Colloquy Podcast: Hate Polarization? Blame It on the Weakness of Our Political Parties

Americans are more politically polarized than at any time since the Civil War. Who we vote for shapes where we live, who our friends are, and even whom we marry. The political party we support seems more central to our identities than ever. But the political scientists Dan Schlozman, PhD ’11, and Sam Rosenfeld, PhD ’14, argue that the prominence of party ID and the polarization that accompanies it are, in large part, a sign that our political parties have actually become weaker. 

In their recent book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, Schlozman and Rosenfeld say that both the Democratic and Republican parties have lost their ability to organize, motivate voters, and advocate for ideas, with troubling consequences for our democracy. The good news is that the hollowing out of the parties could be an opportunity to rebuild them and, in so doing, rejuvenate our moribund politics. 

Let’s start by defining our terms. What is a political party, and what role is it meant to play in our democracy? 

Sam Rosenfeld: As we say in the book, and as I think we tell our students, the pithy definition comes from the great political scientist E. E. Schattschneider, who defined a political party as “an organized attempt to get control of the government.” You can keep it as simple as possible and break it down: It’s an organized attempt. 

This is collective, voluntary, coordinated action by people. In a democracy, the attempt is made through electoral means, through elections. Parties are collective entities that nominate people for public office, mount campaigns on their behalf, mobilize voters in coalitions to support them in elections, and then get control of the government. The party then serves to organize the behavior of officeholders in a particular way: We are this team; this is what we are going to advocate and vote for. That’s what a political party is, in essence. 

There are plenty of collective actors in electoral politics. There are interest groups, social movements, and so forth, all of which can be extensively involved in elections, policymaking, and policy advocacy. 

But it’s only political parties that seek to get their own people collectively in charge and therefore collectively responsible and accountable for what the government does. That’s why political scientists tend to see parties as essential for democracies. Parties give voters meaningful choices in elections between particular directions they want to take public policy and governance, and the collective responsibility of a whole team in charge under a single party banner gives voters some accountability. 

It gives voters the ability to hold governments collectively responsible for how things are going and to throw them out or reward them in the next election. Parties are a key connector between government and governance. 

We know that the Constitution doesn’t mention political parties. It doesn’t actually say a whole lot about elections in general. Were there political parties at the time of the country’s founding? How did the founders of the United States think about or feel about the prospect of political parties, and how did they develop into such a potent force in US politics? 

Dan Schlozman: The framers were famously antiparty. Madison warns in The Federalist No. 10 about the mischiefs of faction. The framers had all read, I think, John Adams’s six-volume Defence of the Constitutions and Bolingbroke’s defense of the Patriot King, who would overcome the petty bickering that Britain saw in the 1740s between Whigs and Tories and unite men of goodwill behind the common interest. 

At the same time, we did not have political parties as we know them. What existed among the Whigs and Tories were elite factions that were not permanently rooted—just groups of “ins” and “outs” scrambling to decide whether they could have access to power. The framers didn’t like that. They believed that there was some kind of common interest. 

They believed that this was good for civic republicanism. In very short order—and this is, in a more general way, in the framework of what the late, great Yale political scientist Robert Dahl calls “what the framers couldn’t know, they didn’t know”—they built a large republic. This was a shot in the dark. 

This antiparty sentiment soon came up against the rocks of deep division in the early republic, with the election of 1800 being a notable example. It was a very bitter dispute, especially over foreign policy, between the Federalists, first associated with the antiparty George Washington and then John Adams, and the Democratic-Republicans and Jeffersonians. 

Again, this was still an elite conflict, and it was more bitter because it was among the very small stratum at the top of a still-limited-suffrage society. Mass parties arrived only a generation later. By mass parties, we mean parties rooted in civil society—organized attempts to take control of the government with roots among ordinary people—to which individual politicians subordinate their own ambitions for party purposes. 

The most important figure in that development is someone whom political scientists probably regard as more important than a lot of ordinary people do: Martin Van Buren of New York. Starting in the 1810s with a group of allies in the Albany Regency, he developed the form of party organization that would long dominate American politics. By uniting the merchants of the North with the farmers of the South, he developed the first national political party, elected Andrew Jackson, and in turn elided the slavery question for a generation. 

