We have the parties that we said we wanted: they compete over extensive policy programs, with voters making decisions among clear issue position alternatives. But how did they get here and have they now gone too far? Katherine Krimmel finds that the American parties became extensively programmatic as they lost vestiges of clientelism and became national parties after federal growth and civil rights. But Trump may be changing the nature of the party system. And running on the issues may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
Guest: Katherine Krimmel, Barnard
Study: Divergent Democracy
Matt Grossmann: Are the parties too focused on policy programs? This week on the Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman. We have the parties that we said we wanted. They compete over extensive policy programs with voters making decisions among clear issue position alternatives. But how did our parties develop these extensive policy programs? Have they gone too far and are they now set to reverse? This week, I talked to Katherine Krimmel of Barnard about her new Princeton book, Divergent Democracy. She finds that the American parties became extensively programmatic as they lost vestiges of clientelism and became national parties after the Civil Rights movement. But she says Trump may be changing the nature of the party system. We may be learning that running on the issues isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
So tell us about the major findings and takeaways from your new book, Divergent Democracy.
Katherine Krimmel: Sure. So I think the main takeaway is that there has been a major transformation of the American party system over the last roughly half century toward issue-based party competition. So there are clear differences between the Democratic and Republican Party platforms on a really wide range of issues now from abortion to gun control and the environment. And we’ve all gotten pretty used to this, I think, and might assume it’s just how party competition works, but it has not always been this way. So I look at the history of competition between Democrats and Republicans since they started competing with each other in 1856, and I find that the sharp rise of issue-based competition started around the late 1960s.
Matt Grossmann: So you distinguish this idea of programmaticism, and its near but not complete opposite, clientelism from the sort of debate that we’re used to having over polarization. So tell us how those kind of concepts from comparative politics are helpful and distinguished from kind of our typical discussion and where the US fits internationally on these dimensions.
Katherine Krimmel: Yeah, sure. So I think polarization has been a really important concept in the American politics literature. But polarization can mean a lot of things, and sometimes sort of seems like it can start to mean everything we don’t like about modern American politics. And when I was thinking about the literature on polarization, realizing that there actually is very little attention to party organizations in the polarization literature and actually in the nature of party competition. And so I think this is important because a lot of times, polarization is used as a sort of proxy for the idea that the parties are more different substantively from each other than they used to be.
But that isn’t necessarily the case. You can have parties that have grown more distinct from each other for lots of reasons besides just programmatic difference. So I think this matters a lot when we think about the trajectory of polarization that this kind of U-shaped curve that we’re used to thinking about over time where polarization was really high actually for most of American history, it’s been sort of a historical norm and was low in the middle of the 20th century. And that’s kind of the historical exception. And I think as we interpret what that means, it’s really important to distinguish programmatic competition from polarization based on just congressional voting coalitions.
So when I look at just issue-based competition over time, I find that while it does rise in the modern era around the same time as the rise of polarization, we did not see, it wasn’t high at the end of the 19th century, that it’s more of a sort of, if anything, kind of a swoosh like a Nike swoosh than a U-shaped curve like we see with polarization. So it’s important not to use polarization as a proxy for substantive programmatic difference between parties.
Matt Grossmann: And then this comparative idea of clientelism, how does that fit in and where does the US stand out, both historically and now?
Katherine Krimmel: Yeah, sure. So clientelism, because if we think about the United States in relation to other countries, in a lot of ways it’s the same. So clientelism is strongly associated worldwide with lower levels of economic and political development and programmaticism with higher levels of development. And so this trajectory tends to go from clientelism to programmatic worldwide. And this is what happened in the United States. And in that sense, and it makes sense, right? For a lot of reasons that it will be difficult for countries that are kind of newer to democracies with lower levels of sort of institutional capacity to engage in issue-based competition. Because to carry out policies, to implement policies requires a significant amount of bureaucratic capacity that countries with sort of lower levels of institutional development will tend not to have.
And so as countries develop more, there can be more demand for and also more an ability to carry out programmatic competition. So in that sense, the United States sort of very follows the trajectory that we see worldwide, but with two important exceptions to that, or two, I guess caveats. One is about timing. So if we take the sort of cross-national relationship association between economic development and programmatic partisanship, we see a really strong association, right? More, as I just said, right? More developed nations tend to be more programmatic. But if we think about that historically with the United States, it actually reveals a puzzle because the United States, you might have expected for the United States to become more programmatic as it experienced really profound economic development in the middle of the, really starting in the 1930s.
