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National Parties and Local Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Ellen Deborah Ellis
Ellen Deborah Ellis
Affiliation:
Mount Holyoke College
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Extract

It is curious that the question with which, of all others, every participant in local politics finds himself most persistently confronted—and it is a truism that by far the greatest part of our political lives are concerned with local affairs—should be given so little. attention in treatises on American government. I refer to the problem of the relation between national political parties and state and local politics.

The problem presents itself under two aspects, in one sense separate, though in reality closely interwoven with each other. There is first the anomaly that local issues seem so far removed from the platforms of the organizations, the national parties, through which the often perplexed and embarrassed voter must express himself in the performance of his ordinary electoral duties in the state or the locality; and there is, secondly, the question faced by every would-be reformer of local government, as to whether the desired reforms can best be brought about through the national party organizations or through separate locally organized groups.

Type
American Government and Politics
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , February 1935 , pp. 60 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1935

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References

1 Municipal Government in the United States (New York, 1934), p. 237Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., pp. 55–56. Cf. also statements of Commission to Devise a Plan for the Government of Cities in the State of New York, p. 13; of Matthews, N. Jr., in The City Government of Boston, p. 178Google Scholar; of Brand Whitlock, in The Evil Influence of National Parties and Issues in Municipal Elections; in the Conference for Good City Government, 1907, p. 193Google Scholar; of Cushman, Robert E., in Non-Partisan Nominations and Elections in 106 Annals of Am. Acad. of Pol. and Soc. Sci., p. 83 (March, 1923)Google Scholar; and of Hughes, Charles Evans, in Conditions of Progress in Democratic Government, pp. 111–112Google Scholar—all cited in Kneier's, Charles M.City Government in the United States (New York, 1934), pp. 237–239Google Scholar.

3 Reed, op. cit., p. 239.

4 Kneier, op. cit., p. 237.

5 Reed. op. cit., pp. 55–56.

6 Munro, W. B., Municipal Government and Administration (New York, 1923), Vol. 1, p. 298Google Scholar.

7 Munro, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 297–298.

8 Leonard, D. White, The City Manager (Chicago, 1927)Google Scholar.

9 White, op. cit., pp. 294–298.

10 City Management: The Cincinnati Experiment (New York, 1933)Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., p. 5.

12 Taft, op. cit., p. 235. Cf. also pp. 76–147.

13 The National Municipal Review has printed a few such articles, but more are needed.

14 Cf. Dickinson, John, Political Aspects of the New Deal, in this Review, Vol. 28, p. 204 (Apr., 1934)Google Scholar.

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