Modern mass parties arrived after the founding. There is also, throughout American history, a kind of ambivalence about parties; that antiparty American heritage remains. Americans are very skeptical of party machinations, but at the same time, in the nineteenth century, there was a huge amount of party spirit. Down to the present, parties organize our politics. 

We come to the Civil War and the enormous divisions it produced. Then afterward, there’s the Gilded Age. I think a lot of people view that time, through perhaps the middle of the twentieth century, as a period when political parties were dominated by bosses and smoke-filled rooms. How did that affect their ability to organize and mobilize voters, and how did they develop as the country moved toward the mid-twentieth century? 

Sam Rosenfeld: It did a lot to enable them to mobilize voters. In the late nineteenth century, turnout rates among the eligible population dwarfed anything we had seen before or have seen since. Upwards of 80 percent—or more—of white men turned out to vote in presidential elections. This was the era of the machines, of patronage politics, and of Tammany Hall. 

It was also the era of torchlight parades and a huge amount of pomp, circumstance, and spectacle associated with electoral politics. Parties were social and civic organizations with roots in communities. What they did less effectively, particularly in the Gilded Age and early twentieth century, was forge programs and positions that differentiated them from one another and spoke to the major issues of the day. 

This became a great critique first from populists and then from the left wing of the Progressive movement. They saw the rise of industrial capitalism—what they called the social question—the rise of class conflict and urbanization, and the emergence of a new proletariat as calling forth all sorts of new questions of governance and public policy. The nineteenth-century, mass, patronage-based party organizations were already organized around different lines. 

They did not emerge in response to these new conditions, and they were not particularly well suited to address them. That’s where you get the so-called age of reform that Richard Hofstadter talked about, culminating in the 1930s and the New Deal realignment—the emergence of new kinds of party formations that spoke to the great public challenges of the time. 

My understanding is that, with the advent of the primary system, things began to open up. In some ways, that was the final nail in the coffin for the old-style party-boss system, smoke-filled rooms, and all the rest. Is that right? And what effect did that have on political parties’ ability to organize people, advocate for ideas, and be effective in government? 

Dan Schlozman: There were a whole lot of reforms in the Progressive Era, including the secret ballot, or Australian ballot. In the nineteenth century, during the heyday of parties, parties printed tickets, so voting the party ticket was not a metaphor. The ticket listed all of the party’s candidates, from president down to dogcatcher, and that forced candidates to cooperate because they needed to appear on a common ticket. 

The parties also needed vast armies of people at the polling place. These were big, raucous mass events, like the Super Bowl, to produce the ticket. With the Progressive Era, nominees were chosen in conventions rather than primaries. With the rise of the secret ballot, various attempts to clean up politics, and primaries that were mostly used for local elections—but not for presidential elections until the late 1960s—parties lost a lot of their control over the political process. 

It’s not the case that primaries alone were the nails in the old party coffin. In many instances, traditional party organizations actually liked primaries because they thought it was easier to get their candidate through against rival factions in a primary, where they had more control over spending, than at a convention, where they were not advantaged. But parties were, in the long run, dethroned from their pedestal. 

The world in which parties dominated politics, and in which party loyalty meant loyalty to a party as an organization rather than simply party-team spirit, went away. 

Was that the beginning of the hollowing-out process for the parties? 

Sam Rosenfeld: The primary system was no great help to vital parties. In particular, it dealt a real blow to state party organizations, which had used their role in delegate selection, national conventions, and presidential elections as a major source of continued power and input. 

We see bigger forces at work in the political and economic transformations of the 1970s: changes in campaign finance and in the rules of the electoral game that made elections ever more expensive and increasingly candidate-centered. Money was increasingly regulated in ways that channeled it out of formal party organizations and into outside groups and individual candidates. 

There was also the collapse of a broader civic culture. That was not limited to parties, but parties were a big part of it. Civic organizations with roots in local communities were declining writ large. That took its toll on parties as well. Think of organizations such as organized labor as a pillar of an associated movement and group allied with one party—an organization with real ties to ordinary people’s communities—that was experiencing systemic decline from the 1970s onward. We don’t center changes to the nomination system in our account of what hollowed out the parties. 

Let’s take it up to the present day, or close to it. You make the case that our parties have become less able to organize and mobilize voters or to set the legislative agenda. When do you see a watershed moment for that? Was it a gradual process, and what are some examples of their inability to perform their traditional functions? 

