Party Membership in the United States, I

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarence A. Berdahl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chicago Tribune ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Party Membership ◽  
Legal Standing ◽  
Democrats And Republicans

In any party system, it would seem of some importance to establish rules and qualifications for membership in the different party groups, in order to bring together those persons, and only those persons, who adhere to the respective party principles. That should be particularly important in a two-party system, where the principles and issues are presumably sharply defined and clearly distinguishable. This matter has received increasing attention during recent years, and the importance of the problem was well stated by the Chicago Tribune, in an editorial referring to the Illinois primary campaign of 1938:“The advantages of party organization and party responsibility have been proved over a long range of political testing, and although the abuses at times seem substantial. If a party is to be recognized as having legal standing, and if it is to make its nominations under the direction of law, there should be, it would seem, some determined qualification of its voters…. There shouldn't be a pretence of one thing and a fact of another. If Democrats and Republicans are to have legal standing as such, then Democrats should not make Republican decisions and Republicans should not make Democratic decisions. To permit this is to commit a fraud against the citizens who are trying to make their organization and their decisions according to the prevailing theory of political action and party responsibility.”

Some Notes on Party Membership in Congress, I

1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarence A. Berdahl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
General Problem ◽  
Party System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alternative Programs ◽  
Party Membership ◽  
Party Platforms ◽  
Party Organizations

The general problem of party membership in the United States was examined to some extent in an earlier article in this Review, and out of that study certain implications could be noted with respect to the nature and operation of our two-party system. It was assumed, to begin with, that it is important in any party system “to bring together those persons, and only those persons, who adhere to the respective party principles,” and particularly important to do that in a two-party system, “where the principles and issues are presumably sharply denned and clearly distinguishable.” The extended survey of the trends in legislation and in party practice led to the conclusion that there is still need for “some better definition or understanding of what is meant by a loyal Republican and a loyal Democrat,” that the lack of such definition is at least partially responsible for the loose and irresponsible nature of the party organizations, for the mass of glittering generalities in party platforms, and for the failure to offer the voter anything like clear alternative programs. “Somehow or other, it should be possible to have a party system which would make it clear whether Wendell Willkie or Senator Nye is the better Republican, whether Franklin D. Roosevelt or Senator Wheeler is the better Democrat.”

Party Membership in the United States, II

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarence A. Berdahl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Party Affiliation ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Party Membership ◽  
Effective Protection ◽  
Registration System ◽  
Independent Voter ◽  
Selection Of

In spite of the recent loosening of the membership or affiliation requirements in Illinois and a few other states, the general tendency throughout the development of party regulation has been toward greater strictness in this respect, toward more effective protection of the party organization against the independent voter with a careless party conscience. This is indicated, in the first place, by the turn toward an official definition and administration of these membership tests. That is, the parties are no longer left free to determine their own membership rules as they please, but these rules are to an increasing extent prescribed by state law and administered by state officials. Secondly, the tests of party membership have become, on the whole, more complex and more comprehensive, and therefore more difficult to evade—the closed primary has become more and more tightly closed. Thirdly, there has been a drift from the challenge to the enrollment or registration system, and, in general, legislation or other official action which requires greater care by the voter and the candidate in the selection of his party, and which imposes greater difficulty in changing his party affiliation.

The 1938 Elections and the American Party System

1939 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-211
Author(s):  
F. A. Hermas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Constructive Work ◽  
The Government ◽  
American Party

Political parties have been subjected to more vigorous criticism than any other institution of modern democracy. It is charged that their divisions split a country artificially. It is further contended that the line-up into the two camps of government and opposition makes it impossible for a country to avail itself of all its political talent, since those belonging to the opposition party are, temporarily at least, unavailable for constructive work, and are instead making every effort to obstruct the government in power. In the United States the point has frequently been made that the two major parties are no longer justified because neither of them contains anything which it could consider characteristic of itself. “The party term Republican isn't definitive any more. It isn't even descriptive. No more so is the party term Democrat. They are labels on empty bottles, signs on untenanted houses, cloaks that cover but do not conceal the skeletons beneath them.” More recently a similar charge has been made by Dr. Mortimer Adler, a writer who brilliantly combines his analysis of the present with a knowledge of the past. He directs attention to the fact that parties, instead of responding to issues, tend to create them. According to Dr. Adler, parties would be justified if they served only the purpose for which they have been created and then dissolved; of course, in reality, they perpetuate their existence. On somewhat similar lines the famous biographer of the modern party organization, Ostrogorski, proceeded from theoretical criticism to practical suggestions. His plan was to replace existing parties by “leagues,” which were to respond to one issue only, and be dissolved as soon as that issue should be settled.

Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Drutman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Party System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Partisan Conflict ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
Democrats And Republicans ◽  
First Time ◽  
Governing Institutions ◽  
Majoritarian Compromise

This book argues that the United States now has, for the first time in American history, a genuine two-party system, with two fully-sorted, truly national parties, divided over the character of the nation. And it is a disaster. It is a party system fundamentally at odds with our anti-majoritarian, compromise-oriented governing institutions. It threatens the very foundations of fairness and shared values on which democracy in the United States depends. The book tells the story of how American politics became so toxic and why the country is now trapped in a doom loop of escalating two-party warfare from which there is only one escape: increase the number of parties through electoral reform. As it shows, American politics was once stable because the two parties held within them multiple factions, which made it possible to assemble flexible majorities and kept the climate of political combat from overheating. But as conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Northeastern Republicans disappeared, partisan conflict flattened and pulled apart. Once the parties became fully nationalized—a long-germinating process that culminated in 2010—toxic partisanship took over completely. With the two parties divided over competing visions of national identity, Democrats and Republicans no longer see each other as opponents, but as enemies. And the more the conflict escalates, the shakier America’s democracy feels.

