The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

Analyzing ‘Political Space’ Two-Dimensionally:
The Notion and Prospects of Interpolitical
Relations

Hiroshi OKAYAMAINTRODUCTION
In today’s world, most countries are divided into two or more subnational territorial units, with various names such as provinces, oblasts,
cantons, and prefectures. And, regardless of whether the country’s constitutional structure is unitary or federal, there are ‘local,’ or non-central, governments that correspond to and govern these units.1 While it isalmost self-evident that the segmentation of politics, or ‘political space,’caused by the presence of these subnational units and their governments
adds immense complexity to the nature of politics in these nations, there
have been surprisingly few efforts to investigate in a systematic fashion
the workings of such segmented domestic politics and its effects on political outcomes.
This, unfortunately, is also the case with the United States, eventhough its federal system has been one of the major subjects of inquiry,
especially for political scientists.2 In this essay, I will make an attempt
to deal with this situation by proposing an analytical approach I call‘interpolitical relations.’ This approach involves a two-dimensional
macro image of domestic politics that challenges the conventional imageof politics, which is unidimensional and dualistic in the sense I explain
below.
Copyright © 2002 Hiroshi Okayama. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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The paper is divided into four sections. In the ﬁrst section, I will
demonstrate the limits of the conventional image of domestic politics,
ﬁrst by pointing out the conceptual confusion the image contains, andthen by reviewing how segmented domestic politics has been studied,especially in the United States. Next, an alternative, two-dimensional
interpretation of domestic politics and an analytical framework based onthat interpretation, which I call ‘interpolitical relations,’ will be proposed
to overcome those limits. In the third section, the structure of U.S.
politics in the period between the 1830s and the 1890s, the so-called‘Partisan era,’ is taken up and analyzed using the approach to show its
strengths. The last section concludes this paper by discussing theprospects and challenges of the framework.
While I will rely primarily on evidence from U.S. politics throughout
the paper, it is written with application to segmented politics in general.
I.

LIMITS OF THE CONVENTIONAL IMAGE OF SEGMENTEDDOMESTIC POLITICS

Well then, what is the problem with the conventional image of domestic politics? To put it simply, the problem lies in the fact that scholars
have been content to grasp segmentation in domestic politics unidimensionally.
It has been the widely accepted practice to discuss this issue in termsof ‘national-local’ or ‘center-periphery’ relations, using such terms as‘national politics’ and ‘local politics.’ Since the meanings of these terms
are usually taken for granted, studies that actually go to the effort ofdeﬁning them are rare, if not non-existent. There seems to be, however,a serious ﬂaw in such an understanding of domestic politics that has led
to, and in time ampliﬁed, a conceptual confusion on this subject.
Take, for instance, the term ‘local politics.’ Its meaning may seem
axiomatic at ﬁrst sight, but the expression can in fact be, and has actually been, used in the following two senses: ﬁrst, as ‘politics that develop within a given subnational (‘local’) territorial arena,’ and second, as‘the political process regarding subnational (‘local’) government.’ Even
though there is an empirical overlap between these two deﬁnitions, thetwo cannot be identical, for the political process not only of subnational government but also of national government takes place in a given
regional arena (for example, think of elections that select representatives
for the national legislature from ‘local’ districts).

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27

The fact is that these two meanings belong to different dimensions.
While the former deals with the spatial or territorial aspect of politics,
the latter concerns the level of government. In other words, what the former meaning has to do with is the territorial unit of the political arena;
the latter pertains to the government involved. This in itself should comeas no surprise to students of U.S. politics, since ‘[i]t is well known thatpolitical authority in the United States has never been horizontally or
vertically integrated.’3 The trouble is that these two meanings, spatial
and governmental, each belonging to a different dimension, have so far
been unconsciously packed into each of the above two terms, ‘national’and ‘local’ politics.
As a result of such confusion between the two dimensions, the actual
usage of these two terms has taken the following two forms. In somecases, as one can easily imagine, these terms have been used with emphasis on one of the two dimensions. In other (and perhaps more) cases,
however, the two meanings, and therefore dimensions, have been combined and narrowed into one, in each of the two terms. In this latter usage,
the two expressions have respectively come to mean ‘politics that develop within a nationwide/subnational territorial arena that involves national/subnational government.’ What is striking (and also problematic)
about this particular set of deﬁnitions is that it is not just unidimensional but dualistic in the sense that it virtually divides domestic politics into
two distinct domains. The two spheres of politics, ‘national’ and ‘local,’are here conceived as separate from each other.
The impact of such a combination of the two conceptual dimensions,and the resulting dualistic image of politics, on the trend of research insegmented politics cannot be overestimated. ‘National’ and ‘local’ politics have so far usually been studied separately, and this dominantresearch strategy obviously has in turn further fortiﬁed the dualistic political image. In the case of the U.S., the long-prevailing notion of ‘dual
federalism’ which assumes that federal and state government act in distinct constitutional spheres undoubtedly contributed to set the course of
research in the same way.4 Different levels of politics that deal with governments of different levels that take place in different territorial units,even though developing inside the same national territory, seem to havebeen treated as if they have little to do with each other.
To be sure, not all research interprets domestic politics as completely
dualistic. Here, I will review three approaches developed by political scientists who have dealt with the segmentation of domestic politics and28

HIROSHI OKAYAMA

point out their strengths and weaknesses, in order to ﬁnd out what must
be done to tackle this issue in a better way.
The ﬁrst approach, widely known as intergovernmental relations, or
IGR, was introduced in the United States well over a half century ago to
analyze the workings of its federal system. Those who developed thisapproach were particularly interested in, and quite successful at, breaking through the myth of ‘dual federalism’ by demonstrating the collaboration between federal, state, and local governments. In a seminal
phrase, Morton Grodzins likened the structure of the American federal
system characterized by interaction and cooperation between different
levels of government to a marble cake, whereas a layer cake represents
the system based on ‘dual federalism.’ IGR has eventually come to form
a subdiscipline in political science.5
This approach, however, has certain limits when viewed from our present concerns. As its name shows, IGR puts its analytical emphasis on
the dimension of government, and focuses especially on the activities ofexecutive branches of national and subnational governments. As a result,the issues typically taken up in research are ﬁnancial and/or jurisdictional, and most of the players considered to be relevant are politicalofﬁceholders.6
The practitioners of IGR, in other words, have not only failed to takeup the spatial dimension of politics, but also are so far largely uninterested in covering the non-public sector. It is, therefore, hardly qualiﬁed
to be an ideal tool for the analysis of the interplay between different
dimensions and levels of domestic politics at large. This is why Daniel
Elazar, a long-time leader of the study of federalism in the United States,
once lamented that ‘[the] deﬁnition of federalism commonly used by students of government today has diminished the original meaning of theterm, to make it virtually synonymous with intergovernmental relations.’7
Peter Ordeshook recently made an attempt to overcome this problem
in a study on the viability of the contemporary Russian federal system.
In it, he points out that a model of the federal system that strictly separates different levels of government has the tendency to assume an‘antagonistic’ relationship between national government and federal
subjects. In its place, he proposes to bring in the notion of ‘blurring’ thedistinctions between levels of government. In arguing that the ‘integration’ of the federal system is essential in stabilizing the politics of democratized Russia, he claims that this ‘blurring’ would play a key role inaccelerating integration.8

ANALYZING ‘POLITICAL SPACE’ TWO-DIMENTIONALLY29

The important contribution of Ordeshook’s approach is that it seeks
to utilize not only formal institutions and actors but also informal ones
to achieve a more ‘integrated’ federation. Drawing from the cases of the
U.S., Germany, and Canada, he emphasizes the role of political parties
operating throughout the federation regardless of level of government.
He shows that the activity of political parties, coupled with changes inelectoral rules, such as holding elections for ofﬁces of different levels ofgovernment on the same day, helps blur the line between different levels of government.9 At the end of his study, he even makes some suggestions for changes in electoral rules that would in his view facilitate
the emergence and operation of such ‘national’ political parties.
While dealing primarily with the case of Russia, Ordeshook’s work is
signiﬁcant in bringing non-public sectors, in this case political parties,
into the analysis of segmented politics. His framework, however, is still
limited as a model for systematically analyzing the structure of domestic politics. This is because governmental and spatial dimensions are
somehow mixed up into a single dimension, as shown in his key concept, ‘integration.’ What seems especially problematic in this regard isthat his analysis, by concentrating on the ‘blurring’ of distinctions between different levels of government, effectively leaves out the spatial
dimension, even though he does not do this intentionally.
Is there an approach that squarely meets this challenge of including
the spatial dimension in analysis, then? Jim Bulpitt develops an approachto segmented politics or, ‘the general relationship between national andlocal politics’ in his book-length study on the politics of the United Kingdom. After reviewing and criticizing the existing analytical frameworks
for the subject, including IGR, he presents what he calls ‘territorial politics’ as an alternative. This is deﬁned as ‘that arena of political activity
concerned with the relations between the central political institutions in
the capital city and those interests, communities, political organisations
and governmental bodies outside the central institutional complex, but
within the accepted boundaries of the state. . . .’10
Bulpitt’s reconﬁguration of segmented politics is notable in two ways.
First, as in the case of Ordeshook, it does not leave out the non-public
sector altogether, even though it apparently gives more weight to governmental institutions. Second, as the name of his approach shows,
Bulpitt is obviously well aware of the signiﬁcance of the spatial, or ‘territorial,’ dimension of segmented politics.
Unfortunately, however, this ‘territorial politics’ approach cannot
sufﬁciently serve our purpose of systematically analyzing segmented

