PLS 103 Lecture 6 1. Today Missouri parties. Last lecture before the exam. We need to start with some

Transcription

1 PLS 103 Lecture 6 1 Today Missouri parties. Last lecture before the exam. We need to start with some terms. In order to understand political parties in the United States, in order to understand political parties in Missouri, you need to recognize that there are three different party parts. Say that 10 times fast and we ll have a lot of fun. The first party part is what we call party in the electorate. Second party part we call party in government and the third party part, party in organization. In order to understand how parties work in Missouri, you need to understand these three things. When we say party in the electorate we mean voters, people like you who identify with the major parties and the minor parties, for that matter. When we say party in the electorate we mean those of you who consider yourselves Democrats, those of you who consider yourselves Republicans, those of you who consider yourselves Libertarian. Party in government is fairly self-explanatory. Elected officials. If the Governor is a Democrat or a Republican, if the senator is a Democrat or Republican, members of the House, Democrat or Republicans, these are what we call party in government. Those people in office who consider themselves Democrats or Republicans, and so on. Party in organization are not elected officials but party officials. Here we would talk about the National Democratic Committee, the Republican National Committee. We talk about the State Democratic and Republican Committee. Down a little bit further we would talk about county chairmen, the Democratic county chairman in Greene County, the Republican county chairman. These are party officials. And what we ve discovered is that these three party parts don t always have the same opinion. It s important to recognize these three distinctions before we get too carried away

2 PLS 103 Lecture 6 2 with our definitions. What you now want to think about is two different types of party. I m gonna move over here. Two different types of party. Ideological parties or pragmatic parties. I ll give you the definitions. It ll take awhile for all this stuff to come together. Ideological parties are defined by principle. Ideological parties are defined by principle. If I needed a scholar to define ideological parties, I would turn to the English writer, Edmund Burke, who believed that parties were defined by principle. What that means is, parties are defined by what they stand for. Pragmatic parties are defined by election. And we would turn to the American political scientist, Leon Epstein, for a definition of pragmatic parties, meaning they are defined not by principle but by election. The most important thing to distinguish is ideological parties stand for something. If you are a member of this party, you believe in the same things that every other member of this party believes in. If you have a pragmatic party, what unites the members of the party is a label. We are all this party or that party, even though we do not agree on the same things. The easiest way to think about this is to think about Democrats and Republicans. Are all Democrats pro-choice? You have to shake your head louder. They can t hear it on camera. No, not all Democrats are pro-choice. Are all Republicans pro-life? No. Are all Democrats in favor of the war or opposed to the war? Are all Republicans in favor of the war or opposed to the war? Are all Republicans in favor of this, are all Republicans in favor of that? The answer is no. Nationally, parties in the United States are defined by pragmatism, not principle. Now, am I saying that the parties don t stand for anything? No, I m not saying that. But the

3 PLS 103 Lecture 6 3 difference between the parties is not as great as you might think. So we re gonna spend some time talking about this. We need to talk about it at the national level and we need to talk about it at the Missouri level. Let s talk about party in the electorate for just a second. Let s talk about you. Standard left/right scale on ideology. What is this? What do we call this? It s a Bell curve. What else do we call it if we re statistically really up on things? It s more than a Bell curve. What is this? What do we call this? It s a distribution. What kind of distribution? Okay. We ll find out where you transferred from in a little while. This is what we call a normal distribution. Normal distribution. Where are you on this scale? Where are you on this scale, left/right? Where are most people on this scale, left/right? Most people in the middle. Most Americans are in the middle. Now, there s a statistic definition of that middle but you can just see by the graph most people are in the middle. So let s take that and add a couple of things like an election. Where do you want to be where do you want to be if you re a Democrat running for office? No, you wouldn t want to be on the far right. Where do you want to be if you re running for office? You want to be in the middle because that s where the people are. All right. So if you re a Democrat you want to be in the middle. Where do you want to be if you re a Republican? You want to be in the middle. So the Democrats and Republicans fight over the middle. That s where you are so that s where they want to be. Because in order to be in office, in order to get elected, the conventional wisdom for elections in the United States is that the parties move toward the

