Role of the Ongoing Party Battles

Chapter 9 discusses political parties and goes into depth about the role of a two-party system, the histories of the parties, and the function of parties today. The roles of political parties in democracy are keeping elected officials responsible, stimulating political interest, ensuring accountability, helping people make sense of the complexity of politics, and making the government work. Let’s examine how successful the parties are in completing a few of their expected roles.

Over the years, a lot of promises had been kept by elected presidents. According to Five Thirty Eight, from 1968-2004 promises kept range from 52%-80%, which produced an average of 67%. I am personally surprised, because presidents make many promises, and if there is a divided government, it is even more difficult to get legislation passed. However, this proves that the government is doing a good job with keeping their promise, and political parties are there to help do that, because politicians can’t let their parties down. The likelihood that the party will be elected for the next year, or that specific candidate is up for reelection, relies on the success of the president preceding it, so it must live up to their promises. This is another role of political parties: ensuring accountability. Citizens also know exactly who to hold accountable under this. This is not as successful as responsibility of elected officials, which can be seen because the political parties switch very often. However, from 1933-1968, the government must have been very accountable because democrats dominated in the New Deal Era, but for the past 30 or so years, it has been a regular switch between parties.

The next role of political parties is to stimulate political interest. This is important because it increases participation, which is a key condition of popular sovereignty. In addition, having parties makes it easier for people to get information. If you know about the stance of an issue of a certain party, than the opposite is the stance of the other party, so this provides a shortcut to better inform our society, which falls under helping people make sense of the complexity of politics. According to the Pew Research Center, people really do not know much about politics. This again affects our popular sovereignty because we need sound information in order to make good judgements. This emphasizes the failure of this role, because the people aren’t getting what they need. Government is supposed to represent the needs of the people.

It is interesting that it is possible to judge these roles, because the last one is simply to make government work. The existence of parties helps different branches work together, which can be proved as being more efficient for our politics, since united government does so much more in terms on passing bills. So, government does work in making government work.

Overall, political parties stimulate Washington D.C. They help our government and our democracy grow and provide more opportunities to politicians and the citizens on the United States. They do pretty well on most of their roles, but there is always room for improvement.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-keep-most-of-their-promises/http://www.pewresearch.org/2010/11/18/public-knows-basic-facts-about-politics-economics-but-struggles-with-specifics/

5 Responses to "Role of the Ongoing Party Battles"

Alyssa Holt says:

December 3, 2017 at 1:55 pm

Kendall, I do agree that parties work to simplify and spread information about certain policies and legislation. In some cases this can be helpful, however it can also be misleading. A huge problem with political parties is that they allow people to blindly support stances on issues that they may not truly understand. For example, American politics has separated tax issues into those who want to raise taxes and those who want to reduce them, the democrats and the republicans. Since most of the country does not have the time or education to read through and understand each tax proposal, they simply support what they think sounds better for them. With the most recent tax proposal, people vouch their support without looking into the true outcome for their family. While there will be tax cuts, for some people this decrease is so small that it is almost insignificant. With one party “increasing taxes” and the other “decreasing them”, people choose one without completely understanding the policies. If the public had a more accurate depiction of the proposal and didn’t just listen to their party leaders, their opinions and support might have been much different.
Brittney Morris says:

December 3, 2017 at 5:44 pm

Kendall, your post is interesting, I haven’t paid much attention to whether presidents are actually keeping their promises. I typically just assume they will not or will be unable to keep all of their promises once they become president, I view their promises more as a tool to get elected. Although I will say President Trump has been keeping his promises, whether that is a good or bad thing is a completely different debate, he has passed execute orders and is reforming laws that he said he would. But at the same time I have a hard time saying other presidents have not kept their promises, mostly because am not sure what actually constitutes keeping a promise. Is it only if actual reform or a law is created? Or does it also include the president attempting to pass laws and reform that address the issue? Both could have very different results and drastically change the percentage of promises that are kept. Also, your idea on citizens knowing who to hold accountable is interesting, but I do not agree. I don’t think it is always the presidents fault if they do not keep a promise, they have to do their job just like any other person and sometimes that includes being unable to keep a promise. They may receive pushback from the other branches of government or other parties and are therefore unable to keep their promises. In addition, I find it difficult to believe that elected officials always agree with their political party, I believe they are forced to agree to an extent. There are many that may disagree with their party on a particular issue, but have to vote a certain way to keep voters appeased and maintain party appearances. We saw this when Hillary Clinton was running for president there were times where the actions she took while working for the government did not match what she was saying as the Democratic nominee. It is hard to determine what she actually stood for when her actions and words did not align. I am also unconvinced that the two parties make it easier for people to understand government. The two parties are so divided, you could be strongly Republican on one issue but Democrats on others and still have to pick a party that you are not going to agree with all the time. While the two parties do give information to voters I do not think it is enough to say they are educated and able to make adequate political decisions. There are so many reasons outside of politics that people may support an elected official that narrowing the two parties down to just politics over simplifies our political system.
Lauren Toth says:

December 4, 2017 at 3:32 pm

Political parties play a large role in keeping everyone in check. Since we only have two major parties in our political system, it requires the parties to cover a large range of issues and not always the same way. Since they are only opposing one opponent and not many, they can focus on trying to be “better” than the other party to capture the most voters. As pointed out in this post, because they are going against each other and stand for certain ideals, it can cause a pause in the passing of laws and regulations. On the other hand, it can cause the party trying to get the law passed to compromise with the other party. This works out in the favor of the american people because more people are satisfied as the law comes closest to the median voter. The constant disagreement in legislature acts as a checks and balances for the parties to make sure they are doing what they were elected to do, represent the majority of Americans. Also, as discussed in this post, the constant cover of each party informs Americans more often. We see the coverage of every decision politicians make in the news. If the opposing parties are working against each other and trying to find the next big scandal against the opposing party, it keeps them in check from abusing their power. The large polarization of our political system along with social media, provides a checks and balances system for the American people.
Diego Rayas says:

December 4, 2017 at 11:22 pm

I see where you are coming from when it comes to the way that parties can help keep control in some very rocky situations. However, there is a few issues I see with political parties as well.
– One is that, in the United States as least, there is only two choices. SOmetimes you feel that instead of voting for a candidate you are voting for the entire party, even those that you don’t agree with. For example, a Republican supporting John Kasich, who believes in climate change, may feel like they are also voting for the party of Donald Trump, who does not. That same person can also be accused of believing in something that they don’t simply because of the way they identify politically.
– Another issue I have is that it restricts our government to having two main ideas as their platforms. With Democrats being socially liberal AND fiscally liberal, and Republicans being both socially conservative AND fiscally conservative. It is hard to find someone who falls in the middle, and those who do are usually spoken over by the rest of the party. This is usually the reason that third parties exist, to present ideas that neither party has, but instead of being put at the forefront and given their own credit, third parties are instead accused of “stealing votes” from other candidates, such as in 2016, where Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were accused of stealing Clinton voters.
-Finally, and the biggest issue with political parties is that they allow for a cognitive dissonance for certain issues. For example, Roy Moore, the Senate candidate for Alabama is currently being accused of sexual assault by multiple women. A recent CBS poll noted that 71% of Republicans in the state believed that it was the “liberal media” who was conflating and falsifying reports. At the same time, there are many Republicans who feel that it is still better for them to vote for Moore because they would be voting AGAINST Democrat Doug Jones. This is a dangerous thought process because it can cause people to lose sight of their own values and justify that by voting for their “own” party, or against another.
Lauren Rothenberg says:

December 6, 2017 at 9:00 am

You bring up some really interesting and thought provoking points. You mention how our two party system is beneficial because if you know the position of one party, as it pertains to a particular issue or ideal, then you inevitably know the stance of the other party, which would be the opposite of the other. Having said this, I view this supposed “benefit” as almost the rather detrimental downfall of merely having a two party system. Especially considering the need for partisan realignment, the two party system is not able to capture the beliefs of everyone. What you mention illustrates how our current two party system operates, which is a system of extreme and polar views, as demonstrated in our most recent election.

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