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

Nicol C. Rae and Juan S. Gil

Chapter 9 in The Legacy of the Crash, 2011, pp 159-178 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Party System; Republican Party; Labour Party; Major Party; National Party (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-34349-8_9

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230343498_9

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