4 PLS 103 Lecture 6 4 middle because that s where you are. Now, let me get this out of the way for just a second. Where is the middle for Massachusetts? The middle for Massachusetts is to the left. And so where are the Republicans in Massachusetts gonna be? They re gonna move to the left with the middle and Democrats are gonna move to they re gonna move to the left to be with the middle. Arizona s middle is to the right. It s not as if Arizona has a different scale. Arizona s middle is just a little bit to the right. So to get elected in Arizona as a Democrat, you would need to be more conservative. The only reason we mention that is we have to say where is Missouri s middle? What kind of state is Missouri? It s a conservative state and it s an individualistic state. Missouri s middle is a little to the right of the national middle, so both Democrats and Republicans in Missouri want to be in the middle just like everybody else. But the middle in Missouri is a little bit to the right of the middle in Illinois. The middle in Missouri is a little bit left than the middle in some other states. The important thing is I want to get elected. In order to get elected, I need to be where the voters are. Do I want to be on the far left? Do I want to be in the medium left? I want to be as close to the middle as possible. You can think about this nationally. We ll go back in history just a little bit. Turn of the century, 1900, the progressive movement. The Progressive party as a third party is getting more and more popular, getting more and more votes. And so Teddy Roosevelt becomes head of the Republican party and he takes the Republican party to the left because more and more people the middle in the United States is moving left. The Republican party moves to the left with it under Roosevelt. The Democratic party under Woodrow Wilson moves to the

5 PLS 103 Lecture 6 5 left to be where the voters are. It is important to remember that parties in the United States, parties in Missouri, are defined by elections. Parties in the United States are pragmatic parties. Parties in Missouri are pragmatic parties. Again, this is not saying that parties don t stand for anything. We will talk about this distance. On this scale, it doesn t seem like a lot. But at election time we make a lot we have a lot of ads, a lot of campaigns, a lot of money being spent to emphasize the difference between these two parties. We ll talk about that in just a second. Parties in the United States, parties in Missouri, are defined pragmatically. Both major parties in Missouri are slightly to the right of the national middle because that s where Missouri is. Let me erase this one. We want to talk about these two. We want to talk about these two. The conventional wisdom for American politics is that parties at election time move to the middle because that s where the voters are. That conventional wisdom is being changed a little bit. There s a political scientist whose name is Paddock who s doing state-level analysis and there s another scholar some of you may actually have heard of because he writes for one of the Washington papers who s been looking at some national level data. The word that we need to talk about now is what we call political efficacy. Let me write that down. Political efficacy. Your belief that you have some say in government. Your belief that your vote is meaningful. Your belief that the major parties, the elected officials, listen to you. What would you say about people s political efficacy in the United States? It s low. It has gone down dramatically since the turn of the century. How many people vote? About 50 percent in presidential elections. Much less in local elections, statewide elections, initiatives

6 PLS 103 Lecture 6 6 and referendums. Much less. One of the reasons that people don t vote we think has to do with declining political efficacy. People don t think it matters. Well, what these two scholars are addressing or looking at is why you don t think it matters. And we draw a line again. Now, this is not a normal distribution. This is what s called a bimodal distribution where there is a clear right and a clear left, and very little in the middle. Very little in the middle. We are changing that conventional wisdom because of this type of scholarship. What we are seeing in Washington --we ll start in Washington is that elected officials, Democrats and Republicans, in the House and in the Senate, are moving apart from each other. There is no middle or at least the middle is getting very small. Party officials at the national level are moving apart from each other. There is no middle ground for the two national parties. Dionne studies this at the national level. The reason you don t vote in presidential elections, the reasons you don t participate very much anymore, is that you don t see that your vote matters. Because you are let s go back to you you are in the middle. Whether you re a Democrat or a Republican, the average electorate voter is somewhere in the middle and neither party is responsive when it comes to party in government or party in organization. Now, at the state level let s talk about the state level. I m sorry that I ll have to erase and do a different slightly different drawing. A couple of different versions of this. Here is a what kind of state? This is a conservative state where there is a clear majority on the right and what they call the loyal opposition on the left. This group is separated by a great gulf of nothing in the middle, but they re not going to they re not gonna win anything in the near future. The other option is the reverse where you have a state that is dominated with one

