Interest Group Factions in the Expanded Democratic Party
Casey B. K. Dominguez
Department of Political Science and International Relations
University of San Diego
caseydominguez@sandiego.edu
This paper begins with the premise that political party organizations should be treated as
open, fluid networks of actors. The "Expanded Party" (Bernstein 1999) encompasses
party committees and officials, but also activists, donors, consultants, candidates,
officeholders, and interest groups. It defines interest groups that have an orientation to the
Democratic party as those that, when they give money, give more than half of that money
to Democrats. The paper then looks for factions among these interest groups in the
Expanded Democratic party. The paper defines factions to be durable coalitions of
different actors that try to influence the party's internal organization, and have some
rational basis for doing so. Examining the 2002 congressional primary candidates that
were supported by Democratic party-oriented Political Action Committees, it finds that
there is a consensus on one primary candidate in about 70% of primary races. This
finding undermines the conventional wisdom that Democrats are frequently deeply
divided, especially in primaries. In the races where these PACs do not support the same
primary candidate, there are no discernible factions organized along recognizable issue
lines. When there is any disagreement about a primary candidate, it is usually the case
that Leadership PACs and labor groups split their support among multiple primary
candidates. The paper concludes that more work needs to be done defining the boundaries
of the Expanded Party, and defining and measuring faction.
Paper prepared for presentation at the Western Political Science Association Annual
Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, March 8-11, 2007
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Interest Group Factions in the Expanded Democratic Party
Upon first inspection, many political observers would agree with the statement,
“the Democratic party is factionalized,” or perhaps with the corollary, “the Democratic
party is more factionalized than the Republican party.” Both of these statements imply
that the Democratic party is so factionalized that it can’t agree on what it is, or what it
stands for, or who its leaders are. Intuitively, one might say that “labor” or
“environmentalists” are some of these supposed factions. These nuggets of conventional
wisdom beg the question: are there factions in the Democratic party? Do interest groups,
or groups of interest groups, make up some of those factions? The pages that follow
apply at least one reasonable definition of faction to the interest groups that loosely
affiliate with the Democratic party, and conclude that at least at a broad level, there are
no durable, sensible, identifiable factions among them. Rather, interest groups do what
they do best: pursue their own individual group’s agenda, not necessarily in concert with
any other group(s). While this may be somewhat surprising, perhaps the more startling
conclusion is that, at least in primary elections, interest groups in the Democratic party do
not fight against each other all that often. Since this is a preliminary study, the paper
concludes with the caveat that more work can certainly be done on these questions.
In order to fully understand the operation and potential influence of modern
American political parties it is important to look beyond their official organizations and
committees and examine how various actors operate in parties’ informal, network-like
structures. Although empirical studies of party organization have focused on the official
representatives of the party (Silbey 1990; Herrnson 1988; Cotter et al. 1984), theories of
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party structure support a broader definition that includes elite party actors.1 An emerging
literature is attempting to reconceptualize the roles that parties play in elections. These
scholars base their approach on the assumption that the party structure is open and fluid,
and at different times, different individuals, in different roles, can be influential.2 For
example, several recent studies (Doherty 2005, Masket 2004, Monroe 2001, Schwartz
1990) that focus on the interpersonal connections between party officials, legislators,
contributors, and activists conclude that conceptualizing a party as a network rather than
a hierarchy allows for a much fuller understanding of how it actually works. According to
1
Schlesinger (1985) and Aldrich (1995) argue that both ambitious office seekers and
“benefit seekers” who “hold, or have access to, critical resources that office seekers need
to realize their ambitions” and whose “goals depend upon the party’s success in capturing
office” (Aldrich 1995, 20) should be included in theories of party organization. Beck and
Sorauf (1992, 9-12) also argue that “most structural conceptions see modern parties as
broad based organizations that transcend office seekers and officeholders…the activists
of the party [are] all those who give their time, money, and skills to the party, whether as
leaders or followers.”
2
For example, the iron triangles of old, which were not formal organizations but were
based on close relationships among a select group of elites on congressional
subcommittees, in interest groups, and in the bureaucracy, have gone by the wayside.
Now a wider population of technocrats and politicos, in a bigger set of institutions, make
up the “subgovernment.” It is possible to track the careers and relationships of such
people, and indicate that they belong in an “issue network” but it is no longer possible to
list the individuals responsible for policymaking on an issue. Heclo (1978, 87-124).