Dan Schlozman: We see the 1970s as a pivotal decade in the hollowing out of American parties. In particular, we see parallel but asymmetric processes. On the Republican side, the boundary between the mainstream and extreme right was very permeable. Republicans lost the capacity to set boundaries—to decide who was in and who was out. 

Beginning in the 1950s, but accelerating in the 1970s, Republicans became dominated by outside forces and paraparty organizations in what we refer to as the long New Right. Thus, ours is more a continuity-than-change story when it comes to 2016 and the rise of Donald Trump, which was admittedly unwanted by the Republican establishment. 

On the Democratic side, the story is rather different. In the new void that emerged in the 1970s, Democrats spent decade after decade trying to pick up the pieces and figure out what an effective party looked like, but they were never really able to bring all of their different factions and demographic groups together in common purpose. 

A party that is less than the sum of its parts is the Democratic Party. These were common forces hitting American parties—new rules, new campaign-finance rules, and new convention rules—in very different ways. 

Are you saying that, in some ways, the drive to open up the election and political processes under the auspices of making them more democratic has actually resulted in a system that many people feel is more autocratic? 

Sam Rosenfeld: Yes. We have a tragic sensibility in the sense that both the calls for democracy and transparency and the illegitimacy of the older, more closed system—thinking in terms of the old system of conventions for presidential selection, for example—were criticized for a reason. That system had come to be felt as illegitimate for good reasons. 

But it is true that parties exist for a reason: atomized individuals in a country of hundreds of millions of voters cannot, in fact, organize and control the government and do coherent things that people want. It takes organization, and a degree of organization takes a degree of centralization or hierarchy, or decisions made outside the transparent glare of the spotlight. 

When it comes to the problems people have with polarization, that is in part a function of changes in the party system that were a consequence of opening up the system—ending Jim Crow and racial apartheid in the South. The sorting of the system came out of a huge democratic opening of the system. 

There were powerful and virtuous reasons for reforms and developments in the political system, but they have come to have a lot of associated problems. 

Parties exist for a reason: atomized individuals in a country of hundreds of millions of voters cannot, in fact, organize and control the government and do coherent things that people want. It takes organization, and a degree of organization takes a degree of centralization or hierarchy, or decisions made outside the transparent glare of the spotlight. 
–Sam Rosenfeld 

That’s a really interesting point, particularly around the politics of race. The driving force behind legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was obviously the action and activism of groups such as the SCLC and others in the South—the grassroots work. But do you think we would have gotten that legislation without a strong party apparatus that enabled somebody like Lyndon Johnson to get the votes in line, although he also had a number of Republican votes on some of that legislation? 

Dan Schlozman: This is Eric Schickler’s story more than it is ours, centrally: the ways northern state parties worked. Liberal activists in Americans for Democratic Action and unions, especially those associated with the CIO, and Black activists in the generation after the Great Migration, who were beginning to make their political force felt, all came together to make northern Democrats more liberal on civil rights and push the issue up the agenda. 

Even though it was a genuinely bipartisan achievement to pass the great legislation of the 1960s, the impetus and real energy came from northern liberals. That was a partisan coalition that had to be forged in the postwar decades, and it was a real party achievement. 

I want to focus a little on the two parties. To what extent are their twists and turns on policy positions and legislative agendas, at least in part, a product of this hollowing-out process? 

Sam Rosenfeld: Part of the story of Donald Trump vis-à-vis the Republican Party is that the Republican Party and the conservative movement—the satellite groups, advocacy organizations, institutions, and think tanks that had come to control the party by the 1970s—also came to control the congressional agenda of Republicans and the policy agenda of Republican presidents. 

They had put a set of regressive, you might say plutocratic, economic policies at the center of their agenda. Certainly when it came to tax policy, by the 1980s the actual balanced-budget commitments of Republicans were a thing of the past. Their work involved the retrenchment of the welfare state and an assault on organized labor. That was a motivating set of agenda items married to an electoral strategy in the wake of the civil rights movement. 

The great sorting out of the two parties did a lot to mobilize support and build electoral coalitions around social, cultural, and identitarian issues—issues related to identity, nationalism, and ethnonationalism. 

