As “unintended” institutions, political parties present an analytical conundrum for political scientists, especially those concerned with American politics. While some recently authored constitutions of strong democracies acknowledge the role of political parties as a means for linkage between the polity and the state, the US Constitution is silent on the topic of political parties. Indeed, as we are frequently told, political parties were reviled by the Founding Fathers, relegated to the status of “factions” that inevitably cause “mischief.” We are also quite familiar with the story of party emergence despite the best efforts of constitutional engineers to guarantee otherwise.

Yet since the founding era (1789–1828), scholars have accepted the role of political parties in American politics as pernicious, probably corrupt, and slowing the legislative process and therefore obstructionist. We debate whether parties channel the will of the people well or whether they offer voters constrained choices designed to support the interests of elites. Rarely, though, have we asked the question of whether political parties interfere with the integrity and operation of formal institutions themselves. Has the behavior of political party organizations in the United States distorted the intended relationship between citizens and their government? Or have the political parties supported, or even enhanced, the channels of communication in this exchange? The two books reviewed here advance our thinking on these central questions, though in very different time periods and with very different analytical questions. Taken together, Daniel Klinghard and David Mayhew find that the story of the American political party system as a “spoiler” of democratic practices is false. Our parties are not nearly as unified, focused, or autonomous as they would need to be to cause the kind of trouble often attributed to them.

In The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896, Daniel Klinghard tackles one of the great myths of American politics that refuses to die—the “golden age” of political parties in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time when through corruption, guile, and secrecy, political party organizations held political institutions and processes in a grip of vice: Party bosses called the shots and the democratic project was subverted as these bosses imposed their will on the people. Klinghard puts this myth to bed through an exhaustive look at party organization in the nineteenth century. His book is not quite history and not quite political science, which is what makes it so appealing. He takes a much broader view than most historians would by examining party organizations from the Jacksonian era to the early twentieth century. Unlike authors of most political science research, Klinghard uses primary and secondary archival sources with an eye not only to making his case but also to contextualizing its implications in historical time.

Klinghard's central argument is that political party transformation from a closed group of elites to a direct appeal to the voting public is not a post–Progressive era phenomenon but, rather, a late-nineteenth-century one. Further, the idea of a “golden age” of parties in the late nineteenth century is not supported by the historical record. He finds that a fundamental transformation from Jacksonian era politics to presidential-centered politics takes place between 1880 and 1896 and that resulting developments in the twentieth century are extensions of that process.

What is impressive about Klinghard's argument is its scope. He first exposes Jacksonian era party organization as being administered inconsistently, with some areas firmly in charge of the local political scene and others, especially during westward expansion, weak or spotty at best. Next, the author takes on the central ideas of patronage, mass participation, and presidential focus in the mid-nineteenth century. Patronage, he argues, was based on geographical concerns and congressional power, and could be seen as a remedy to the weakness of party organization, not its strength. This is a provocative way to view patronage, but it is an explanation that is just as plausible as the traditional notion that the mass public was a slave to patronage politics.

Klinghard argues that the rise of national civic associations in the second half of the nineteenth century provided an important new model for party organization. Now, rather than following the interests of their locality, people were persuaded to act in their own self interest, especially in their professions. As the national civic associations emphasized the relating of political issues to professional interests, individuals were encouraged to participate in politics through these groups, rather than political parties. These organizations moved party strategy away from a localism/homogeneous model to a national “interest”–related model. Klinghard finds a direct relationship between national civic associations and the rise of an “educational” style of campaigning. The parties needed to explain the advantages of their platform to likely voters and this meant that there was a need for the production of literature to make the case. The national party committees became self-sustaining enough to take on this role. They fund raised and understood the need to persuade people directly. The author spends a chapter on the rise and fall of national campaign clubs, claiming that they are a model showing how parties shifted from a localized structure to an educational one, via national civic associations.

