Julian Zelizer Calls For Partisanship

The book: Division, dysfunction, distrust, and disinformation are at the heart of the problems that plague the U.S. government. One possible solution: partisanship. Yet politicians of today are fiercely loyal to their parties and unwilling to reach across the aisle to govern. Julian Zelizer’s new book In Defense of Partisanship (Columbia Global Reports) refers to examples of partisanship in the 1950s and 1960s that led to impactful reforms. He ultimately calls for a reimagining of partisanship in order to have a more functional government.

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The author: Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcom Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton. He is the author of more than 20 books including Defining the Age: Daniel Bell and Burning Down the House. He is also a CNN political analyst and columnist for Foreign Policy.

Excerpt:

Hyperpartisanship is destructive. Few observers are eager to defend the status quo. The trauma of the past few years, particularly January 6, has left few Americans satisfied with the way our politics works.

But the major alternatives each pose significant problems of their own. Madisonians ignore the real need for big government interventions, downplaying the dysfunctional elements of our constitutional design. Nonpartisanship imagines a fictitious political world where deep electoral divisions magically disappear and an expert-driven governing structure can design policies that command broad interest and support. Based on American history since the Civil War, third-partyism doesn’t have much of a chance of unseating either of the two deeply entrenched parties.

The depth of Democratic and Republican strength, combined with the state-by-state challenges posed by the Electoral College, means that third parties are more likely to help elect one of the two mainstream candidates. Bipartisanship has challenges of its own, as the nation learned in the decades between the 1920s and the 1970s, which included its tendency to privilege cabals of leaders operating without transparency. Moreover, given how divided Americans are on core issues, the possibility of bipartisanship would be difficult to achieve as the norm. Presidentialism ignores the long history of abusing power that has resulted from executive-centered government.

The best and most realistic alternative to hyperpartisanship is responsible partisanship. But what Washington needs is an understanding of responsible partisanship that differs significantly from what was envisioned in APSA’s 1950 report, when political scientists were concerned primarily about party leaders who were responsible to their rank and file and rank-and-file members who were responsible to the party platform. In the 2020s, responsible partisanship must revolve around strong parties that adhere to guardrails and compete within clear parameters, ensuring some degree of stability and functional governance despite our divisions.

With responsible partisanship, elected officials would once again respect and balance the trifecta of responsibilities that a healthy democracy requires besides attention to the needs of constituents within the district or state: partisanship, governance, and the protection of institutions.

An era of responsible partisanship would empower leaders to make tough decisions while being checked from abusing power, it would offer greater coherence to political competition and negotiation, it would provide a means for continuing to centralize deliberations while allowing all members pathways to participation, it would create a means for the electorate to express core differences of opinion within the mainstream political process, and it would provide mechanisms to hold leaders accountable for their actions.

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Partisan Integration

One powerful element of partisanship in the 19th century was that it was woven into a public culture that connected the white male electorate to the party institutions that represented them. Without romanticizing what drove citizens to participate in party activities, and recognizing the limitations of the franchise before 1965, political parties in the 19th century served an important intermediary function between citizens and the state. At the height of partisan tensions in the Gilded Age, rates of voting remained extremely high and par­ties were seen by citizens as a valuable institution in their lives.

In recent decades, we have experienced another era of inten­sified partisan conflict but with rising levels of distrust of and disconnection from the democratic process. The result, argues political scientist Julia Azari, has been “weak parties and strong partisanship.” The disillusionment born out of Vietnam and Watergate never disappeared. The reinvigorated partisanship after the 1960s was layered over this sentiment. Even worse, the structure of contemporary party organizations is too top heavy. Voters tend to feel strong attachment to their party despite these institutions being largely absent from daily lives filled up with consumption, work, and family. “Hollow parties,” as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld have argued, “are unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day-lives.” It is for this reason that so many Americans are passionate about Democrats and Republicans but barely encounter party officials or participate in party activities outside of receiving solicitation texts, watching television, or scrolling through social media advertisements. Under these conditions, parties no longer serve the function of forging connective tissue that helps maintain faith in the democratic process.

Reforms to achieve responsible partisanship must create mechanisms that foster serious engagement by citizens in political activity. The goal should be to reduce the distance between the voter and the legislator. Improved communication between members and voters will be a place to start. Some localities have been exploring changes to the town hall format, an important component for national representatives and senators, to make them less imposing and dominated by activists. Some of the innovations have included the use of high-quality livestreaming platforms, along with breakout sessions online and in person, to encourage dialogue. Having members commit to a minimum of four digital town hall meetings per year or citizen boards focused on specialized issues can entrench these inter­actions. Another recent innovation has been to assemble “citizens’ assemblies,” where citizens are brought together around specific issues, such as the debt or criminal justice, and have submitted recommendations to congresspersons. During the run-up to midterms, there have been several moments, such as with the Tea Party in 2010 and the Democratic anti-Trump vote in 2018, when the party apparatus demonstrated the clear capacity to forge meaningful connections with frustrated voters.

