How ‘Hollow’ Political Parties Gave Us Donald Trump

If it seems like party loyalty doesn’t mean much in politics these days, that’s because the parties themselves don’t mean much.

As the political scientists Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman argue in their new book, Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, America’s current system is shaped by a paradox: The parties appear omnipresent — on the ballot line, at the party conventions, on the debate stage — yet they’re unable to perform many of their basic functions, like enforcing ideological discipline among officeholders or building effective electoral coalitions.

In Rosenfeld and Schlozman’s formulation, the parties have become hollow shells of their former selves: “Strong on the outside, but nothing on the inside.” And that’s not just a problem for the parties themselves, the authors told me when I spoke to them recently — it’s a problem for American democracy as a whole.

The following has been edited for length and clarity. 

You write at one point in the book, “Hollow parties do not merely enfeeble governance, they endanger democracy.” Why is hollowness in particular a threat to democracy? 

Sam Rosenfeld: Hollowness in a polarized age is what has let a wolf into the barn: It’s the inability of the Republican Party to prevent a hostile takeover by Donald Trump in 2016. That incapacity was symptomatic of party hollowness, and Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party ever since is what poses the most central and immediate threat to American democracy.

The more general answer — and the kind of point that political scientists try to convey when they talk about parties — is that political parties are the central collective actor in democratic politics. They’re what make collective democratic decision-making comprehensible and actionable for individual Americans, and they’re the actor that links the governed to their government. In the very act of making democratic politics work, parties helped to inculcate norms of forbearance, of win-some-lose-some mutual toleration, of the nonviolent transfer of power and respect for the rules of the game. When parties lose their efficacy and their capacity as organizations — and when they do a poor job of making the system work — those norms lose their purchase, and space opens up for actors who don’t have any similar commitments to make claims for power.

You argue throughout the book that hollowness manifests differently in the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party. Can you explain that asymmetry?

Daniel Schlozman: For Republicans, hollowness is the inability to maintain strong boundaries against threats to democracy — and those threats to democracy have come in via the party system itself.

On the Democratic side, it is ineffectuality — it’s a problem of being unable to get the horses together of all its different constituent parts, acting in ways smaller than the collective energies of the party as a whole. No one is thinking of the Democratic Party as a collective interest, and the party has been unable to marshal its resources as a party, for all of its vigorous activity.

Are there headlines from recent months that jump out to you as examples of the consequences of hollowness within the GOP and the Democratic Party, respectively? 

Rosenfeld: The difficulties of the modern Republican Party are manifest in their inability to govern effectively. Part of what you see in these rote and repetitive cycles of recrimination and rebellion and chaos in the House is a party that is dominated by para-party forces and a media infrastructure that don’t have any incentive [to serve the GOP]. Matt Gaetz isn’t worried about the collective electoral fortunes of the Republican Party, and he doesn’t care about incrementally advancing a Republican Party program. Instead, a ton of the incentives for these individual members point precisely to the kinds of performative behavior that you see and that makes it impossible to actually accomplish anything in power.

Schlozman: It is under unified government that the dilemmas of a party in power are more acute, and thus the Democrats in the first few years of the Biden administration had real hollow parties issues in governing — and above all in setting the priorities of what should go into the legislation that became the Inflation Reduction Act. All these different players wanted their piece of legislation without any actors in Congress, in the presidency or in the formal party to set priorities and say “We are going to do this and not that — and here’s why.” So what emerged was a very, very messy compromise whose messiness, I think, had a fair amount to do with the lack of explicitly party-oriented decision-making.

Let’s talk a bit more about how we got here. What are the big-picture historical trends that set the stage for the hollowing out of the parties, and when did they come to a head? 

Rosenfeld: In the 1970s, you see what historians refer to as the breakdown of the New Deal order — the constellation of party, organizational and economic arrangements that had organized politics since the 1930s. The decline of organized labor after the 1970s plays a major part in this, as does the political mobilization of business and the long-term atrophying of civil life in the United States. All that has organizational manifestations in politics. The 1970s is an era of the so-called “advocacy explosion” — the explosion of new lobbying organizations and interest groups that came to subsume the parties. You get organizational changes to party nominations that both reflect and advance the decline of party organizations at the state and local levels.

At the same time, you’ve got the political realignment of the South in response to the civil rights movement and the ideological sorting of the two parties. Paradoxically, that polarization in fact renders the parties less internally divided and incohesive on policy questions than they had been during the New Deal era, at the same time that they’re being hollowed out organizationally.

How did the parties react to those new historical conditions? 

Schlozman: After their disastrous convention in Chicago in 1968 — and also emerging out of the civil rights movement — the Democrats set up a commission called the McGovern-Fraser Commission that set minimum standards for the allocation of state delegates to that national conventio, and that more or less unintentionally leads to the proliferation of primaries and caucuses. And for a lot of anti-reformers, McGovern-Fraser looms large as the before-and-after moment in [the decline of] American party politics.

