Did international politics drive the creation of American political parties?

Upvote:1

The "great divide" in early America was between Federalists and anti-Federalists. That is between people who favored a strong central federal government and weak state governments (basically what we have); and those who favored a weak central government that managed only defense, foreign policy and the legal system, while strong state governments managed everything else, a model practiced by Switzerland. Much as they hated political parties, anti-Federalists like Jefferson and Monroe formed the Republican party (later retroactively called the Democratic Republicans to oppose the Federalists.

There were links to international affairs, insofar as most Federalists were pro-British and anti-French, while most anti-Federalists were pro-French and anti-British.

Upvote:4

Political parties inevitably appear for one simple mathematical reason: Shapley value is superadditive. IOW, the power of a coalition is more than the sum of powers of its members.

Example: suppose we have a parliament of 3 members. Each has power (Shapley value) of 1/3 (because of symmetry). If two of them form a "party" (i.e., always vote as a block), then they always win and the power of the party is 1 while the power of the third MP is 0. Thus, by joining forces, each of the two party MPs increased their power by 50% (from 1/3 to 1/2).

This means that whenever a parliament is formed, its members will start aligning into political parties to increase their personal power.

Upvote:6

Looking at what happened, it does not appear that international issues were the primary driver.

When the Constitution was first being debated and voted on, there was a group of Anti-Federalists who were very suspicious of it, and in particular the way it concentrated power in the Federal government. This feeling had enough support in the country that a revision was required addressing their concerns (the Bill of Rights), before the document could placate enough of those people to get ratified.

Then, in the very first administration, Washington's treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton introduced a sweeping economic program involving creating a powerful national bank, assuming the previous government's debt, and imposing tariffs to both pay that debt and promote local industry. That may not seem radical to modern eyes, but to the people who were still very wary of a strong central government, that government immediately assuming all that power was alarming.

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson started holding meetings with like-minded people to help organize the opposition to this program in Congress. Hamilton reacted by starting to organize his own supporters under the "Federalist" banner, which caused Madison and Jefferson to need to further organize nationally to compete, and it sort of snowballed from there.

Now to be sure there was a foreign policy dispute between the new parties. For various reasons, after the French Republic was declared the Federalists tended to be much more supportive of the English side in the subsequent wars, while the Democratic-Republicans tended to be more sympathetic to the French. However, that was not what induced the founding of the two parties.

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