62 The two-party system
altered, and the mainstay of their power has vanished. Many of the former
immigrants, their children and their grandchildren are citizens who under-
stand their rights. More important, the social security programmes of the
federal government have removed much of the demand for relief services
upon which machine politics was based. The machines have lost their power,
and the great bosses of the past no longer dominate. But the decline of the
boss and of the machine has not been paralleled by the rise of any other
political organisation that could give cohesion to politics. The remnants
of the machines, often locked in battle with pressure groups, still provide
the political structure of many cities and counties. The philosophy of the
machine, which was to treat politics as a business – the business of getting
votes and winning elections, as Banfield and Wilson put it – still persists. The
old machine was really non-partisan, although it might have been nominally
Republican or Democratic, and this non-partisan, non-ideological approach
is still typical of some city governments. The spoils of office are still consider-
able and attractive. Patronage is important, with many jobs to be distributed
and contracts worth millions to be awarded for highway construction, parking
facilities and public buildings. The line between ‘honest graft’ and ‘dishonest
graft’ is often difficult to draw. Thus, although the problems facing American
governments are quite staggering in their complexity and difficulty, and day-
to-day decisions are taken that deeply affect the lives and conditions of their
citizens, there is often a strange hiatus between the working of politics and
the people most closely affected by it.
Party organisation
The ‘informal’ elements of the American party structure may well be, in
practice, the most important, but there is a formal structure of organisations
rising up from the local level to the national. This formal party organisation
consists of a pyramid of committees starting at the base with ward, precinct,
town and township committees, and going up through city and county com-
mittees, to state committees, and then to the National Party Committee.
Within each state there is great variation in the way in which these commit-
tees are constituted. Broadly speaking, the practice is for the lowest level of
committees to be elected by the party’s supporters, and for the higher levels
to be selected from the membership of these lower levels, although direct
election may also be used for selection further up the scale. The National
Committee is responsible for conducting the party’s presidential election
campaign and for organising the national convention of the party, but there
are also congressional and senatorial campaign committees, emphasising
the fact that presidential and congressional politics are distinct.
The National Committees are federal in composition. The Republican Na-
tional Committee consists of one national committeeman and one national
committeewoman from each state together with each state Republican party
chairman and representatives of the District of Columbia and a number of