But it actually has a delayed shift, right, relative to that expectation and doesn’t start the steep rise of programmatic development until more like the late 1960s, early 1970s. So why was it kind of a late bloomer relative to its level of economic development? And the second way in which it stands out is that if we look across nationally, the United States is the most programmatic system in the world, or at least it was the last time this was measured cross-nationally, which comes from a study out of Duke from an expert survey from 2008 to 2009. The United States is by far the most programmatic nation in the world, and it’s actually far, even more programmatic than its level of economic development would predict today.
Matt Grossmann: So your story is related to the story that most people have heard about racial realignment in the US, which is a common explanation for polarization to put it starkly. It’s hard to have either a programmatic or a polarized party if it’s a mix of southern segregationists and Blacks in the north. So tell us about kind how you think about the role of racial politics in your explanation, and then how it differs from kind of this traditional explanation for polarization.
Katherine Krimmel: Sure. So I think in order to answer that question, I might have to back up a little bit in terms of the puzzle, which is that, and sort of what I end up explaining, which is when I went into this project, I thought the main puzzle was, you know, why did the United States shift toward issue-based competition? But as I looked into it more and as I looked into the relationship cross-nationally, I realized that actually it’s just as much of a puzzle why it was so late to do so, right? So it seems like there was actually, there were factors that were constraining the development of issue-based competition in the US when we would have expected to see it. And that’s where the racial politics explanation comes in.
So as you said, right, when you have the kind of main supporters and opponents of civil rights in the same party, it was very hard not just to agree on a position on civil rights, but actually this had a constraining effect on even the idea that parties should be competing via issues at all, right? That this was an appropriate way for parties to be appealing to voters. And I think for a long time, when Jim Crow laws were on the table, that the stakes of programmatic competition were just too high to get buy-in broadly from people in the party system, particularly southern members of Congress, as well as members of Congress from machine states. It kind of gets back to the clientelism explanation. And so in some ways, I think my story is very much related to the typical story of racial realignment in that Democrats support for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the subsequent movement of Southern Democrats to the Republican camp was really instrumental in creating more ideologically consistent party coalitions.
But my focus here is not on the particular positions that Democrats and Republicans take, like why they switched sides over time on civil rights or anything else, but in sort of the mode of competition itself. How they compete, whether there was support for the idea of parties competing over issues at all. And this is where I think when we look at modes of party competition and focus on the extent to which parties were competing on issues, we see that actually the conflict over civil rights had these kind of extended well beyond civil rights to even constraining the way that parties could compete with each other in general.
Matt Grossmann: So a related story is sort of the rise of cultural politics and this idea of conflict extension where we were fighting over new deal economic issues, but now we’re fighting over more things. Once you have race, you also have all kinds of issues related to culture. And I did notice when you disaggregate some of the position taking that a lot of the new position taking is on culture war related issues, and some of the economic issues, there really hasn’t been much increased position taking by the party. So how do you see it in comparison to that kind of story, that we’re just arguing over more than we used to, rather than we’re arguing over issues rather than not?
Katherine Krimmel: So I think, I mean, I do think that we certainly have seen the-
I mean, I do think that we certainly have seen the movement of political conflict to non-economic dimensions and that’s not something that I would argue with at all. I think that’s quite clear that that’s happened. But I think where I want to intervene in that is to say that that’s not just something that happens organically. That parties competing over all sorts of different culture issues requires an organizational foundation to figure out which issues should be on the table and what positions that they should take. And that what was missing for a long time for the parties. And one of the important impediments to the development of issue-based competition was that it wasn’t clear to party. They hadn’t done that work of figuring out.
What issues made sense for the party to even take positions on and to gather the information from different parts of their party coalition and different experts to stake out what those positions should be. And so, this proliferation of party competition on culture war issues and lots of other issues, I think, rests on an organizational foundation of the work that goes into knowing what those positions should be, if that makes sense.
Matt Grossmann: So if you would have asked me why the US is so high on the programmatic scale, the two-party system would be very central to my initial explanation that if you have two big sides, then once one party has moved, the other has moved by default, and it’s hard for one party to be programmatic without the other. So where does that fall into your story? Is it possible that things are moving at different rates on the two sides or is this a system level that it’s hard for one party to make a decision about?
Katherine Krimmel: Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So if you look at, there’s this survey that I mentioned before that’s done by Duke called the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project. And they actually have studied, they rank, or they’re not ranked, they rate parties individually and then also you can use that to look at the party systems. And from that, you can see that there can be variation among parties or between parties in a system. So just because one party in a system is programmatic, doesn’t necessarily mean they all will be. And often movement toward a more issue-based system will start with one party.
And so, in that sense, you can have variation, but I actually, I think of in some ways the two party system in the United States being a long time constraint on the development of two party competition. Because when you have a large nation, a large diverse nation with only two major parties, that makes it harder I think to settle on what issues to take positions on and what those positions should be. Because in any party, in any coalition, there’s going to be some natural disagreement about what issues they should compete on and what positions they should take.
And I think in a system where there are a lot of parties that it would be easier to resolve that conflict because you wouldn’t have the kind of heterogeneity in each coalition that we see in the United States. And so, I guess if we were to, we don’t get to go back and replay history or make changes to systems, but I actually think that if you went back and you were able to insert more parties into the United States earlier in its history that perhaps programmatic competition would have developed earlier than it did.
Matt Grossmann: And what about nationalization? It’s another trend that’s going up over time, over the same period. And I know is related in your book, but I guess it’s feasible to think about parties competing with somewhat different positions in different places. So where does that fit in? You have to have nationalized parties for programmaticism?
Katherine Krimmel: So this is interesting question too. So I think when I saw this question, I think it’s important to be clear about what we mean by nationalization. So when I was working on this book, I was thinking about nationalization really as movement toward the federal government doing more in terms of regulation, in terms of program development, in terms of having the kind of center of power in political life being shifted away from the state and local level, more toward the national level in this kind of new deal sense.
And I think in that way, yes, nationalization was very important to the development of programmatic competition for a lot of reasons. I mean, one of them is that is related to clientelism. So when there is not, before the new deal, before we had things like unemployment insurance and social security, when people, somebody lost their job, they didn’t have unemployment insurance to look to, they would go to their local party leader for help. And that is kind of plugs them into a system of clientelism. And then once you get programs like unemployment insurance, these kind of big national social safety net programs, that clientelism loses some of its appeal. And so, in that sense, I think it matters a lot.
But then, I was thinking about your question in terms of the way I think nationalization, the term nationalization is used more now and I’m thinking about work by Dan Hopkins. And even this comes up in a recent book by Eric Schickler and Paul Pierson about nationalization being this trend whereby the prominence of state and local issues declines. And so, you have even local mayoral races or state legislature races being waged over things that have actually very little to do with state and local politics and more kind of infused with national issues.
And then, also variation in what it means to be a Democrat or a Republican declining over time. And I think in that sense, for the nationalization, the Dan Hopkins and Schickler and Pearson sense that programmatic development will reinforce that nationalization because it keeps these national brands and the different issues that they’re associated with, the different issue positions that they’re associated with really at the forefront of politics, and I think can make it more difficult for local and state issues to even, for there to be space for them and an air them and for there to be differences in what it means to be a Democrat in different states.
Matt Grossmann: So we sometimes say that political scientists asked for polarization and then got it. And we can quibble a little bit with that, but they certainly asked for programmaticism. So what did we think we were going to get compared to what we got and what lessons should we draw from how we’ve thought about this normatively?
Katherine Krimmel: So, yes, it is what they asked for, but I don’t think they imagined it getting quite to the extreme that it has. And in some ways when it gets so extreme, it’s actually more difficult I think for parties to achieve policy change because it’s harder for them to work in a bipartisan manner. And so, the other, your question, you’re asking is this what political scientists asks for? And that brought to mind for me the kind of mid-century work like the APSA committee on political parties that was asking for parties to become more responsible and to develop issue positions and compete on that basis.
