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Party Polarization and Ideology: Diverging Trends in Britain and the US

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The Legacy of the Crash

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Abstract

Major political parties in the US have traditionally been regarded as organizationally weak, highly decentralized, and ideologically incoherent by comparison with the highly disciplined, ideological, class-based parties of the UK. Indeed, for a period after the Second World War American parties’ scholarship tended to look approvingly at the UK as an alternative model of a well-functioning party system for modern advanced industrial democracies (Schattscheider, 1942; Ranney, 1962; Beer, 1965). British scholar David Butler and others had challenged this interpretation as early as the 1950s (Butler, 1955), but it was the late Leon Epstein (1980) in his 1979 American Political Science Association (APSA) presidential address ‘What Happened to the British Party Model?’ who convincingly argued that the UK party system was no longer – if it ever had been – an appropriate model for American political parties.

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Authors
  1. Nicol C. Rae
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  2. Juan S. Gil
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, USA

    Terrence Casey (Associate Professor of Political Science and Head of Department) (Associate Professor of Political Science and Head of Department)

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© 2011 Nicol C. Rae and Juan S. Gil

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Rae, N.C., Gil, J.S. (2011). Party Polarization and Ideology: Diverging Trends in Britain and the US. In: Casey, T. (eds) The Legacy of the Crash. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343498_9

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