Party Labels Research Articles

The Importance of Party Campaigning

Political parties are facing some stiff challenges: party labels are irrelevant to many voters, political action committees (PACs) are spending unprecedented amounts of election money, and contemporary campaigns are candidate-centered and run by professional consultants. However, I contend that an examination of party activity in elections reveals that parties are meeting the challenges posed by the new politics and that parties really do matter. My analysis is based on information drawn primarily from interviews with officials of the Democratic and Republican national, congressional, and senatorial campaign committees, interviews with and mail questionnaires from 385 candidates and campaign managers in the 1984 elections for the House, mail questionnaires from 77 candidates and campaign managers in the 1984 and 1986 elections for the Senate, and a less formal set of discussions held with a small group of PAC managers and state and local party officials.' The evidence demonstrates that parties are playing an important role in the campaigns of many candidates for public office. This is especially true for candidates running in competitive districts: incumbents who are in danger of losing their bids for reelection and nonincumbents who appear competitive enough to possibly defeat a sitting incumbent or capture an open seat. Party assistance can be divided into three types. First, parties assist candidates by providing them with money, professional campaign services, and strategic and administrative advice. Second, parties assist their candidates in making contacts and agreements with professional campaign consultants and PACs that result in the flow of money and other resources to the parties' most competitive contestants. Third, parties fund voter registration, get-out-the-vote drives, and mass media advertising designed to assist all of the candidates on the party ticket. Turning first to the assistance given directly by the parties to the can-

The Friends and Neighbors Effect in Judicial Retention Elections

HIS is a study of judicial retention elections for major trial court judges. Judicial retention elections differ from the more traditional partisan or nonpartisan elections in several respects. The absence of traditional voting cues including party labels, candidate appeals, incumbency, campaigns, and relatively fewer issues makes these plebiscites a most interesting topic for examination. One of the few traditional voting cues present in judicial retention elections is the cue of and neighbors, which has received little scholarly attention (Key 1949; Dubois 1979; Griffin and Horan 1982). This article will rectify this oversight by empirically examining the and effect in judicial retention elections. It is said that all politics are local politics. We found it surprising therefore, that one of the voting cues which has received very little attention is and neighbors. Voting on the basis of friends and neighbors is a Babbit-like calculated promotion of local interest. The candidate garners support (votes) not primarily for what he stands for or because of his capacities, but because of where he lives (Key 1949: 37). Studying the oneparty politics of the South, where many of the traditional voting cues were absent, Key called that appeal back the home-town boy irrelevant, but he was careful to point out that in the absence of traditional voting cues, such an appeal based on boosterism can exert no little influence over an electorate (Key 1949: 41). Trial court personnel were chosen as the subjects of this study because 90 percent of all court business of this nation takes place in the state trial courts. A very small percentage of cases are appealed and reviewed by higher courts.

Information, Electoral Equilibria, and the Democratic Ideal

A considerable literature argues that poor information among voters produces an elitist or class bias in public policy. Owing to the complexity of public issues and their generally slight impact on outcomes, citizens fail to invest in information, and in their voting decisions rely instead on cues such as party labels, the opinions of friends, and interest group endorsements. As a result, political entrepreneurs are unable to mobilize effectively the general electorate to vote in their own self-interest. This essay takes issue with some theoretical premises of this argument. Using a rational expectations approach to modeling elections with incomplete information, we show first that citizens require only very general information to vote correctly. Second, this information can be deduced from exactly those cues that are commonly interpreted as substitutes for "voting on the issues." Finally, even if interest groups attempt to influence candidate positions with money, equilibria exist to the election game that are identical to what occurs under full information, provided some strong symmetry conditions hold with regards to the resources of such groups. Thus, popular control of public policy is not precluded per se by lower levels of voter information about the candidates' positions on issues.