3
this perspective, a definition of the “Expanded Party” (Bernstein 1999) can encompass
both the party’s formal hierarchical structures and the loyal big-money donors who
support the organization, the activists who staff candidate campaigns, the highly partisan
hired-gun strategists who help party candidates compete for office, and at least some of
the interest groups that support the party’s efforts. This definition is totally compatible
with more traditional definitions of party (for example, Aldrich 1995) that argue that a
party is fundamentally composed of office-seekers and benefit-seekers. Its contribution is
to broaden the operational definition of benefit seekers and ask more questions about how
they relate to, and influence, the office seekers.
Recent work has shown that it can be fruitful to consider how elite party
participants in the Expanded Party can affect the political process, and particularly the
politics of party nominations. Recent research into the endorsements received by
candidates for presidential nominations has shown that candidates who receive support
from a broad swath of party elite endorsers are more likely to win the nomination (Cohen
et al. 2001). In addition, several studies have shown that staff (both campaign
professionals and those who work in political or members’ offices in government) are
overwhelmingly party loyal and that when they select candidates or members to work for,
that can be a signal of party insider support for that person (Monroe 2001; Bernstein
2000; Bernstein and Dominguez 2003).
With this expanded view of the party organization, it is important to consider the
roles that outside groups like organized labor and conservative Christians play in
performing essential party functions like recruiting, funding, and getting out the vote for
the party’s candidates. Cohen et al, for example, include in their presidential candidate
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endorsement lists such important interest groups as the UAW in the Democratic party and
the NRA in the Republican party. But asking how “interest groups” fit into the Expanded
Party begs the question of how we should decide which groups qualify as “partisan”. We
might say that some interest groups are more integrated in to the political parties (Skinner
2004), but others may act more as competitors to the party establishment. Once the
boundaries of the Expanded Party have been established, a second, and more important
set of questions arises: to what degree do these party-oriented groups divide into
factions? And if there are identifiable factions in the Expanded Party, how often and
under what circumstances do they try to remake the party in their own image, regardless
of the wishes of other important party constituents?
These are the questions that will be addressed in the following pages. I argue that
interest groups themselves are not equivalent to factions. Factions should be considered
to be groups of actors who regularly engage in similar behavior in competition with other
similar groups. I identify some factional groups and behavior in the Expanded
Democratic party, but conclude that the party is more fractured than factionalized.
Faction. As Bernstein (2004) notes, the literature on party factions in the
American context is practically nonexistent. V.O. Key explained the degree of
factionalism in southern Democratic one party rule, but as noted by Benedict (1985), his
definition of faction, “a combination, clique or grouping of voters and political leaders
who united at a particular time in support of a candidate” is so general that it would imply
that modern candidate-centered politics is totally factionalized (Benedict 1985, 365).
There is a literature on the formation and maintenance of durable factions in multiparty
contexts, particularly in Italy and Japan (see, for example, Cox, Rosenbluth and Thies
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2000), but because the electoral context is so different, it is difficult to make analogies
from this body of work to the American context. And even in a comparative context,
there does not seem to be a scholarly consensus about how to identify and measure
factions within party organizations. Belloni and Beller (1976) organize some of the
literature on party factions in a helpful review. They found, albeit thirty years ago, that
most studies of factions were specific to particular countries and circumstances. They
also found, perhaps because of each study’s narrow focus, that each defined faction
somewhat differently. Some authors argue that factions only exist prior to the formation
of parties, others that factions only exist within fully functioning parties. Some
characterize factions as issue-oriented, while others say that they arise around
personalities. All of the studies discussed by Belloni and Beller imply that a faction must
be organized, but there is no apparent agreement about the criteria for that organization.
Benedict (1985) seems to argue that clientelism is an important component of factions,
but it is not clear how essential that criterion is to the definition.
Contemporary journalists also use the concept of faction to refer to different
phenomena. A recent blurb in the Tampa Tribune asserts that “incoming Governor
Charlie Christ and U.S. Senator Mel Martinez represent different factions of Florida’s
Republican party…a ‘moderate populist’ in the future governor and a ‘religious
conservative’ in the new party chairman.” This definition of faction implies a broad,
ideological agreement and an existence that goes beyond any one leader or candidate.
Another recent Washington Post article describes the post election blame-game between
moderate and conservative Republicans. It lists several potential groupings of
Republicans:
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Moderate Republicans quickly concluded that the party
needs to be more moderate. Conservative Republicans
declared that it should be more conservative. Main Street is
angry at Wall Street, theo-cons are angry at neo-cons, and
almost everyone is angry at President Bush and the GOP
congressional leadership.(Grunwald 2006).
Here, faction implies both loose groupings of ideologically similar Republicans,
but also seems to imply that the President and his allies, and separately, the
Congressional Republicans, might comprise distinct factions of the party. Another article,
this time about the Democrats, refers explicitly to the factions that Speaker Nancy Pelosi
will encounter in the House: Blue Dogs, New Democrats, and Progressives (Epstein
2006). This definition of faction refers not to loose ideological tendencies in the parties,
but rather to self-conscious organizations of legislators.
It could be argued that a good deal of research on the US Congress is inherently
interested in the formation and behavior of factions within the parties in government
(particularly studies of caucuses, Leadership PACs, or most famously the “Conservative
Coalition” of the middle-twentieth century). But these studies, while relating ideology to
voting behavior in Congress, do not explore potential relationships between those
factions-in-government, and the broader organizational party. One could ask, for
example, whether factions-in-government relate to regular, “factional” connections
between coalitions of legislators, the campaign staff they hire, the interest groups with
whom they affiliate, and the fellow candidates to whom they lend their support. Or, more
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broadly, one could ask to what extent the parties are “controlled” by a given faction. How
does a faction achieve that power within the party? What is the structure of the
competition within a party? Which actors or institutions mediate conflict between these
factions? To what extent are the parties really serving to broker among competing groups,
to forge compromises between their constituents’ interests? Questions like this are
intriguing, but they beg the question of how to identify a faction in the first place.
Given the presumption that the party involves multiple types of actors
(candidates, donors, activists, staffers, strategists, groups) one could start looking for
factions almost anywhere. My focus here is on interest groups. I ask whether there are
identifiable factions among the interest groups that are loosely aligned with the
Democratic party. To do this it is necessary to distill some of the essential qualities of a
faction from the many definitions offered by scholars and political observers. I choose
three of these qualities. The first is that a faction must be durable to at least a modest
degree. It would be useless to observe, and really impossible to catalogue, the infinite
pairings of groups that come together to support candidates or policies. So a faction must
be observed to act in concert in multiple instances. Second, a faction should demonstrate
some coordination, or give rise through its behavior to a belief that communication might
exist between its constituent parts. That is to say, a faction must have some rational basis
for acting in concert. It could happen that the Service Employees International Union and
the gay-rights organization Human Rights Campaign support the same candidates in
several different election cycles. But is there any rational basis for believing that they
might be doing so on purpose? Do they have any policy or ideological goals in common?
Are there any spoils of office that would benefit both? Third, a faction is inherently in
8
competition with other similar groupings or potential groupings for control of its
umbrella party’s agenda, message, or personnel. Coming together on a common softball
team does not mean that two groups have formed a faction (though such informal
connections could certainly form the basis for one). A party faction must try to influence
the internal workings of the party in a meaningful way.
It is assumed in these criteria that a faction is not equivalent to an interest group
itself. Faction implies that there is a loose, temporary amalgamation of interests who
share at least one common goal. Because an interest group is a permanent organization, it
cannot meet that definition.
Identifying Groups in the Expanded Party
Taking a step back from the problem of faction, we must start with an equally
troubling problem, that of defining the groups that should count as part of the party’s
coalition. Some groups may pursue a fully non-partisan, issue-oriented strategy,
supporting candidates of both parties in order to gain access to them, and rewarding
members of whichever party embrace their agenda more fully at any given point in time.
These groups probably should not be considered to be part of either party. Other groups
may, over time, or even at their inception, believe that their issue agenda will be best
served by electing more members of a particular political party, and work uniformly to
advance that party’s interests as a means to further their own. Some may, by their
behavior, clearly prefer one party, but still act in clearly independent ways, while others
may subordinate their primary issue positions to the good of the party. An important
question for scholars of the Expanded Party is: which groups pursue which strategies, and
how can you tell the difference? Certainly it is easier to tell with some groups than others.
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MoveOn.org, The Sierra Club, EMILY’s List, and the AFL-CIO all appear on lists of the
biggest donors to Democratic Candidates. But what about groups that don’t give money,
that give less money, or that give some money to Republicans?
The analysis that follows lays the groundwork for addressing these questions by
drawing some initial boundaries around the Expanded Democratic Party. For reasons
discussed below, I adopt a broad definition of which groups belong in the Expanded
Party, though there is undoubtedly a continuum of “party-ness” not captured here. The
universe of groups that will be examined here is defined by the groups’ behavior. In
particular, I will examine the “party-ness” of Political Action Committees (PACs) that
gave money to at least one candidate for a Democratic nomination for Congress in an
open seat in 2002, and that have a general orientation toward the Democratic party. Why
define the universe this way?
