John W. Soule

Bio: John W. Soule is an academic researcher from Florida State University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Amateur. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 3 publications receiving 85 citations.

Amateurs and Peofessionals: A Study of Delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention

Abstract: Several years ago James Q. Wilson studied the members of the three amateur Democratic clubs in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He intended his study, by his own admission, to be interesting rather than theoretical, but we have found its theoretical portions to be intriguing. The amateur politicians studies by Wilson primarily concentrated their energies in local politics, although their ambitions extended far beyond local campaigns and issues. Indeed, they expressed a clear desire to alter fundamentally the character of the American party system and, accordingly, all governing institutions. Wilson's task of identifying and characterizing the political motives and tactics of amateur Democrats was facilitated by the existence of political clubs. He had only to identify the clubs he wished to study and survey their members. Future researchers were left the responsibility of identifying similar political motives and tactics in less well-defined groups. We attempted to do this for a sample of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and, following Wilson's criteria, we were successful in identifying a substantial proportion of amateur Democrats. The amateur Democrat described by Wilson was not set apart from the more conventional party activitsts by his liberalism, his age, education or class. He was not a dilettante or an inept practitioner of politics, nor did he regard politics as an avocation or hobby. Rather the amateur found politics intrinsically interesting because it expressed a conception of the public interest. The political world was perceived in terms of policies and principles which were consistent with the amateur's theory of deomocracy.

Issue Conflict and Consensus: A Comparative Study of Democratic and Republican Delegates to the 1968 National Conventions

Abstract: A ccumulated research by political scientists has disspelled the notion that the leaders of American political parties are devoid of ideology and differ on only inconsequential issues. Herbert McClosky and his colleagues' were the first to demonstrate empirically that Democrats and Republicans were ideologically dissimilar. Delegates from the two parties who attended the 1956 National Conventions differed significantly from each other in regard to their aggregate attitudes toward 23 or 24 national issues. Samuel J. Eldersveld2 found all echelons of the Republican party in Detroit more conservative ideologically than the Democrats. Edmond Costantini's3 survey of Democratic and Republican delegates from California to the 1960 National Conventions revealed substantial differences along a liberalism-conservatism dimension. Roll-call studies in Congress and state legislatures have also revealed significant inter-party ideological conflict.4 In short, there is mounting evidence that the two parties diverge sharply on many important issues that may be construed to represent liberal and conservative ideologies. The late 1960s appeared to mark a change in the normal conduct of two-party politics in the United States. Somehow the terms used to describe the 1954-1964 period when most of the afore-

A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties

Abstract: The rational choice tradition has generated three models of competitive political party behavior: the vote-seeking party, the office-seeking party, and the policy-seeking party. Despite their usefulness in the analysis of interparty electoral competition and coalitional behavior, these models suffer from various theoretical and empirical limitations, and the conditions under which each model applies are not well specified. This article discusses the relationships between vote-seeking, officeseeking, and policy-seeking party behavior and develops a unified theory of the organizational and institutional factors that constrain party behavior in parliamentary democracies. Vote-seeking, officeseeking, and policy-seeking parties emerge as special cases of competitive party behavior under specific organizational and institutional conditions. Since Downs (1957), rational choice theories have come to play an increasingly important role in the study of competitive political parties. Efforts to develop such models of political parties have been of tremendous benefit to political science. Theories based on simple assumptions of party and voter objectives have generated influential (though often controversial) results. But even though rational choice models of political parties have been both powerful and suggestive, they have failed to generate any single, coherent theory of competitive party behavior or to produce robust results that apply under a variety of environmental conditions. There is little theory to help us choose between existing models, and where their assumptions fail, we are often left in the dark. Arguably the defining characteristic and virtue of rational choice theory is precisely its resistance to ad hoc explanation and its quest for equilibrium results independent of structural peculiarities. However, neoinstitutionalists, both within and outside the rational choice tradition, have recently challenged this conception of "pure theory" (March and Olsen 1984; Schlesinger 1984; Shepsle 1979). Moreover, the reluctance of many rational choice theorists to apply their models of electoral competition beyond individual candidates in simple institutional contexts has limited their influence on the empirical study of parties. My objective in this article is to provide a framework in which to explain

PARTY POLARIZATION IN AMERICAN POLITICS: Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Recent commentary points to clear increases in ideological polarization between the major American political parties. We review the theoretical and empirical literature on party polarization and partisan change. We begin by comparing the current period both to earlier political eras and to theories of partisan change. We argue that in the current period the parties have grown increasingly divided on all the major policy dimensions in American politics—a process that we term conflict extension. We discuss various perspectives on increases in polarization between the parties in government, the parties in the electorate, and the parties' activists, and we consider the causal links between polarization at each of these levels. We consider whether American society itself, and not just the parties and their identifiers, has become increasingly polarized. Finally, we discuss the consequences of growing party polarization for American political life.