Social Background Characteristics of Nonpartisan City Council Members

IN ROUGHLY two-thirds of U.S. municipal elections, candidates run for office without party labels.' Such nonpartisan elections are a product of the municipal reform movement of the early twentieth century, which attempted to limit the power of corrupt party machines, insulate local elections from the influence of state and national party politics, facilitate more efficient and businesslike administration of local government, and encourage recruitment of superior candidates, who might be reluctant to associate themselves with party organizations (Lee 1960). Nonpartisan elections provide an interesting contrast with elections where party labels are present. Behaviorally oriented political scientists of the mid-twentieth century questioned the validity of the reformers' good government theory of nonpartisan elections. A revisionist theory developed based on observations of nonpartisan elections in practice and a theoretical recognition of the functions of political parties in political systems. The classic reassessment was made by Adrian (1952), who hypothesized that nonpartisan elections weakened political parties, tended to be issueless in nature, advantaged incumbents and made them less accountable to the public, and restricted recruitment to higher political office. Subsequent studies of California cities (Lee 1960; Hawley 1973) also asserted that nonpartisan systems tended to over-recruit members of the business community and Republicans, thus reducing the representativeness of local government. This is plausible on any of several grounds: high-SES candidates (and Republicans) may be more willing to run for office in nonpartisan systems; highSES candidates may be more likely to have the resources to win without the aid of a party label; or lower turnout in nonpartisan elections may bias the voting electorate in favor of high-SES candidates. To date, none of this has been tested with a nationwide survey. This paper makes a beginning toward remedying that omission. Drawing on a survey of all U.S. cities with a population of 2,500 or more, I test the revisionist assertion that high-SES candidates are elected more frequently

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

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

POLITICAL DISTILLATION

Change in the American electorate has traditionally been studied by comparing the number of independents to the number of partisans, and comparing the impact of partisanship to the impact of issue voting. Stable numbers of partisans and stable correlations between partisanship and attitudes and behavior are interpreted to mean continuity in the electorate. These comparisons, though useful, ignore the possibility that the meaning of partisanship and the reasons behind its impact on attitudes and behavior may have changed as well. As the potential for independent behavior and political sophistication increases in the United States, the most sophisticated and rational partisans are able to lay aside their party labels, leaving fewer, less rational partisans. This argument is tested and supported using data from the National Election Surveys of 1952 through 1980.

Race as a Salient Factor in Nonpartisan Elections

T HE POLITICAL bias of nonpartisan electoral systems has been described extensively.1 By imposing differential information costs, nonpartisan electoral settings are viewed as reinforcing the political importance of the class differences which exist in the ability to process and to structure incoming political cues and information. As Hawley has pointed out, by eliminating the party symbol nonpartisan electoral settings make the connection between candidate choice and personal interest very difficult, and as a result, such elections require higher levels of voter motivation and interest as a prerequisite to voting participation.2 Ethnicity has been observed as a factor acting to lessen the informational biases of nonpartisan electoral settings. Ethnic affiliations become, according to a number of observers, an important means of organizing political behavior when the party label is absent.3 This point has been well established insofar as black ethnic identification is concerned. In municipal mayoral elections held in a nonpartisan setting, black political participation has been observed to increase significantly in those races where one of the candidates is black.4 The purpose of this note is to observe whether or not race acts uniformly as a salient factor across different types of municipal elections held in a nonpartisan setting.

The meaning of party labels

To determine the meaning(s) of the concepts “Republican,” “Democrat,” and “Independent,” the most frequently cited attributes of each party label were scaled in terms of their semantic centrality. An analysis of the magnitude scale values demonstrates that the labels “Republican” and “Democrat” have unique cognitive properties which easily discriminate one label from another. The most characteristic and discriminating properties refer to (1) voting, (2) electioneering, and (3) other forms of electoral behavior. Although these two labels have many strong properties over which there is considerable agreement, such consensus is lacking for the fewer and weaker properties which characterize and discriminate the label “Independent.” Whereas “Republican” and “Democrat” are sharply delineated, semantic inversions of one another, the concept “Independent” is ambiguously defined and only weakly distinguishable from other concepts.