Nominations. If, as Aldrich (1995) and others tell us, the party is very critically
made up of those who hold offices under its label, the party’s choice about who holds
those offices is a fundamental one. It makes sense to examine the Expanded Party
through a focus on nomination politics because in choosing a nominee, the party names
an individual, with all of that person’s experience, policy positions, and symbolic
characteristics, to represent the party as a whole. By supporting one candidate over
another in a nomination contest, a group is therefore trying to affect the very composition
of the party and what policies it fights for. By looking at nominations, any factions that
are identified will be sure to meet the third criteria above, that of clearly trying to
influence the internal operations of the party.
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Open seats. In races to fill seats with no incumbents, the party actually has an
opportunity to nominate a new candidate and stage an internal debate about the future of
the party in that location. One certainly could examine interest group support (or rare
opposition) to the re-nominations of sitting congressional incumbents. But because even
contested primaries for congressional seats are so rare, and because interest groups have a
strong tendency to support incumbents rather than give to challengers, it might be less
fruitful to look at incumbent re-nomination contests for evidence of broad party
cleavages. I leave that task for follow-up studies.
PACs. I focus on those groups that have formed PACs in part because their
behavior is so easy to trace, and in part because it is explicitly electoral in nature. This
research agenda is explicitly focused on redefining the party organization as organization,
rather than as part of government. PACs are the single greatest organized force in
congressional campaigns, including primaries. The parties themselves give far less
money to primary candidates than interest groups do. Other work may very well choose
to focus on different actors in the Expanded Party.
Time horizon. I focus on 2002 because the data are old enough to reasonably
believe that all campaign finance reports have been turned in by the groups and
campaigns and made available in the public database.3 In that sense, when I search for
factions that show some durability in their coalition, it will be a search for crosssectional, not temporal, cohesiveness.
Contribution threshold. I include all groups, regardless of the amount of money or
the number of contributions a group made. Although a group’s monetary resources may
3
http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/ftpdet.shtml
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affect its power within the party, resources should not determine, on their own, which
groups are considered to be “in” the Expanded Party.
Methods and Data
I gathered data for this project from the Federal Election Commission’s public
databases. In particular, I gathered data on open-seat candidates from the detailed
“Candidate Master File” from the 2001-2002 election cycle. Having identified those
candidates in open races, I wrote software in the Matlab programming environment that
collected all of the Primary election PAC contributions to those candidates from the data
in the “Contributions to Candidates (and other expenditures) from Committees” database.
I then wrote software to sort these contributions into interest group-specific files. Once I
had a list of those files, I manually categorized them into recognizable issue-specific
areas. I obtained a list of Leadership PACs, and their sponsors, from OpenSecrets.org.
Table 1 About here
Table 1 shows the numbers of groups, organized by their issue focus,4 in each
category, that gave to at least one Democratic House or Senate primary candidate in
2002. I include not just interest groups, but also official party committees like the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic Senatorial
Campaign Committee (DSCC) as well as official Leadership PACs and contributions
from candidates’ authorized committees. These put into perspective the relative totals
4
As defined by the Federal Election Commission’s coding, with some amendment by the
author in order to break categories down into issue areas of interest to the Democratic
party.
12
given in these primary races. As they are ranked in order of total given, it is striking that
Corporate and Trade Association PACs give so much more to candidates for the
Democratic party’s nomination than many categories of traditionally Democratic groups.
Just looking at this list gives rise to the feeling that some of these groups must not really
be oriented toward the Democratic party, even though they do give to a Democratic
primary candidate in an open seat. For example, does the fact that corporate PACs gave
so much to Democratic primary candidates mean that Corporate America must be
considered to be part of the Expanded Democratic party? It does seem to participate in
the party’s most meaningful internal decision-making process. On the other hand, giving
money to a Democratic primary candidate isn’t a behavior that necessarily excludes
Republicans. Even highly Republican groups could give to a Democratic primary
candidate to hedge its bets, or even to interfere in the “other side’s” nomination contest.
It seems reasonable to impose another criterion for inclusion in the Expanded
Democratic Party. A group should be included in the Democratic party if it supports the
Democratic party’s candidates when it really counts, in the general election. A great
many corporate PACs, for example, give a majority of their general election contributions
to Republicans. When you eliminate Corporate PACs that gave more than 50% of their
money to Republican congressional candidates in the 2002 general election from the
figure presented in Table 1, the amount given to Democratic candidates drops by more
than 80%, to $125,450.
The question then arises, if you want to impose a strict enough standard to
exclude access-driven Corporate PACs from the party, do you want to make it so strict as
to exclude any group that gives to a Republican? If you did that, you would exclude such
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traditionally Democratic groups as the National Abortion Rights Action League, which
gave 11% of its 2002 general election contributions to Republicans, or the gay rights
organization Human Rights Campaign, which gave 20% of its 2002 general election
contributions to Republicans. If the cut-off for being “in” the Democratic party were a
requirement to give 90% of campaign contributions to Democrats, neither of these groups
would qualify. With an 85% cutoff, NARAL would qualify but HRC would not. With an
80% cutoff, both would qualify as part of the Expanded Party.