7 PLS 103 Lecture 6 7 party on the left with a smaller loyal opposition on the right. The point that Dr. Paddock would make is that the parties in the state legislature are moving farther and farther to the left and to the right, where they have a clearly defined ideological position. That parties in the organization and parties in government are becoming defined by ideology where you, party in the electorate, is still defined by pragmatism where you are still in the middle. The argument is that these states you ll have declining political efficacy because you are still in the middle. Now, what we re trying to sort out is whether you, party in the electorate, are going to join the party in organization, party in government, in moving that direction as well. Right now most of the public opinion polling, the data that we get back, we find that you re still in the middle and you re increasingly dissatisfied with your elected officials because they are moving farther and farther away from you. But again, in order to understand all that, you have to understand the difference between electorate government and organization, and then you have to recognize that there s two different types of parties. It appears that party in government, party in organization, are increasingly defined by ideology while party in electorate is still defined by pragmatism. This is deep political science-y stuff. Now, what about Missouri? That s the most important thing. The pattern in Missouri we ll have to erase one last time. Well, that s not a very accurate drawing. Sorry. We apologize to the viewers at home. Missouri is moving in the bimodal direction. Missouri is already a conservative, individualistic state. In recent years the parties have been very evenly balanced in the House and in the Senate. This past election the Republicans took

8 PLS 103 Lecture 6 8 control of the House and the Senate. The margins are not so far that we re gonna show this skewed as we did in the other drawings, but there is, at least according to Dr. Paddock s data, a movement in Jefferson City, in the party officials within the Democrat and Republican parties, away from the middle and towards the left and towards the right. Again, we want to know if you re still here in the middle how you re going to respond to that change. Do you want to ask questions about this? Again, this is deep stuff. We ve got plenty of other things to do. All right. We want to talk about why it works this way. Let me erase. It s really deep and current stuff. Deep and current stuff. We want to talk about go back to that conventional wisdom in terms of parties being defined by the middle and talk a little bit more about election law. I ll just put it over here. I have a very small state. It has four legislative districts. Okay. This will make sense in just a second. Favorite color? Green. Favorite color? Purple. Oh, sorry. Didn t want to make it a want to give the purple some hope. Okay. I ve got four legislative districts. That means I have four seats in my legislature. It s a very small country. Who wins the most seats? Green wins the most seats. By a lot? No. If you think about it, where are about half of the voters? Half the voters are Purple and half the voters are Green. But in my legislature, how many seats is green gonna get? Three. All right. It s important to recognize this. We ll come back to our normal distribution again in just a second. First thing. We have in the United States we have, in Missouri, single member districts. One person and one person only can represent this district. Other countries do this differently. But in Missouri one person and one person only can represent this district. Now,

9 PLS 103 Lecture 6 9 how do I know who s gonna win? What we call winner take all. So even if how many people voted for Purple? About? Almost half voted for Purple. What do you get as the representative of the Purple party? You get nothing. You get nothing. Okay. So it s winner take all. Now, another fancy word for that and I ll give you another example here would be plurality elections. In the United States and in Missouri we have plurality elections. So let s introduce we need another color. I need another color. What s your favorite color? Black. Black will work. I was gonna say let s give who s gonna win that seat? Black. The Black party wins that seat. Because? Winner takes all, plurality elections. Now, this one is crucial. Even though what would you say? How did Jesse Ventura get elected Governor? Black is gonna win this seat, even though finish that sentence. You can do it. Even though more people voted against Black, 66 percent voted against Black, Black still gets the seat because Black got the most votes. That s what we call plurality elections. Now, let s go back. Where are most people? Most people are in the middle. Do you want to be pink? Do you want to be puce? Where is puce gonna be on our scale here? Where s violet going to be? Where s mauve going to be? The farther you go this way in the rainbow, the less likely you are to win any votes. You have to get the majority so you have to be in the middle. So it draws you to those primary colors. It draws you to the middle. The election system by itself defines parties here in the middle. Third thing. Ballot access. Ballot access. Most of what happens in the United States, most of what happens in Missouri, is defined by single member districts and winner take all.

