Paper presented at the University of Pennsylvania, November 1, 2002. Please do not quote without the author's permission. Please direct comments to the author via e-mail at apolsky@hunter.cuny.edu.
 

Abstract

Among schemes to periodize American political development into episodes of broad political change and eras of stability, political party coalitions or partisan regimes claim a central place. A "partisan regime" may be defined as a political coalition organized under a common party label that challenges core tenets of the established political order, secures effective national governing power, and maintains sufficient power to thwart opposition efforts to undo its principal policy and institutional achievements. Regimes are both outcomes and causes. I seek first to account for the emergence of a partisan coalition organized to advance a new policy agenda. The process of regime formation rests upon creative and entrepreneurial political leadership and the use of political narratives to unite diverse politicians, policy seekers, and electoral groups. Once a partisan coalition secures control of national policymaking institutions, it begins to generate policy, institutional, and political innovations designed to achieve its goals and preserve its hold on power. Regimes always accomplish the primary tasks they set for themselves, but the tasks are limited by the narrow scope of agreement among regime participants. Over time regimes are undone by their policy success and by the ambitions of politicians, but they leave a significant institutional residue. On a metatheoretical level, the theory of American partisan regimes draws together two currents within political science - rational choice and discourse analysis - whose proponents are often at odds with each other. The theory connects the microfoundations of politics at the level of individual ambition to the discursive processes that shape how people come to construe their self-interest and define the terms upon which politics will be conducted.

Political party coalitions or partisan regimes have figured prominently among the schemes that scholars use to periodize American political development into episodes of broad political change and eras of stability. A listing of the more significant and often tumultuous turning points in American politics would include the Federalist-Jeffersonian clash and the Democratic-Republican triumph, the emergence of Jacksonian democracy, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the election of 1896, the Progressive era, the New Deal, the 1960s, and the Reagan era. Apart from the 1960s and perhaps the Progressive era, each of these episodes is clearly linked to the advent of a strong party coalition, its redefinition of the political agenda, and bold national policy innovations. Note, too, that the longer interludes of stability tend to be characterized by the dominance of one party in national elections and by the persistence of its core themes in political discourse. These become, as David Plotke (1996, 162) puts it, the new political "common sense." It seems clear that if we propose to understand the "big picture" in American political development, we must reckon with the phenomenon of partisan regimes - how they form, what they include and exclude, what holds them together, what they do, what they change and what they leave untouched, why they decline, and what they leave behind when they are gone.

A modest body of literature addresses some of these issues, and I propose to build upon it to frame a more general theory of partisan regimes. The existing scholarship tends to focus on particular institutions such as the presidency (Skowronek 1986, Skowronek 1993), single case studies of a regime such as the New Deal Democratic coalition (Plotke 1996), or the relationship between regimes and certain policy seekers (Polsky 2000a, Shoch 1998). Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek (1999) address the regime concept in more general terms, but they extrapolate from one case (the Democratic coalition in the 1930s and 1940s) and emphasize how regimes interact with other institutions. In some of the literature, the regime concept itself is sketched in only vague terms, inviting varied and perhaps conflicting interpretations. There is no agreement, moreover, on whether regimes are best understood as recurring, unique, or weakening (and hence merely historical) structures. Skowronek (1993) concludes his study of the presidency by speaking of the "waning of political time," that is, an end to the pattern of regime formation, consolidation, and decline; Plotke (1996) compares the New Deal order to other governing systems in advanced industrial democracies, but not to partisan coalitions in the other eras in the United States; and I have argued (Polsky 1997a) that certain goals lead politicians to continue to bear the costs of building durable coalitions under a party rubric. I will suggest here that partisan regimes share certain properties across time, that they continue to explain important patterns of policy and political change, and that they help account for the persistence of policies and institutions.

I define "partisan regime" as a political coalition organized under a common party label that challenges core tenets of the established political order, secures effective national governing power, and maintains sufficient power to thwart opposition efforts to undo its principal policy and institutional achievements.⁽¹⁾ This definition calls for some elaboration. First, governing coalitions form under partisan auspices because parties have shown themselves to be useful instruments for organizing officeholders and for regulating and realizing political ambition (Aldrich 1995). To this I would add that parties draw together not just politicians but clusters of policy seekers and segments of the electorate, all of whom contribute political resources essential to partisan success. Second, a period of consistent party control does not suffice to delineate a regime, for a party can be devoted to nothing more than the preservation of an older political settlement (as was the case when the Republicans in 1921 promised a return to "normalcy" under Harding⁽²⁾). Rather, a new partisan regime embarks self-consciously on a project to remake major parts of the political order. Third, under the American constitutional system, the exercise of power at the national level requires control over the two leading policy-making institutions, Congress and the presidency. With this control party coalitions can extend their reach over time to the federal courts and the bureaucracy. Because of the different selection mechanisms used to fill national offices, however, nothing assures unified party control of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, a situation that differs from that found in a parliamentary system where control of the legislature brings with it control over the executive. American party coalitions thus face a formidable challenge in achieving and maintaining coincident control across institutional lines. To complicate the task further, national electoral arrangements - the system of geographically-apportioned congressional seats - make it necessary that coalitions be regionally broad based. It follows that the fewer issues placed on the table, the more likely a governing coalition can be forged and maintained. Core institutional arrangements in the American political system thus give American partisan regimes certain distinctive characteristics: they must regularly confront the challenge of securing cross-institutional control, they must incorporate members from different sections or regions, and they must be restricted in their policy scope. Given the obstacles that partisan coalitions face, they may fall short of the effective and durable control by which I define a partisan regime. We should investigate such quasi-regimes or incomplete regime formations to determine the consequences of partial success in the quest to gain and/or hold power.

In the theory I explicate here, I treat partisan regimes as both outcomes and causes.⁽³⁾ I seek first to account for the emergence of a partisan coalition organized to advance a new policy agenda - the regime is the dependent variable. Creative and entrepreneurial political leadership lies at the center of the process of regime formation. Partisan leaders bid for support, hoping to draw together other politicians, various policy seekers, and electoral groups around a party program that represents a bold departure from political convention. This effort to forge a broad coalition is made possible by the apparent exhaustion of old ways of governing that lets regime entrepreneurs depict the situation as one of crisis requiring new approaches. To unite politicians representing diverse constituencies, disparate policy seekers, and assorted electoral groups, leaders engage in a discursive project, redefining how their audiences perceive their political interests to yield support for a common program. The process is marked by competing political visions; success for any one narrative owes a great deal to chance.