All parties are awkward coalitions. They have factions driving the programmatic agenda and priorities, and then they try to build electoral coalitions. By the mid-2000s, as a product of the hollowing out we’ve talked about over time, the gap between what voters who mobilized to identify as Republicans cared about and what Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were advocating in Congress was very wide. So was the gap between ordinary Republicans’ trust in, legitimacy for, or respect for what they called the establishment at that time. 

It would take somebody who was independently rich, already famous, and not attached to the pillars of what had by then become the long-in-the-tooth Reaganite conservative movement to exploit that gap and come in saying things that would actually mobilize people across the board on policy grounds. That was Donald Trump. 

That was the right-populist agenda. He wanted to build a wall with Mexico and make Mexico pay for it and ban Muslims. He also talked about a $1 trillion infrastructure bill and protecting Social Security and Medicare. To a certain extent, I think any right-of-center party that rebuilds connections and forges real connections to the priorities of ordinary voters is going to have more right-populist positions than what you were seeing from Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney in 2012. 

On the flip side, though, a demagogue—a celebrity authoritarian personality such as Donald Trump—is in a position to exploit these pathologies, remake a party in his image, and take it in directions not just on policy but on core, small-d democratic grounds that are really destabilizing and dangerous. 

Dan, anything to add to that before I ask you about the Democratic Party? 

Dan Schlozman: Let’s go on to the Democrats. 

We see the 1970s as a pivotal decade in the hollowing out of American parties. . . . On the Republican side, [the party] lost the capacity to set boundaries—to decide who was in and who was out. . . . In the new void that emerged in the 1970s, Democrats spent decade after decade trying to pick up the pieces and figure out what an effective party looked like, but they were never really able to bring all of their different factions and demographic groups together in common purpose. 
–Dan Schlozman 

Right. Let’s talk about them. I remember 2008, when the Democrats captured both houses of Congress by large majorities, including a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, as well as the presidency. I remember people talking about a generational party realignment—the kind of thing that happened in the 1930s or arguably in the mid-1960s. 

Since then, despite championing policies such as health-care reform, repairing and improving the country’s infrastructure, raising the minimum wage, and many others with widespread support, Democrats have struggled to hold and consolidate power, pass legislation, and build a broad-based progressive movement. What happened? And how did the hollowing out of the parties make the Democratic Party not only less effective but, if you look at the polls, perhaps more unpopular than at any time in the last hundred years? 

Dan Schlozman: 2008 was an election that at the time seemed more important than, in retrospect, we would deem it. Part of that is obviously that 2016 much more conclusively ended the neoliberal era. Sam was talking about this period, which begins in, let’s say, 1980, and then the Obama years and the convulsions of the Great Recession, which had already hit to some extent by Election Day—Lehman Brothers had gone bust. 

The full effect of the recession, and the recovery from it, would dominate politics for the next decade and lead to a different kind of left, from Occupy onward, that revived democratic socialism. There was also the reaction against the Obama presidency, which in some sense was fairly straightforward: Do big things, get big losses at the midterms. That led to a Republican takeover in 2010 after the health-care bill, which was Obama’s signature achievement. 

All of this was not known at the time. The 2008 election looks different from a party standpoint. One thing that’s notable is that Obama ran a big grassroots campaign with Obama for America. He said he was going to be organizing. Democrats seemed to win, and Obama let that organization basically disappear on the vine after he was elected. 

For some people, that’s a real hinge point of history: If only he had been a better party builder. On the one hand, we’re sympathetic to that as people who think party building makes a difference. On the other hand, if you zoom out to some of the bigger issues, that can feel a little myopic. The question of hollowness leads you to think not just about the particulars of party organizing but about the ways parties can connect ordinary people with the great questions of government. 

There you get to something that Democrats have in common with center-left parties across the wealthy democracies. For the political scientists listening, one of the ways we think about our parties is as the American variant of what the late Irish political scientist Peter Mair called Ruling the Void: the inability of center-left parties to maintain ties both with their traditional working-class electorate and with the new, much more culturally engaged voters who make up their rising electorate. What the Democrats have not done in a hollow age is surmount the challenge of doing both of those things. 

Obama was able, in 2008, to build a very big coalition, but it was not a durable one. 

