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Ideology Construction, Grassroots Mobilization, and Party Strategy in South Africa and the United States, 1934–1948

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Polity

Abstract

According to recent scholarship, parties in a variety of electoral systems can significantly increase their share of the vote with “flanking moves” designed to siphon off opponents’ supporters with appeals to neglected policy concerns. These models do not specify the conditions that enable parties to carry out such maneuvers, however. We maintain that to take advantage of flanking opportunities, parties must undertake two tasks—ideology construction and grassroots mobilization—prior to the emergence of those opportunities. We illustrate our argument with a comparative-historical analysis of the National Party in South Africa and the Republican Party in the United States. Facing similar strategic contexts after the Great Depression, the two parties responded very differently to opportunities to attract voters through conservative racial appeals during the 1940s.

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Notes

  1. Quoted in Earl Black and Merle Black, The Vital South: How Presidents are Elected (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 150.

  2. See, inter alia, Gary Miller and Norman Schofield, “Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States,” American Political Science Review 97 (May 2003): 245–60; Gary Miller and Norman Schofield, “The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics 6 (September 2008): 433–50; Norman Schofield, Architects of Political Change: Constitutional Quandaries and Social Choice Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Norman Schofield and Itai Sened, Multiparty Democracy: Elections and Legislative Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  3. According to Schofield's theoretical model, South Africa's National Party and the United States’ Republican Party are both “most likely” cases of conservative racial flanking. The divergent outcomes—flanking in South Africa, and no flanking in the United States—point to inadequacies within the Schofield model. We use ideas about organizational factors to account for the presence and absence of flanking maneuvers, and use historical process tracing to establish the plausibility of our causal arguments. Although our case studies cannot prove the validity of our organizational hypotheses for all cases that could be covered by Schofield's model, they suggest fruitful avenues for future research. For a detailed discussion of the role of case studies in the evaluation and development of theory, see Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).

  4. Miller and Schofield, “Activists and Partisan Realignment,” 253.

  5. Adam Przeworski and John Sprague, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 120.

  6. On the utility of “supply-side” explanations of party outcomes, see David Art, “The Organizational Origins of the Radical Right: The Case of Belgium,” Comparative Politics 40 (July 2008): 421–40.

  7. Andrew J. Polsky, “When Business Speaks: Political Entrepreneurship, Discourse, and Mobilization in American Partisan Regimes,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 12 (October 2000): 455–76.

  8. As Schofield suggests; see also Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  9. Polsky, “When Business Speaks.” On entrepreneurs’ efforts to make their projects the “common carrier” of multiple interests, see Eric Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and Development in the U.S. Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Adam Sheingate, “Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 17 (Fall 2003): 185–203. Entrepreneurs may be formal party leaders, but they may also be activists or interest group leaders who are closely affiliated with the party and who seek to shape its positions and prospects. Typically, entrepreneurs come from all of these sectors, and must negotiate common approaches if they are to succeed. This more expansive understanding of party is influenced by Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations before and after Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  10. See, for example, Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Michael Temple, “New Labour's Third Way: Pragmatism and Governance,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 2 (October 2000): 302–25.

  11. Daniel E. Bergan, Alan S. Gerber, Donald Green, and Costas Panagopoulos, “Grassroots Mobilization and Voter Turnout in 2004,” Public Opinion Quarterly 69 (December 2005): 760–77; Paul Whiteley and Patrick Seyd, “How to Win a Landslide by Really Trying: The Effects of Local Campaigning on Voting in the 1997 British General Election,” Electoral Studies 22 (June 2003): 301–24.

  12. Peter W. Wielhouwer, “The Mobilization of Campaign Activists by the Party Canvas,” American Politics Research 27 (April 1999): 177–99.

  13. Daniel J. Galvin, “Changing Course: Reversing the Organizational Trajectory of the Democratic Party from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama,” The Forum (June 2008), 3; see also Galvin, Presidential Party Building (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 236–46.

  14. For example, see Robert Harmel, Uk Heo, Alexander Tan, and Kenneth Janda, “Performance, Leadership, Factions, and Party Change: An Empirical Analysis,” West European Politics 18 (January 1995): 1–33; Herbert Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  15. Miller and Schofield, “Activists and Partisan Realignment,” 256.

  16. For a more elaborate discussion of these regional disparities, see Dan O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 49–51.

  17. O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme, 96–101.

  18. Ibid., 49.

  19. Ibid., 33.

  20. Aletta J. Norval, Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse (London; New York: Verso, 1996), 67.

  21. Quoted in Hermann Giliomee, “The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929–1948,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (June 2003): 373–74.

  22. See, for example, Giliomee, “The Making of the Apartheid Plan.”

  23. Dan O’Meara, “The Afrikaner Broederbond 1927–1948: Class Vanguard of Afrikaner Nationalism,” Journal of Southern African Studies 3 (April 1977): 178.

  24. O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme, 72.

  25. A. W. Stadler, “The Afrikaner in Opposition, 1910–1948,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 7 (November 1969): 210.