Once the partisan coalition secures control of national policymaking institutions, it begins to generate policy, institutional, and political innovations designed to achieve its goals and preserve its hold on power. The regime now becomes the independent variable. Or, more precisely, different elements of the regime framework explain different outcomes. On the most obvious level, the governing coalition aggregates sufficient power to accomplish its primary tasks - regimes always strike their main targets, the elements of the old order they have identified as responsible for the crisis the nation faces. But the targets are limited because of the narrow scope of agreement among regime participants. Regime leaders may differ, too, over how best or how fast to pursue even their primary goals. On these "second-order" choices, the outcome depends not upon the regime as a whole but on the power exercised by partisan factions based upon their institutional and intraparty positions. Other issues fall outside the area of agreement around which the regime has formed, and preexisting policymaking patterns may survive intact. The upheaval associated with regime transitions, moreover, is short-lived. Simply put, the success of partisan governing coalitions proves their undoing, for the themes that brought them to power cease to resonate after the offending pillars of the prior order have been displaced. Factions within the coalition instead press their parochial claims with scant regard for the effect on the coalition as a whole. Politicians and policy seekers soon turn to the task of devising means to preserve what they have created or acquired. A new cohort of entrepreneurial politicians will bid to displace the now-entrenched regime, but nothing assures they will succeed, and the decay of a regime may be followed by an interregnum in which no partisan coalition can establish its hegemony.

I begin by reviewing the sources of regime theory, including the realignment framework and some of its limitations. Next I examine the processes by which regimes are constructed by ambitious partisan entrepreneurs. I focus most closely on the role of narrative in organizing a coherent explanation of a political crisis and establishing an alternative policy agenda. In the third section I explore the actions of a new dominant coalition as it assumes power. Rising regimes achieve dramatic policy results and reframe public discourse, but their impact is selective.. I then discuss the aging of dominant coalitions, with particular attention to the continuing significance of political leaders. Having suggested certain patterns common across partisan regimes, I return to the question of whether regime theory can help us understand modern American politics. I conclude by indicating the potential value of a theory of partisan regimes for the study of American political development and its possible "metatheoretical" contribution.
 

Antecedents and Inspirations

The recent scholarly attention to the role of partisan regimes in American political development originates in the realignment synthesis and its perceived limitations. I do not propose to recapitulate all the criticisms of the realignment framework here,⁽⁴⁾ but several stand out. First and most obvious, realignment theory seems to offer no explanation for important patterns in American mass electoral behavior dating back at least to the late 1960s. Voters have dealigned from political parties; periods of political controversy and policy change have not been characterized by shifts to new, stable partisan alignments.⁽⁵⁾ Second, despite the absence of an electoral realignment, we have witnessed far-reaching changes in public discourse, political institutions, and public policies since the late 1960s. Of particular note, the election of Ronald Reagan ushered in new terms of political discourse and significant shifts in spending, tax, defense, and regulatory policies. Third, the realignment perspective may account for some general features that distinguish unstable periods in American politics, but it begs the question of why changing social conditions and widening political discontent result in specific policy responses. Scholars (e.g., Burnham 1970) working within the realignment framework have observed the tendency toward stagnation in American politics that permitted social tensions to accumulate without a political response and have noted the proliferation of protest movements and third parties as electoral systems decayed. When it came to the actual policy directions that new governing coalitions pursued in the wake of major electoral upheavals, however, realignment theory has nothing to offer. Recent criticism emerging from the rational choice perspective finds that voters are "price takers" who lack the incentives or means to shape new party programs (Aldrich 1995) and suggests the need to look elsewhere to understand how parties come to define their programs. For example, Ferguson (1995) contends that emerging dominant economic interests act as "principals" in defining party programs with politicians operating as their "agents." While one might take issue with him over who has the necessary incentive to organize a party coalition (Polsky 2000), he and others correctly observe that voters have no reason to incur the transaction costs associated with forging a new party coalition that will confront the old order.

On the other hand, some realignment scholarship hints of a more promising direction for research on how partisan coalitions manage to retain power in the wake of an electoral upheaval. Clubb, Flanagan, and Zingale (1980) argue that the actions of the party empowered by an electoral shift have proven to be decisive in securing its grip on power over subsequent electoral cycles. "Indeed, we view the electorate as primarily passive and reactive in matters of governmental policy; policy innovation and promotion of specific policy directions are seen as largely emanating from political leadership." (Clubb, Flanagan, and Zingale 1980,14) As the new dominant party delivers on its promises to voters, it secures their support in subsequent elections, especially the backing of new or formerly unaligned voters. (Clubb, Flanagan, and Zingale 1980, chap. 5). Paul Allen Beck (1979, 132) observes that new partisan alignments have been spurred not just by crises but "in the presence of creative leadership in exploiting these crises." Regime theory builds upon these passing references to the role of partisan leadership by making that leadership the starting point for linking popular discontent with political and policy change.

Several other bodies of literature also offer a foundation for theorizing about partisan regimes. These include rational choice new institutionalist scholarship, historical institutionalism, narrative and discourse analysis (particularly among public policy scholars), and work on patterns of political incorporation and exclusion that focuses on race, ethnicity, and gender. I will touch briefly on each in turn to highlight the implications for regime theory.

Although open to various criticisms, rational choice scholarship has proven to be a fruitful source of insights about politicians and political parties. Aldrich (1995) notes that parties can solve several recurring political problems that arise in governance, among office seeking politicians, and in the electorate. Following his lead, it is useful to conceive of regimes as attempts to find a durable solution to the problem of forming coalitions within legislative bodies among lawmakers with different interests. I would extend the argument to include the problem of linking institutions in a system of separated powers. Aldrich observes, too, that parties also connect politicians to other political actors with valued political resources. Partisan regime theory needs to explore the relationship between politicians and what I term policy seekers. Rational choice new institutionalism further illuminates how regimes may govern despite internal frictions by establishing structure-induced equilibria. (Shepsle 1989) Institutional arrangements may be devised to reduce conflicts among fellow partisans by allocating positions of power to different regime factions and by structuring incentives to promote cooperation among them.

Historical institutionalism (of the non-rational-choice variety) helps to highlight the limits of regime influence and the persistence of other governing orders. Many institutionalist writings underscore the "stickiness" of agencies, programs, and policy norms amid powerful currents of political change. (Orren and Skowronek 1994) Although regimes bring together enormous political resources for altering governing arrangements, then, we should anticipate that any given regime transition will not touch important elements in the American state. Further, regimes will leave behind their own institutional legacy, adding new layers to the sedimentary accumulation of state structures that results in what Skowronek (1993) refers to as the "thickening" of the American political system.

As a number of critics of rational choice theory have commented, it tends to treat the interests of political actors as a given. This assumption invites the political analyst to treat interests as fixed and immutable. While that is sometimes appropriate, it begs the problem of how interests may be shaped by political processes. An alternative approach - not inconsistent with rational choice but uncommon in that literature - stresses the role of discourse in framing how political actors construe their self-interest and understand their political position. (Dodd 1994, Stone 1997) Political leaders play a creative role through the stories they tell about problems and politics, imposing an interpretation on events and information that helps others make sense amid uncertainty. As Deborah Stone (1997, 28) puts it, "much political activity is an effort to control interpretations," and politicians use narratives strategically to frame how people understand the cause of a problem and how it can be mastered. Though she does not discuss partisan regimes, the implications of her concept of causal stories as tools of political discourse are plain: "Causal stories are essential political instruments for shaping alliances and for settling the distribution of benefits and costs." (Stone 1997, 189) This holds true whether the alliances in question are ad hoc, issue-specific coalitions or durable, broad governing parties. Ideas can also be used by policy entrepreneurs to destabilize established policy monopolies in the hope of reordering the distribution of power. (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 4) There are hints in the policy literature, too, of a relationship between the struggle over ideas or stories and the chance occurrence of political events. According to John Kingdon (1995), events create opportunities for policy entrepreneurs to call attention to their particular understanding of problems and their prescriptions.