There are additional, theoretical problems with excluding groups that give most
but not all of their money to the Democratic party. As long as a group sides more often
with Democratic general election candidates than with Republican ones (a commitment
in itself in the era of Tom DeLay’s “K Street Project”), some “more-Democratic” groups
could still choose to maintain some independence from the party itself, while some others
might choose to fully integrate and try to affect the party’s agenda from the “inside”
rather than the “outside.” It would be entirely arbitrary to establish a cutoff above which,
if a group gives more than the cutoff amount, it is considered “inside” the party and
below which it is considered “outside” the party, and doing so might make it difficult to
identify that more important “in” party distinction. Moreover, just because a group gives
90% of its money to Democrats, that does not mean that it does not engage in behavior
potentially antithetical to the party’s interests, like supporting an issue-purist, even
radical, candidate against a more moderate candidate for the party’s nomination in a
highly competitive district. Therefore, I will define the outer boundary of the Expanded
Party to include groups that participate in open Democratic primary contests, and that
give at least 50% of their general election contributions to Democratic candidates. These
14
are groups that could be said to have a Democratic Orientation. Table 2 lists the number
of groups in each category meeting these criteria.
Table 2 about here
In comparing Tables 1 and 2, note that the pro-gun and pro-life groups drop off of the
list, and the corporate, trade association, and law firm groups fall significantly on the list,
since the fewer groups that qualify as oriented toward the Democratic party give
relatively less to Democratic primary candidates than other groups like reproductive
rights groups (NARAL, Planned Parenthood) and the Trial Lawyers of America.
Factions in the Expanded Democratic Party
Tables 1 and 2 organize Democratic-giving PACs into recognizable, issue-based
sectors. If the individual PACs in these categories actually do act in concert, they would
certainly meet the second criterion for faction discussed above—they would have an
obvious basis for their cohesiveness. But as it happens, most of these groups of interest
groups do not behave in totally cohesive ways.
As noted, the best place to look for factional behavior within a party, or in this
case within a small sector of a party, is in a primary election. It is here that a party can
engage in internal warfare without directly affecting the outcome of the general election.
Therefore, I begin to search for factions by looking for in-sector unity in 35 open,
contested, primary elections that took place in 2002. I ask how often groups within each
issue category support the same primary candidate, and how many times they support
different primary candidates within the same race. (Appendix 1 Lists those primary
races).
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Table 3 about here.
At least some of the issue-based sectors of interest groups have the potential to be
considered real factions, in that they both have a rational basis (their shared issue
concern) for acting in concert, and that they demonstrate some durability in their
coalition. Interestingly, some issue-based potential factions are much more crosssectionally durable than others. Table 3 illustrates the obvious, but important point, that
those issue sectors whose component groups are more cohesive tend to be composed of
fewer groups, and participate in fewer primaries. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient
relating the percent unity in a sector and the number of groups is over .80. Similarly, the
more primaries in which a sector’s groups participate, the more likely it is that those
groups will disagree. The correlation between the percent of primaries in which the sector
participates and the percent of the time the sector participates in a unified way is .70.
It is somewhat surprising that many of these groups, all oriented toward the
Democratic party, and focusing on what superficially seem to be the same issues, do not
prefer the same candidates in open primaries. Perhaps this divergence is due to the fact
that American elections, perhaps especially primary elections, are highly candidatedriven, and different candidates with very similar issue positions might have connections
and supporters in different interest groups. There is a great deal more exploration of the
potential factions within each of these issue sectors than can be done here, but it is worth
considering a few of these sectors in more detail.
The most unified sector is the one encompassing Reproductive Rights groups.
These 10 PACs participate in 26 of 35 races and agree about which primary candidate to
support 74% of the time. Perhaps this is due to these groups’ truly narrow focus. A
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candidate is either pro-choice or he or she is not. That should provide a relatively simple
way for groups to, independently or through communication, choose to cohesively
support a single primary candidate. A second explanation is that the PACs in this
category affiliate with two parent organizations: NARAL and Planned Parenthood. The
rest of the PACs in this group are regional affiliates of these Washington organizations,
and may very well take cues from them about whom to support.