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HIROSHI OKAYAMA

domestic politics. This is because even though it refers to both territory(space) and government, they are bound together (central government
with the capital city, local government(s) with the peripheral region(s))
and effectively form a core/periphery structure, making the approachessentially unidimensional, as was the case with Ordeshook’s work. The
fact that Bulpitt makes the assessment of the state of territorial politics
only by reference to ‘centralisation’ illustrates that this approach is basically a government-oriented one with only an occasional nod to the spatial dimension of politics.11
In the end, it seems that we are left without an analytical frameworkthat sorts out the two dimensions of domestic politics in a satisfactory
way. One area of research on the United States in which this situation isparticularly visible is that of historical studies of politics in individualstates. While research interest in this ﬁeld has steadily increased during
the last few decades, scholars who have undertaken this kind of researchseem to be at a loss when it comes to bringing politics regarding different levels of government to terms. Lacking a systematic perspective,
many studies simply end up scrambling together two different levels ofpolitics, one related to the federal government and another related to thestate government, although there are several notable exceptions.12
Figure 1 presents the conventional image of segmented domestic politics. The base of each cone indicates the territorial (spatial) unit in which
the political process takes place, and its apex represents the governmentthat corresponds to the unit, making the interior of the cone the politicalprocess (‘political space’) related to the government that unfolds within
the territorial unit. In this image, ‘national’ and ‘local’ politics belong todifferent spheres, only inadequately bridged by IGR, because of the conceptual mix-up between the two dimensions of politics, space and government. Other approaches, such as Ordeshook’s and Bulpitt’s, are still
one-dimensional one way or the other, even though they do have thestrength of taking up non-governmental actors. Is there a solution to thisproblem?
II.

TWO DIMENSIONS, TWO AUTONOMIES: INTRODUCINGINTERPOLITICAL RELATIONS

From the discussion above, it seems that there are two things that need
to be done in order to overcome the limits of the conventional image ofsegmented politics. First, each of the two dimensions, those of space andANALYZING ‘POLITICAL SPACE’ TWO-DIMENTIONALLY

Figure 1.

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Conventional ‘Dualistic’ Image of Domestic Politics

government, that have so far been mixed up in one way or the other, mustbe singled out as individual dimensions. Second, the research agenda on
segmented politics ought to be stretched out so that not just governments
but the entire political process, including non-governmental actors suchas political parties, interest groups, and ordinary citizens, can be taken
up. To accomplish these two tasks, I will develop an analytical framework based on these ﬁndings.
To begin with, I will bring in a set of multi-level politics for each of
two dimensions, space and government, in order to distinguish between
them. As to the spatial dimension, domestic politics can be classiﬁed
according to the size of the territorial unit. Politics that involve the whole
nation as a single unit would hereafter be called ‘nationwide’ politics,
whereas politics that take place within a certain subnational regional unit
would be called ‘regionwide’ politics. In regard to the governmental
dimension, politics concerned with the national government would becalled ‘national-level’ politics, making politics related to subnational
government(s), ‘subnational-level’ politics.13
Consequently, the politics of a nation will be treated as a complex inwhich different levels of politics in two intersecting dimensions interact
with each other. Since this framework deals with the relationships
between different dimensions and levels of politics, I will call it and its
subject, ‘interpolitical relations,’ or IPR.14 Figure 2 shows the two-32

HIROSHI OKAYAMA

Figure 2.

The Two-Dimensional Image of Interpolitical Relations

dimensional political image of IPR. In contrast with Figure 1 that shows
the conventional, dualistic image of domestic politics, here we can seethat different levels of political process are not just closely related but infact overlap with each other in both of the two dimensions.
Different from the conventional image of domestic politics that tacitly presupposes the separation of the political process between different
levels and dimensions, in IPR, it is nothing surprising that they are connected with and affect each other. As a result, a single political phenomenon will have different meanings in the two dimensions. In
addition, it would often become difﬁcult to ﬁx the boundary between the
different levels of political process in each political dimension. The
amendment process of the U.S. Constitution that requires both proposal
by Congress and ratiﬁcation by the states is a good example. On the one
hand, by requiring action of both federal and state governments, it connects state- and federal-level political processes in the governmental
dimension. On the other hand, since the ratiﬁcation (or its failure) in astate clearly has a nationwide effect, it cannot take place without moreor less being affected from outside, which results in the interaction ofnationwide and statewide political processes.

