Abstract
The American party system has been criticized on four main grounds: (1) the parties do not offer the electorate a choice in terms of fundamental principles; their platforms are very similar and mean next to nothing; (2)they cannot discipline those whom they elect, and therefore they cannot carry their platforms into effect; (3) they are held together and motivated less by political principle than by desire for personal, often material, gain, and by sectional and ethnic loyalties; consequently party politics is personal and parochial; and (4) their structure is such that they cannot correctly represent the opinion of the electorate; in much of the country there is in effect only one party, and everywhere large contrib-utors and special interests exercise undue influence within the party.1
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References
Political Parties, U.S.A., ed. Robert A. Goldwin (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961), 21–39.
E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942).
Defenses of the American party system include A. Lawrence Lowell, Essays on Government (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889)
Arthur N. Holcombe, The Political Parties of Today (New York: Harper, 1925)
Pendleton Herring, The Politics of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1940)
Herbert Agar, The Price of Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
Henry Jones Ford, The Rise and Growth of American Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 303.
André Siegfried, “Stable Instability in France,”Foreign Affairs, XXXIV (April 1956): 395.
Herbert Luethy, France against Herself (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 61.
Willmoore Kendall, “The Two Majorities,” Midwest Journal of Political Science IV, no. 4 (November 1960), 317–45.
Lucian W. Pye, “The Politics of Southeast Asia,” eds. G. Almond and J. Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 97.
William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1914), 271–72.
Robert Moses, La Guardia: A Salute and a Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 37–38.
Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Popular Government (New York: Henry Holt, 1886), 106–8.
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© 1985 Plenum Press, New York
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Banfield, E.C. (1985). In Defense of the American Party System. In: Here the People Rule. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2481-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2481-2_2
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