CHAPTER 4POLITICAL PARTIES

Ideology

• Definition– Ideology is a system of beliefs and values

about the nature of the good life, society, the economy, moral values, and the role of government.

– "Liberalism" and "conservatism" are the two dominant systems of beliefs and values in American and Texas life today.

Ideology

• Conservatism– The basic conservative principle in economic policy is

laissez-faire, but in practice conservatives often pursue "pseudo laissez-faire," that is, the theoretical assertion that an unregulated economy produces the best results coupled with practical support for government policies that help business to overcome problems in the market place.

– Commonly described as being on the “right wing” of the political spectrum, conservatives argue that economic problems are caused by over-regulation by government.

Ideology • Liberalism

– Liberals are more apt to blame "market failure" for economic problems and to place more faith in the ability of government to direct economic activity.

– Commonly described as being on the “left wing” of the political spectrum, liberals usually oppose government activity in the personal sphere while conservatives generally favor government regulation in areas such as religion, sexual activity, and drug use.

– On foreign policy issues liberals and conservatives tend to follow partisan rather then ideological cues.

– Because of these contradictions, ideological debates are often confusing, but in Texas as else where ideological arguments form the basis for a great deal of rhetoric and intense disputes over public policy.

Ideology • Ideology in Texas

– Texas has historically been dominated by a combination of the traditionalist and individualist political cultures which are translated, in the Texas case, into an ideology of political conservatism.

– A 2002 survey reported that only 18 percent of Texans think of themselves as liberal while 52 percent call themselves conservative.

– Self-report numbers may contain ambiguities but are sufficiently dramatic to emphasize the weakness of the liberal ideological tradition in Texas.

– Although the national Democratic party is controlled by liberals and the national Republican party is controlled by conservatives, both parties in Texas are unusually conservative.

– The Texas Democratic party is comparatively more liberal that its Republican counterpart because it contains a large and active liberal minority.

Political Socialization

• Definition– The process of political socialization explains how the

attitudes and values of the conservative political culture that dominates Texas is transmitted from one generation to another.

– Political socialization is the process by which we teach and learn our political knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, values and habits of behavior.

– The basic agents of political socialization are family, schools, churches, and the media.

Political Socialization

• Family– The most important agent of socialization, the

family, furnishes the child's attitude toward authority and community, which, in Texas, means that most parents pass along an anti-government attitude and conservative philosophy to their children.

– Basic political orientations are difficult to alter, thus the ideas of Texas citizens change only slowly.

Political Socialization • Schools and Churches

– Churches and, more significantly, public schools also have a conservative influence on political attitudes.

– While Roman Catholicism, which is prevalent among Mexican Americans, has historically been more encouraging of government activity on behalf of the poor, Protestantism, the state’s dominant religion among the historically dominant social group, has tended to reinforce political conservatism.

– There is little evidence that schools in Texas educate children about politics or encourage them to democratic participation beyond voting.

– A study of political socialization in one small South Texas town conducted by anthropologist Douglas Foley in the 1970s and 1980s found that the town’s schools simply reflected the conservatism of the community, which neither demanded nor encouraged an open, imaginative, or critical curriculum.

– Foley’s conclusions are consistent with the observation that Texas schools tend generally to educate children to passivity rather than to democratic participation.

Political Socialization

• Media– The Texas news media, which generally rely

for advertising revenues from other businesses, tend to echo the business point of view on most issues.

– In the last decade or so, talk radio, which is dominated by conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, has become a new political force.

Political Socialization

• Evaluation– Although most agents of political socialization in

Texas support the conservative political culture, factors such as the influence of individual personality, the presence of some liberal agents of political socialization, the national news media, and the migration of people into the state mean that the dominant political culture is being challenged and modified by competing cultural values.

– Interests are as important as ideology as a basis for party support.

Interests

• Definition– An interest is something of value or some

personal characteristic that people share and that is affected by government activity.

– When the two major parties differ on public policy issues, people often side with the party favoring their interests regardless of whether their political ideology is in line with the party's.

Interests• The Effects of Interests

– Parties often sacrifice ideological consistency by taking positions designed to attract support from a coalition of interests.

• In recent years, Republican candidates in Texas have tended to favor tort reform while Democratic candidates have tended to side with plaintiffs in lawsuits.

• As a result of these positions, those interests who tend to be the target of lawsuits (doctors and business owners, for example) have leaned toward Republican candidates while those who benefit from such suits (plaintiff's attorneys) have leaned toward Democratic candidates.

– Interests and ideology may combine in different ways, sometimes opposing and sometimes reinforcing one another.

