Review of The Great Retreat: How the Decline of Political Parties Is Undermining American Democracy by Didi Kuo (Oxford University Press, 2025).
For decades after World War II, political scientists, reform-minded politicians, and pundits lamented the weakness of American political parties. Parties were seen as ideologically incoherent, dominated by regional or group interests rather than unified around a clear platform — think of the fact, for instance, that at one time arch-segregationists and civil rights leaders belonged to the same party. Reformers believed that greater ideological coherence would make government more accountable and party competition more meaningful and help voters better understand the stakes of elections.
Today, however, parties are more ideologically polarized, centralized, and internally disciplined than ever before. Roll-call unity in congressional voting is up; the ideological distance between the major parties has grown; and partisanship is a stronger predictor of citizens’ stances on the issues than ever before — and yet more Americans than ever hate political parties, and the future of democracy itself appears in doubt.
On the surface, this would seem to suggest that political parties are woefully inadequate as vehicles for effective representation and for maintaining a vibrant democracy.
Where parties once operated as mass-membership organizations embedded in civil society, they have increasingly become professionalized, elite-driven, and disconnected from the everyday lives of most citizens.
To the contrary, in The Great Retreat: How the Decline of Political Parties Is Undermining American Democracy, Didi Kuo makes a forceful and largely persuasive case that…
Auteur: Jared Abbott
