Contrary to conventional wisdom, platforms matter. Political science research makes it clear that in the long run what the parties say about themselves in their platforms becomes the basis for their policy. It is not that the specific wording gets translated directly into law but that the sentiments expressed tend to set the agenda for the following administrations.

Historically, national conventions are of three general types. When an incumbent president has a record to defend, he normally controls who is elected to the committees and what the platform says no matter what party members think of it. Yet when a first-time nominee is selected and is in sync with his party’s traditional positions or is not in sync but cannot afford to offend its base, he normally allows the process to develop freely and ends up with a platform most party members can support enthusiastically. But when a nominee is setting a new direction for the party against its historic positions and is determined to impose his own agenda, he will insist on the wording of the platform whatever the cost, acting like an incumbent even though he does not have the power.

The recent Republican conventions have seen examples of all three. In 2004 incumbent George W. Bush controlled the platform process with an iron fist and dictated every word, even when much of the party had become uncomfortable with his positions, especially his large increases in domestic government spending. By 2008 John McCain realized he could not defend the Bush record in the face of its unpopularity and let the delegates develop their own platform based on more traditional conservative limited government party positions. The year 2000 showed the third type. The newly-nominated George Bush was determined to impose his new “compassionate conservatism” on a party still adhering to Ronald Reagan’s supposedly non-compassionate platform and he mobilized all his resources to impose his will on that convention.

With a sitting president in 2004 top level control was more pervasive but the resentment was even greater at the 2000 convention when many activist conservatives were upset at the high-handed tactics of the campaign organization to force through many deviations from earlier party principles. On the first day of the Platform subcommittee meetings in 2000, the sitting delegates had taken the working language of the education plank developed by party staffers and toughened it significantly in its commitment to decentralization and local control. They were opposed in the subcommittee by Bush loyalists who favored national testing and nationwide educational standards.

After the vote, the subcommittee majority was threatened to remove the language or suffer the ire of the Republican standard-bearer. While they persisted in supporting the language of earlier education platforms, the Bush campaign committee successfully insisted that the full committee reverse the earlier decision, much to the annoyance of many members and the party activists attending the meeting. Other traditional statements on limiting the power of the national government and favoring market or local decision-making over national regulation, especially on the environment and energy, were watered down too. Importantly, these early actions perfectly predicted the direction later taken by the Bush Administration when it entered office. This convention represents the strongest case that platforms matter. As a matter of record, President Bush’s first term saw the largest increase in domestic discretionary government spending of any other modern president, Democrat or Republican. He created the first new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, with an unfunded liability almost twice that of Social Security’s. He increased national education spending by 99 percent. Environmental, energy and other business regulation was tightened across the board.

After two successive conventions of top-down control, conservatives were pleasantly surprised with the 2008 platform written in Minneapolis and formally adopted the next week in St. Paul. The working copy of the 2008 platform was drafted by party staff without the heavy-handedness often imposed by presidential nominees. It began as a conservative document and was only moved further to the right by the various amendments adopted by the 112 member platform committee, whose representatives were relatively freely chosen locally by the elected delegates to the convention. Because the party base was conservative, the document was conservative. The 2008 Platform reflected the beliefs of the party and its activist base and as a result was significantly more conservative than the one four years before and more enthusiastically embraced.

The most important change was a reassertion of the fundamental principle of limited constitutional government and a resulting promise to reduce bloated Federal Government spending. Sen. McCain even rebuked his predecessor’s “profligate spending that has characterized this administration’s fiscal policy.” Even with McCain’s support for embryonic stem cell research in a close and emotional vote, the language was tightened from 2004. While nominee McCain supported civil unions, the 2008 text supported a constitutional amendment that “fully protects marriage as a union of a man and a woman, so that judges cannot make other arrangements equivalent to it.” While McCain called global warming a danger and  had supported mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions and a cap-and-trade system to control it, the 2008 platform said “Republicans caution against the doomsday climate change scenarios peddled by aficionados of centralized command-and-control government.” It called for technology and markets as the keys to reducing carbon emissions without damaging the economy. While the party base loved it, unfortunately, the candidate did not follow it very closely.

Platforms do not write themselves. They depend upon the involvement of the activists and the efforts of the party and candidate leadership to support or control them. There have been organized attempts to move the platform leftward since the re-nomination of Richard Nixon in Miami Beach in 1972, after which conservatives have had a counter lobbying effort at each convention ever since, often under the leadership of the American Conservative Union. In 2008, tens of thousands activists expressed their opinion through surveys, town halls and petitions that were summarized in a Conservative Agenda for America’s Future that was distributed by ACU to committee members as they began their deliberations and had at least some influence upon the final result.

Next year the Republican Convention will be held in Tampa Bay Florida the week of August 27 and the Platform Committee will gather the week before. It is not too early for conservative to begin planning for 2012. The party is conservative and without an obvious candidate for president, ordinary party members could have a great effect on what the party stands for in its official Platform in this critical election year.

Donald Devine was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online.