• A Mexican American doctor might find that her professional and ethnic interests conflict, creating difficulties in deciding how to vote.

• An Anglo oil company executive or an African American labor union president would likely experience no such conflict.

– It is important to understand that not every person who has an interest agrees with every other person with the same interest and thus a description of interests provides evidence only of partisan tendencies.

– Rather than remain static, ideologies and interests evolve as history changes the way people live.

Texas Political Parties—A Brief History

• The Nineteenth Century– Although no parties existed in Texas prior to

statehood, Sam Houston's dominance of Texas politics led to the formation of pro- and anti-Houston factions which debated policy issues.

– Because Texas entered the Union with Democratic party support as a slave state, most Texans identified with the Democrats.

– Most Texans' identification of the Republicans with the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction policies made Texas, like other former Confederate states, a solid one-party Democratic state after the Civil War.

Texas Political Parties—A Brief History

• One-Party vs. Two-Party Systems– Two-party systems, such as that of the U.S. at the

national level, promote debate on policy issues and provide a forum for emerging minorities and emerging issues.

– Political participation (including voter turnout) is generally greater in a two-party system than in a one-party system.

– One-party systems promote only limited debate on policy issues and make party labels worthless.

– Because those sharing the Democratic label in Texas were neither ideologically homogeneous nor committed to the party, one-party politics was really no-party politics.

Texas Political Parties—A Brief History

• The Transition to Two-Party Politics– The transition to two-party politics in Texas, as in most of

the South, has been gradual.– Beginning in 1928, Texas voted Republican in national

elections on occasion and, in 1961, Republican Senator John Tower first broke the Democrats' monopoly in statewide elections.

– In 1978, Bill Clements became the state's first Republican governor in 104 years, but not until the 1984 Republican landslide was the Democrats' hold over Texas broken at the local level.

– The election of 1994 was a watershed as Republicans defeated an incumbent Democratic Governor, retained a second U.S. Senate seat, pulled almost even in the state senate, and won hundreds of local offices.

Texas Political Parties—A Brief History

• A Political Realignment– By 2004 Texas could just barely be considered a two-

party state with Republicans holding every state-wide elective office, both US Senate positions, and a majority of the state senate.

– Survey research in 2002 indicated that 47 percent of Texas voters described themselves as more-or-less regular supporters of Republicans, while only 39 percent were regular supporters of Democrats.

– Thus, during the last two decades of the twentieth century Texas went through a political realignment.

Texas Political Parties—A Brief History

• Differences between the Parties– While the growth of two-party competition in Texas has

been good for democracy by promoting a robust debate between the parties on many issues of importance to citizens, it remains an open question whether democratic discussion will be maintained if Republicans continue their statewide dominance.

– Differences between the parties are of two types.• The two parties oppose each other on some issues, such as

abortion and minimum wage.• The two parties are concerned about different issues, as is

evidenced by the Republicans' concern with the right to gun ownership and the Democrats' support of affordable child care.

Functions of Political Parties • The basic purpose of parties is to win elections and thus gain

the opportunity to exercise control over public policy.• Parties may perform a number of functions including:

– Involving ordinary people in the political process.– Recruiting political leaders.– Communicating to the leaders the interests of individuals

and groups.– Providing factual information and persuasive argument in

public policy debates.– Structuring political conflict and debate, sometimes by

screen ing out the demands of minority groups lacking political clout.

– Moderating differences between groups.– Partially overcoming the fragmented nature of the political

system.

Party Organization

• Introduction– Parties have many different structural patterns.– Compared to parties in other democracies, American

parties are structurally weak, and parties in Texas are especially weak in an organizational sense.

– In Texas and in most other states, parties are divided into a permanent organization, a skeleton force that conducts the routine but essential business of the party, and a temporary organization, which comes alive in election years in an effort to capture power.

Party Organization • The Temporary Party Organization

– Membership• The temporary organization is focused on the spring primary, where

the emphasis is on choosing attractive candidates, and fall general election, where an effort is made to mobilize voters to support them.

• Texas has no permanent political party rolls and thus party membership is determined by the act of voting in one party's primary.

– Precinct and County Conventions• A small fraction of voters in each precinct takes part in the pre cinct

convention where resolutions regarding party policy are made.• The main function of the precinct convention is to select delegates

to the county convention, which in turn has as its main function selecting delegates to the state convention.

Party Organization • The Temporary Party Organization, cont.

– The State Convention• Each party holds its state convention on a weekend in

June in even-numbered years and the convention performs several important functions.

