parties from interest groups
• Explain how U.S. political parties formed

At some point, most of us have found ourselves part of a group trying to solve a problem, like picking a restaurant or movie to attend, or completing a big project at school or work. Members of the group probably had various opinions about what should be done. Some may have even refused to help make the decision or to follow it once it had been made. Still others may have been willing to follow along but were less interested in contributing to a workable solution. Because of this disagreement, at some point, someone in the group had to find a way to make a decision, negotiate a compromise, and ultimately do the work needed for the group to accomplish its goals.

This kind of collective action problem is very common in societies, as groups and entire societies try to solve problems or distribute scarce resources. In modern U.S. politics, such problems are usually solved by two important types of organizations: interest groups and political parties. There are many interest groups, all with opinions about what should be done and a desire to influence policy. Because they are usually not officially affiliated with any political party, they generally have no trouble working with either of the major parties. But at some point, a society must find a way of taking all these opinions and turning them into solutions to real problems. That is where political parties come in. Essentially, political parties are groups of people with similar interests who work together to create and implement policies. They do this by gaining control over the government by winning elections. Party platforms guide members of Congress in drafting legislation. Parties guide proposed laws through Congress and inform party members how they should vote on important issues. Political parties also nominate candidates to run for state government, Congress, and the presidency. Finally, they coordinate political campaigns and mobilize voters.

POLITICAL PARTIES AS UNIQUE ORGANIZATIONS

In Federalist No. 10, written in the late eighteenth century, James Madison noted that the formation of self-interested groups, which he called factions, was inevitable in any society, as individuals started to work together to protect themselves from the government. Interest groups and political parties are two of the most easily identified forms of factions in the United States. These groups are similar in that they are both mediating institutions responsible for communicating public preferences to the government. They are not themselves government institutions in a formal sense. Neither is directly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution nor do they have any real, legal authority to influence policy. But whereas interest groups often work indirectly to influence our leaders, political parties are organizations that try to directly influence public policy through its members who seek to win and hold public office. Parties accomplish this by identifying and aligning sets of issues that are important to voters in the hopes of gaining support during elections; their positions on these critical issues are often presented in documents known as a party platform ( Figure ), which is adopted at each party’s presidential nominating convention every four years. If successful, a party can create a large enough electoral coalition to gain control of the government. Once in power, the party is then able to deliver, to its voters and elites, the policy preferences they choose by electing its partisans to the government. In this respect, parties provide choices to the electorate, something they are doing that is in such sharp contrast to their opposition.

Figure 1.  The party platform adopted at the first national convention of the Progressive Party in 1912. Among other items, this platform called for disclosure requirements for campaign contributions, an eight-hour workday, a federal income tax, and women’s suffrage.

Winning elections and implementing policy would be hard enough in simple political systems, but in a country as complex as the United States, political parties must take on great responsibilities to win elections and coordinate behavior across the many local, state, and national governing bodies. Indeed, political differences between states and local areas can contribute much complexity. If a party stakes out issue positions on which few people agree and therefore builds too narrow a coalition of voter support, that party may find itself marginalized. But if the party takes too broad a position on issues, it might find itself in a situation where the members of the party disagree with one another, making it difficult to pass legislation, even if the party can secure victory.

It should come as no surprise that the story of U.S. political parties largely mirrors the story of the United States itself. The United States has seen sweeping changes to its size, its relative power, and its social and demographic composition. These changes have been mirrored by the political parties as they have sought to shift their coalitions to establish and maintain power across the nation and as party leadership has changed. As you will learn later, this also means that the structure and behavior of modern parties largely parallel the social, demographic, and geographic divisions within the United States today. To understand how this has happened, we look at the origins of the U.S. party system.

HOW POLITICAL PARTIES FORMED

National political parties as we understand them today did not really exist in the United States during the early years of the republic. Most politics during the time of the nation’s founding were local in nature and based on elite politics, limited suffrage (or the ability to vote in elections), and property ownership. Residents of the various colonies, and later of the various states, were far more interested in events in their state legislatures than in those occurring at the national level or later in the nation’s capital. To the extent that national issues did exist, they were largely limited to collective security efforts to deal with external rivals, such as the British or the French, and with perceived internal threats, such as conflicts with Native Americans.