The Significance of Names : the Evolution of Irish Party Labels

The Significance of Names : the Evolution of Irish Party Labels

Conservatism in Switzerland: A Study in Antimodernism

As in Great Britain, the term 'conservatism' has an established place in Swiss history and politics.' Two meanings may be distinguished, one general, one particular; when written with a small c, the word may be taken as roughly synonymous with 'traditionalist'; with a capital, it usually refers to those political parties of Switzerland which include 'Conservative' in their official name. However, the word has disappeared from today's Swiss party labels.

The Significance of Voting Cues in State Supreme Court Elections

Voters rarely take time to inform themselves about the candidates and issues in judicial elections. Uninformed, voters must rely upon some kind of voting cue, such as political party affiliation, incumbency, name familiarity, or the like, to help them cast their ballots in these low-salience elections. This article examines the effects these cues have in determining voter behavior in partisan and nonpartisan elections for state supreme court justices. The results show that party labels structure voter behavior along partisan lines. Without a party cue, however, voting decisions are relatively unstructured and, as examples show, often produce idiosyncratic results. The implications of these findings for the continuing debate over judicial selection are then explored.

Cohort Analysis of Party Identification Among Southern Whites, 1952-1972

Cohort studies generally find that different generations retain the same pattern of partisanship throughout their lifecycles. In contrast, this study finds that changes within generations contribute greatly to the decline in traditional Democratic affiliation among southern whites. Carol A. Cassel is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The author is indebted to Robert Erikson and Norman Luttbeg for their encouragement and helpful comments. POQ 41 (1977) 28-33 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.156 on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 05:02:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms COHORT ANALYSIS OF PARTY IDENTIFICATION 29 Table 1. Party Identification among Whites by Region, 1952 and 1972 South Nonsouth 1952 1972 1952 1972 Democrat 79% 47% 43% 35% Independent 10 34 25 37 Republican 10 19 33 28 NOTE: The data were made available by the Inter-university consortium for Political Research. Neither the Center for Political Studies nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation presented here. 1971. He did not exclude interregional migrants to the South. While migrants are known to have made an important contribution to the changing distribution of partisans in the South (Converse, 1966; 1972), in a sixyear period, migrants would have little effect on the relative size of cohort shifts. Glenn found all age cohorts contributed to an increase of 24 percentage points in political Independence in the South from 1965 to 1969, although the oldest cohorts made somewhat smaller shifts. Three-fifths of this increase in Independents, however, was lost from 1969 to 1971 as cohorts shifted back to the parties, and Republicans made a net gain of approximately 5 percentage points. Although Glenn did not view increasing southern Independence as the first stage of a southern movement to the Republican party, he found evidence that older as well as younger cohorts were adopting the Republican label in the South. Glenn's study of short-term partisan shifts in the South leaves unanswered important questions about the long-term trend away from Democratic affiliation: (1) What is the relative impact of generational change and aggregate life-cycle shifts on the overall trend away from Democratic affiliation in the South? (2) Does the long-term trend include adoption of a new (Republican) party label or merely shifts to political Independence? (3) Is there a relationship between age and ability to make life-cycle shifts? To assess more clearly the extent of life-cycle and generational shifts, we must first isolate the native white population. Interregional migrants must be excluded so that the addition of nonsoutherners to the South is not confused with aggregate life-cycle shifts and generational differences. Likewise, inclusion of blacks would obscure shifts away from the traditional Democratic affiliation of the South. Blacks only recently emerged as participants in the southern electoral system and are overwhelmingly Democratic for different reasons from those of white southerners.

Trends in Public Support for the American Party System

To this point I have presented a variety of available observations on what I take to be several types of most relevant indicators of support for the party system in the United States. I have paid special attention in this analysis to the trends in public opinion regarding the parties over time. Given the fragmentary nature of the available indicators, when they are considered in combination they do reveal some fairly common general tendencies. First, these data show that public support for the parties, both in historical and cross-institutional perspective, is relatively weak. Attitudes toward the parties and the evaluations of the importance of the party institution show, with few exceptions, a general state of low public regard and legitimation. More importantly, even the areas such as party identification or a preference for keeping party labels on the ballot, relatively strong points of support a decade ago, have shown a significant decline since that time. The decline is greater for some aspects of public evaluations of parties than for others. But this downward trend, especially beginning in the years i960 to 1964, is fairly uniform across the various areas that we have touched upon. There are a few exceptions to these trends - such as one aspect of contributor support, willingness to contribute money. Yet, even at the point of measurement when people are most willing to contribute, those who are positively supportive are far from a majority. Thus, the improvement here does not really offset the many other kinds of losses the party institution has suffered in public regard over the past decade.