I think another way in which this is something that we might think we asked for is that this is programmatic competition is generally associated with more mature party systems and with democracies and with all kinds of positive democratic outcomes, measures of democratic quality. And so, in that sense, I think it’s also programmatic competition is seen as this normative good. And I don’t think that’s wrong necessarily, but I think that we’ve reached a point where we should be really thoughtful and careful about whether there might be an upper bound to how much programmatic competition is good and whether there can be too much of a good thing. Like I read work by Frances Lee on Insecure Majorities and think, and I ask my students in class, “Is there such thing as too much competition?” And maybe there is in some ways. And I think the same can be true for programmatic competition that it can go too far. And I think we have learned, we have some data in the United States, which is the case I’m most familiar with to really think about that question carefully.
Matt Grossmann: So you say we’ve reached high levels of programmaticism, but a lot of people would look at today’s Republican Party as a movement away that we have now an anti-system party in power, something that looks more like a Burn it all down coalition than one with a large agenda of public policy issue positions that it wants to advance. So is that an outcome of a lot of programmaticism or is that a turn away from it?
Katherine Krimmel: So I think this is a really important question, and this is a question I hadn’t, when I started working on this project, I was focused on the shift toward issue-based competition. And I wasn’t imagining that I was writing about something that would be peaking while I was writing about it. I imagined that I would stop my time period in 2016 or 2020 because you have to get the book out, not because that might be the kind of peak of programmatic competition, but by the time I actually got to the book’s publication, I realized that actually the forces that I’m describing in this book and the trend that I’m describing in this book might actually be taking a turn. And this anti-system rhetoric and anti-system appeals are one important part of that. And I think others that are related are grievance-based appeals, which can sound like programmatic appeals, but they’re not necessarily, and these kind of appeals of vote for me because I see you. I see the ways in which the system has hurt you. That can be paired with a policy-based solution, but it isn’t always. So I think we’ve seen this kind of rise of populism, anti-elitism, anti-system, all of these kinds of things, especially from the Republican Party, that I actually think might mean that we are seeing a movement away from programmatic competition. I think in some ways this was surprising. It was surprising to me because I’ve spent so much time focused on the rise of programmatic competition. I also think it’s surprising from the perspective of the literature on parties because most of the literature on parties, kind of the two big alternatives are clientelism, which is this kind of material-based transactional relationship between voters and parties, and programmatic competition. But there are these other ways that parties can appeal to voters that I think we really need to think quite seriously about and consider whether we’re actually seeing a movement away from programmatic competition.
I think this is a little surprising in the same way that questions about movement away from consolidated democracy are surprising. These were kind of the end of the road, the last base on the Candyland board as I think about it. And maybe they’re not. Maybe it can erode from there. Not even erode. I think it can decline from there. I think it’s a complicated question. This isn’t exactly the question that you asked, but a question that comes up for me when I think about this is, is this a bad thing to have programaticism decline? I think it would be very easy to say yes, because programmatic competition is associated with more mature and stable systems, better quality democracies. But I think the Democratic Party and the United States can give us an example of actually how something that has happened or something that may have happened is that the parties, in trying to appeal to voters, expanded their platform so much and have made so many policy promises that it leads to a profound sense of disappointment in the parties.
In some ways, that’s very fair because the parties have promised these things and they have said that they stand for these things, and in other ways is, I don’t want to say unfair, but I think it was never realistic for parties to be able to do all of these things, at least not quickly. So it makes sense, I think, that we might see a movement toward other modes of party competition in a way from policy-based competition just because people have gotten very frustrated with policy-based competition.
So the fact that we’re seeing what appears to me to be a movement may be now away, particularly on the Republican side, from programmatic competition with anti-system appeals, I think puts the Democratic Party in a tough spot. I think this was on display in the 2024 election where I think there’s some confusion about, not necessarily confusion, but I think it’s less clear than it used to be, what party competition is about. We’ve been in this programmatic system, and so the expectation is that parties and parties candidates will make these policy-based appeals and explain what their position is across a wide range of issues. And that’s how voters will know if they like that candidate.