Partisan regimes, as instruments for controlling policymaking institutions over time, stand at the center of national politics. How such coalitions define what politics will be about should lead us to investigate the problems about which regimes remain silent, the questions they prefer to push to the periphery of political life. Here the growing literature on political exclusion seems most relevant to the regime phenomenon. For example, the repertoire of symbols and values upon which political leaders draw in constructing their partisan narratives includes themes that emphasize the marginal political standing of people with certain ascriptive attributes. (Smith 1997) Conversely, political entrepreneurs may find strategic benefit in urging that national politics recognize the claims of certain marginal groups. Social movement literature points to the connection between a surge in social movement activity and the decline of one political order and its displacement by another. (Goldfield 1997)

To formulate a theory of American partisan regimes, I draw upon the several bodies of literature I have briefly reviewed and on writings that explicitly address the regime phenomenon. Extending the analysis of some of the later realignment scholars and the rational choice critics of realignment, I contend that creative, entrepreneurial leadership holds the key to unifying politicians and policy seekers around a partisan agenda and to organizing an effective governing coalition. The initial process of coalition building has a discursive dimension, for it includes the telling of stories about politics that seek to make sense of the problems with which the political system cannot cope. David Plotke (1996) has made explicit the role of discourse in articulating the project that a new political order undertakes in his close study of the New Deal Democratic regime (or order, as he prefers). But we also need to weigh properly the costs associated with organizing a broad coalition and, hence, incorporate rational-choice insights into ambition and political entrepreneurship. Upon taking power, an emergent coalition faces a state established by the old order and possibly populated by its supporters. (Shefter 1994; Polsky 2002) To uproot the entire institutional apparatus, Orren and Skowronek (1999) suggest, is beyond the wherewithal of any partisan coalition. Yet scholars working within a regime perspective have argued that incoming regimes take advantage of their control over institutions like the presidency to disrupt established governing arrangements and uproot backers of the old regime from the institutional bases of power they held within the state. (Skowronek 1993; Shefter 1994)
 

The Regime as Outcome: Ambition, Narratives, and Chance

Efforts to overturn an established order, however weakened, and to strike directly at conventional thinking about state-society relations require a boldness not common in politics. Such assaults entail significant risks, for advocates of change may misread the depth of public disenchantment. They also face significant competition: the decay of a partisan order invites many political challengers, including a proliferation of third parties. That some political actors will assume large risks and face numerous competitors in the quest for decisive political gain suggests the entrepreneurial character of regime-building political agency - and also the possibility that it has parallels to moral crusades. The crusader's passionate commitment to a cause may overwhelm short-run calculations of cost and benefit.

We need to consider who might have reason to accept the challenge of confronting a political order and trying to create a replacement. The universe of political actors might be divided broadly into two groups, politicians and policy seekers, with the latter including conventional interest groups, citizen activists, and social movements. Although policy seekers might have the wherewithal to bear the cost of broad collective action, they have little incentive to do so. Their policy concerns are limited; to bring together the support needed to secure national governing authority requires an enormous investment that can hardly be justified by the return. Even leading economic sectors will receive a limited share of the gain from the triumph of their preferred party. Moreover, a better alternative presents itself, because policy seekers can usually hope to realize their interests by supporting or subsidizing politicians. (Polsky 2000) Given that policy seekers can readily switch their support and still win the gratitude of politicians, this approach entails little risk.

It is more likely that certain politicians (officeholders and officeseekers) will absorb the transaction costs of regime building as a necessary means to fulfill their ambition. Ambition here may assume various forms - a desire to win a higher national office, to gain greater influence within an institution, or to see a bold policy agenda in which a leader believes deeply carried into practice. It is reasonable to assume, in fact, that at every regime founding a mix of these motives will be at work, often evident in the same person. Ronald Reagan sought the Republican presidential nomination as early as 1964 and in every election cycle thereafter until his victory in 1980. He was also a passionate ideologue in his defense of a particular free-market vision of America. (Dallek 1999) Whatever the motives, the decisive point is that some ambitious politicians must conclude that cannot achieve their goals unless they can construct an effective governing coalition, and that induces them to accept the heavy costs involved.

Most politicians will shun the risks associated with regime building. Officeholders allied with an established regime party could jeopardize their intraparty standing and the power and rewards they already derive from their institutional position. They probably have an ideological affinity with the governing party, too, making a bold attack on its premises unpalatable. Only when the party seems to have abandoned the principles that drew them to it will regime-allied politicians break ranks. Martin Van Buren in 1848 led Free Soil Democrats in an insurrection against the party he had founded two decades before. Ronald Reagan, once a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, left the Democratic party in the conviction that the party had repudiated FDR's ideals. The more likely source for regime-creating entrepreneurship is the opposition party. Usually denied the chance to exercise power, shape the direction of policy, or enjoy the perquisites of majority control, opposition politicians have more reason to cast about for strategies that can alter an unfavorable balance of power. For example, Abraham Lincoln began to look for new issues to undermine Democratic dominance during his single term in Congress as a Whig in the mid-1840s. (Donald 1995)

The political tasks facing prospective regime creators are formidable ones indeed. Recall the conditions for the effective exercise of policy initiative at the national level: control of the policymaking branches, the members of which are each chosen on a geographical basis. A new governing coalition, then, will need support of electoral pluralities in enough states and districts across the nation in elections for both Congress and the presidency to secure working control. This electoral system fosters decentralized parties, a tendency reinforced by early decisions to respect the local autonomy of party sub-units that became an established norm of American politics (Aldrich 1995, chap. 4). Certainly attempts by American presidents like Taft and Franklin Roosevelt to purge congressional dissenters have demonstrated that cooperation of officeholders within a party coalition cannot be imposed from above. Entrepreneurial politicians who hope to put together a coalition that can challenge for power must appeal to fellow partisans in diverse states and congressional districts. Since the latter group of politicians responds to local policy seekers and constituencies (as well as national ones, perhaps), the would-be regime architect also must find ways to reach out to a range of policy seekers who share little in common. Appeals to national policy-seeking organizations may play a role in regime building, but the hard work must be done in the hinterlands, wooing partisan politicians and their local and state supporters.

To weave together the disparate policy seekers and diverse voters required for effective control, partisan entrepreneurs engage in a discursive project. They need to redefine politics in a way that retains old party backers yet draws in additional elite and mass support. Through the telling of stories about the American condition, they make coherent what has become, by the discourse of the old order, unintelligible. Prospective regime builders offer candidate narratives, each proposing a new analysis of the problems facing the nation and pointing toward solutions. These stories draw heavily upon familiar symbols, invoke an idealized version of the past while promising a bright tomorrow, and identify villains who brought on the current predicament. Symbols help political audiences make sense of new conditions by situating them in a more comprehensible context. (Stone 1997) References to a lost time of innocence, virtue, or prosperity let politician-storytellers connect themselves to a legacy of success that they will restore. And culprits let audiences identify tangible sources of evil, usually associated with the current political regime, where more abstract explanations fail. In rational choice terms, all these rhetorical devices may be understood as means to lower information costs in a climate of great uncertainty.