Differences between Suburban Republicans and Democrats

The main argument against partisan politics at the loca11evel has been that parties contribute little to sorting out issues and candidates. Since presumably there is no Democratic method of maintaining streets or Republican approach to collecting garbage, it has been contended that nonpartisanship would be preferable to any system which attempted to differentiate local political candidates on the basis of their national party labels. A related topic of debate has been the extent to which the suburbs–through some mysterious alchemy–convert Democrats into Republicans. This issue has tended to concentrate on suburban voting patterns in state and national elections. The question arises, then, as to whether suburban Republicans and Democrats do in fact subscribe to differing views related to local government. Are there real differences on local matters among partisan voters in suburban areas or are party labels more related to state and national issues? In the following article, we examine suburban Republicans and Democrats in terms of their socio-economic characteristics and then their attitudes toward various governmental concerns. The area chosen for collection of data was the lower portion of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The county is in the southeastern section of the state, bordering Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey.

The urban university student: A political profile

A survey of University of Pittsburgh student participation in the 1970 election suggests that college students may not exert the independent political influence that many predicted. Pittsburgh students tend to participate within the established party system, to accept traditional party labels (especially the party identity of their parents), and to participate in those (higher-order) political activities usually performed by college-educated adults. Although students may be concerned with effecting programmatic change, radical political activity common to the 1960s is on the want. Our data suggest, further, that the findings and conclusions of the voting studies of the 1950s still apply.

The Urban-Rural Cleavage in Political Involvement: The Case of France

Rural France is often seen as culturally isolated and politically uninvolved. Using a combination of community studies and survey evidence, one can show that the lack of declared interest in politics of rural Frenchmen seems to mean an absence of involvement in the party system rather than a passivity toward public life. Nevertheless rural France produces higher voting turnouts in local and national elections than are found in other sections or population groups.The weakness of partisan involvement, as opposed to citizen involvement, seems to bespeak not merely apathy, but actual hostility, toward party politics. This political hostility is widespread among French workers but is politically more important among French peasants. Thus voting choices are less party-oriented precisely where urban-based campaign organizations are least effective. Local non-party notables therefore probably play a greater brokerage role in national election campaigns, and election results are less predictable than in the rural sectors of many other societies. The degree of antipartisanship in rural constituencies also seems to encourage candidates to avoid national party labels in election campaigns.Three kinds of factors are suggested to account for both the high citizen involvement and the low partisan involvement: First, historically, the extension of the suffrage to the rural periphery long before the French party system was capable of the same kind of penetration may have habituated rural Frenchmen to the exercise of the vote in a non-partisan context. Second, the achievement of stable landholding for most peasants removes visible class conflict as a legitimizing factor for party organization, while an extensive interest group structure increases the tendency to keep informed, to participate, and to run for local office. Third, the political ecology of the French village both encourages high citizen involvement and discourages partisan involvement. While many of these factors are universal among peasant societies, the particular historical, sociological, and ecological configuration of the French village seems to produce a rural resident who is more informed and active than our inherited wisdom would suggest, but less partisan than are urban citizens with similar levels of involvement.