Winning May Not Be Everything, But It's More than We Thought: Presidential Party Activists in 1980

Abstract: Recent studies of party activists in the United States have shown an influx of issue-oriented activists into the presidential nominating process since the 1960s. These new activists are described as dogmatic ideologues more interested in promoting their issue concerns than in nominating an electable candidate. Based on our survey of 17,628 delegates attending party conventions in 11 states during the 1980 Democratic and Republican presidential nomination campaigns, we show that activists in both parties weighed electability more heavily than ideology in choosing a party nominee. This finding is in sharp contrast to a strong preference among these same activists for ideological purity over electability when they are presented with questions, typical of past studies, that pose the trade-off only in very general and abstract terms. A partial replication using data from the CPS survey of delegates to the 1972 Democratic national convention supports our findings and leads us to assert that previous studies have underestimated the concern of contemporary party activists with winning.

“Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System”: Political Science, Policy Science, or Pseudo-Science?*

Abstract: The 1950 Report of the APSA Committee on Political Parties, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” is relevant today to current problems of public policy and party reform and to the efforts of political scientists, as political scientists, to contribute to the resolution of these problems. This essay examines the Report from a policy science perspective.The Report was explicitly therapeutic in aim. It defined health, diagnosed ills, and prescribed remedies for the American party system; through the remedies prescribed, the whole American political system was to be restored to health. The healthy democratic system was asserted to be one in which the two national parties were cohesive, disciplined, programmatic, and responsible; internally responsible to their members through primaries, caucuses and conventions, and externally responsible to the whole electorate for carrying out their programs. The programs of the two parties were to be clearly differentiated so as to provide the electorate a real choice. The ills of the Ameican system were said to be due to the failure of parties to have these characteristics. The prescription was recommendation for comprehensive reform.Despite the special expertise of political scientists on such “constitutional” questions and the work of such distinguished predecessors as Wilson, Goodnow, Lowell, Ford, and Herring, the Report was both normatively and empirically deficient. Little attempt was made to clarify or justify norms or goals. Repeatedly, instrumental propositions linking proposed reforms to goals were based on inadequate evidence or no evidence at all. Even in 1950, evidence (not mentioned in the Report) was available that cast doubt on the Committee's description of the political world. Subsequent research has produced a rich body of literature making clear that much of the substance of the Report is simply mistaken.The errors of the Report do not vitiate its goals; democratic potential is not revealed by democratic practices. But the errors drastically affect the utility of the Report as policy science. The failure of the Report as policy science is due, in part, to failures of the discipline to clarify the roles of political scientist as policy scientist, to explore adequately the problems of relating knowledge to goals, to pay appropriate attention to the development of political theory, and to develop intellectual tools more specifically suited to the tasks of policy science. The last half of the essay is devoted to an examination of these problems, concluding that the political scientist will succeed in being effective in the policy field just to the extent he succeeds at his own distinctive tasks, in sharpening his own tools, and in thoughtfully applying his special knowledge and skills.

Candidate Support in Presidential Nomination Campaigns: The Case of Iowa in 1984

Abstract: We analyze three explanations of candidate choice in presidential nomination campaigns: (1) a preference model, which contends that nomination choice is based on the ideological, issue, or candidate preferences of the voter; (2) a candidate-chances explanation that argues choice is motivated by the chances candidates have of winning the nomination or the general election; and (3) an expected utility model that includes both preferences and candidate chances by discounting ideological, issue, and candidate-trait preferences by the perceived chances each candidate has of winning in November. We test these explanations on samples of Democratic caucus attenders and state convention delegates from Iowa in 1984. The expected utility model most successfully predicts candidate choice in both samples. Even with appropriate controls for candidate affect, both preference and candidate chances measures have significant independent effects on candidate choice. Our analysis suggests that the interests of individual nom...