Soon after the United States emerged from the Revolutionary War, however, a rift began to emerge between two groups that had very different views about the future direction of U.S. politics. Thus, from the very beginning of its history, the United States has had a system of government dominated by two different philosophies. Federalists , who were largely responsible for drafting and ratifying the U.S. Constitution, generally favored the idea of a stronger, more centralized republic that had greater control over regulating the economy.

Larry Sabato and Howard R. Ernst. 2007. Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections. New York: Checkmark Books, 151.

Anti-Federalists preferred a more confederate system built on state equality and autonomy.

Saul Cornell. 2016. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America . Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 11.

The Federalist faction, led by Alexander Hamilton , largely dominated the government in the years immediately after the Constitution was ratified. Included in the Federalists was President George Washington , who was initially against the existence of parties in the United States. When Washington decided to exit politics and leave office, he warned of the potential negative effects of parties in his farewell address to the nation, including their potentially divisive nature and the fact that they might not always focus on the common good but rather on partisan ends. However, members of each faction quickly realized that they had a vested interest not only in nominating and electing a president who shared their views, but also in winning other elections. Two loosely affiliated party coalitions, known as the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans , soon emerged. The Federalists succeeded in electing their first leader, John Adams , to the presidency in 1796, only to see the Democratic-Republicans gain victory under Thomas Jefferson four years later in 1800.

The “Revolution of 1800”: Uniting the Executive Branch under One Party

When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, its authors were certainly aware that political parties existed in other countries (like Great Britain), but they hoped to avoid them in the United States. They felt the importance of states in the U.S. federal structure would make it difficult for national parties to form. They also hoped that having a college of electors vote for the executive branch, with the top two vote-getters becoming president and vice president, would discourage the formation of parties. Their system worked for the first two presidential elections, when essentially all the electors voted for George Washington to serve as president. But by 1796, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist camps had organized into electoral coalitions. The Anti-Federalists joined with many others active in the process to become known as the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalist John Adams won the Electoral College vote, but his authority was undermined when the vice presidency went to Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, who finished second. Four years later, the Democratic-Republicans managed to avoid this outcome by coordinating the electors to vote for their top two candidates. But when the vote ended in a tie, it was ultimately left to Congress to decide who would be the third president of the United States ( Figure ).

Figure 2.  Thomas Jefferson almost lost the presidential election of 1800 to his own running mate when a flaw in the design of the Electoral College led to a tie that had to be resolved by Congress.

In an effort to prevent a similar outcome in the future, Congress and the states voted to ratify the Twelfth Amendment, which went into effect in 1804. This amendment changed the rules so that the president and vice president would be selected through separate elections within the Electoral College, and it altered the method that Congress used to fill the offices in the event that no candidate won a majority. The amendment essentially endorsed the new party system and helped prevent future controversies. It also served as an early effort by the two parties to collude to make it harder for an outsider to win the presidency.

Does the process of selecting the executive branch need to be reformed so that the people elect the president and vice president directly, rather than through the Electoral College? Should the people vote separately on each office rather than voting for both at the same time? Explain your reasoning.

Growing regional tensions eroded the Federalist Party’s ability to coordinate elites, and it eventually collapsed following its opposition to the War of 1812.

James H. Ellis. 2009. A Ruinous and Unhappy War: New England and the War of 1812 . New York: Algora Publishing, 80.

The Democratic-Republican Party, on the other hand, eventually divided over whether national resources should be focused on economic and mercantile development, such as tariffs on imported goods and government funding of internal improvements like roads and canals, or on promoting populist issues that would help the “common man,” such as reducing or eliminating state property requirements that had prevented many men from voting.

Alexander Keyssar. 2009. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States . New York: Basic Books.

In the election of 1824, numerous candidates contended for the presidency, all members of the Democratic-Republican Party. Andrew Jackson won more popular votes and more votes in the Electoral College than any other candidate. However, because he did not win the majority (more than half) of the available electoral votes, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, as required by the Twelfth Amendment . The Twelfth Amendment limited the House’s choice to the three candidates with the greatest number of electoral votes. Thus, Andrew Jackson, with 99 electoral votes, found himself in competition with only John Quincy Adams, the second place finisher with 84 electoral votes, and William H. Crawford, who had come in third with 41. The fourth-place finisher, Henry Clay, who was no longer in contention, had won 37 electoral votes. Clay strongly disliked Jackson, and his ideas on government support for tariffs and internal improvements were similar to those of Adams. Clay thus gave his support to Adams, who was chosen on the first ballot. Jackson considered the actions of Clay and Adams, the son of the Federalist president John Adams, to be an unjust triumph of supporters of the elite and referred to it as “the corrupt bargain.”