You’re working on a new book about the limits of policy for solving our political problems. This could be my own bias at work, but it seems to me that the story of the Democratic Party in my lifetime is very much in line with that. It seems that every time Democrats lose an election, there’s a sense of shock: Why don’t voters want better health care and action on climate change? That’s followed by the conclusion that they lost because they focused too much on identity politics and not enough on kitchen-table issues. Is there really a policy solution to the polarization we’re seeing? And if not, what is the way out? 

Sam Rosenfeld: This is a book about the Democratic Party exclusively. I think it has implications for parties writ large and for how we think about governance and its electoral dynamics. It’s about the Democratic Party from 2016 onward, but it grounds the party’s response to the rise of Trump and MAGA in transformations that had been decades in the making. 

The core argument is that Democratic policy advocates and the institutions surrounding the party that help set its agenda came to identify the core electoral challenge Democrats faced—class dealignment, the increasing disaffection of working-class and less-educated voters from the Democratic Party—and conceived of a strategy to address that electoral challenge almost exclusively in policy terms. 

They were going to have a big agenda, described as post-neoliberal, with a shift to the left and a focus on things such as industrial policy and antitrust, along with an expansion of the welfare state. During the Biden presidency, through the eye of a needle of really narrow legislative majorities, Democrats managed to do quite a bit of what they conceived of as their answer to this electoral problem. 

They didn’t solve the electoral problem. That’s just a statement of what happened. We argue that Democrats have come to this in part because they have so lost the muscle memory for any other kind of electoral strategy—party building and forging ties, especially with unengaged people. It’s not that they’re not perfectly good at building and organizing already politically engaged people. 

They’ve lost the capacity to mobilize or win the loyalty of less politically engaged people. They default to a policy strategy, and policy has very serious limits to what it can achieve politically because people’s experience of policy is so refracted. Policy can create constituencies that then redound to the long-term support of particular programs, making it hard to repeal them. 

But the leap from that to long-term credit and loyalty toward the party associated with those programs is a very big one. 

Dan Schlozman: It’s an academic theory I learned at the [Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin] Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University called policy feedback. To quote another aphorism from Schattschneider, “new policies create new politics,” and policies then reshape the political landscape. That is very often true. But that is very different from thinking that policy will give the party that enacted those policies an immediate electoral shot in the arm. That is, at best, an illusion. 

It seems that the only thing voters from both parties can agree on is that they’ve had it with parties led by politicians who seem weak and ineffective. Is there an opportunity at this inflection point to rebuild our parties? What would that look like, and what examples from US history can we learn from? 

Dan Schlozman: There is no moment in US history that was a golden age. We’ve talked about the limits of the nineteenth-century model. There are limits to what the postwar liberals who were important for the Civil Rights Act can give you. There are limits to what a practical-minded, organization-minded, party-first conservatism can give you. 

Rather than say, across the political spectrum, “Here’s what you should do,” we tend to quote the great political theorist Melania Trump, who says, “Be best.” Wherever you are politically, look to do things in the most pro-party, pro-civic way you possibly can. One of the interesting things that has happened in 2026, outside the frame of how parties have been, is the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America as a very unhollow political tendency that is also very far from the median voter. 

The DSA had its national convention a week before this podcast was recorded, and people talked about how much meaning they got from attending it and going to DSA game night, as well as from believing in the principles of democratic socialism. There are armies of DSA members who go and knock on their neighbors’ doors. 

There’s a real thick politics that they are practicing. Lots of Democrats who worry that it will not work electorally outside of big cities with many well-educated, not very rich young people say, “Oh my God, how do we stop this?” Our advice would be much less substantive: not that everyone should become a socialist, but that DSA is an interestingly unhollow political formation. 

Rather than say, across the political spectrum, “Here’s what you should do,” we tend to quote the great political theorist Melania Trump, who says, “Be best.” Wherever you are politically, look to do things in the most pro-party, pro-civic way you possibly can.  
–Dan Schlozman 

What DSA has done on an absolute shoestring, in terms of dollars, at a time when we’re awash with money, is very notably unhollow. The question then is, What does the DSA of other political factions look like? For those who operate by Trumpism, there are a lot of people having fun at a Trump boat parade. 

What does something look like where people are having fun but not necessarily embracing the system-destabilizing elements of Trumpism? Those are good, hard questions to ask across the spectrum.