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33

This kind of difﬁculty of differentiating between multiple levels ofpolitical process in two dimensions may lead one to conclude that IPR
is an approach of little signiﬁcance. As the above example shows, however, the connection between different levels of political process is in
itself nothing unusual, and is not caused by the adoption of IPR. Whatreally is problematic is the fact that the connection has been more or lessunnoticed by those who study segmented politics, due to the predominance of the dualistic image of domestic politics. IPR, therefore has theprospect of not only discerning the degree of connection between different levels of political process but also of analyzing its character, since
it grapples with the intricacy that is inherent, but hitherto largely ignored,
in the nature of segmented domestic politics.
In order to achieve these goals, the following two questions must be
answered so that IPR can be applied to the real world. First, what makes
one set of interpolitical relations (of a country, at a certain point in time)different from another? In other words, how can interpolitical relations
be measured? Second, after having established the form of measurement,
we need to ﬁnd out on which element of politics we should focus ourattention to determine the state of interpolitical relations.
Conventionally, the measurement most commonly used in understanding the state of segmented politics has been the degree of ‘centralization’ or, the ‘strength’ of central government, which is the degree ofconcentration of political resources in terms of ﬁnance, jurisdiction, andauthority in central government. This measurement, however, is unsuitable for analyzing interpolitical relations, as it is not only unidimensional
but also concentrates its attention on government, leaving out the nonpublic sector.
In place of ‘centralization,’ I will bring in the degree of autonomy ofa lower-level political process in relation to its higher-level counterpart
in each political dimension as the measurement of interpolitical relations.
This measurement pays attention to how much a subordinate-level political process in each dimension develops without being inﬂuenced or
dominated by its higher-level counterpart. The reason autonomy is chosen instead of integration as the measurement is that we are here interested in how (much) the institutional segmentation within a national
polity affects its political outcome, not, as in many studies that concentrate on public sectors, the level of penetration of the central state.
Note here that this degree of autonomy of a lower-level politicalprocess, especially in the governmental dimension, is different from the34

HIROSHI OKAYAMA

Figure 3.

Four Types of Interpolitical Relations

relative ‘strength’ of a government. Even if its political resource is small,political process regarding a non-central government can still be strongly autonomous, at least in theory.15
If we draw two vertically intersecting axes, each corresponding to thedegree of autonomy of a subordinate-level political process in a given
dimension, we get a two-dimensional diagram. This can then be interpreted as a two-by-two matrix, each quadrant representing a certain type,or pattern, of interpolitical relations (see Fig. 3). This way, we now havefour types of interpolitical relations, each corresponding to a cell of thematrix. From here, much of the discussion will be based on this typology.
In order to ﬁnd out which cell of the matrix a set of interpolitical relations belongs to, we need to focus on those elements of politics that characterize interpolitical relations. While a countless number of candidates
are available, since IPR covers the entire range of politics, I will concentrate here on two systems that play the critical role of organizing andmaintaining modern constitutional democracy.
The ﬁrst is the constitutional system organized around the national
constitution that formally deﬁnes the institutional framework of the politics of a nation. We are interested here in how the political processes of

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35

different governmental levels are formally connected (or, separated),rather than the division of authority between different levels of government, which is one of the main subjects for inquiry of IGR. Especially,
the effect of any constitutional rule that requires a combination of thetwo levels of politics to generate a single outcome is worth a lot of ourattention.
How the political process actually unfolds, however, depends largely
on political actors. This is why we also need to take up the workings ofparty system. Among various political actors, such as interest groups andthe governing elite, particular attention should be paid to political parties,
since they play a constitutional, or constituent function in politics in
most, if not all, modern democracies. To borrow the words of Theodore
Lowi, the political party in a democracy ‘institutionalizes, channels, andsocializes conﬂict over control of the regime [emphasis in the original].’16 Also, by paying attention to the role of political parties, we canshed light on the electoral and legislative process that has largely been
overlooked under IGR, which is primarily interested in administrative
process. What we need to ﬁnd out here is how political parties bridge or
divide different levels in the two political dimensions by looking into
their organizational structures and activities. Other political actors will
be taken up as they come politically in touch with political parties.
Once having grasped the essence of the research strategy of IPR, it
might be natural to wonder how this approach is actually different fromthe conventional way of comprehending segmented domestic politics,
and how constitutional and party systems form the basic structure ofinterpolitical relations. And to these questions we shall now turn in thenext section.
III. THE IMAGINATION OF INTERPOLITICAL RELATIONS—THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY U.S. AS A TEST CASE
Among the strengths of the IPR, the most notable is its capacity toidentify and analyze diverse structures of segmented domestic politics—
in other words, interpolitical relations, including those hitherto ignoredor unnoticed. In order to demonstrate this point, I will take up the halfcentury period in the nineteenth-century United States often called the‘Partisan era,’ whose politics provides us with a case of type two interpolitical relations, and show how this approach can better get hold of theinstitutional features of the politics during the era.17

