Political Ideologies and

Political Parties in America

Chapter 5: Ideology Remakes the Parties
By Hans Noel
Ideological vs Partisan Organization
• Parties are coalitions of people that rally around similar ideals, not necessarily
voting patterns
• Congressional voting patterns are helpful indications of party alignment, as well
the party unity vote
• A party unity score is percent of votes a member makes with his/her party
• Party line voting begins to decrease in the early twentieth century
• Organization of issues by ideology does not match that of parties
• Congress was organized by political parties during the late 1800s
• Congress started facing competing organizational frameworks between ideology
and parties by the 1950s because of pundits, before ideology became adopted by
parties
Long Coalitions among Members of
Congress
• NOMINATE scores can be used to quantify who votes
similarly with a two-dimensional graph
• During the mid-twentieth century, signs of three
“parties” – northern Democrats, southern
Democrats, and Republicans, all voted within their groups
• However, really just two conflicting sets of long coalitions – issues like
the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement caused striations
• We can see that what matters most is the issues that separate the
parties rather than the party lines themselves.
The Ideological Coalition & The Party
Coalition
• Issue areas tend to have ideological votes, therefore separating
liberals and conservatives, not necessarily Democrats and Republicans
• These differences are more than just religion and region, but divisions
by issues that are brought up by pundits outside of government
• Procedural matters, budgeting, and general governance typically
break on party lines
• Parties merely help organize issues – Ideology and parties are in fact
distinct forces, and parties exert influence beyond just ideology
Putting Pundits in the Space
• Pundits do not have partisan pressure, so they are typically more scattered on the
NOMINATE space
• Ideology became more important throughout the 1960s-70s, with more polar
ideological extremists being nominated by parties, so parties and pundits became less
aligned
• By 1990s, parties and pundits became aligned again – parties likely adopted the ideals
of the pundits to realign
• By and large, the party system has aligned itself to the ideological division developed
in the 1950s
• The ideological dimension has reoriented and largely absorbed the party dimension
• This shows that ideological coalition pervades political activists and politically relevant
actors
The Organization of Congress without
Ideology
• After the post-Civil War Era, there has never been a period of time in which the majority of
cutting angles for votes in Congress were at odds with the divisions of the parties
• Off-dimensional issues in the first period included currency and prohibition
• The currency issue which was one of the most vital ideologues during the late 1800 was an
issue that parties resisted, causing votes on the topic to be off-dimensional
• Congressional voting during the late 1800s was incredibly structured, however party cohesion
became more volatile towards the later part of the 1800s till around 1900
• Parties were able to manage control during the Progressive Era, a time period in which the
intellectual organization of politics was extremely disorganized, through strong party leadership
• The usage of strong party leadership made it difficult to identify crosscutting ideological
patterns in the voting records of congress
• During the end of the 1900s, there was significant ideological tension within the Republican
party
Progressive Ideology and the Party System
• The Progressive movement signified the beginning of the ideological organization of the issues which
crosscut parties
• There was not much evidence of Progressivism in Congress during the early 1900s as there were many
internal divisions
• The Progressive Movement reshaped the party system - the economics oriented core caused many
Republicans to form into a third party, eventually causing the Democratic Party to be established as the
home of Progressivism
• Major Republican policies included the tariff and extensive government spending for internal improvements
• The 1912 election resulted in the competition of both Roosevelt and Wilson each utilizing two visions of
Progressivism – “The New Nationalism” and “The New Freedom”, respectively
• After Wilson won the election, he slowly changed his policies toward Roosevelt’s approach of Progressivism,
one that focused on statist intervention
• Progressive reformers pressured both parties, and they succeeded in eventually taking control of the
Democratic Party
 Get Well Soon
Professor Bizzoco 
Sagar Shah