10 PLS 103 Lecture 6 10 This explains why parties are the way they are. Let s have our Black candidate we ll use Black as an example. You re the upstart third candidate or third party. You re energized. Are you excited about the upcoming election? You want to get on the ballot so that you can get your feelings out. You really believe in something. You stand for something. So what do you have to do, according to Missouri law? You have to take your clipboard to Wal-Mart. Okay, you don t have to take it to Wal-Mart. You need to get signatures on a petition in order to get on the ballot. In order to get on the ballot. We have two things having to do with ballot access here. In order to get on the ballot, you have to get signatures on a petition. The best way to get signatures on a petition in Missouri is to go to Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart is where people go and Wal-Mart is everywhere. You get I won t tell you the number. It s based on the number of votes in the previous election. You get signatures on your petition in every county in Missouri and you get on the ballot. So you re excited, you re fired up about the Black party issues, you re gonna go to Wal-Mart, you re gonna get all your supporters to go to Wal-Mart, you re gonna get the requisite number of signatures. He s on the ballot. Okay, he s on the ballot. Second part. He s gotta stay on the ballot. How do you stay on the ballot in Missouri? What do you think? You have to get a certain number of votes. Just like you had to get a fixed number of signatures on a petition, in order to stay on the ballot you have to get a certain number of votes. Now, Black party. They re energized, they re pumped, but they re the new kid on the block. Are they gonna get the required number of votes? What do you think? What do you think? C mon, be honest. You re not.

11 PLS 103 Lecture 6 11 That first time that first time you get on the ballot, you re fired up, you re excited, but you just haven t gotten the word out to enough voters and you don t make the minimum number of votes, so you don t get to stay on the ballot. So next election, do you still believe in the principles of Black? And you re fired up. You did okay, you re gonna try it again. So you ve gotta go back to you gotta go back to Wal-Mart to get signatures on your petition. And you got more signatures. You re excited. You got more. You did a little bit better. You got more signatures, you re back on the ballot. Second election comes around ooooh, it was so close. But still? No, you didn t make it. What kills most third parties? You just the amount of work involved to get on and stay on the ballot is enormous. Getting on is one thing. Lots of legwork involved. Staying on is really the same thing. You have to get that number of signatures. Now, not that this happens very often, but what happens as the Black party gets closer and closer and closer to the requisite number of votes to stay on the ballot? Well, that s a separate issue and that s probably true. The other parties probably moved towards the Black party, but that s a little bit different. You re the two major parties in control of the state legislature and state law. You see this third party getting a little bit more popular, a little bit more popular, a little bit more popular. What do you do? Well, you re already out against them. You have something at your disposal that s better than that. You write the laws. What re you gonna do? No, we aren t gonna outlaw em. You don t need to do that. What re you gonna do? Right here. What re you gonna do? No, they get their votes or not. What re you gonna do? You re in charge of the legislature. What re you gonna do to ballot access? You re gonna make it harder. Thank you

12 PLS 103 Lecture 6 12 very much. You re gonna require a little bit more signature, you re gonna require a little bit more percentage, and that s just gonna kill your third party. Which is why third parties, nationwide there s lots of third parties but they don t last very long. Because it s really in the best interests of the major parties to keep the third parties down. And so ballot states will adjust the numbers to get on and stay on the ballot in order to keep third parties off. Now, in Missouri the Libertarian party is on because they got the requisite number of signatures, the requisite number of votes, in election after election. So they stay on the Reform Party from Ross Perot. Although I m not sure what their status is, but they were on the ballot for the last two elections. But third parties in the United States suffer from single member districts, winner take all, and that very nuanced issue of ballot access. So do you want to be a third party? No, you want to work within the two major parties if you want to get elected. And then take that another step further, you want to be somewhere near the you want to be somewhere near the middle. Parties in the United States are electorally defined and this is part of that reason. Now, let s go back to what I said before. Are we saying there is no difference between the major parties in Missouri, and the answer is no. We ll go back to the middle. I should ve just brought an overhead and then I would never have to do this again. Where are you? You re in the middle. So where are the parties? They re fighting for the middle. The middle in Missouri is a little to the right of the national middle and so on. Let s magnify this section right here. Let s magnify this to try and isolate what is the difference in Missouri between the Democrats and Republicans, okay? And in order to do that we need to talk about what we call party alignments.