Bipartisanship as Possible Alternative of Russian Political System Evolution

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 256-265
Author(s):  
Konstantin V. Simonov ◽  
Stanislav P. Mitrakhovich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Political System ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Practical Advice ◽  
Simultaneous Separation

The article examines the possibility of transfer to bipartisan system in Russia. The authors assess the benefits of the two-party system that include first of all the ensuring of actual political competition and authority alternativeness with simultaneous separation of minute non-system forces that may contribute to the country destabilization. The authors analyze the accompanying risks and show that the concept of the two-party system as the catalyst of elite schism is mostly exaggerated. The authors pay separate attention to the experience of bipartisan system implementation in other countries, including the United States. They offer detailed analysis of the generated concept of the bipartisanship crisis and show that this point of view doesn’t quite agree with the current political practice. The authors also examine the foreign experience of the single-party system. They show that the success of the said system is mostly insubstantial, besides many of such systems have altered into more complex structures, while commentators very often use not the actual information but the established myths about this or that country. The authors also offer practical advice regarding the potential technologies of transition to the bipartisan system in Russia.

Aestheticism, Civil Society, and the Origins of Totalitarianism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Mangrum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Vladimir Nabokov ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Lionel Trilling ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
New Critics ◽  
Second World

This chapter argues that ongoing concerns about the rise of totalitarianism led writers and intellectuals in the United States to oppose social-democratic institutions after the Second World War. Familiar accounts about opposition to these institutions center on conservative politics. In contrast, this chapter argues that liberal thinkers invoked forms of aestheticism to combat what they perceived as the possible rise of totalitarianism in the United States. In order to document this under-explored trend in American political culture, this chapter establishes connections across writing by Lionel Trilling, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek, the New Critics, and the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. These figures in postwar cultural life invoked aestheticism in the arenas of literature, philosophy, political action, and economics as a prophylactic to the perceived intrusions of an activist-managerial state.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

scholarly journals Revealing the spatial shifting pattern of COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Di Zhu ◽  
Xinyue Ye ◽  
Steven Manson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Network Optimization ◽  
Network Modeling ◽  
The United States ◽  
Standard Series ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Long Range Interactions ◽  
Dynamic Relationships ◽  
Over Time

AbstractWe describe the use of network modeling to capture the shifting spatiotemporal nature of the COVID-19 pandemic. The most common approach to tracking COVID-19 cases over time and space is to examine a series of maps that provide snapshots of the pandemic. A series of snapshots can convey the spatial nature of cases but often rely on subjective interpretation to assess how the pandemic is shifting in severity through time and space. We present a novel application of network optimization to a standard series of snapshots to better reveal how the spatial centres of the pandemic shifted spatially over time in the mainland United States under a mix of interventions. We find a global spatial shifting pattern with stable pandemic centres and both local and long-range interactions. Metrics derived from the daily nature of spatial shifts are introduced to help evaluate the pandemic situation at regional scales. We also highlight the value of reviewing pandemics through local spatial shifts to uncover dynamic relationships among and within regions, such as spillover and concentration among states. This new way of examining the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of network-based spatial shifts offers new story lines in understanding how the pandemic spread in geography.

1—by Captain A. Wepster

1963 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-398
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Travel Time ◽  
Long Range ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ship Routing ◽  
Waves And Currents ◽  
Meteorological Institute

In 1960 Hanssen and James described to the Institute a system developed and used by the United States Hydrographic Office for selecting the optimum track for transoceanic crossings by applying long-range predictions of winds, waves and currents to a knowledge of how the routed vessel reacts to these variables. The paper (Journal, 13, 253) described how, over a period of two years, an average reduction in travel time of 14 hours was achieved over 1000 optimum routes.In the present papers, presented at an Institute meeting held in London on 19 April, Captain Wepster of the Holland-America Line first of all goes into the benefits which effective ship routing offers the ship operator and then describes the results of the experimental routing programme undertaken by his Company in association with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Mr. Verploegh of that Institute then discusses the programme from the forecaster's point of view.

Why Two Parties? Ambition, Policy, and the Presidency

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Aldrich ◽  
Daniel J. Lee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Party System ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Party Affiliation ◽  
New Parties ◽  
The Us ◽  
Duverger's Law ◽  
National Electorate

Duverger’s Law suggests that two parties will dominate under first-past-the-post (FPTP) within an electoral district, but the law does not necessarily establish two-party competition at the national level. United States is unique among FPTP countries in having the only durable and nearly pure, two-party system. Following this observation, we answer two questions. First, what contributes to the same two parties competing in districts all across the country and at different levels of office? Second, why is the US two-party system so durable over time, dominated by the same two parties? That is, “Why two parties?” As an answer, we propose the APP: ambition, the presidency, and policy. The presidency with its national electorate and electoral rules that favor two-party competition establishes two national major parties, which frames the opportunity structure that influences party affiliation decisions of ambitious politicians running for lower offices. Control over the policy agenda helps reinforce the continuation of a particular two-party system in equilibrium by blocking third parties through divergence on the main issue dimension and the suppression of latent issue dimensions that could benefit new parties. The confluence of the three factors explains why the United States is so uniquely a durable two-party system.

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