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But one caveat before we proceed: it is hard, if not impossible, to set
a single, universal standard for measuring the degree of autonomy weare discussing here. The difference between the four cells mentioned
above is therefore at best a relative one, which means that the same setof interpolitical relations may ﬁt different parts of the matrix dependingon the set of interpolitical relations it is being compared with. With thisin mind, I will conﬁne the comparison between different sets of interpolitical relations within U.S. political development. This treatment may
not totally solve the problem, but overall stability of the nation’s constitutional and party systems should serve as basic conditions on which
we can make a reasonable comparison of autonomy of lower-level political processes between different periods.
The reason I take up type two interpolitical relations is that of the fourtypes, this particular pattern is the most distant from the traditional treatment(s) of segmented politics. Type two is diametrically opposite fromtype four, whose characteristics clearly ﬁt into that of the dualistic political image, that of low autonomy of lower-level political process in thespatial dimension and high autonomy of lower-level political process in
the governmental dimension. This particular type of interpolitical relations is also different from the other, more familiar, two types. Weak
autonomy of lower-level political process in both dimensions of politics,
the essence of type three, ﬁts well with the traditional image of the politics of a nation with a ‘strong’ central state. Diagonally across the diagram we ﬁnd type one with strong autonomy of lower-level politicalprocess in the two dimensions, whose institutional features correspondwell with the political process usually associated with confederations.
Why, then, do we look into this particular era of U.S. political development? This is because when compared with other eras, the nineteenthcentury period ﬁts with the characteristics of type two, and this has
something to do with the way the nation’s interpolitical relations werestructured by the constitutional and party systems. On the one hand, theU.S. constitutional system was established and has functioned under federal principles that tend to autonomize the lower-level political process
in two dimensions. On the other hand, the U.S. party system has been
doing the exact opposite; since political parties have played a crucial partin politics, operating throughout the U.S. at every level of government,
they have worked as the ‘solvent of federalism.’18 U.S. interpolitical relations, therefore can be understood as the outcome of the constant rivalry between the constitutional and the party systems.

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The American ‘Partisan era,’ during which it is thought that the nationwide two-party system fully developed for the ﬁrst time and thrived themost, provides us with a case of tremendous interest in this regard, especially when compared with the eras that came before and after.
U.S. interpolitical relations of the half-century period immediately following the American Revolution, sometimes referred to as the ‘Pre-partisan era,’ is characterized by high autonomy of subordinate-level
political process in both dimensions, due to the dispersive constitutional system and the absence of a fully developed party system. U.S. politics of this era lacked strong institutional links, formal or informal,
between different levels in the two political dimensions. The result wasa spatial segmentation along state borders and the separation of federaland state-level political processes within statewide politics. This situation is well represented by the presence of a ‘dual party system’ in several states, that is, two distinct sets of political parties (factions) eachorganized to ﬁght elections at different levels, federal and state.19
Although quasi parties were born inside the federal government
around the turn of the century, the Federalist party had practically disintegrated by the 1810s, without being able to inﬁltrate into state-level
politics. Battles between Republican factions would be the rule for the
next couple of decades. There was little political uniformity among thestates, and statewide politics were fought primarily over state-levelissues. The strong autonomy of state-level political process during thisperiod is aptly illustrated by the generally higher electoral turnouts forstate-level elections than their federal-level counterparts, including
Presidential elections.20 In the ‘Pre-partisan era,’ therefore, the conditionof both constitutional and party systems pointed towards type one interpolitical relations.
In contrast, the low autonomy of subordinate-level political process
in both dimensions seems to characterize the ‘Post-partisan’ era of thetwentieth century. The most notable change that affected the conditionof U.S. interpolitical relations during this period occurred in the constitutional system in the direction of strengthening the federal government.
The role of the government rapidly increased in both domestic and foreign affairs, making the President the focal point of U.S. politics. The
President was no longer the important but nonetheless chieﬂy symbolicﬁgure of the ‘Congressional Government’ of the nineteenth century. He
was now expected to demonstrate strong leadership as both chief executive ofﬁcer and leader of a major party.21