– It certifies the party nominees for the general election.– It writes the party platform.– It selects the members of the State Executive Committee

(SEC).– It selects the Texas committeeman and committeewoman to the

national party committee.– It makes the final selection of delegates to the national party

convention.– It selects a slate of presidential electors to serve in the electoral

college in the event that the party’s candidates for president and vice-president win in Texas.

Party Organization – The State Convention, cont.

• Party conventions have tended, over the past several decades, to travel in opposite directions, the Democrats from argument to harmony, the Republicans from agreement to disharmony.

– Until the 1980s liberals and conservatives within the Democratic party fought vigorously over party platforms and leaders, but with liberals coming to dominate the organizational level of the party during the 1990s, conventions have tended to adopt liberal platforms and save their criticism for the Republicans.

– In contrast, when Republicans were a small minority they rarely argued over policy in their conventions, but as the party grew their conventions have reflected the internal disagreements between social and economic conservatives.

– The Republican state convention of 1994 set a new pattern with the ability of the Christian Right to elect a majority of the delegates to the convention and thereby dominate its proceedings.

– This grass-roots insurrection at the Republican state convention demonstrates the impact that dedicated citizens can have on party machinery.

– The domination of Republican state conventions by the Christian Right continued through the 2004 convention.

Party Organization – The State Convention, cont.

• The importance of party conventions should not be exaggerated.

– Because candidates are nominated in primaries and raise their own campaign funds, the state convention and party platforms are of little importance to what nominees say and do.

– In 1994, George W. Bush and Kay Bailey Hutchison pointed ignored the state Republican platform and in 2002 Governor Rick Perry publicly opposed 23 of the 46 planks in the Republican platform.

– A party’s platform positions are good indications of the values and beliefs of the major party activists as groups, but are not reliable guides to the issue positions of candidates as individuals.

Party Organization • The Permanent Party Organization

– Precinct Chairpeople• The precinct chairperson, the lowest-ranking permanent party

official, is elected by voters in that precinct's party primary to serve a two-year term.

• Duties include recruiting candidates, arranging for the precinct convention, getting out the vote, and generally promoting the party.

– County Executive Committees• Precinct chairs collectively make up the County Executive

Committee, which conducts the party primary and the county convention.

• The county chairperson, the most important official at the local level, is elected for a two-year term.

• Following the primary election, the County Executive Committee canvasses the vote and certifies the results to the State Executive Committee.

Party Organization • The Permanent Party Organization, cont.

– The District Executive Committee• These committees, whose membership varies according to the

number of counties that comprise the senatorial district, are supposed to perform party primary duties related to the district.

• In practice, few District Executive Committees are functional.

– The State Executive Committee• This is the highest permanent body in the state party

organization.• The chair generally works closely with the party's top leaders and

elected officials.• The executive committees of both parties are responsible for

staging the state conventions and certifying the parties' candidates, and for coordinating a general party campaign.

Party Organization • The (Un)Importance of Party Organization

– American political parties are not "responsible parties"--that is, they cannot completely control nominations, campaign financing, or party members' adherence to the party platform.

– With candidates forced to rely on their own fund-raising and organizing abilities to win office, they are more likely to feel beholden to a wealthy interest group rather than to their party.

– While parties may be able to fashion a "party attitude" on public policy, they cannot put together a disciplined governing team.

– Parties in Texas fail to perform many of the functions that make parties useful elsewhere and thus it is more realistic to view them as loose confederations of citizens, interest groups, and office holders temporarily cooperating because of occasional ideological agreement and parallel interests.

– Lack of party cohesiveness in the legislature results in political conflict that lacks stability and order and citizens have difficulty holding politicians accountable for their actions.

– The practice of presiding officers in the legislature appointing members of both parties to chair important committees reflects Texas’s weak parties.

– The lack of partisan organization is likely to change in the aftermath of the redistricting fight of 2003 to a much stronger legislative party organizations and more cohesive party voting with the possible consequence that state government will be more coherent and responsible.

– The primary election of 2004 between African American Democrats Ron Wilson and Alma Allen indicate a new world of Texas politics where party loyalty matters.

Two Parties, Three Factions (or Perhaps Four) • Republicans

– Political Culture and Background• Although recent disagreements have divided social from economic

conservatives within the Texas Republican party, these disagreements have not created two cadres of elected officials as virtually all elected Republicans are economic conservatives first.

• The Republican party in Texas is strongly conservative and, while sometimes sliding into pseudo laissez-faire under the pressure of actual politics, can generally be counted on to favor a cheaper, less active government than the Democratic party, except in the area of national defense.

• Texas's two U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, are good representatives of this ideological position.