Important though information shortcuts are, narratives serve a more far-reaching purpose. Stories function as one means by which entrepreneurial political leaders reshape the interests of policy seekers. As this process of interest reformulation may be pivotal in regime transitions, it calls for some theoretical discussion. In the abstract universe of rational political action, interests are never fixed: rational actors engage in the constant re-evaluation of all possible courses of action, selecting the one that at that moment yields the greatest utility. Of course, since this intellectual exercise is completely impractical, actors instead exercise "bounded rationality" and assess only a small number of choices. It is not difficult under normal conditions to canvass limited alternatives and arrive at a workable understanding of where one's interests lie. A political crisis, however, upsets routine calculations of interests, invalidating rational short-cuts and injecting a large dose of uncertainty. Enter the political entrepreneur, who touts an analysis that sorts out the confusion for other political actors by suggesting a plausible account of why the world no longer works as it did, and proposes a new programmatic menu grounded in this analysis. Narratives thus contribute to the constitutive efforts of political leaders to reconfigure the interests of prospective coalition participants.⁽⁶⁾

I refer to narratives in the plural because in the same crisis period competing entrepreneurial politicians advance different stories. The decade before the Civil War may be taken as a case in point. In the aftermath of the Whig election debacle in 1852, a number of opposition parties vied to become the principal challenger to the Democrats by offering different accounts of the core political questions facing the polity. Some contending minority parties stressed ethno-cultural issues including temperance and immigration; others focused on halting the expansion of slavery. (Gienapp 1987) Even within the party that emerged as the primary opposition, the Republicans, partisan leaders told different stories. For Salmon Chase, the framer's vision of a Constitution hostile to slavery had been subverted by a Slave Power conspiracy and the full authority of the federal government should be directed against slavery where it stood; for William Seward, Southern aristocracy menaced the future of free labor in all regions and so promised an "irrepressible conflict"; Abraham Lincoln borrowed from both and added his own stress on blocking the expansion of slavery so it might wither in place. (Foner 1995)

Although the narrative exercise calls for vision and creativity, politicians face one important constraint on how free they are to break with the past. They need to preserve the party base as the foundation for building a larger coalition. Any defections from the party have to be offset before the party can grow; it is less costly to augment existing strength than to alienate, recover, and then add. Moreover, the party has embraced a set of commitments and risks being portrayed as unprincipled and opportunistic if it attempts to shed itself of old supporters, even where these may appear an embarrassment or a liability. It is not surprising, then, that party programs display strong continuity across different regimes.⁽⁷⁾ Rather than shed the past, politicians look for ways to rework traditional partisan themes.

They also refashion traditional American themes. American political culture offers a rich store of appealing (and sometimes not-so-appealing) values that can be enlisted to justify the prescriptions that partisan entrepreneurs offer. By manipulating values to achieve strategic purposes, regime architects turn the cultural repertoire into a dynamic political force. American political values may not change, at least not at the speed of American politics, but political actors redefine and recombine those values in innovative ways. Attacks on the old order include attacks upon how that order has chosen to interpret and represent core American principles. Both Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln espoused a deep commitment to liberty in their 1858 debates. For Douglas, liberty meant the freedom of white men to choose their governing political arrangements through popular sovereignty, while Lincoln offered a literalist reading of the Declaration of Independence to insist that the framers really did mean "all men are created equal" when it came to controlling the fruits of one's labor. There is nothing necessarily ennobling about the invocation of traditional American values. The menu of value choices upon which entrepreneurial politicians may draw includes ascriptive norms that legitimize exclusion. Jacksonian Democrats played heavily on norms of racial superiority as they sought to build their base among an expanded franchise of white male voters. (Smith 1997) If partisan challengers prevail, they gain the opportunity to ensure not just the hegemony of their story but also of their interpretation of American norms.

Regime entrepreneurs take risks in their challenge to the old order, but that challenge is still guided by a strategic purpose - to win the political power that makes it possible to accomplish their political goals. With that in mind they need to find a way around issues that threaten to divide their prospective coalition. Decentralization helps because it permits partisans to emphasize different issues at the local level while agreeing on a central issue or set of issues as their national message. (Aldrich 1995, chap. 4) So, too, can silence be an asset: regime builders avoid or sidestep matters that divert attention from the set of issues that play to their advantage. They also will not reach out to groups that would result in a net loss of support. Republicans in the 1850s appreciated that while opposition to the expansion of slavery worked to their advantage, abolitionism had little support in the lower North and support for political enfranchisement for African-Americans would be fatal. Decentralization allowed the party to preserve abolitionist backing; leaders like Lincoln explicitly repudiated full social and political equality for blacks. (Donald 1995)

As partisan leaders consider the most cost-effective ways to expand elite and mass support, political logic suggests they will focus upon groups that seem receptive and that can be readily mobilized. In the former category will be policy seekers and voter blocs alienated from the old order. Republicans as early as the Nixon era began to identify white ethnic groups that had become estranged from the Democratic party despite their longstanding support for its New Deal programs. Ronald Reagan made a strong pitch for support from Catholic voters. Because it is easier to enlist active backing from groups that are already mobilized for political action, regime builders also look to third parties and social movements as sources of recruits. Insurgent organizations offer cues to entrepreneurial politicians about rising political passions and discontent among groups that may just be entering the political system. Christian fundamentalists had been detached from politics for a long period in the mid-twentieth century until social issues and the 1976 Jimmy Carter campaign spurred renewed interest in politics. When fundamentalist conservative political organizations emerged in the 1970s, they provided a ready audience for candidates like Ronald Reagan who hoped to turn the Republican party into the vehicle for mass discontent. (Dallek 1999) The emphasis on marginal-but-mobilizing electoral groups may explain why, as the realignment literature demonstrates, regime transitions tend to be characterized by an influx of new voters who back the emerging regime party. (Clubb, Flanagan, and Zingale 1980)

For all the strategic calculations of different would-be regime founders to establish the superiority of their particular narrative and to cultivate the widest base of support, the outcome does not rest in their hands. Rather, unpredictable events determine which story will prevail by validating the narrative project of some politicians rather than that of others. As entrepreneurial politicians advance their competing accounts of what ails the nation, audiences face a number of plausible stories, none of which is self-evidently truer or more compelling. A narrative gains credibility and impact, though, when an event or series of events that captures public attention seems to reinforce that particular interpretation of the political world.⁽⁸⁾ The event allows a leader, faction, or party (where there is more than one contending opposition party) to proclaim, in effect, "So you see, it's just as we said!" To put it in the most concise form: events empower stories.