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Since the major parties were organized around federal-level issues andconnected different levels of political process in two dimensions (as was
also the case in the ‘Partisan era’), this development in the constitutional realm resulted in the weakening of autonomy of subordinate-level
political processes in general. Thus, U.S. interpolitical relations shiftedto the lower-left cell of the matrix, that of type three.
In the ‘Pre-partisan’ and ‘Post-partisan’ eras, the autonomy of the subordinate-level political process was either low or high in two dimensions.
If these two were the only possible patterns of interpolitical relations,
there may be not much need for two dimensions in the analysis of segmented politics. Being sandwiched chronologically between these two
periods, however, the nineteenth-century period occupies a unique placein the nation’s history, in which the tension between the full-ﬂedged
nationwide party system and the federalist-oriented constitutional system created a ‘compromise’ between them. The result was a set of interpolitical relations with strong autonomy in statewide politics and weak
autonomy in state-level political process, that of type two.
How were such interpolitical relations structured? The political parties of the nineteenth century that emerged through conﬂicts in federallevel political process linked the politics of different states of the Unionand different governmental levels by extending their organizations
throughout the nation and by ﬁghting elections at all levels of government. As we have seen above, such characteristics would be held over
into the twentieth century.
The nineteenth-century parties, however, were different from their
twentieth-century counterparts in an important way. Even though theparties of this period contributed to making the state-level politicalprocess less autonomous, the autonomy of statewide politics was largely retained throughout this period, due to the high level of independenceof party organizations in each state. The ‘national’ political parties ofthis era did not have central organizations, at least none strong enoughto dominate the organization in each state. Also, the leadership ofPresidents in this era was considerably weaker than that in the twentiethcentury. Party leaders in each state could act on their own behalf in bothelectoral and legislative processes, even in the ﬁeld of federal-level politics, regardless of the behavior of their fellow partisans in other states.
As a result, the same party could and often did take different, even opposite, stands on both federal- and state-level political issues in different
states.22

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At the same time, not only federal-level but also many state-level elections were often fought over federal-level issues. In this era, it was nothing unusual for a gubernatorial or state-legislative election campaign tobe conducted with an emphasis on federal-level issues such as the tariffor the national banking system, even though the issues were hardly relevant to the constitutional capacity of the ofﬁces in question. Membersof state legislatures were divided along party lines, which were based onfederal-level conﬂicts, and more often than not they behaved as partisans, rather than forming groups based on preferences on state-levelissues.23 The following case of a mid-nineteenth century state-level election depicts the nature of the interpolitical relations of this period particularly well.
It goes without saying that the Illinois state-legislative election of 1858
is one of the most notable state-level elections in American history. Thisis because of the public debates involving Abraham Lincoln, future
President of the U.S., and Stephen A. Douglas, an incumbent U.S.
Senator from Illinois, that took place during the campaign. During thecourse of seven debates that stretched across two months beginning inlate August, the two argued ﬁercely against each other over the then burning issue of slavery, especially on the question of the institution’s extension into the West. The event received nationwide attention and paved
the way for Lincoln, who proved himself to be a more than worthy opponent for Douglas, the ‘Little Giant’ of the Democratic party, to be nominated as the Republican Presidential candidate in 1860.24
People with any knowledge of American political history must be
familiar with this episode, the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Not much attention has been paid, however, to the important and yet somewhat puzzling(that is, from the perspective of the early twenty-ﬁrst century) fact thatneither the two rival politicians nor the main subject of the debate seems
to have had any direct connection with the election. After all, neither of
the two politicians was a candidate for state legislator, and the state legislature itself had no constitutional capacity to interfere with the affairs
in the U.S. territory. How, then, was the event related to the campaign,
and what does it tell us about the interpolitical relations of the nineteenthcentury U.S.?
The answer to this important question can be found by looking into
the constitutional and party systems of the day that set the framework ofinterpolitical relations. The constitutional system tells us why the twopoliticians were campaigning. Until the late nineteenth century, U.S.