R. R. Stenberg, “Jackson, Buchanan, and the “Corrupt Bargain” Calumny,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 58, no. 1 (1934): 61–85.

This marked the beginning of what historians call the Second Party System (the first parties had been the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans), with the splitting of the Democratic-Republicans and the formation of two new political parties. One half, called simply the Democratic Party, was the party of Jackson; it continued to advocate for the common people by championing westward expansion and opposing a national bank. The branch of the Democratic-Republicans that believed that the national government should encourage economic (primarily industrial) development was briefly known as the National Republicans and later became the Whig Party.

2009. “Democratic-Republican Party,” In UXL Encyclopedia of U.S. History , eds. Sonia Benson, Daniel E. Brannen, Jr., and Rebecca Valentine. Detroit: UXL, 435–436; “Jacksonian Democracy and Modern America,” http://www.ushistory.org/us/23f.asp (March 6, 2016).

In the election of 1828, Democrat Andrew Jackson was triumphant. Three times as many people voted in 1828 as had in 1824, and most cast their ballots for him.

Virginia Historical Society. “Elections from 1789–1828.” http://www.vahistorical.org/collections-and-resources/virginia-history-explorer/getting-message-out-presidential-campaign-0 (March 11, 2016).

The formation of the Democratic Party marked an important shift in U.S. politics. Rather than being built largely to coordinate elite behavior, the Democratic Party worked to organize the electorate by taking advantage of state-level laws that had extended suffrage from male property owners to nearly all white men.

William G. Shade. 1983. “The Second Party System.” In Evolution of American Electoral Systems , eds. Paul Kleppner, et al. Westport, CT: Greenwood Pres, 77–111.

This change marked the birth of what is often considered the first modern political party in any democracy in the world.

Jules Witcover. 2003. Party of the People: A History of the Democrats . New York: Random House, 3.

It also dramatically changed the way party politics was, and still is, conducted. For one thing, this new party organization was built to include structures that focused on organizing and mobilizing voters for elections at all levels of government. The party also perfected an existing spoils system, in which support for the party during elections was rewarded with jobs in the government bureaucracy after victory.

Daniel Walker Howe. 2007. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 . New York: Oxford University Press, 330-34.

Many of these positions were given to party bosses and their friends. These men were the leaders of political machines , organizations that secured votes for the party’s candidates or supported the party in other ways. Perhaps more importantly, this election-focused organization also sought to maintain power by creating a broader coalition and thereby expanding the range of issues upon which the party was constructed.

Sean Wilentz. 2006. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln . New York: Norton.

Each of the two main U.S. political parties today—the Democrats and the Republicans —maintains an extensive website with links to its affiliated statewide organizations, which in turn often maintain links to the party’s country organizations.

By comparison, here are websites for the Green Party and the Libertarian Party that are two other parties in the United States today.

The Democratic Party emphasized personal politics , which focused on building direct relationships with voters rather than on promoting specific issues. This party dominated national politics from Andrew Jackson’s presidential victory in 1828 until the mid-1850s, when regional tensions began to threaten the nation’s very existence. The growing power of industrialists, who preferred greater national authority, combined with increasing tensions between the northern and southern states over slavery, led to the rise of the Republican Party and its leader Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860, while the Democratic Party dominated in the South. Like the Democrats, the Republicans also began to utilize a mass approach to party design and organization. Their opposition to the expansion of slavery, and their role in helping to stabilize the Union during Reconstruction, made them the dominant player in national politics for the next several decades.

Calvin Jillson. 1994. “Patterns and Periodicity.” In The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations , eds. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin C. Jillson. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 38–41.

The Democratic and Republican parties have remained the two dominant players in the U.S. party system since the Civil War (1861–1865). That does not mean, however, that the system has been stagnant. Every political actor and every citizen has the ability to determine for him- or herself whether one of the two parties meets his or her needs and provides an appealing set of policy options, or whether another option is preferable.

At various points in the past 170 years, elites and voters have sought to create alternatives to the existing party system. Political parties that are formed as alternatives to the Republican and Democratic parties are known as third parties , or minor parties ( [Figure] ). In 1892, a third party known as the Populist Party formed in reaction to what its constituents perceived as the domination of U.S. society by big business and a decline in the power of farmers and rural communities. The Populist Party called for the regulation of railroads, an income tax, and the popular election of U.S. senators, who at this time were chosen by state legislatures and not by ordinary voters.