Examples from two regime transitions plainly illustrate this. During the early and mid-1850s the Republican party struggled to establish itself as the primary opposition in the United States. William E. Gienapp (1987, chap. 9) demonstrates that the headway made by the Republicans had been limited before early 1856, in part because they could not keep the question of the expansion of slavery consistently before the Northern public. Then, with a key presidential election approaching, public attention was captured by the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Preston "Bully" Brooks on the floor of the United States Senate and by the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery settlers. The twin episodes - "Bleeding Sumner" and "Bleeding Kansas" - were exploited by the party and its newspapers as a vivid demonstration that an aggressive Slave Power was preying upon the nation. Later the Republican narrative of the Slave Power would be reinforced by the Buchanan administration's heavy-handed efforts to force congressional Democrats to swallow the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution as the basis for Kansas Statehood. This so divided the Democrats, moreover, that by the 1860 presidential contest they were unable to unite behind one presidential candidate, making possible Lincoln's victory despite a mere forty per cent of the popular vote. (Donald 1995) Jumping ahead to our own era, Ronald Reagan's bold conservative critique of the Democrats seemed to be confirmed by a series of events in the last year of the Carter presidency. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran appeared to be graphic proof that the United States no longer commanded respect abroad; the failure of the mission to rescue the hostages demonstrated the sad decline of American military efficiency; and the rise in inflation and unemployment underscored the failure of New Deal Democratic economic management tools. In Reagan's hands these events confirmed a story of the failure of American will under Democratic leadership, even as the entrepreneurial energy and moral integrity of the people remained steadfast.

Important as chance events are to the triumph of a narrative, it would be misleading to suggest that would-be regime founders are passive about the prospects of their story. Quite the opposite: they are politicians and use every political tool at their disposal. Republicans in 1856 faced a strong challenge from the American (Know Nothing) party. The parties in fact had significant membership overlap and had been busy subverting each other over the previous two years. When the American party convention met that spring, Republican operatives in attendance worked behind the scenes to introduce anti-slavery platforms that they knew would split the Know Nothings on sectional lines. The successful Republican manipulation resulted in a divided American party that ran a distant third in the fall elections and found itself on the path to oblivion. (Gienapp, chap. 9) Political action also contribute to the triumph of particular leaders or factions within a party, which in turn gives the victors a chance to make their narrative the party message. For example, Ronald Reagan used superior grassroots organization to beat George Bush, the Republican establishment's safe and preferred choice, in the 1980 presidential primaries. Had Bush prevailed, with his more conventional (and effectively anti-visionary) outlook, modern American politics would have followed a very different course.
 

The Regime as Causal Force: Policy Change and Narrative Hegemony

When a rising partisan coalition that promises far-reaching political and policy change secures effective governing power, the shock waves reverberate through the political system. Regime transitions represent not merely a shift in partisan control but an attempt to refashion fundamental political understandings and key state-society linkages. The transfer of power is accompanied by a heightened sense of anticipation among political actors and political audiences alike.

The anticipation stems in part from the circumstances under which the new cohort of governing officeholders assumes power. They take control amid a pervasive sense of political crisis, a sense they have helped to create by their alarmist portrait of the American condition. All crises, of course, are not alike; the magnitude of the political shocks preceding the advent of a new partisan governing coalition varies dramatically. The governance challenge confronting Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in the spring of 1861 stands as the most serious one that any incoming administration faced, much less a partisan coalition formed but a few years earlier that had never held the reins of power before. (Polsky 2002) At the other end of the spectrum I would place the Republicans in 1981 or the Jacksonians in 1829. Here the incoming partisan coalitions reflected pockets of deep popular dissatisfaction with the established order, but existing institutions, whether the Second Bank of the United States or Great Society programs, still commanded important support that the new leadership would have to overcome. Partisan entrepreneurs in these two cases worked relentlessly to foster a conviction that the old order was intellectually exhausted and morally bankrupt. Somewhere in between rank the partisan coalitions empowered by economic collapse, the Republicans under McKinley in 1896 and the Democrats under FDR in 1932. Sensitivity to the uniqueness of each transition situation, however, should not blind us to an important parallel - in each instance the combination of actual political failure, propaganda directed against the old order, and the obvious popular and elite repudiation of its principles leaves the ousted party temporarily prostrate. Moreover, politicians, policy seekers, and mass publics all anticipate bold departures because the old order has been declared wanting in the most central respects.

Other factors make major policy departures likely at the outset of a new partisan regime. Electoral upheavals associated with regime transitions often give the new regime party large electoral margins and substantial congressional majorities to accompany its control of the White House. But this is not necessarily the case: the Republicans came to power in 1861 having won well under a majority in the popular vote for the presidency, and they gained a comfortable governing edge only after secession led to the resignation of many Democratic lawmakers. In these instances, the disarray among backers of the former regime assumes added importance. Civil War Democrats were tainted by their historical association with the South and by their many members who sympathized with secession. The Republican near-regime established in 1981 had formal control of only the presidency and the Senate, but demoralization among the Democrats contributed to extraordinary legislative successes in the first months of the Reagan administration. More important than the margin of electoral victory or the size of the congressional majority is the unity of purpose that distinguishes an incoming regime. That unity has both discursive and political sources. Because the governing coalition has triumphed under a clear narrative, office holders have good reason to assume that their mass and elite constituents endorse the goals identified by the story as first-order priorities. Further, on the core questions around which the nascent regime mounted its challenge to the old order, regime party officeholders find any policy alternative within their party spectrum closer to their optimal outcome than the old policy.⁽⁹⁾ Factions in the new dominant coalition always find common ground on the key issues the party confronts upon assuming power.

Building upon opposition disarray and the high initial degree of internal agreement, regimes accomplish the principal tasks their narratives have defined. American partisan regimes in their first years in power have enjoyed remarkable success: each one has achieved its central policy objectives, although not necessarily the policy results it desired. Even the Reagan Republican quasi-regime accomplished the dramatic changes in tax policy and spending priorities that candidate Reagan promised, along with important administrative reforms. Regimes should be judged on the challenges they define for themselves, though these might seem modest in retrospect. The Republican triumph in 1896 led to the extension and elaboration of tariff policies intended to support Northern sectional interests, to a reaffirmation of monetary policies, and to the repudiation of the populist agenda. That this policy record pales next to the New Deal is beside the point. What counts is what political actors engaged in regime building have identified as the urgent question of the moment. That many institutional orderings in the American political system continue undisturbed through each regime upheaval (Orren and Skowronek 1994, Orren and Skowronek 1999) is also to be expected, given the strategically limited nature of the agreement that ties together regime participants. Regime logic points to the juxtaposition of rapid change in some realms and stability in others.

