"The Call of Citizenship... Parties and Your Vote"

In civics classes, students are often told to “vote for the person, not the party” or “vote on the issues, not the party.” Commentators sometimes make the same pitch. On the whole, it’s pretty bad advice.

To vote for the person is to assume that the individual officeholder wields singular power. But that’s not true even in the case of the president. In choosing one presidential candidate over another, Americans are choosing more than the person who will sit behind the desk in the Oval Office. They are also selecting several hundred other executive officers, including the secretary of state, the attorney general of the Unites States, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The president also nominates all federal judges and justices. The great majority of these individuals, including the judicial officers, will be of the same party as the president.

The election of a senator or a representative is also more than a decision about which individual will occupy a seat in Congress. Rarely does a single member of Congress have a decisive voice in legislation. Congress works through collective action. Power resides with the majority party in each chamber.

By the same token, a vote based on an issue is usually shortsighted. Once in office, a successful candidate will vote on scores of policy issues, not just one or two issues that were the cornerstone of the election campaign. And what is the best predictor of how the successful candidate will vote on these issues? In nearly every case, the best predictor is the political party to which the officeholder belongs.

An issue that dominates an election can be overtaken by events and be a secondary issue by the time the winning candidates are sworn into office. Partisanship, on the other hand, tends to endure. Today’s Democratic and Republican candidates and officeholders are not all that different in their policy leanings from their partisan counterparts of a decade or two ago.

In recent decades, Americans have increasingly called themselves Independents rather than Democrats or Republicans. They pride themselves on “voting the issue or the candidate rather than the party.” Do you agree with that outlook? What argument would you make to support it?

This article taken from: Patterson, Thomas E. We the People: A Concise Introduction to American Politics. 6th Ed. McGraw-Hill, New York: 2006 (273).