“Organized Labor”, on the other hand, divides its support among primary
candidates in a great number of races. The first thing to note about the labor groups that
participate in these races is that most only participate in a handful. Only 39 of the groups
give more than 5 contributions. A second observation about labor is that even with all of
these participating groups, and their participation in virtually all (32 out of 35) primaries
in this sample, labor throws its 100% unified support behind one primary candidate in
only 12 (38%) of the races in which it participates, and 90% of its support behind one
primary candidate in another 5 races. But in the other half of the races in which labor
participates, it divides its support. In 7 (22%) of those primaries, labor divides its support
among three or more candidates. All of this is to say, that as often as labor might itself be
considered an organized faction of the Democratic party, labor is itself divided. An
important question for future studies is whether there are discernible factions within
“organized labor”, particularly in the choice of primary election candidates.
A second highly fractured, potentially important group of Democratic partyoriented PACs are the Leadership PACs. Members of Congress form Leadership PACs in
order to use their status as incumbents to raise money that they can contribute to other
more endangered incumbents or needy challengers in their party. They do this, perhaps
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primarily, to build goodwill among fellow members of Congress that can be traded for
support when the member vies for leadership positions within the caucus. Leadership
PACs give a great deal of money to Democratic primary candidates (>$680,000) in open
seats, but they divide their support among different primary candidates in the same race
in 61% of the races in this sample. There are at least two possible explanations for this
finding. The first is that Leadership PACs give to candidates with whom the member has
some sort of personal connection. The second is that they give to primary candidates who
are ideologically similar to the member. These hypotheses have very different
implications for the roles that officeholders and ideology may play in the Expanded party.
Exploration of this puzzle in future work may identify party factions not noticed in the
rest of this paper, but since Leadership PACs are not precisely interest groups, these
intriguing questions will be tabled until a future date.
Defining the center of the Expanded Party
The preceding discussion highlights a main finding of this paper: that defining
faction within the Expanded Democratic party is more than just an exercise in separating
groups by policy issue. But the more important question is: is the party factional in ways
that might be detrimental to its interests as a competitive, seat-maximizing entity? Do
factions within the party come into frequent, contentious conflict? Do they create divisive
primaries? Are there any factions that regularly align against each other in primary
elections in ways that potentially cause problems for the party’s seat-maximizing
interests?
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First, and somewhat surprisingly given the Democratic Party’s reputation for
internal divisions, the party is actually incredibly unified in open seat primaries. Even in
races with several candidates vying for party support, one candidate is, on average,
heavily favored by party-oriented PACs. This pattern holds true both when the general
election outcome is uncertain (and the party as a seat-maximizing entity might have some
incentive to coordinate on one candidate early) and in races where the general election
outcome is not in doubt. Table 4 shows the percentage of all PAC contributions received
by a race’s primary candidates that is received by the leading recipient in that race.
Across race types, better than 75% of all PAC contributions, on average, go to a single
primary candidate. That is hardly evidence of a party so divided that it deserves the
Democratic Party’s reputation!
Table 4 About Here
In fact, there are only 15 races in which party-oriented PACs divide their support
in any significant way. In these 15 races, at least two different primary candidates receive
at least 10% of all the PAC contributions. That is, admittedly, a very low bar for selecting
races with interest group divisions. Nevertheless, with even that little bit of disagreement
about primary candidates, we can address the question: do any factions emerge in these
races?
There are several ways to look for factions. One is to look for groups that
regularly support the same candidate. The data used for this particular analysis consisted
of the number of times that two issue sectors uniformly supported the same candidate in
one of these 15 contested primaries. Table 5 lists the sectors that most frequently,
uniformly, support the same primary candidates in divided primaries.
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Table 5 About here
Do any of these groups constitute a durable faction? Or several durable factions?
With so few races, the durability of whatever factions appear here is certainly suggestive
rather than definitive. Nevertheless, perhaps some of these groups might be said to
constitute a relatively more durable faction than others, since their joint behavior is
repeated several times. Qualitatively, the interest groups that most commonly support the
same primary candidate (in 8 of the 15 races) are the Trial Lawyers and the Reproductive
Rights PACs. Those two groups also overlap in 1/3 (5 of 15 races) with the Gay Rights
groups. Do these three groups constitute a faction together? Separately? I would argue
that as a single group, that does not need to coordinate with others, the Trial Lawyers by
themselves cannot be considered a faction.
Certainly the Reproductive Rights and Gay Rights groups share goals of
promoting individual privacy and autonomy in personal health and behavior. They also
share a “rights” orientation to the issues that concern them. This might be a faction that
would be worth looking for in other election cycles and in lobbying or staffing behavior.
But do the Gay Rights groups, Reproductive Rights groups, and Trial Lawyers, even if
they potentially constitute a faction, also belong with Law Firm PACs, Corporate PACs,
or Leadership PACs? Here the rational basis for coalition building might break down. It
might very well be the case that these groups ally frequently because of their preference
to support a frontrunner primary candidate, or a potentially competitive general election
candidate. It is hard to say that those, in themselves, are goals that would make these
groups ally against others in the party, or against the party organization itself.
