The Dynamics of Party Organizational Development

Abstract

Once characterized as poor, transitory, and “powerless,” national party organizations in the United States are now financially secure, stable, and highly influential in election campaigns and in their relations with state and local party committees. The transformation of the Democratic and Republican national, congressional, and senatorial campaign committees can be explained using theories of organizational change from the organizational behavior literature and traditional arguments about electoral competition and coalition-building from the parties literature. This paper explains the timing and content of party organizational development by focusing on the nature of the problems that confront the parties, the crises that create opportunities for party organizational change, the motives and behaviors of political entrepreneurs instigating the change, and the internal politics of the party organizations themselves. The explanation accounts for the different paths of institutionalization taken by the six national party organizations and for the variations in the roles they currently play in the electoral process.