13 PLS 103 Lecture 6 13 By party alignments we mean those things that separate or distinguish the two major parties. Basically, we talk about three party alignments in Missouri: the Civil War, the New Deal, and -- we re not too sure about this last one but we re gonna talk about it here the 1980s, 1990s. What kinds of issues come up during this time period? Civil War. Where was Missouri in the Civil War? It was in the north but why was Missouri in the north in the Union? All things being equal, where would Missouri have been? Missouri would ve been in the south but the Union army was here. We don t need to go into the history of the Civil War in Missouri, but Missouri probably would ve been in the Confederacy had it not been for the Union army. So the split in the Civil War is what we refer to as a sectional split. Missouri s party system in and around the Civil War was a sectional party system and the split between Democrats and Republicans was largely a regional split. Largely a regional split. Where am I gonna find Republicans? Well, so you re thinking about Republicans today as opposed to Republicans during the Civil War. Republicans of the Civil the party of Lincoln, the Republican party of Lincoln, is not the Republican party of today. In many ways the parties have switched. Where am I gonna find Democrats in Missouri in this time period? They re in the south. This is especially true especially true if we talk about the Bootheel, all the way across the middle of the state. Some people call it the southern middle, little Dixie, the Ozarks, especially the eastern Ozarks. And then Republicans are going to be in the north. What we re gonna spend some time on later is migration patterns. Where did people in the Bootheel, little Dixie, the Ozarks, come from? They came from the south. They came from Kentucky, they came from Tennessee, they came across. And so the Democrats in the

14 PLS 103 Lecture 6 14 south brought with them that ideology of the Confederacy. Immigration from the line is roughly Interstate 44, some people say Interstate 70. But the northern line, those are people who have immigrated from the north. And the split between the two parties, Democrat and Republican, is a sectional split between north and south. Just like it was nationally with respect to the Civil War. All that changes. The next major national alignment is the New Deal alignment and the split is no longer regional. The split between Democrats and Republicans becomes a class based party system. We move from a sectional party system to a class based party system. And the way it breaks down a little bit let me be consistent and write em the same way. Don t tape that. When we say class, what do we mean? Social class, income level, education. There s a variety of issues that go into what we call a class based system. But who s my classic Democrat? Well, we can go simply poor. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. We could make that case and we might be able to make it stick. Sorry? Minorities would be one key part. And what s my other key part? Especially if you think about St. Louis. The classic Democrat is the labor Democrat. You have to go back to the New Deal, you have to go back to the system nationwide. The classic Democrat of the New Deal system would be a member of labor, working class, and then minority. Now, it s not an absolute rich-or-poor thing because you can do well by being a member of the union and so on. It s not an absolute rich-or-poor thing. Then where am I gonna find labor and minorities in the State of Missouri? Kansas City and St. Louis. I ll find Democrats and Republicans in the excuse me Democrats, labor and minorities, in the urban areas. Republican? Who s my Republican? Non-labor,

15 PLS 103 Lecture 6 15 non-minority. So upper income, non-minority voters. Where? Suburbs. Okay. That s exactly right. The class base system divides the urban area from the suburban area. And that s how we tend to do it nationally. And then we have to add one other component. What s missing? Rural areas. What do we call rural areas? What s the phrase that we use? Outstate Missouri. Outstate Missouri. Where does outstate Missouri fit? Here. It doesn t fit necessarily by class, but probably does by income. It s a tough call. Where is outstate Missouri gonna be? It s gonna be in the Republican party. Before I get in trouble, are any of these things absolutes? Absolutely not. But if you had to draw a picture of Missouri s partisan split, what separates the Democrats on the left and the Republicans on the right? Civil War? Regional or excuse me sectional, north and south. Get to the New Deal from President Roosevelt s administration to about the 1980s, what separates is pretty much urban, Kansas City/St. Louis versus suburban. And then we throw in outstate Missouri on the side of the Republicans. So the split is not defined by north or south. It s defined by class. The question we have for the 1980s and 1990s is: are parties in Missouri still defined by class? Let me erase a little bit cause I don t have quite enough room. The biggest issues for the let s put it in the form of a question. What are the biggest issues for the 1980s, 1990s? What kind of issues become more important? Well, if it s the economy, then class based we re gonna come back to that. If it s the economy, then class based is still gonna be the right answer. What issues compete with the economy for your attention? The argument for the 80s

16 PLS 103 Lecture 6 16 and 90s we ll just do it this way is that there are a number of social and cultural issues that become more and more important. We tend to associate the rise of these issues with the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan at the national level, but that s just one of the signals. Issues like abortion are more and more important, and abortion is not a class issue. Issues like prayer in schools become more and more important. But again, that s not necessarily a class issue. Issues of civil rights and civil liberties become more and more important. Issues of affirmative action become more important. The question is, do these issues, these social and cultural issues that arise in the 1980s do they account for the difference between Democrats and Republicans? And the answer is no. The answer is the social and cultural issues that arise in the 1980s weaken weaken the New Deal alignment. It s not as strong as it was. But the rise of social and cultural issues has not replaced class as the thing that separates Democrats and Republicans. The social and cultural issues are more and more important, but they have not replaced class as the defining factor that separates the two parties. And the reason is we ll come back to you the reason is one thing is still more important. The economy is still more important than these social issues. The rising social and cultural issues are important and they have weakened the alignments, but they are not more important than the economic issues that still define. So we still say that the 1980s, 1990s parties are defined by class just like they were in the New Deal. Now, the question is, when we go over here to the parties of the 2000s, is to see whether these social and cultural issues replace the economic issues of the 80s and the 90s. Now, this is all specifically geared towards Missouri. This is all Missouri. This is not national;

17 PLS 103 Lecture 6 17 this is all Missouri. If you think about Missouri in the future we re gonna talk about that at the very end of the semester think about the urban/rural split, the urban/suburban split. It s not as pure as it was during the New Deal. There are cracks in those things that kept the parties and these cracks are still there. The question is whether they get better or worse as we move on into the 2000s. So this is, in terms of we talk about this at the end of every section. What re you looking for in Missouri party politics, and the things you re looking at is whether these social and cultural issues are going to be the new thing that separates Democrat and Republican in Missouri. I ll give you a hint now. The answer is? Probably not. Probably not. And let s come all the way back to give you something to do come all the way back over here. Last thing. Why in Missouri aren t these social and cultural issues going to replace the economy? And the answer is cross-cutting cleavages. What kind of state is Missouri? Missouri is a conservative state and Missouri is an individualistic state. There are some of these social and cultural issues where what a conservative might decide is different than what an individualistic person might decide. The reason the social and cultural issues will not replace the economy in the near future is because the two parties don t always agree on resolution of these social and cultural issues. When we come back, we re gonna talk about two very important issues in this category, social and cultural issues. We re gonna talk about right to an abortion and we re gonna talk about right to die. And I m gonna use those two examples to show how Missouri cuts across these things that will prevent these issues from becoming the most important ones.

18 PLS 103 Lecture 6 18 Now, you can pack up for just a second and we ll talk a little bit about the test which is coming up on Wednesday. Thank you. I probably should write it. What s gonna be on the test? You need to know the lecture material. All right. That goes without saying. The most important thing to remind you of and this is a really good lesson for a lot of people is there anything that I ve talked about in any of these lectures that duplicates what s in the book? Very little. There is very little. The idea, as we said at the very beginning, is you read those few pages to just get a sense of what we re talking about. Now, on the test there will be a question or two from those readings, just to be sure you are reading it. To keep you honest. So I ll ask a question. Now, a little thing? No. If you are reading the chapters, you re reading the material, what s important here? Those are the kinds of questions I m gonna ask. Most of the material will come from what we ve been talking about. The rule of thumb, if there is a rule of thumb, is we want to know what you know about Missouri. So there may be a couple of questions about national things the U.S. Constitution, for example but what we really want to know is what you know about Missouri. But I may ask you a question about something else to be sure that you understand the material as well. But the focus of the class is Missouri. The focus of the test will be Missouri. But there will be questions from the readings that we didn t talk about. Not a lot, not a significant amount, not to keep you from passing but just to keep you honest.