In focusing his argument on the presidential aspect, Klinghard takes great care to explain the significance of the presidencies of Grover Cleveland and James Garfield in shifting the orientation of political parties from local enterprises to national networks aimed at promoting presidential candidacies directly to the voting public instead of through the filter of local parties. This is a significant insight, as the golden-age myth rests on the notion that late-nineteenth-century presidents were mere puppets of strong local party bosses. Klinghard argues that the reverse is true, that late-nineteenth-century presidents led the national party organizations toward an overt president-centric type. Cleveland is singled out as the president who shakes off the yoke of Jacksonian-style politics. He did not follow general Democratic principles, but instead had well-known issue positions that then became “attached” to the Democratic Party because of him. Cleveland also gave the first public nomination acceptance speech in Madison Square Garden, which others would follow. On the Republican side, Garfield's nomination is seen as a success for reforms in the Republican Party to demolish the unit rule at nominating conventions and break up or bypass state party organizations in favor of congressional district organizations. This is a clear advantage for a presidentialized party, as congressional districts are federal units that can and often do shift every 10 years, unlike the more static manifestation of state parties.

Klinghard's book makes a good central point in each chapter, but it overburdens the reader with repetitive evidence from an exhaustive search of primary and secondary sources. The evidence is not always presented as systematically as I would like to have seen. Why use these particular newspapers? Why these particular politicians' letters? The attempt to be comprehensive can also be overwhelming for the reader, especially in introductory and concluding chapters. While I would recommend the book to political party scholars and advanced graduate students, I think it would be hard-going for even the most sophisticated undergraduate audience.

Mayhew's Partisan Balance follows a trend found in his work of clear, succinct arguments, writing, evidence, and conclusions. The author's approach is different from that of Klinghard. Mayhew asks whether political parties have skewed the outcome of policymaking in the United States in contrast to the “Framers' intent.” Rather than looking at parties as organizations in campaigns, he looks at the performance of political parties in government. He asks whether political parties, when in control of Congress, the presidency, or both, have managed to distort the direction of policy in their own favor more than the constitutional system would appear to dictate. In particular, has one party had more success at the expense of the other? Mayhew's counterintuitive conclusion is no, that they have not. He writes that “many alleged problems have proven to be nonexistent, short-term, limited, tolerable, or correctable” (p. 190).

Mayhew makes his case on the merits of 60 years worth of policymaking. Looking carefully at proposals championed by presidents, he asks if they got what they wanted. If they did not, did they lose because of the other party? Or did they lose because one legislative chamber (or two) opposed them, even when controlled by their own party? Mayhew selects 184 presidential policy requests that satisfied three criteria—that they were domestic policy proposals, that they were very important to the president to advance, and that they occurred in the first two years of a president's term (whether the president was freshly elected or reelected) (p. 35). While this whittles down the list to a handful of proposals in each presidency, the author recognizes that some efforts monopolize more of a president's time and subsequent reputation than others. To account for this, he weights each request by importance on a scale of 1 to 4, 4 being most important (pp. 49–50).

Mayhew spends the rest of the book evaluating the fate of the 184 proposals, looking at how party control of the presidency and Congress influences their success, how party control within Congress and therefore between the chambers influences success, whether either the House or the Senate poses more of a problem for presidents, and, in every iteration, whether political parties systematically skew policy in their direction when they can. What makes the book an enjoyable read is the care with which Mayhew outlines the fate of each proposal, his almost stream-of-consciousness discussion of how to handle methodological conundrums and ambiguous results, and his crisp conclusions once all avenues have been exhausted. Not only do political parties not skew policy perpetually, but they also do a poor job of making the government work efficiently, contra the wishes of the Founding Fathers. Mayhew ends by addressing a few potential reforms that would weaken “unfair” partisan power, such as eliminating the Electoral College and the Senate's filibuster, but he finds little to recommend going to the trouble to do so. At the end of the book, I am left wondering whether it is possible for political parties to have a more substantial effect on the American system and if that is indeed desirable. This author's work usually leads me to more questions than answers, but this is of course a sign of a stimulating book.

Clearly, both Mayhew and Klinghard find that the institutional design of the US system does indeed “cure” the “mischiefs” of faction. But does the cure kill the patient—the exercise of legitimate representative democracy in America?