20
A second technique would be to look for groups that regularly support a losing
candidate, or regularly dissent when the rest of the party-oriented PACs support the same
candidate. Relatively few groups actually do support the second-place recipient of PAC
contributions, a reflection once again of these groups’ counterintuitive cohesiveness.
Nevertheless, Corporate PACs and Women’s Group PACs are the sectors that most
frequently support the second-place recipient (dissenting from the rest of the PACs in 3
of the 15 races). Leadership PACs and Liberal/Democratic group PACs each dissent in 2
of the 15 races.
The only potential cross-issue faction here is a combination of Liberal groups and
the Women’s groups. Groups in these two categories joined up to support a second-place
candidate in opposition to the rest of the PACs in two of the 15 races. That does not seem
remotely durable enough to constitute a faction. In addition, though groups in these issue
categories were dissenters, the actual groups that participated in the races were different.
In one race where “Women’s groups” and “Liberal/Democratic groups” joined forces to
support a minority candidate, the Illinois 5th, it was the Americans for Democratic Action
teaming up with Emily’s List and the Women’s Campaign Fund. In the other race where
groups in these two categories supported the second-place PAC recipient, it was the
National Organization for Women and the Young Democratic Candidates’ Network who
supported Stephanie Herseth in the open South Dakota House seat.
Discussion and Conclusions
This paper has attempted to do two things. The first is to establish some initial
boundaries around the Expanded Party, including only interest groups that participate in
21
party nominations and give more often to the Democrats than to the Republicans. These
criteria imply that the boundaries of the party should depend on the degree of an actor’s
loyalty to the party and the degree to which the actor participates in the party’s internal
debates. There are other ways of defining those boundaries. One might be to include
actors or groups based on the degree of support they offer to the party (e.g., how much
money they give to party candidates). Another might be to require that actors or groups
don’t just participate in primary elections, but also support the winner of the primary in
the general election—that is, once they’ve had their say, they get on board with the
party’s decision. Further development and definition of the boundaries of the Expanded
Party is certainly needed.
The second goal of this paper was to define and try to identify factions among
these party-oriented interest groups. That project, in one sense, failed: interest groups that
affiliate with the Democratic party, at least as aggregated by the policy issues that most
concern them, do not form distinct factions—even as they are quite fractured. This
finding is consistent with the truisms about American politics that interest groups are
focused on their own goals, and that elections are candidate-centered. At the same time,
the paper finds that several major classes of PACs that give to Democrats regularly give
to different Democrats in the same party. Further research into potential factions within
the labor movement and among Leadership PACs may prove fruitful in finding factions
not identified here. Other future work with these data might, for example, use the
techniques of Social Network Analysis to identify factions.
A third, incidental, finding of the paper is that in contrast to the commonly held
perception of the Democratic party in particular, the interest groups that have a party
22
orientation are really not at each other’s throats in primary elections. Most of the time,
they support the same candidate, and in the rare instance when they disagree, it is in an ad
hoc way. This makes the search for “faction” in the electoral arena more difficult, and
perhaps should shift the focus for that search to the party in government or other elements
of the party organizational network.
23
Table 1: 2002 PAC Contributions to Democratic Primary Candidates, in open seats, by
issue
Number of
Group(s)
groups
Total Given
Gun Control PACs
1
5,000
Gun Rights PACs
1
10,973
Defense/Peace PACs
4
18,283
Pro Israel PACs
12
27,000
Pro Life PACs
1
35,002
Ethnic Group PACs
5
42,500
Social Issue Group PACs
3
44,708
Moderate Democratic Group PACsa
2
60,047
Women's Group PACs
7
60,695
b
Liberal/Democratic Group PACs
12
64,782
Law Firm PACs
27
65,600
Environmental PACs
6
100,984
Gay Rights PACs
3
103,999
Trial Lawyers PACs
1
185,000
Reproductive Rights PACs
10
440,030
Leadership PACs
53
681,083
Corporate PACs
261
721,266
Trade Association PACs
141
827,052
House and Senate Candidate Committees
137
996,515
Party Committees
27
2,124,003
Labor PACs
94
3,355,930
All groups included in the categories on this table gave at least one contribution to a
Democratic primary candidate in 2002. a Moderate groups are the New Democrat
Network PAC and the Blue Dog Political Action Committee. I separated these from the
groups coded by the FEC as “ideological” in the Almanac of Federal PACs because of
their clear preference for ideological centrism. b This category includes: The National
Committee for an Effective Congress, Americans for Democratic Action INC PAC, 21st
Century Democrats, CALPAC – CA Aggressive Leadership, Progressive Leadership for
America, TEX-USA Fund, Texans for Excellence in Government, Progressive Alliance
PAC, MOVEON.org, Progressive Majority, Young Democratic Candidates Network,
Winning Margins PAC, Democratic Competitive PAC, and People for the American Way
Voters Alliance.