Although the campaign finance laws that promoted party-building activity in the 1980s and 1990s — called “soft money” — proved to be extremely problematic as they were enacted and regulated, the basic goal of that system still has immense value. If there can be government incentives for disclosed donations that actually help cover the expenses of local party-directed initiatives, with certain kinds of projects specified, such reforms could foster citizen engagement with the party. More funding, for example, can be devoted to support parties developing promotional and recruitment initiatives that target constituencies, such as younger voters and poor Black Americans, to participate in door-to-door canvassing, phone banks, or poll watching.

In the Columbia Law Review, Tabatha Abu El-Haj and Didi Kuo have labeled such efforts “associational party-building.” These law scholars pointed to recent developments showing what can be achieved. El-Haj and Kuo looked at measures that were recently implemented by both parties to boost participation. Indiana Republican Jim Banks proposed having members of the caucus convene specialized roundtables organized around particular occupations such as janitor, electrician, and restaurant owner. Texas and Nevada Democrats have put resources into in-person canvassing operations and multilingual hotlines, as well as celebratory events targeting ethnic groups. Nevada Republicans undertook efforts that included debate-watching parties and game-night fundraisers. Expanding on these initiatives would require substantial investments in state and local parties, given that only they have the true capacity to serve as full-time intermediary institutions. Engaging in these kinds of operations, the authors argue, benefits the parties as well at the electoral level: “Parties were stronger where they canvassed door-to-door and worked through peer and local civic networks.”

The protection of voting rights must be at the heart of effective partisan integration. The past decades have seen a steady erosion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After the Supreme Court knocked down the key provision of the law in Shelby v. Holder (2013), red states have passed large numbers of bills imposing new restrictions on the vote. Restoring the VRA and dismantling the new limitations would make voting easier, more inviting, and less intimidating. The more that people become engaged in the act of voting, feeling a stake in elections, the stronger their attachments will become to the party system as agents, not just spectators, in political change.

Expanding the size of the House of Representatives would be a key step toward creating an integrative style of responsible partisanship that is more representative and responsive to the population. The House has been stuck at 435 members for far too long. It has remained the same size since Woodrow Wilson’s first term. The total number was locked in in 1929 when the House passed the Permanent Apportionment Act, which instituted a formula for apportioning the 435 seats. Despite the fact that the population has more than doubled since that time, the composition of the House has not changed. The average district had reached 740,000 by 2015, a dramatic rise from the 300,000 in 1940. This contradicts what the founders, who clearly wanted the House to grow along with the population, envisioned in the Constitution.

Districts have grown too large, which creates a number of significant problems that curtail the ability of legislators to have genuine interactions with voters. Even in the age of computers and Zoom meetings, it remains difficult for most members to engage in meaningful contact with large swaths of their constituency. No matter how much time a member allocates to traveling back home to meet with voters, there are too many people to see and too many organizations to interact with—and too many groups to raise money from. As a result, members are more likely to hear from the most active and the most vocal persons in their specific electorate, thereby replicating the same kind of dynamics that occur in primaries and caucuses.

An added benefit of expanding the House, as political theorist Danielle Allen argued, would be to counterbalance some of the problems caused by the Electoral College. Our system for picking presidents has come under considerable criticism because the Electoral College favors smaller states, which already benefit from the anti-majoritarian structure of the Senate. Expanding the size of the House would allow the lower chamber to fulfill its obligation of offering proper representation to populous states. “A larger House of Representatives will reduce the advantage of small states to an appropriate level,” offering some counterbalance to the Senate and Electoral College. At a practical level, as Allen confirmed in discussions with top architects, it would be feasible to renovate the physical infrastructure of the House and adjacent office buildings—as has been done many times—to facilitate additional members.

Strong partisanship benefits citizen engagement. The more that politicians and the electorate maintain grassroots ties, the more enduring the roots that bind the party organization together will be.

Excerpted from In Defense of Partisanship by Julian E. Zelizer. Copyright © 2025 by Julian E. Zelizer and published by Columbia Global Reports. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Reviews

“This useful and timely study can serve as a textbook for American government courses and for politically engaged citizens.” — Library Journal

“This book is instantly essential. Too many commentators bewail our hyperpartisan politics. Julian Zelizer does something much better—he explores the long and fascinating history of America’s political parties, explains the current moment, and offers a road map back to sanity.” — Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington