Civic Literacy Curriculum

Political parties help to coordinate people with similar ideas about government, helping them to elect like-minded people to achieve their policy goals, to educate and persuade the public, and to hold officeholders accountable (by offering an alternative).

Parties have come and gone in American history, but there have typically been two leading parties. Although it arose from earlier parties, the Democratic Party formally developed in the 1820s and 1830s under Martin Van Buren and its first elected President, Andrew Jackson. Initially created to enforce states’ rights and local government, in the 1930s the Democratic Party shifted to favor a more centralized federal government. 

The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s with the specific purpose of ending the expansion of slavery into the federal territories — its first President was Abraham Lincoln. 

Compared to today’s Democratic Party, the modern Republican Party tends to favor a more decentralized federal government. The Democrats and Republicans are the two major parties today, whose ideas and values have shifted over time to reflect a changing United States.

Other political parties today include the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and the Constitution Party. These are known as “third parties;” their candidates are rarely able to win elections due to the electoral system in the United States. But they do have a meaningful impact on election outcomes, and they provide another way for voters to express their views. 

Political parties are both stabilizing and flexible parts of electoral politics. They tend to hold broad political philosophies over time, though they can change these too. Sometimes this is due to a new issue developing. Other times, this is due to a party achieving its goal—for example, the purpose of the Republican Party at the time of the Civil War was ending slavery in the territories, and then, after the Thirteenth Amendment, ensuring the rights of the freed slaves. In other cases, a particularly influential president or important event will lead a party to rethink its commitments, as when Franklin Roosevelt pushed the Democrats to abandon the party’s historic commitment to states’ rights in the 1930s.
Parties are largely guided by people who care deeply and have strong ideas about policy positions, which tends to make them stable. On the other hand, party members want to win elections, so parties require a level of flexibility to please the voters, too.

George Washington famously criticized political parties in his Farewell Address. In the early twentieth century, political reformers similarly argued parties were too corrupt, and they sought to weaken them. Others have argued parties have important roles in structuring politics, educating voters, screening candidates, and offering voters an easy way to pick like-minded candidates who share the voters’ goals.  Today, many observers argue that political parties are, ironically, relatively weak institutions compared to earlier points in history, even as voters’ own partisan polarization is far more intense than years past. In other words, the strength of organized parties—the ability to cultivate, recruit, discipline, and support candidates, is weak, even as voters are historically polarized and hostile to the opposition party.

A president's political affiliation usually gives us a general idea of his or her political philosophy. For example, a Republican president generally leans toward conservative ideas, such as less government regulation and a smaller federal government, while a Democratic president leans toward a more progressive agenda, which involves more government regulation and more government programs.

But those are just general trends, and sometimes presidents will be more distant from the views of the rest of their party, Congress, etc. Sometimes presidents will move the rest of the party to share their views---and sometimes the party will move the president toward its views.