I think when you have one party that’s sort of moving away from programmatic competition at least more than the other, then it can be hard to know how to compete with that. So if Donald Trump is running a largely, not a completely unprogrammatic campaign, there’s some very clear policy appeals in Trump’s campaign, but also a lot of non-policy appeals, these kind of anti-system appeals and more kind of grievance-based appeals, that I think it could be very difficult to know how to counter that. Right? You don’t want to bring soccer equipment to play in a hockey game or vice versa. So I think it can be really… I think the Democrats are in the position now where facing a party that really seems to be much less programmatic, they’re still facing the expectations of their own constituents to explain what they’re about from a programmatic standpoint. But that might not be an effective way to counter a less programmatic party in the Republican Party now.
Matt Grossmann: Yeah. Is there a way to go back? Because all of the current discussion is all subsumed within a programmatic party. Whether you’re on the left of the party or in the center of the party, all of the proposals are, “Here’s a new program that can be more successful.” One might look at the history and say, Democrats have lost from this. Democrats were better off when their party was a hodgepodge of different things to different people in different places. But to me, that doesn’t necessarily mean they can go back. What do you think?
Katherine Krimmel: So I don’t think they can go back. I mean, I don’t think they can go back to a clientelistic system, at least not easily, because clientelism requires its own pretty elaborate set of institutions that don’t exist anymore. It’s also not how people are used to relating to politics, which I think puts us in a position where we need to think about, okay, well, what are the other alternatives? So we know what programmatic systems grow from typically, but if they then become less programmatic, it is not clear what they grow into. I think this is part of the challenge of having been the most programmatic system in the world, is that I think there aren’t a lot of great examples to look at. But I think, to me, this is a moment for some real creative thinking and even some kind of democratic soul-searching in terms of what are legitimate ways for parties to appeal to voters and maybe some tools we are not as familiar with.
If we look beyond just policy appeals and looking to other countries, what are other ways that parties can appeal to voters that are still consistent with democratic norms but aren’t necessarily policy appeals? I think policy appeals have seemed very safe in the sense that that is consistent with our traditional notions of what is acceptable in a democratic context. But I think it’s time for us to sort of expand our toolbox and think outside that box a bit. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in a new project that I’m working on with Didi Kuo, where we are asking these very questions and trying to think about, well, if not programmatic competition, when parties become less programmatic, first of all, what does that even mean? We don’t really have a great framework for thinking about that because when we think about programmatic competition, it’s usually movement toward that movement away. But also, is that necessarily bad? I think it would be a mistake to just assume that it is necessarily bad. I don’t know that more program is really going to help here.
Matt Grossmann: There’s two programmatic sides to American politics, but how central are the parties to that? I know we want to define the parties broadly, but obviously the party organizations aren’t necessarily the center of the money. They’re not necessarily the center of the policy development, and they don’t necessarily have a lot of control over who’s running, who’s winning, and what policies move forward. So yeah, is this a story of parties? Or once you get these two programmatic sides, does that mainly empower the interest groups and activists?
Katherine Krimmel: So I think that in order to shift toward programmatic competition, I think systems really need some sort of coordinating force to gather information from different parts of the coalition, to even gather technical information to figure out what are the consequences of different kinds of policy, both in terms of the world and also in terms of our coalitions. A lot of this work in the United States was organized by the party organizations. They would put together these groups of experts and people in industry and citizens groups to try to all get together and figure that and figure this out. So I think party organizations were never necessarily the only coordinating force that could potentially do that work, but somebody needs to. Party organizations are sort of the best positioned to get that project going because they’re in the best position to think ecumenically across all of the different parts of the party.
But once they do that work and once they get all of these different groups and experts and people together, it can take on a life of its own. It can kind of then grow organically from there, maybe in some ways that weren’t originally intended, which in some ways could be good, but in some ways you can end up with things that you didn’t intend at the beginning. So I guess my short answer to your question is that I think party organizations were, in the United States’ case and probably in other cases as well, really important to the beginning of the shift to programmatic competition, but probably less important as the system develops in terms of tweaking and expanding from a base that’s already-
In terms of tweaking and expanding from a base that’s already there.
Matt Grossmann: When you get programmatic parties, does that mean that you’re getting the left, right configurations that we have now? Or is there a set of examples where you get programmatic parties but you get more shuffling of positions rather than the ones that are the global norms?
Katherine Krimmel: Once you have a party program and a set of groups and voters who are invested in that program, I think there is room for growth for the party to take on new issues, new positions to add to that program. And maybe certain positions fall out of the program over time, either because they’re not as politically relevant or the groups that were invested in them are not as important anymore or have switched to the other party. So I do think that there is room for change.
Any new position that is added to the set of party positions is likely to be impacted, at least somewhat, by the groups that are already there. Both because there’s some sort of selection, that it’s something that they have wanted to expand on or that they just sort of consider an acceptable addition.
However, I think it’s also possible to add things to the party program that are really unacceptable to existing members of that program and existing members of that coalition because once you’re really invested in a coalition and you have people who are really attached to a party brand, they will likely tolerate some amount of stuff in the platform that they don’t like. And it can be a little bit of a gamble for a party to how much can you add that’s distasteful to existing members before they stop being existing members. But there’s probably a significant amount of room in both parties to add things that they don’t like, things that might even have been considered to be the opposite of what they thought they wanted.
Matt Grossmann: So you mentioned that your idea of nationalization, which is related to programmaticism, is partly about just the expansion of the federal government and its scope and its issue expansion. But certainly there are some measures that have found that issue explosion ended some time ago, and we’re now witnessing an attempt at a retrenchment of the role of the federal government and maybe the prospect of new things for the federal government to do. That is if we’re going to be at parity and we have one coalition that’s going to try to undo what the other coalition does, then we might be at a point where the seeming prospects for programs to be implemented come to seem a lot less likely.
So what would that say for your story? How important was this issue expansion that we had federally? And then if it has come to an end, what would that mean?
Katherine Krimmel: I think that’s a really important question. I’m not sure I have a great answer right now, but I think this is another example of a question that I hadn’t imagined asking before. The size of government is something that, sort of like movement toward programmatic partisanship, right? A democratic consolidation is something that has typically happened in one direction. Governments across the world tend to expand, not contract over time. And so what happens when the government does get smaller? I think that’s an open question.
And how do parties appeal to voters under conditions of shrinking government is I think a really hard question, but something that is really worth thinking about as we move forward in a potentially, I don’t want to say post-programmatic phase of party competition. I think that would be a vast overstatement. I think policy appeals still play an important role in people’s attachment to parties and why a lot of people get involved in politics to begin with. But in expanding our imaginations about how parties can appeal to voters and what voters can expect from parties in exchange for their votes. Because that’s also something that changes with clientelism.
In a world of clientelism, so in the example before, if I lose my job and I go to my local party leader for some support until I get another job, they expect me to and I plan to vote for that party in the next election and to mobilize for that party in the next election. That’s what I expect to do. And in a programmatic world, I vote for the party because I like their position on X. And they’ve said that it would do that. And so when they get into office, I expect them to try to pass that kind of policy. That can’t be the expectation anymore, I think, or at least there need to be different kinds of expectations if we are in a world of the government doing less, not doing more.
Matt Grossmann: And anything we didn’t get to that you wanted to include, or tout, that you’re working on now?
Katherine Krimmel: Oh, my gosh. So what I’m working on now is really thinking about programmatic decline. Are we in a moment of programmatic decline? If we are exactly what does that mean? If programmatic competition declines, what does it decline to? What replaces it? How do we think about the relationship between things like grievance and populism and anti-statism and programmatic politics? And is this decline, if it is in fact a decline, is this temporary? Is this something that is related to Donald Trump’s particular style of politics, or is this something that will outlast? Is this a systematic shift?
I tend to think, if I had to guess, that this is not just a because of Donald Trump and his particular style of politics, but that programmatic partisanship has limits. And because there are limits to what parties can achieve policy-wise at any given time, and there’s even limits to what policy can achieve. And so that parties are probably going to need to, in order to maintain robust coalitions, have other ways of appealing to voters. And so that’s what I’m thinking about now. That’s what Dee and I are thinking about now.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The science of politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website.
Are the Democratic or Republican parties becoming more similar or different? The roots of the party’s racial switch. Are American parties reviving or hollow? Are Americans becoming tribal with identity politics trumping all? And compromise still works in Congress and with voters.
Thanks to Catherine Crimmel for joining me. Please check out Divergent Democracy and then listen in next time.