On the broader level of public discourse, too, emergent regimes claim striking success. Their triumph shatters political conventions while their political foes have been stunned into silence. For some period of time a new dominant party dominates the flow of information to the public, with few countervailing messages.⁽¹⁰⁾ Regime party leaders exploit their near-monopoly over political communications to determine not just what issues will be debated but the terms around which the issues will be framed. In the early 1980s the Republicans emphasized that middle-income Americans were taxpayers first and foremost, rather than beneficiaries of public services. Business policy seekers were similarly addressed as valued resources that had been over-taxed and over-regulated. The party could meet the concerns of citizens-as-taxpayers and business-as-taxpayers by sharply reducing tax rates. (Ginsberg and Shefter, 1990) Although it was true that opinion polls revealed continued staunch public backing for New Deal social programs, the Republicans neutralized the appeal of the old order by using their advantage over information flow to reframe the public agenda.

The new terms of public discourse are derived from the narrative that regime entrepreneurs invent before they come into power. That narrative now provides the symbols and images for elite-level public conversation under the new order. The winners gain an opportunity to circulate their story widely, eclipsing other candidate narratives. As the regime amasses a record of policy accomplishments, moreover, its achievements add to the credibility of the story its leaders tell. If conditions improve under the new dominant coalition (not necessarily as a result of its policies), it secures the hegemony of its narrative for years, perhaps decades, to come. Stories persist not because they are "better" but because they have been associated with effective policies.

Beneath the agreement on central policy choices and obscured by the triumph of the new narrative, partisan regimes are fragile constructions. Participants may be deeply divided over second-order choices - the means or timing for reaching major coalition objectives (Plotke 1996), who should carry out regime policies, and lesser issues that regime entrepreneurs had downplayed or ignored. When second-order decisions arise, regime ideology does not bind partisan officeholders. Disputes over implementation may prompt some coalition backers to conclude that they share more in common with the opposition at the tactical level than with certain fellow party members. For example, after secession in 1861, the Republicans affirmed their intention to restore the Union and set slavery on a path to extinction. But they disagreed sharply about the pace at which to attack slavery, what military policy to assume toward Southern property (including slaves), and what political and military qualifications Union military commanders should have. Some of these differences initially placed moderate and conservative Republicans closer to the position that War Democrats adopted in favor of a war to preserve the Constitution than to that of their radical partisan colleagues. (Polsky 2002)

Divisions within a governing party coalition have several implications. First, where internal regime discord arises, institutions take on renewed importance. The branches of the national government, designed to operate independently and indeed at odds with each other, become the instruments regime players use as they struggle to shape the course the regime will follow. Should different factions within a regime come to dominate different institutional power centers, the conflict will be resolved according to the resources and prerogatives associated with those institutions. Second, institutional leverage can be neutralized by the need of party leaders, especially the president, to preserve support across the entire party coalition. Officeholders who are insecure about their standing within the party may deem it prudent to exchange some of their institutional authority for enhanced support from other party leaders. Third, because so many choices are not circumscribed by party ideology, specific outcomes under a regime depend heavily upon the individuals who occupy particular offices. A full explanation of political outcomes in a regime framework thus will move from partisan commitment and agenda-setting through institutional and intraparty position to individual choice. (Polsky 2002)
 

Consolidation, Stability, and Decay

The upheaval that marks a regime transition and the whirlwind of policy innovation typical of the first years of a new governing coalition soon give way to a more stable set of political arrangements. Once the regime has achieved its primary policy goals, it faces numerous obstacles to further innovation. Coalition factions may not find common ground on the policy challenges that now arise; policies enacted at the start of the regime may generate consequences that drive apart coalition participants (Bensel 1990); regime party politicians find they can better satisfy their ambitions by responding to local policy seekers and constituencies. There is little space within the regime narrative for bold departures - any call for additional dramatic innovation clashes with the confident assertion by the party in power that it has mastered the grave threat facing the nation that it first identified. Radical elements within the coalition may persist with demands to press ahead to complete the regime vision as they construe it, but once many politicians and policy seekers gain a stake in preserving what the regime has done the radical voices find little sympathy. An established regime tends to be conservative and complacent.

Loss of zeal should not be mistaken for weakness, however. Where the opposition mounts a serious challenge to core regime commitments, the dominant coalition still possesses enough energy to turn back the threat and renew itself. The New Deal Democrats faced such a situation after they lost control of Congress in the 1946 election and the Republicans proclaimed their intention to undo some of the policy legacy of the prior decade, especially in the area of labor relations. Plotke (1996) makes a good case for seeing the battle over Taft-Hartley, passed over Truman's veto, as a Democratic victory at the regime level. The Republicans wounded organized labor but the core principles of the Wagner Act survived the conservative-business assault.

Regimes use institutions to preserve their grip on power. Power-sharing within institutions can help dampen intra-regime conflict among different factions and interests. The most obvious example is the allocation of committee power within Congress to allow each regime faction to exercise control over the policy domains that matter most to it and thus yield a structure-induced equilibria. (Shepsle 1989) If the New Deal Democratic coalition stands out as having refined the committee system most fully to preserve harmony between its sectional wings (Bensel 1984, chap. 7), other regimes have recognized the need to address factional claims thru institutional mechanisms. So long as power-sharing institutional arrangements help regime politicians and policy seekers meet their objectives, moreover, those arrangements will command sufficient support to survive. Regimes also create and restructure government agencies to carry out their policies and tend to staff them with public employees sympathetic to the regime. (Shefter 1994) The patronage appointee who campaigned vigorously for his party in the era before civil service reform has a modern counterpart in the New Deal agency functionary who voted reliably Democratic over the course of his career.

For all the efforts to preserve dominant party control, destabilizing elements abound in the political system. In the first place, although the broad opportunity to remold social interests passes with the establishment of a new partisan order, political entrepreneurship may alter how policy seekers choose to pursue their interests. Most policy seekers settle into a new bounded rationality, in which they weigh the limited choices available through normal politics. This exercise yields a preference function: policies are evaluated not merely on their merits but also in terms of the relative political cost that would be incurred in the quest to secure them. An optimal policy might be shunned in favor of one that seems much more possible. But if this appears to invite moderation in policy demands, bold leadership can alter preference functions by changing how policy seekers calculate the relative costs and gains of different policies. (Polsky 2000)

Entrepreneurial political actors may seek to capitalize upon the fluidity of preference functions by making outcomes seem possible that policy seekers have dismissed as too costly. Leaders of the regime party or a quasi-regime coalition, hoping to broaden their support, may articulate a new agenda that aims to redefine what is within reach. This strategy holds special appeal for a political coalition, such as the post-1980 Republican party, that does not secure full control over policy making institutions in the initial burst of regime-building activity. The 1994 Contract With America contained a series of proposals intended to win over business support that had drifted into the Democratic camp by offering forms of regulatory relief that corporations had never believed possible. Even where a new regime does manage to consolidate its rule, political ambition - for higher office, greater influence, and/or policy objectives - encourages entrepreneurial politicians to appeal to policy seekers by redefining the limits of the possible. Paradoxically, regime equilibrium structures may double as power bases from which fringe leaders within the coalition can curry favor with organized policy seekers or mobilize potential backers. Opposition politicians may also try to manipulate preference functions. This is but one of the avenues open to the opposition party once it recovers from the upheaval that cast it into the political wilderness.

