Republican Party

4 Key excerpts on "Republican Party"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Republican Party

  Documents Decoded

  • Douglas B. Harris, Lonce H. Bailey(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: The RepublicanParty’s Origins, Evolution,and Transformation

  Political parties are ideological. Relatively consistent policy stances across a range of issues provide important guides to party members—politics elites and masses alike—and those policy stances form a mosaic of beliefs that are forever the subject of elaboration, reconciliation, and change central to a party’s development. To be sure, parties are many things other than ideology-driven organizations. They are teams of officeholders and would-be officeholders, organizations that provide opportunities and structure ambitions of politicians, social networks that connect political elites to one another and to broader mass publics, entities to which the public attaches attitudes and forms expectations, and compromise machines aimed at brokering differences among disparate interests. Still, the ideological functions of party are critical to most of these alternative aspects. Without some common policy beliefs exhibiting broader thematic coherence, political elites would have even fewer incentives to work as a team, the social networks of party would have little beyond mere common interest or elaborate patronage networks to unite them, and the public would lack sufficient cues to determine which major party to support and how vehemently to support that party.

  Not all observers of the American political system stress the ideological underpinnings of America’s political parties. Many, such as Alexis de Tocqueville , discount the importance of party ideology in America and bemoan the fact that American parties are “lacking in political faith.” Observing the parties of the Jacksonian era and thinking them “small” rather than “great,” Tocqueville wrote:

  What I call great political parties are those that are attached more to principles than to their consequences; to generalities and not to particular cases; to ideas and not to men. These parties generally have nobler features, more generous passions, more real convictions, a franker and bolder aspect than the others. . . . America has had great parties; today they no longer exist.1

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  Elephant's Edge

  The Republicans as a Ruling Party

  • Andrew J. Taylor(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  AMERICAN PARTY POLITICS TODAY 7 to be polarizing toward the liberal and conservative extremes, strategic flexibility. Policy differences are frequently obfuscated and campaigns clouded by advertising campaigns that attack opponents and frame a candidate's position in "apple pie" terms—job creation, educational opportunity, family values, faith, and patriotism. This book does not seek to answer definitively perhaps the most obvious question posed by the current state of play in American party politics: will one party upset the balance and form a durable majority of identifiers among the electorate? As I shall reveal in the final chapter, I don't think this will happen, at least not in the short and medium terms. Instead, it recognizes that, after nearly a dozen years in control of Congress and at the beginning of a second George W. Bush term, the GOP is a ruling party. The book explains a present and future of Republican rule—that is, the GOP as the usual majority in Congress, the accustomed party of the Presidency, a frequent shaper of the courts, and, much of the time, the party affiliation of most elected officials in the states. I will show that there now exist conditions throughout American politics that have established and will sus- tain this state of affairs. These conditions involve constitutional and statutory rules governing elections and campaign finance, the metamorphosis of important issues in contemporary politics in a way that favors Republican campaigning and governing strat- egies, shifts in core political values among the public that are consistent with Republican philosophies, and fundamental social and economic changes in American society likely to increase the ranks of Republican voters.

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  The Republican Transformation of Modern British Politics

  • G. Foote(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: The Republican Idea The years after the fall of the Soviet Union have seen a decline of interest in ideology and conviction in favour of image-projection and career-pursuit – a new ‘pudding-time’ of British politics in which tactical skill counts for more than fundamental differences between parties, and courage is a synonym for foolishness. However, ideas of economics and politics are more powerful than is often understood, lingering as values and prejudices to inform the most practical of men and women, and changing circumstances may once more lead politicians to become identified with political principles. I would argue that the fundamental consensus of the present day is expressed by a republican conception which unites the main political parties on a common terrain of ideas. This conception did not spring from thin air, or even from a New Labour spin-office. It was a language within which all political parties had to operate because it had already been created at a prior point in time and had now become generally accepted. It was a language which had been developing its own momentum from a period before the ideological vacuum of the 1990s. Indeed, an exploration of this republican conception at its gestation could well illuminate its nature and, arguably, its limitations. It may even illuminate the nature and problems of our own age. It is my argument that a major innovation occurred in British politics with the re-emergence in the political languages of both Right and Left of a near-dormant republican tradition in the period after 1956. This occurred as a result of an unhappiness felt on both Right and Left at the consensus firmly established by the post-war Labour Government – a consensus based on a corporate socialist ideology of state planning, public provision of welfare and varied forms of state ownership and con- trol of large sectors of British industry and services.

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  Hard Line

  The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II

  • Colin Dueck(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  For example, a country that is extremely powerful in relative terms, as the United States was in the s, can afford to engage in military intervention abroad, regardless of which party is in power. A country that is threatened by a clear external danger, as the United States was by the Soviet Union dur- ing the cold war, will also be inclined to respond assertively, regardless of party. Conversely, a country that is unthreatened or relatively con- strained by geopolitical conditions will be likely to follow a more re- strained or accommodating foreign policy, regardless of which party is in office. According to this model, we should therefore see little varia- tion in U.S. foreign policy due to partisan interest or ideology; the major variations should come in response to international conditions. The na- ture or composition of the Republican Party itself counts for little in this approach. 15 A fourth possible explanation for changes in a party’s foreign policy refers to the power of certain policy ideas. According to this approach, neither international nor economic nor political pressures are entirely determinate in causing policy outcomes. Foreign policy decision-makers necessarily rely on some set of assumptions or prior beliefs in order to organize and simplify an array of incoming information while under severe time constraints. These assumptions or beliefs help specify the national interest as well as the best way to pursue it. The preconceived policy ideas held by party leaders are therefore crucial in shaping precise foreign policy responses. In the case of the Republican Party since the s, one can easily imagine some of the specific sets of influential ideas to which this sort of explanation would point in order to account for changes in GOP foreign policy over time, such as ideas of anti- Communist liberation or rollback in the s, or neoconservative ideas beginning in the s.

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