  26. Charles Bloomberg, Christian-Nationalism and the Rise of the Afrikaner Broederbond in South Africa, 1918–1948, ed. Saul Dubow (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 86.

  27. Bloomberg, Christian-Nationalism, 54.

  28. Norval, Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse, 39–43.

  29. O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme, 77.

  30. Ibid., 115.

  31. Ibid., 173.

  32. Dan O’Meara, “The 1946 Mine Workers’ Strike in the Political Economy of South Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 13 (July 1975): 146.

  33. Letter to M. C. Gillett, February 1, 1947, reprinted in Jean van der Poel, ed., Selections from the Smuts Papers, Vol. VII: August 1945–October 1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 738–41.

  34. Adam Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-century South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 120.

  35. Quoted in Ashforth, Politics of Official Discourse, 133–34.

  36. Reprinted in W. A. Kleynhans, ed., Suid-Afrikaans Algemene Verkiesingsmanifeste/South African General Election Manifestos 1910–1987 (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1987), 316–34; translation ours.

  37. Reprinted in Kleynhans, Suid-Afrikaans, 344–46.

  38. Kenneth A. Heard, General Elections in South Africa, 1943–1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).

  39. O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme, 226.

  40. Heard, General Elections, 38.

  41. Simon Topping, Lincoln's Lost Legacy: The Republican Party and the African American Vote, 1928–1952 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008).

  42. David W. Reinhard, The Republican Right since 1945 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983).

  43. In other work, we examine in detail the complex relationship between party factionalism and ideology construction within the Republican Party in the 1933–1964 period. See Shamira M. Gelbman and Jesse H. Rhodes, “Party Organization and the Origins of the Republican Party's Belated ‘Southern Strategy,’ ” presented at the Policy History Conference, Columbus, Ohio, June 5, 2010.

  44. Clyde P. Weed, The Nemesis of Reform: The Republican Party during the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

  45. Donald Bruce Johnson, The Republican Party and Wendell Willkie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960), 20–24.

  46. For example, see Topping, Lincoln's Lost Legacy.

  47. George H. Mayer, “The Republican Party, 1932–1952,” in History of U.S. Political Parties, Vol. III: 1910–194, from Square Deal to New Deal, ed. A. Schlesinger (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), 2261.

  48. Malcolm Moos, The Republicans: A History of Their Party (New York: Random House, 1956), 399–400.

  49. Mayer, “The Republican Party,” 2280.

  50. Michael D. Bowen, “Fight for the Right: The Quest for Republican Identity in the Postwar Period,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 2007).

  51. See Black and Black, The Vital South.

  52. For a discussion of the Republican Party's shifting relationship with southern African Americans during the late nineteenth century, see Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Chapters 2–4 and 6.

  53. James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967).

  54. For example, see Anthony S. Chen, “The Party of Lincoln and the Politics of State Fair Employment Practices Legislation in the North, 1945–1964,” American Journal of Sociology 112 (May 2007): 1713–74.

  55. See, respectively, Eric Schickler, Kathryn Pearson, and Brian Feinstein, “Congressional Parties and Civil Rights Politics from 1933–1972,” presentation, History of Congress Conference, George Washington University, May 29 – June 1, 2008; and Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 283–306.

  56. Mayer, “The Republican Party,” 2285.

  57. Lowndes, From the New Deal, 14.

  58. Katznelson et al., “Limiting Liberalism.”

  59. Lowndes, From the New Deal, 45.

  60. Ibid., 14.

  61. Moos, The Republicans, 401.

  62. Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008).

  63. Johnson, The Republican Party.

  64. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 86–97.

  65. Alexander Heard, A Two-Party South? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952).

  66. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1949), 292.

  67. Quoted in Heard, A Two-Party South? 119.

  68. See, especially, Anthony S. Chen, Robert W. Mickey, and Robert P. Van Houweling, “Explaining the Contemporary Alignment of Race and Party: Evidence from California's 1946 Ballot Initiative on Fair Employment,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (October 2008): 204–28; Brian D. Feinstein and Eric Schickler, “Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (April 2008): 1–31.

  69. Gelbman and Rhodes, “Party Organization.”

  70. Lowndes, From the New Deal, 36–39.

  71. Miller and Schofield, “Activists and Partisan Realignment,” 256.

  72. Examples include Luis Ricardo Fraga, “Playing the ‘Latino Card’: Race, Ethnicity, and National Party Politics,” Du Bois Review 1 (2004): 297–317; Daniel N. Posner, “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi,” American Political Science Review 98 (2004): 529–45; Kanchan Chandra, “Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (June 2005): 235–52.

  73. Ira Katznelson and Barry Weingast, eds., Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism (New York: Russell Sage, 2005).

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Richard Bensel, Abhishek Chatterjee, Carol Mershon, and Polity's anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Illinois State University,

    Shamira M Gelbman

  2. University of Massachusetts, Amherst

    Jesse H Rhodes

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Gelbman, S., Rhodes, J. Ideology Construction, Grassroots Mobilization, and Party Strategy in South Africa and the United States, 1934–1948. Polity 43, 154–178 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2010.30

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