Whither the Local Parties?: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analysis of the Strength of Party Organizations

Abstract

The authors have earlier demonstrated that state and national party organizations have increased in strength in the last few decades. Here they assess the nature of change in the attributes of local party organizations. They find that local parties have not become less active and less organized over the past two decades. Most sustain a fairly high level of programmatic activity and a significant minority of them conduct some party-maintenance activity in nonelection periods. The strength of local party organizations varies significantly by region, but not by party. Local organizational strength is relatively independent of the strength of the state party organizations, despite the substantial assistance state parties give to their local counterparts. These findings complicate the party demise thesis by suggesting that the consequences of change in one component of party must be assessed within the context of possibly dissimilar and maybe even compensatory change in the other components of party. The last 20 years have not been kind to American political parties. Parties appear less able at performing their traditional functions than in the past: the ability to structure the vote is diminished as the partisan attachments of the electorate weaken; control over candidates' access to the party label is loosened as democratization opens primary processes to those with marginal party attachments; candidates eschew party election support and turn to political action committees and campaign consultants instead, thereby reducing the incentives to defer to the party; and the ability of parties to organize the government is waning. Generally, it seems that the forces contributing to the maintenance of the existing parties and party system are badly eroded. But there is also evidence that parties as organizations have grown stronger