24
Table 2: Groups giving at least 50% of their general election contributions to Democrats,
2002
Total number of
Total Given by
groups giving
Number of
Democraticto Democratic Democratic- oriented groups
Group(s)
candidates oriented groups
Gun Control PACs
1
1
5,000
Defense/Peace PACs
4
4
18,283
Pro Israel PACs
12
11
27,000
Law Firm PACs
27
11
33,000
Ethnic Group PACs
5
5
42,500
Social Issue Group PACs
3
2
44,458
Moderate Democratic Group PACs
2
2
60,047
Women's Group PACs
7
7
60,695
Liberal/Democratic Group PACs
12
12
64,782
Environmental PACs
6
6
100,984
Gay Rights PACs
3
3
103,999
Corporate PACs
261
57
125,450
Trial Lawyer PACs
1
1
185,000
Trade Association PACs
141
38
240,678
Reproductive Rights PACs
10
10
440,030
Leadership PACs
53
53
681,083
House and Senate Candidate Committees
137
137
996,515
Party Committees
27
27
2,124,003
Labor PACs
94
84
3,336,561
All groups included in the categories on this table gave at least one contribution to a
Democratic primary candidate in 2002.
25
Table 3. Issue Sector Unity in primary candidate support in Contested, Open 2002
Primaries for the US House and Senate
Number of
Percent of
Percent of
Groups
Primaries in Primaries with
which sector in-sector Unity
Group(s)
participates
Party Committees
27
88.6
42
Labor PACs
84
94.3
46
Trade Association PACs
38
54.3
53
House and Senate Candidate Committees
137
85.7
57
Corporate PACs
57
65.7
61
Leadership PACs
53
80.0
61
Women's Group PACs
7
34.3
83
Liberal/Democratic Group PACs
12
51.4
89
Environmental PACs
6
25.7
89
Law Firm PACs
11
28.6
90
Social Issue Group PACs
2
28.6
90
Gay Rights PACs
3
34.3
92
Reproductive Rights PACs
10
74.3
96
Gun Control PACs
1
5.7
100
Defense/Peace PACs
4
17.1
100
Pro Israel PACs
11
25.7
100
Ethnic Group PACs
5
14.3
100
Moderate Democratic Group PACs
2
25.7
100
Trial Lawyers PAC
1
77.1
100
26
Table 4. Percent of party-oriented PAC contributions going to leading recipient
Number of races Percent of PAC $ to leading recipient
Likely or Safe Republican
18
78
Leans Republican
5
86
Tossup
11
90
Leans Democrat
2
88
Likely or Safe Democrat
9
76
Races are classified according to the Cook Political Report rating, February 2002.
27
Table 5. Sectors that most frequently support the same primary candidate in divided
primaries
Groups
Number of primary candidates in common
Reproductive Rights and Trial Lawyers
8
Reproductive Rights and Gay Rights
5
Trial Lawyers and Gay Rights
5
Trial Lawyers and Pro Israel
4
Trial Lawyers and Law Firms
4
Trial Lawyers and Leadership PACs
4
Reproductive Rights and Leadership PACs
4
Law Firms and Corporate PACs
4
Reproductive Rights and Corporate PACs
4
28
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31
Appendix: Selected 2002 Open House and Senate races, with number of candidates who
filed with the FEC
Race
Number of
Race
candidates
Number of
candidates
AL 01
5
NV 03
1
AL 03
4
NH 01
2
AZ 01
8
NJ 05
1
AZ 02
6
NM 02
2
AZ 07
6
NC Senate
6
CA 21
2
NC 01
4
CA 39
7
NC 13
5
CO 04
2
OH 03
1
CO 07
3
OK 04
3
FL 13
5
PA 06
3
FL 17
1
PA 18
3
FL 24
1
SC Senate
1
FL 25
1
SC 03
1
GA 03
4
SD 01
5
GA 11
3
TN Senate
2
GA 12
8
TN 04
3
GA 13
4
TN 05
6
IL 05
10
Tn 07
1
32
IN 02
5
TX Senate
5
IA 05
1
TX 05
3
LA 05
1
TX 25
4
ME 02
7
TX 26
1
MD 02
2
TX 31
1
MI 10
2
UT 01
5
MI 11
1
33