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Senators were chosen not by direct elections but by state legislatures.
And in this case, the Illinois state legislators who were about to be elected were due to select a new U.S. Senator. Douglas was the incumbent
whose term was about to expire and who was ﬁghting for reelection,
while Lincoln was the contender, who had been nominated as a candidate by the recently held state Republican convention.25
The constitutional arrangement only, however, cannot cover the wholequestion. In order to show why the campaign was organized in such amanner, we must also turn to the party system, since the institutional features of the two major parties deﬁned the style of the campaign. The
state-level electoral campaign was dominated by the question of slavery
in the territory, a federal-level issue, not just because it was a vital political issue, but also because the two major parties were organized according to preference on federal-level issues. At the same time, the absenceof commanding national party organizations enabled the party leaders ineach state, in this case, those of Illinois, to take any stand of their choiceon political issues, even on those at the federal-level.
This example shows that, in this so-called ‘Partisan era’ of the UnitedStates, the political process of different levels in the governmental
dimension was highly integrated with the predominance of the federallevel process over its state-level counterpart, while statewide politics
stayed highly autonomous at both state and federal levels. Such a combination of parameters in two political dimensions obviously corresponds well with that of type two of interpolitical relations.
I have already pointed out the problems of the conventional, dualistic
understanding of domestic politics. While the criticism holds true generally, it becomes particularly persuasive when it comes to this patternof interpolitical relations. It seems that researches based on the dualistic
image of domestic politics which have been unable to perceive this pattern of interpolitical relations have missed the critical structural featuresof nineteenth-century U.S. interpolitical relations.
Studies on ‘national politics,’ or, the nationwide federal-level political process, have most of the time overlooked the fact that statewide politics of this era had strong autonomy even in the federal-level politicalprocess. This is especially true for the studies that look into the relationship between political parties and their policy preferences. In many
instances, researchers, especially political scientists studying past politics, tend to assume that one political party held a single view on a political issue throughout the nation, even though it did not, at least in most

ANALYZING ‘POLITICAL SPACE’ TWO-DIMENTIONALLY

41

cases. The national party platform, on which they usually rely, must be
considered a compromise between fellow partisans from different states,
at best.26
Unfortunately, works on ‘state politics’ do not fully cover the interpolitical relations of the Partisan era either, for they are usually conducted with interest in the statewide state-level political process.
Although many of them take up the federal-level political process directly related to the state in question along their way, they tend to overlook
the inherent tension between the two levels of political process in thegovernmental dimension. Also, the piling up of case studies of individual states does not in itself lead to the comprehension of how the autonomy of statewide politics systemically affects the nationwide (andfederal-level) electoral and policy outcomes. This can only be achieved
with an approach that fully takes the spatial segmentation of a nation’s
politics into account.
All of this goes to show that the interpolitical relations framework has
not only the strength of untangling the threads of segmented politics by
its two-dimensional approach, but that it has the promise of generating
new models for empirical research that would further broaden our understanding of the subject.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, I have tried to demonstrate the limits of unidimensional interpretation of segmented domestic politics, and have introduced atwo-dimensional analytical framework, interpolitical relations, to replace it. In the process, I have emphasized the importance of including
the non-public sector within the scope of research in order to study
domestic politics at large.
While the notion of interpolitical relations should be applicable to any
polity with more than one subnational territorial unit, the conceptual
framework seems particularly promising for the analysis of U.S. politics, as was suggested in the preceding section. This is because the lowerlevel political process in both of the two dimensions has maintained a
relatively high level of autonomy and also because the non-public sector has played a critical role throughout the nation’s history.27 It is notaccidental that Stephen Skowronek argues in his monumental work on
the development of modern state in the U.S. that the American state
during the ﬁrst century after the Revolution was characterized by the

42

HIROSHI OKAYAMA‘courts and parties,’ the institutions that embody the two systems which
form the structure of interpolitical relations.28
Analytical usefulness alone, however, does not assure the success of
the approach. The framework still needs much more sophistication andimprovement. For instance, standards for comparison between different
sets of interpolitical relations, even between those of different nations,must be developed. Also, actors of the non-public sector other than political parties, such as interest groups, should be further incorporated into
analysis. This would be crucial if we are to apply IPR to contemporary
U.S., for it has been argued that the control by two major parties over
U.S. politics has gradually declined through the last century, especiallyduring its last four decades.29 It is a cost that naturally arises from analyzing segmented politics two-dimensionally, but the cost, I believe, iswell worth paying.
NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2000 annual convention of theJapanese Russian and East European Studies Association held in Kanagawa, Japan.
1
Although there are usually more than two levels of government in a given nation, I
will take up only the two ‘top’ levels of government in this paper, federal and state levels in the case of U.S., in order to prevent the discussion from becoming overly complicated. As a result, non-central government dealt with in this paper is actually what isoften called meso government, even though it is referred to as ‘local’ government, following the conventional usage. On the notion of meso government, see L. J. Sharpe, The
Rise of Meso Government in Europe (London: Sage Publications, 1993).
2
The theme of segmentation in American society is treated, although in a more
abstract way, by Robert Wiebe. Wiebe, The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the
Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
3
Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern
American Social Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 26.
4This holds especially true for the pre-New Deal period. Cf., Edward S. Corwin, “The
Passing of Dual Federalism,” Virginia Law Review, 36: 1 (Feb., 1950), 1–24.
5
Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal-State Collaboration in the Nineteenth-Century UnitedStates,” Political Science Quarterly 79 (June, 1964), 248–261; Elazar, The American
Partnership: Intergovernmental Co-operation in the Nineteenth-Century United States(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Morton Grodzins, American Federalism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
6
On later development of IGR, refer to the following standard textbook: Deil S.
Wright, Understanding Intergovernmental Relations, third ed. (Paciﬁc Grove, Ca.:
Brooks/Cole Publishing Company).
7
Daniel Elazar, “Civil War and the Preservation of American Federalism,” Publius,
1: 1 (1971), p. 57.
8Peter C. Ordeshook, “Russia’s Party System: Is Russian Federalism Viable?” PostSoviet Affairs, 12: 3 (July-Sept., 1996), pp. 198–202.

