48 The two-party system
The presidential and congressional parties
The structure of American federalism provides one of the most important
disintegrating influences on American politics, but the Constitution struck
a further blow at the basis of any attempt to centralise political power. The
Founding Fathers, in their determination to limit the power of government,
also established a strict separation of personnel between Congress and the
president’s administration, and gave to president and Congress a different
electoral basis and different constituencies. The president cannot dissolve
Congress if it displeases him, nor does he resign if his proposals are rejected
by it. Thus, although both president and Congress are concerned with the
passage of legislation and with the way that it is put into effect, there are
very few formal links between them. A major function of the political parties
throughout their history has been to provide such links between the sepa-
rated branches of government; but their success in coordinating these ac-
tivities has been only partial. Indeed, as a result of this institutional division
of governmental power, each of the political parties has been divided into a
presidential wing and a congressional wing.
The distinctive quality of these two wings of each of the major political
parties led James McGregor Burns to describe the American party system as
a four-party system. The presidential Democrats, the presidential Republi-
cans, the congressional Democrats and the congressional Republicans are, he
argued, ‘separate though overlapping parties’. Each has its own institutional
patterns and ideology, representing a different style of politics. The presi-
dential Democrats differ from the congressional Democrats in their electoral
base, appealing, in part at least, to different sections of the population. The
presidential party seeks its major support in the urban areas of the large
industrialised states, while many Democratic senators and congressmen are
much more responsive to rural and suburban influences. The presidential
wings of both parties tend to be closer together doctrinally than they are to
the respective congressional wings of their own parties. Indeed, the conflict
between the two wings of a party may be more bitter and intense than the
conflict between the parties themselves.
It is, of course, difficult to draw precise lines between the presidential
and congressional wings of the party. Some members of Congress must be
numbered among the supporters of the presidential wing, although usually
they are relatively few in number, and each of the two wings will make at-
tempts to influence or even control the other. The nomination of Senator
Barry Goldwater by the Republicans in 1964 represented the success of the
congressional Republicans over the presidential Republicans, and his ensu-
ing defeat at the hands of the electorate illustrated the differing bases of
support upon which the two wings of the party must depend. Goldwater was
out of his element in presidential politics, and never seemed able to come to
terms with the new context in which he found himself. Although both John
F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had served in the Senate before election to
the White House, few senators have been able to make the transition to the