Norman Pollack. 1976. The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 11–12.

The party’s candidate in the 1892 elections, James B. Weaver, did not perform as well as the two main party candidates, and, in the presidential election of 1896, the Populists supported the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lost, and the Populists once again nominated their own presidential candidates in 1900, 1904, and 1908. The party disappeared from the national scene after 1908, but its ideas were similar to those of the Progressive Party, a new political party created in 1912.

Figure 3.  Various third parties, also known as minor parties, have appeared in the United States over the years. Some, like the Socialist Party, still exist in one form or another. Others, like the Anti-Masonic Party, which wanted to protect the United States from the influence of the Masonic fraternal order and garnered just under 8 percent of the popular vote in 1832, are gone.

In 1912, former Republican president Theodore  Roosevelt attempted to form a third party, known as the Progressive Party , as an alternative to the more business-minded Republicans. The Progressives sought to correct the many problems that had arisen as the United States transformed itself from a rural, agricultural nation into an increasingly urbanized, industrialized country dominated by big business interests. Among the reforms that the Progressive Party called for in its 1912 platform were women’s suffrage, an eight-hour workday, and workers’ compensation. The party also favored some of the same reforms as the Populist Party, such as the direct election of U.S. senators and an income tax, although Populists tended to be farmers while the Progressives were from the middle class. In general, Progressives sought to make government more responsive to the will of the people and to end political corruption in government. They wished to break the power of party bosses and political machines, and called upon states to pass laws allowing voters to vote directly on proposed legislation, propose new laws, and recall from office incompetent or corrupt elected officials. The Progressive Party largely disappeared after 1916, and most members returned to the Republican Party.

1985. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections . Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 75–78, 387–388.

The party enjoyed a brief resurgence in 1924, when Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette ran unsuccessfully for president under the Progressive banner.

In 1948, two new third parties appeared on the political scene. Henry A. Wallace , a vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, formed a new Progressive Party, which had little in common with the earlier Progressive Party. Wallace favored racial desegregation and believed that the United States should have closer ties to the Soviet Union. Wallace’s campaign was a failure, largely because most people believed his policies, including national healthcare, were too much like those of communism, and this party also vanished. The other third party, the States’ Rights Democrats, also known as the Dixiecrats , were white, southern Democrats who split from the Democratic Party when Harry Truman , who favored civil rights for African Americans, became the party’s nominee for president. The Dixiecrats opposed all attempts by the federal government to end segregation, extend voting rights, prohibit discrimination in employment, or otherwise promote social equality among races.

“Platform of the States Rights Democratic Party,” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25851 (March 12, 2016).

They remained a significant party that threatened Democratic unity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Other examples of third parties in the United States include the American Independent Party, the Libertarian Party, United We Stand America, the Reform Party, and the Green Party.

None of these alternatives to the two major political parties had much success at the national level, and most are no longer viable parties. All faced the same fate. Formed by charismatic leaders, each championed a relatively narrow set of causes and failed to gain broad support among the electorate. Once their leaders had been defeated or discredited, the party structures that were built to contest elections collapsed. And within a few years, most of their supporters were eventually pulled back into one of the existing parties. To be sure, some of these parties had an electoral impact. For example, the Progressive Party pulled enough votes away from the Republicans to hand the 1912 election to the Democrats. Thus, the third-party rival’s principal accomplishment was helping its least-preferred major party win, usually at the short-term expense of the very issue it championed. In the long run, however, many third parties have brought important issues to the attention of the major parties, which then incorporated these issues into their platforms. Understanding why this is the case is an important next step in learning about the issues and strategies of the modern Republican and Democratic parties. In the next section, we look at why the United States has historically been dominated by only two political parties.

Political parties are vital to the operation of any democracy. Early U.S. political parties were formed by national elites who disagreed over how to divide power between the national and state governments. The system we have today, divided between Republicans and Democrats, had consolidated by 1860. A number of minor parties have attempted to challenge the status quo, but they have largely failed to gain traction despite having an occasional impact on the national political scene.

Which supporter of federalism warned people about the dangers of political parties?

• Alexander Hamilton
• James Madison
• George Washington

Show Answer

Which of the following was not a third-party challenger?

• Progressive Party
• Green Party

Why were the early U.S. political parties formed?

What techniques led the Democratic Party to national prominence in the 1830s through 1850s?

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