ANALYZING ‘POLITICAL SPACE’ TWO-DIMENTIONALLY

43

Ibid., pp. 203–210.
Jim Bulpitt, Territory and Power in the United Kingdom: An Interpretation(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 1.
11This is why his analysis has its own problem of being dualistic. Ibid., pp. 60–66.
12
Following are a few examples of historical studies on mid-nineteenth century U.S.
politics that most consciously and systematically interpret the interactions between different levels of political process (although in the conventional classiﬁcation); Thomas
E. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics: North Carolina, 1815–1861 (Athens,Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1989); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of
the 1850s (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978); Holt, The Rise and Fall of theAmerican Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000); William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican
Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
13
Hereafter, ‘national,’ ‘regional,’ and ‘subnational’ may be replaced by the actualnames of the level of government or the territorial unit in question, as in ‘federal-level’or ‘statewide’ politics.
14
For the sake of clarity and convenience, I will hereafter use ‘IPR’ to refer to theapproach and ‘interpolitical relations’ when referring to its subject.
15
Cf., Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 50–53.
16
Theodore J. Lowi, “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America,” in William Nisbet
Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of
Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 239.
17
The periodization scheme is developed in Joel H. Silbey, The American Political
Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), esp. in Chap. 1.
18
V. O. Key, Jr., American State Politics: An Introduction (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1956), p. 34.
19
Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in
the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966), pp. 11,141, 273–274, 316–318. Also see William G. Shade, “Political Pluralism and Party
Development: The Creation of a Modern Party System, 1815–1852,” in Paul Kleppneret al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1981), esp. pp. 89–91; William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation(New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).
20
Walter Dean Burnham, “The Turnout Problem,” in A. James Reichley, ed., Elections
American Style (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 112.
21
Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics(Gloucester: Peter Smith, [1885] 1973). On the rise of Presidential power in the twentieth century, see Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise
Unfulﬁlled (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
22
John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Party Politics inAmerica (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 124. Richard F. Bensel
analyzes how platforms of a major party differed from state to state in the so-called
Gilded Age. Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Chap. 3.
23
Jeffrey, op. cit.; Herbert Ershkowitz and William G. Shade, “Consensus or Conﬂict?
Political Behavior in the State Legislatures during the Jacksonian Era,” Journal of
American History, 58: 3 (Dec., 1971), 591–621; Ballard C. Campbell, Representative
Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
9

10

44

HIROSHI OKAYAMA24
See Harold Holzer, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: HarperPerennial,
1993).
25
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), pp. 205–211. It
must be noted, however, that the nomination of a U.S. Senatorial candidate by a stateparty convention was an exceptional practice even in the historical period. In fact,according to Donald, Lincoln’s nomination was only the second of its kind in U.S. history.
26
See, for example, John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1998); James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party
System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States, rev. ed.
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1983). For a more detailed discussion on thisissue, see my “Amerika Nidaiseitousei no Kakuritsu: Saikenki ni Okeru Sengotaisei no
Keisei to Kyowa to, (1) [The Consolidation of the American Two-Party System: The
Formation of the Postbellum Regime and the Republican Party, Part 1], ” Kokka Gakkai
Zassi, 114:5–6 (June, 2001), 239–298, in Japanese.
27
In this paper, space did not permit me to explain the role played by the actors of
non-public sectors other than political parties. As for the organizational structure andthe style of activities of interest groups during the late Partisan era, see the following:
Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise ofInterest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: The Chicago
University Press, 1997); Theda Skocpol, “How Americans Became Civic,” in Skocpol
and Morris P. Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999), 27–71.
28
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National
Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
29
Increase in independent voters, the rise of interest groups politics, and the frequent
occurrence of divided government both at federal and state levels are the key featuresof such political transformation. See Clemens, op. cit.; Martin P. Wattenberg, The
Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1996 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Morris Fiorina, Divided Government, Second ed. (Boston: Allynand Bacon, 1996).