A seemingly secure regime may also be left vulnerable by the discursive strategies that had been pursued by its architects. Narratives include implicit and explicit promises to potential supporters to persuade them to enlist in the cause. Inevitably, given that a coalition agrees on only a limited set of first-order priorities, some promises will go unfulfilled and some regime participants will feel abandoned or betrayed. Power-sharing arrangements can purchase temporary peace as can symbolic acknowledgment of the legitimacy of unmet claims. Still, dissatisfied policy seekers may be courted by leaders (especially peripheral ones) within the regime who see division as the path to their own success or by opposition leaders who recognize potential targets for defection.

That partisan regimes may survive for a generation or longer despite threats from within and without can be either the product of a deliberate strategy to modernize the regime or an unintended consequence of short-term political choices by party leaders. Core regime leaders have the most at stake in the established order and so have incentives to incur the costs of sustaining it. Sometimes regime leaders attempt to revive the fervor that marked the regime's origins by finding surrogate targets, as Lyndon Johnson did in the mid-1960s with his Great Society attack on poverty and racial discrimination. A governing coalition can be reinvigorated, too, by regime party politicians who seek immediate policy and political goals. Democratic presidents in the later years of the New Deal coalition reached out to various policy seekers to overcome points of resistance within a congressional committee system better suited to preserving party harmony than fulfilling broad national policy goals. As Cathie Jo Martin (1994) notes in her analysis of the politics surrounding economic policy in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson found it necessary to mobilize business support for particular revenue bills. Their efforts drew certain business interests closer to the Democratic party in the 1964 election. Thus the issue-specific mobilization of interests can have political effects at the partisan regime level, helping to incorporate policy seekers who have become more significant in the interval since the regime was created.

By the same token, however, the effort by political leaders to organize collective action may weaken the regime and leave it more vulnerable in a time of crisis. Where partisan leaders operate within a short time horizon or focus on a limited legislative package, as is commonly the case, they do not calculate the long-term consequences of their actions for the party coalition. Certainly Democrat David Wilmot, worried about his reelection prospects in Pennsylvania in 1848, never envisioned the chain of events that would follow when he offered his famous proviso to bar slavery from the territories newly acquired in the Mexican War - in short order the party system was roiled by the Free Soil defection from the Democratic party, Conscience Whigs unsettled the cross-sectional ties in their party, Southerners demanded a strengthened fugitive slave law and the possibility of slavery in Kansas, these actions fueled northern fears of a Slave Power conspiracy, and more. Further, regime equilibrium arrangements created to assist politicians in meeting their individual objectives can be removed once they become impediments to that end. During the 1960s and early 1970s Democratic congressional leaders, often with an eye on a possible run for the White House, agreed to dismantle the congressional gatekeeping institutions that had helped preserve peace within the party when it became clear that these stood in the way of immediate policy goals. Similarly, as ambitious politicians mobilize support among new policy seekers, no mechanism functions to resolve conflicts with other party supporters who may be antagonized by the incoming interests. Entrepreneurial political initiative can both broaden and destabilize a party coalition.

The destabilizing elements at work in any regime era eventually result in the decay of the dominant coalition. Over time some groups once loyal to the regime become disenchanted by its unresponsiveness; new issues arise for which the regime narrative offers no explanation; and a new generation of ambitious political leaders conclude they can better satisfy their goals by dividing the regime from within or peeling off its supporters from without. Also, notwithstanding the efforts by regime leaders to modernize a governing coalition by incorporating new policy seekers, that strategy confronts an insurmountable tension. Incorporation presupposes either the willingness of other regime actors to share power or an expanding stock of divisible resources. (Plotke 1996) Another approach is to rely heavily on symbolic measures in lieu of real substantive accomplishments. Republican presidents Harding and Coolidge in the 1920s could do little to overcome divisions within the party that lingered from the Progressive insurgency and relied heavily on Herbert Hoover to foster an impression of effective governance. (Polsky and Tkacheva 2002) But gestures do little to reconcile the real tensions that afflict an aging governing order.

Absent some crisis to trigger the formation of a new regime, the decay of a governing coalition results in an interregnum in which no party establishes the hegemony of its narrative or a sustained grip on power. The advantage here lies with politicians and policy seekers tied to the fading order. If they anticipate the loss of control, they can take steps to preserve what they have gained over their years in power. Further, to disrupt established institutions and relationships requires effective governing control, which neither party claims during an interregnum. The Civil War Republicans lost their political dominance by the mid-1870s - over the next two decades Democrats won more seats in the House and more votes for the presidency - but the Republican tariff and military pension policies survived and continued to favor Republican constituencies. In the modern era, the unraveling of the Democratic coalition after 1968 did not spell the end of Democratic institutions. Democrats preserved control of Congress through the interregnum of the 1970s and retained a House majority even after the Reagan Republican "revolution" established a new political narrative in the 1980s.
 

The More Things Change....

In proposing a general theory of American partisan regimes, I have stressed commonalities across time. Two alternative perspectives have been suggested to my emphasis on recurring patterns. According to one view, each regime is a unique formation and is best understood that way. This approach invites us to engage in a close historical inspection of the particulars of each case rather than to search for common elements. A second concept of partisan regimes contends that they have become weaker forces across the span of American political development as the sedimentary accumulation of institutions leaves the political world too "thick" for regimes to have much impact. The lack of any recent realignment, once a cornerstone of regime transitions, lends support to the "regimes-are-history" claim that regime theory can tell us more about the past than about the present or future.

I regard these alternative views as complementary to the theory I have articulated here rather than as its antitheses. There are real limits to what a general theory of partisan regimes can tell us about any particular case. Each regime comes to power under unique political circumstances that may facilitate or impede the realization of its agenda; specific events shape the triumph of a particular regime narrative; creative leadership, factional institutional position, and the intraparty standing of individual leaders determine second-order choices; and whether leaders contribute to regime revival or decay will depend upon the new issues that arise in the stable phase of a given regime's life span. The general theory of regimes tells scholars what to look for in each case but not what they will find.

As the regimes-are-history perspective rightly observes, secular changes in the American political system force regime entrepreneurs in different eras to operate under different constraints and with different resources. But whether that makes regime formation more or less likely and whether that enhances or weakens the power of regimes is an open question. I will offer only a very preliminary assessment here. We should bear in mind that although partisan leaders have powerful incentives for organizing regimes, regime formation is not inevitable. Prospective regime entrepreneurs face enormous obstacles, some chronic (such as the fragmented character of the American political system frustrates the coherent exercise of control and the high transaction cost regime builders must pay to forge a durable governing coalition) and some of recent vintage (for instance, electoral dealignment denies party coalitions in the modern era much of the advantage of party identification). On the other hand, parties have represented a flexible solution to a set of recurring problems that politicians encounter. Regimes, I have suggested, constitute a special case of party formation and maintenance, intended to provide a lasting answer to the challenge of governance in the American system.

