The Institutionalization of U.S. Political Parties: Patronage Newspapers

There is general agreement that mass political parties emerged during the Jacksonian era, but there is no consensus about their precise origins. Institutional theorists within political science contend that political parties trace their beginnings to elite who nurtured them within the civil service bureaucracy, whereas theorists in political science who rely on microlevel explanations consider that parties developed to solve problems of social choice and collective action. Historians, in contrast, indicate that newspaper patronage in Washington, DC, beginning with Jefferson, was critical for the emergence of federal political parties. This study systematically examines the empirical implications of that assumption and considers both the organizational and political processes that underlie establishment of newspapers in the Capital, contributing to the understanding that newspapers provided a model both for the civil service and for political parties.