But in fact, the McGovern-Fraser members actually were quite pro-party. They did not want the smoke-filled rooms of old, but they wanted movement-inflected parties that would be in close touch with the grassroots. So the McGovern-Fraser reforms did not remake American parties — they changed the conditions under which presidential nominations happen, and they were doing that in a period when all sorts of actors were seizing on new opportunities. And the most important of those actors were on the right.

What were those actors on the right doing? 

Rosenfeld: What we identify as “the long New Right” [dating back to the dawn of the conservative movement in the 1950s] is an approach that is preoccupied not with party building but with building electoral coalitions through the mobilization of hard-hitting resentment, directed at different targets over time.

The long New Right take a very instrumental and mercenary approach to organizations and institutions. They will use the party form if that’s useful, they will discard it or revolt against it when that’s useful, and they will play hardball with any institution or organization that they encounter. It’s a tendency that you can identify all throughout the post-war era, but it breaks through and seizes the commanding heights of the Republican Party in the 1970s, through actors that historians have come to be associated with “the New Right” — people like Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie and others who were teaming up with and brokering the entrance of Christian right organizations into the party. That is an approach to politics that comes to increasingly define the Republican Party from the 1970s onward, and as a consequence, that approach comes to define the kind of political crisis that we’re in nationally in the 21st century.

You argue in the book that the New Right displaces political power from the parties to what you call “the party blob.” What is a party blob, and how do changes in campaign finance law contribute to their growing power?

Schlozman: In 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act, Congress restricted direct donations to campaigns, and then the Supreme Court invalidated some of that in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. But what survived are limits on direct donations to candidates in federal action campaigns. What that means is that there are all sorts of encouragements for groups to get involved in campaigns not on behalf of formal parties, which are themselves atrophying for all sorts of reasons that go beyond McGovern-Fraser. And the people who figure this out best are the people on the New Right — people like Weyrich and Viguerie, the direct mail king.

After that, independent groups are building single-issue coalitions around issues they care about — like abortion or tax cuts — rather than working through formal parties or making the claims about collective representation that parties make.

How did those changes eventually bleed into the Democratic Party then? 

Schlozman: After 1980, Democrats find themselves in the minority in the Senate, and in 1981, they lose [votes] repeatedly in the House as the massive Reagan tax cuts come down. And they realized that they needed to do something — principally raising some money in a real way, among other things. And they do this by trying to win the inside game of getting contributions from organized political action committees who are representing interests — especially business and corporate interests — with business before Congress.

That left a lot of folks feeling queasy, but Democrats were able to keep a congressional majority all the way until 1994, even as tides in national politics turned against them. And that, in turn, helped create a kind of a party where donors and the money mechanics to organize donors are more important and where a sort of mercenary spirit reigns, rather than a party spirit.

So in this story that you’re telling, the post-Citizens United innovations have sort of supercharged trends that were already happening, as opposed to fundamentally altering the landscape? 

Schlozman: If anyone is reading this and says, “What we need to do is stop Citizens United,” well, if you want to turn something back, it’s Buckley — which is very hard to do. There really is a continuity since the ’70s.

Another thing to add, though, is just how much money Democrats have gotten in recent years. With class depolarization, there are more rich liberals who want to give a lot of money to Democrats, and with the threat of Trump, Democrats have all these resources coming to [support candidates] up and down the ticket. There are, I think, a lot of liberals who are still ‘Oh, woe is us, all the money is against us’ in ways that were very true in 1981, but that are not quite so correct in 2024.

I’ll invite you now both to get up on your soapbox to answer this question: The parties are hollow and weak, so why not just embrace a style of anti-party politics that frames parties as the problem? Why double down on parties and try to make them better? 

Schlozman: I think that there are venerable arguments that parties do a really good job of organizing conflict and making clear alternatives and that parties are the ways that the government and the governed get connected to one another. If you want to hold leaders to account, parties can do that; if you want to decide on competing interests, parties can do it.

Rosenfeld: If you have a project for power and if you want to accomplish something, there is no alternative to party politics. A consequence of the organizational developments that we’ve talked about — the growth of para-party blobs, the movement away from formal party activity, the erosion of parties as civic presences on the ground — is a loss of legitimacy and respect for parties, even by the most engaged political actors in American life. So we make a case for the importance of parties across American history and for the future, and then we think that party actors themselves need to snap out of it and recognize their own value and make decisions that help shore up their own legitimacy, rather than further eroding it.

Schlozman: For instance, when Democrats were debating the so-called “superdelegates” [in 2016], the excuse given for the superdelegates was not “We think that members of Congress and big-city mayors, governors and members of Democratic National Committee should have a role in selecting the president because these are important actors with wisdom who can engage in peer review of important political figures.” It was, “Well, if there are automatic delegates, then there are more grassroots activists who get a chance to go to the convention,” which is the silliest and flimsiest possible reason. If you want to defend parties, you should defend parties.