Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics.
New York: Hill & Wang, 1986.
Book information: Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.
Investment theory of party competition, Wikipedia.
In the following excerpt from Right Turn, pages 44-46, Ferguson & Rogers explain their investment theory of party competition:
. . . Many analysts of American voting behavior have concluded that the whole realignment approach must be jettisoned; but this conclusion is even less satisfying than the original theory. Whatever its defects, the theory of critical realignment does have the immense virtue of focusing attention on the problem of qualitative change in U.S. politics. Work done withing the framework of the theory has also made a number of illuminating suggestions about the ways in which policy changes relate to institutional transformations in American society. Rejecting the theory altogether risks neglect of these problems and insights, and other analysts have therefore sought different approaches to the question of party systems and realignment.
This study follows one of them -- the suggestion that what properly defines American party systems is not blocs of voters but patterns of interest-group alignment and coalitions among major investors.
In sharp contrast to the voter-centered analysis that lies behind older realignment theories, this "investment" approach to the analysis of partisan conflict attempts to incorporate into social-science theory a fact most election analysis only rarely comes to grips with -- that efforts to control the state, by voters or anyone else, cost heavily in time and money. Merely developing views about major issues of public policy, and evaluating the candidates who compete for electoral affections, costs a great deal. Formulating and implementing particular policy initiatives costs even more. Given the background inequalities in wealth, income, information, and access to key decision-makers characteristic of most advanced industrial states, as well as the host of "collection action" problems that proliferate within them, these costs weigh particularly heavily on those with modest means. And while organization can compensate for background material inequalities, it itself requires major investments of time and money, and cannot be presumed. As a result, voter control of the state, while not zero, is likely to be uncertain and variable.
In the United States such control is even more problematic. By constitutional design, the U.S. political system is intensely fragmented, and its structure poses great obstacles to the aggregation and coordination of voter demands. The major parties, which are among the oldest in the world, are relatively undisciplined "constituency" organizations, rather than programmatic vehicles for defined ideologies. Particularly given the absence of proportional representation, barriers to third-party entry into the political system are high. Popular secondary institutions, such as unions and cooperatives, claim a relatively small share of the population as active members. The low-involvement political system imposes many costs on voters that other countries do not, and voter turnout is among the lowest and most decisively class-skewed in the industrialized world. These many different aspects of the American case both reflect and prolong its "exceptionalism." Voters here, by comparison to most other advanced industrial states, are especially disorganized, and this disorganization further raises the costs to individual voters of attempting to control the state.
As a practical matter, then, the fundamental "market" for political parties in the United States is not individual voters. The real market for political parties is defined by major "investors" -- groups of business firms, industrial sectors, or in some (rare) cases, groups of voters organized collectively. In contrast to most individual voters, such investors generally have good and clear reasons for investing to control the state, and the resources necessary to sustain the costs of such an effort. These major investors define the core of the major parties, and are responsible for sending most of the signals to which the rest of the electorate responds.
From the standpoint of such an "investment" theory, the rise and fall of American party systems is best analyzed by examining the rise and fall of investor blocs. In considering the rise and fall of the New Deal, for example, the approach does not recommend spending time, as do so many revisionists and the older generation of liberal historians, speculating endlessly (and usually unverifiably) on the mysteries of charasmatic domination by great Democratic Presidents. Rather, it recommends first identifying the investors that originally constituted the New Deal coalition, then tracing how and why they left the coalition, and where they went.
This is what we shall attempt to do in this and the next chapter, in a discussion that ranges from the origins of the New Deal to the election of Ronald Reagan. . . .
Prior to Right Turn, Ferguson and Rogers collaborated on other articles and books including:
Thomas Ferguson & Joel Rogers, editors. The Hidden Election: Politics and Economics in the 1980 Presidential Campaign. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
[Google Books; Amazon.com.]
Thomas Ferguson & Joel Rogers, editors. The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy. M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1984.
[Google Books; Amazon.com.]
The themes and analysis presented in Right Turn continue with further elaboration in Ferguson's next major book, Golden Rule:
Thomas Ferguson. Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
A 2011 paper by Ferguson on the U.S. Congress:
Thomas Ferguson, "Legislators Never Bowl Alone: Big Money, Mass Media, and the Polarization of Congress," INET Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, April 2011.
Links for Thomas Ferguson:
Thomas Ferguson, University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Thomas Ferguson, Wikipedia.
Thomas Ferguson at The Nation.
Stories by Thomas Ferguson at AlterNet.
Thomas Ferguson, Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Tom Ferguson, Next New Deal, The Blog of the Roosevelt Institute (but most recent post dated August 2011).
Links for Joel Rogers:
Joel Rogers, University of Wisconsin Law School.
Joel Rogers, University of Wisconsin - Madison, Department of Sociology.
Joel Rogers, Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS).
Joel Rogers Publications, Center on Wisconsin Strategy (note that many of Rogers' papers can be downloaded from this webpage, including many articles with Ferguson from the 1980s).
Joel Rogers, Wikipedia.
Erik Olin Wright & Joel Rogers. American Society: How It Really Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
Video of Joel Rogers speaking at the Occupy Los Angeles Teach-In, 05 November 2011:
My post with all the November 2011 Occupy Los Angeles Teach-In talks is here.
Joel Rogers speaking in 1996: