During his presidency, Barack Obama described rising economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time.” But a growing number of scholars and journalists argue that rising inequality is in part a result of the Democratic Party’s diminishing fidelity to an egalitarian economic agenda and its embrace of neoliberalism. In this article, we assess the veracity of this claim through a content analysis of all national Democratic Party platforms issued since 1984. We find that broad assertions of Democratic retreat from economic equality are for the most part exaggerated. Specifically, we argue that Democrats’ support for egalitarian policies has been complex and varied over time, with a marked decline under the influence of the New Democrats in the 1990s followed by a significant resurgence thereafter. However, while party support for equalizing policies has rebounded overall, the extent of the party’s commitment to specific policies varies according to the purported deservingness of beneficiaries. Our findings have important implications for debates concerning Democratic Party change, the politics of inequality, and the policy agenda of the Joe Biden administration.

American politics has been transformed by the emergence of the advocacy party—a form of organization in which extraparty interest groups, advocacy organizations, and social movements substitute for the diminished institutional capacity and popular legitimacy of the formal party apparatus. Many scholars have rightly pointed to the presidential nomination reforms made by the Democratic Party's post-1968 Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission) as a key contributor to polarization by increasing the influence of ideological activists. However, I argue that polarization is not the direct result of the actions of McGovern-Fraser reformers, but rather the outcome of their pitched battle with intraparty opponents of reform, who, while failing to prevent changes to presidential nominations, were ultimately successful in defeating the party-building dimension of the reformers’ project of party reconstruction. The product of their intraparty struggle was a hybrid institutional amalgam that layered new participatory arrangements over a hollow party structure, thus setting the Democratic Party on a path toward the advocacy party and its polarizing politics.

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What are political parties, and how and why do they change? These questions are foundational to party research, yet scholars of American parties disagree about the answers. In this paper we present a new theoretical framework capable of bridging these scholarly divides and coming to terms with American party politics today. We argue that political parties should be seen as fundamentally contentious institutions. Due to their mediating position between state and society, parties are subject to rival claims of authority from a range of political actors, including elected officeholders, party officials, interest groups, and social movements. To manage intraparty contention, win elections, and govern, entrepreneurs construct and maintain party orders -- institutional and ideational arrangements that foster an operational degree of cohesion and constraint through time. Together, the dynamics of intraparty contention and the rise and fall of distinct party orders over time illuminate the patterns of American party development.