Let us weigh first several factors that make regime formation, regime governance, and regime survival more problematic. To the degree that a more highly differentiated and complex society leads to the proliferation of different, mutually exclusive interests - Madison multiplied, as it were - the challenge of framing a unifying narrative may become more daunting. Also, the frayed ties between voters and parties do not make for durable attachments, so the task of mobilizing electoral support must be mastered with each election and with little help from a party label. As party coalitions bid for power in the modern era, moreover, they may find it far more difficult to dislodge adherents of the previous regime. The dense institutional setting that marks the modern American state increases the likelihood of regime overlap. (Skowronek 1993, 30-31, 55-56). Meanwhile, rising party coalitions operate under conditions that tax their capacity to consolidate control and make it probable that regime-building will become a protracted, multi-step process. The experience of the Reaganite Republican coalition illustrates the difficulties of establishing a regime today. Democratic congressional seats were insulated from the Reagan-era electoral shock waves. Although the Republican party briefly seized effective governing power in the early 1980s, it did not secure control of Congress until the 1994 mid-term election, by which time, of course, it had lost the White House. Further, as John Coleman (1996) suggests, significant policy domains have been removed from partisan contestation. Voters accordingly do not identify policy differences between the parties.

On the other side of the coin, certain developments may promote regime formation and effectiveness. I have suggested that the ability of regime leaders to dominate the flow of information to the public contributes to establishing the hegemony of a regime narrative during the founding period of a political order. The highly partisan press of the nineteenth century may have assured politicians of a direct outlet for their views, but also resulted in a competitive information environment that one party could not dominate. Abraham Lincoln faced sharp press criticism from Democratic newspapers almost from the moment he took office in 1861; his administration resorted to press censorship, sometimes through prosecutions and sometimes through unofficial popular action, to silence some of the attacks. By comparison the independent news media and the norm of impartial journalism that characterize our era mean that there will be no institutional counter to the communications juggernaut a new regime presents when it takes power. The proliferation of electronic media also make possible direct communication of partisan story lines to mass publics. In addition, if a partisan coalition can acquire effective governing power today, regime leaders gain access to a vastly larger state with much greater resources, capable of penetrating society to a degree unimaginable a century ago.

At the same time, changes in some parts of the political system may be less consequential than they first appear or may be offset by other developments. Parties no longer command the kind of grass roots organization they had in the mid to late nineteenth century, and regimes cannot rest on the kind of mass voter turnout they once expected. Yet at that time local party leaders could and often did decide to sit out elections or to mobilize support only for some campaigns. The Democrats likely would have won the 1880 presidential campaign had not a local party leader in New York refused to mobilize his troops lest he lose control of the state party organization. (Jordan 1988) Other evidence accumulates that party organization was not so pervasive in that era as scholars have depicted. (Formisano 1999) In our own time parties draw upon different resources, with candidate-centered campaigns that depend upon election professionals and citizen activists. But the professionals tend to work for candidates in one party, and the citizen activists are deeply passionate and respond to ideological messages - and partisan narratives - at least as strongly as did low-level party operatives of an earlier generation.

Changes in the political system, then, do not point decisively to a weakening of the regime pattern in American political development. Rather, it seems likely that regimes differ across time in certain respects, including how mass constituencies are integrated into the governing coalition, whether policy seekers are incorporated as organized interests or through local party channels, the means partisan entrepreneurs use to circulate their narratives, the likelihood that an emerging coalition will secure effective governing power in a single national election, how quickly a regime can penetrate the state apparatus, and more. The significance of these differences can only be assessed once they have been systematically investigated through comparative historical analysis.
 

Conclusion

Regime theory offers a promising framework for integrating several important trends in the scholarship on American politics. The theory moves beyond the analytical and historical limitations of the realignment perspective by focusing on the role of political leaders in solving problems of collective action. Reflecting the attention to discourse and narrative that has become an emphasis in both policy literature and historical research, regime theory also reserves a central role for political narratives in shaping interests and forging coalitions. The impressive record of new regimes in accomplishing their core objectives suggests how important partisan transitions are in broad processes of political change: dominant party coalitions assume power with the institutional, intellectual, and political resources needed to overcome the centrifugal forces that ordinarily frustrate change in the American political system. A regime framework also draws upon new institutionalist insights by stressing the significance of institutional position in explaining second-order outcomes, by recognizing the potential value of institutional solutions to intraparty conflicts, and by appreciating how those same solutions may be undermined by entrepreneurial leaders within the regime.

On a metatheoretical level, the theory of American partisan regimes that I present here attempts to draw together two currents within political science whose proponents are often at odds with each other. Rational choice and social choice scholarship, grounded in economic logic, rightly calls our attention to the microfoundation of politics in everyday human motivations, especially political ambition. But this orientation understates the richness and complexity of politics, including the role discursive processes play in shaping how people come to construe their self-interest and defining the terms upon which politics will be conducted. In contrast, political scientists who emphasize the power of ideas capture the creative side of regime building and the genuine passion that drives many partisan entrepreneurs. It is hard otherwise to explain someone like Ronald Reagan, who warns against the evils of an expanding welfare state at the very peak of Great Society enthusiasm. Surely the notion of Reagan as a crusader is more compelling than the claim he is practicing what Riker calls the "heresthetic art" of instrumental manipulation of ideas. (Smith 1992) Yet the discursive approach often neglects or understates collective action problems that recur in politics. Regime theory bridges the divide between formal theory and discursive approaches.

Much work remains to be done. The theory of American partisan regimes appears to suggest broad but indeterminate processes of regime formation. Although the theory anticipates that ambitious leaders will tell stories, it does not offer much guidance on the content of those stories or on whether there are limits to how far narratives can go that are imposed by broader constraining forces in American politics or political culture. Regime theory asserts that partisan entrepreneurs bid for the support of policy seekers, but does not clarify whether some policy seekers occupy a "privileged position." To what degree is the quest for support constrained by structural economic position? Has this changed over time? Does the need for legitimacy of a party that is challenging the established order preclude policy commitments to mass social movements? The quest for definitive propositions on these and other issues rests upon inductive reasoning and so leads us back to the close study of historical cases.
 

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Notes

1. Unfortunately, I have helped foster the confusion surrounding the term "regime" by defining differently as my own views have developed. Compare the definition offered here with Polsky 1997b and Polsky 2000a.

2. On the Republican regime in the 1920s and the governance dilemmas it faced, see Polsky and Tkacheva (2002).

3. Scholarship on policy legacies may follow a similar approach. See Pierson 1993.

4. For a useful critique of realignment scholarship, see McCormick 1986. The extensive literature on realignment is examined in Bass 1991. For a recent critique, see Mayhew 2002

5. On the move of voters away from parties in the contemporary era, see Coleman 1996 and Aldrich 1995.

6. On constitutive politics more generally, see Berk 1994.

7. On the persistence of themes in party platforms and campaigns, see Gerring (1998).

8. There is a clear parallel to this point in the policy literature that stresses the notion of a "window of opportunity." (Kingdon 1995)

9. This point is based on an argument Aldrich derives from social choice theory about preference orderings within partisan coalitions where one party has been excluded from power for some time. (Aldrich 1995, 222-23)

10. The impact of a one-sided information flow on public opinion is discussed in Zaller (1992).