– Geographic Distribution• Because Republicans are clearly the dominant party in Texas, it is easier

to describe the areas where they are weakest.• They are weakest in the areas of the state where Mexican Americans are

in a majority and in central Texas, the extreme southeastern part of the state, in a few counties near the Louisiana border, and in central cities.

– Socioeconomic and Ethnic Distribution• Republican activists in Texas are Anglo, middle and upper class, and

business people or professionals and tend to be evangelical Protestants. • The Republican party has not attracted significant numbers of minorities

since the 1960s.

Two Parties, Three Factions (or Perhaps Four) • Conservative Democrats

– Political Culture• Conservative Democrats are representatives of the Old South political

culture which is very conservative on social issues but may hold a populist attitude on economic issues.

• Conservative Democrats who are activists and officeholders are slightly less devoted to laissez-faire than Republicans are, but much more so than the liberal faction of the Democratic party.

• Three of the major Democratic candidates during the 2002 campaign, Tony Sanchez, Ron Kirk, and John Sharp, were so conservative that they were almost indistinguishable from their Republican opponents.

– Geographic Distribution• Conservative Democrats’ traditional base is in East Texas where the

traditionalist political culture is strongest but Republicans have substantially cut into this base of White conservatives

• Small cities and rural areas often remain conservative Democratic in their affiliation, but they are evolving toward the Republican party.

– Socioeconomic and Ethnic Distribution• Conservative Democrats until recently drew support from all classes in

Texas, but as Republicans increase their support among the wealthy, they have lost support among the Anglo middle and upper classes, business and professional people, and white-collar workers.

• Conservative Democrats continue to draw support from workers, especially those in rural areas and small cities, although this pattern may be changing as well.

Two Parties, Three Factions (or Perhaps Four) • Liberal Democrats

– Political Culture• Liberal Democrats generally support government activity in behalf

of those who have less wealth and power while generally opposing government intervention in personal life.

• Former Governor Ann Richards and former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros are among Texas's liberal Democrats.

– Geographic Distribution• Liberals are most successful in the areas of Texas where

Hispanics are most numerous, in southern and far western areas of the state and near the border with Mexico.

• Support for liberal Democrats also comes from areas where labor unions are a factor (far East Texas, East Central Texas, and much of the Gulf Coast).

• Liberals generally do well in Austin, Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange, Corpus Christi, and El Paso.

Two Parties, Three Factions (or Perhaps Four) • Liberal Democrats, cont.

– Socioeconomic and Ethnic Distribution• Liberal Democratic strength in Texas is based on an uneasy coalition of

various socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups, each with a slightly different political agenda.

• Liberal support comes primarily from labor unions, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and certain educated Anglos.

• Most liberal leaders are from the legal, teaching, and other professions.• Union officials, formerly among the leaders of the liberal faction, have

generally become more conservative in recent years.– The Future of the Three-Faction System

• Conservative Democrats are being drained of votes by Republicans on their political right and losing power to liberals on their political left within the Democratic party.

• Republicans steadily draw away conservative voters, while liberals continue to dominate the party organization.

• As Texas evolves toward a population in which minorities constitute a majority, Democrats will continue to nominate many Mexican American and African American candidates.

– If voter turnout rates continue to favor conservative Anglos, Republicans will dominate Texas for a long time to come.

– If liberal-leaning minorities begin to vote at higher rates, they will alter the party balance decisively.

Third Parties in Texas

• The History of Third Parties in Texas– There have been many third parties in Texas, the

most noteworthy of which was the Populist party around the turn of the century.

– The Populists, like many other third parties in Texas (and at the national level), did not survive, although some of their positions were adopted by the major parties.

– Among the other parties that have run candidates in Texas are the Prohibitionists, Socialists, Communists, States Righters, American Independence Party, and the Reform Party.

– In the late 1990s and early 2000s the two most vigorous third parties were the Greens, who were on the ultraliberal end of the political spectrum, and the Libertarians, the consistent anti-government party.

Third Parties in Texas • Mexican American Political Organization in

Texas– Mexican Americans in Texas have organized a

number of political groups intended to improve the lot of Spanish-speaking Texans.

– In the 1970s, Mexican Americans established La Raza Unida, a true political party.

– La Raza Unida won some local elections in Texas before ceasing to exist in the early 1980s following personal and factional feuding within the party and FBI infiltration for alleged radicalism.

– Mexican Americans are now represented not by a political party but by several interest groups, including LULAC and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and two organizations within the Democratic Party, Mexican-American Democrats (MAD) and Tejano Democrats.