Canadian Party Labels: An Essay in Semantics and Anthropology

Les étiquettes des partis politiques, les termes qu'utilisent les parlementaires pour définir leur affiliation partisanne sont autant d'idéologies, de programmes sous forme concentrée. Etudier l'évolution linguistique de tels termes, c'est étudier l'évolution de tout un ensemble de forces et d'idées politiques. L'avantage de lier l'étude politique à l'étude sémantique consiste à réduire un ensemble de données trop complexes à des proportions réduites, celles du vocabulaire, et surtout à permettre l'application des lois de la sémantique à la mesure de l'évolution politique.Faite à partir d'un échantillonnage systématique (de 10 en 10 ans) duParliamentary Guide,cette étude analyse les termes dont se sont servis législateurs provinciaux et fédéraux, de 1878 à 1968, pour décrire leur parti ou tendance politique; elle mesure ainsi le succès et les transformations linguistiques des principaux symboles politiques utilisés au Canada au cours du siècle dernier.Le succès du terme Libéral, par rapport à ses rivaux, apparait non seulement dans sa dominance historique et géographique mais aussi dans sa résistance à la formation de mots composés et dans son pouvoir de rejeter les qualificatifs qui lui furent attachés. Ce succès est attribué, bien sûr, aux forces politiques qui se sont groupées sous le terme Libéral mais il parait dû aussi à la valeur expressive du mot lui même; mot qui exprime bien les valeurs dominantes de la société canadienne du vingtième siècle; mot qui, de plus, est le seul parmi ses principaux rivaux à passer presque sans tranformation de l'une dans l'autre des deux principales langues de la fédération.Il apparaît ainsi que la simple étude de l'évolution non seulement du sens mais aussi de la forme des mots permet d'identifier et de mesurer l'évolution politique d'une societé.

The Chinese Community in Sabah and the 1963 Election

Research Article| March 01 1965 The Chinese Community in Sabah and the 1963 Election Henry Robert Glick Henry Robert Glick Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (1965) 5 (3): 144–151. https://doi.org/10.2307/2642404 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Henry Robert Glick; The Chinese Community in Sabah and the 1963 Election. Asian Survey 1 March 1965; 5 (3): 144–151. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2642404 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Urbanism and the National Party Organizations

Scountry was the hope of developing an autonomous system of urban politics entirely divorced from shifting tides and sentiments on the national political scene. From the perspective of urban reform, such a separation was necessary to prevent local elections from turning on national issues and personalities that were quite irrelevant to the needs and problems of the municipality itself. Moreover, there was a widespread conviction that Tammany and a great many other corrupt city machines had been able to strengthen their power by trading on the loyalties of the voter to a national political party of which they were the local representatives. This effort to isolate urban from national politics took the direction of separating the date of local and national elections, or a more drastic remedy banishing national party labels from municipal ballots altogether. On the surface at least the efforts of reformers to effect a separation between local and national politics have met with considerable success. It has today become common practice to hold municipal elections on a different date from national contests. Across the country, but particularly in the West and Mid-West, such elections have become increasingly non-partisan in legal form. As a recent study of nonpartisanship points out: During the half-century which has passed since the development of the nonpartisan ballot in the United States the abolition of the party label in local elections has been extended to almost two-thirds of American cities 65,000,000 citizens. 1 And yet, as Eugene Lee and a variety of other observers indicate, the nonpartisan ballot does not prevent the persistence of strong national party identifications in local elections. Freeman, for example, argues that institutional devices are not likely to abolish a local two party system in a city where attitudes toward the two major national parties are strongly structured and the relations between national and local party organizations are durable and persistent. 2 The evidence he cites on the experience of Massachusetts, as well as that presented by Lee for California,3 and Williams and Adrian for Michigan,4 would suggest that national party alignments remain highly durable and on occasion even decisive factors in urban politics.

The Party Whip Organizations in the United States House of Representatives

In the literature on political parties in the United States Congress two points are usually stressed. First, it is said that the political party label lacks a precise programmatic content because “party government” in the British sense is absent in the American Congress. Second, however, it is contended that the party label is the single most important and reliable attribute in predicting the voting behavior of a Senator or Representative.Between these two contentions lies a sizeable area of unexplored territory. If party is the best predictive device in analyzing voting behavior in Congress then, despite the lack of “party government,” the party machinery in both houses must have effects that deserve study. Professor Huitt has suggested the necessity and importance of this kind of study: “… the preoccupation with reform has obscured the fact that we have no really adequate model of party leadership as it exists in Congress, and that none can be constructed because we lack simple descriptions of many of the basic working parts of the present system.” Huitt himself and a few others have filled some of these gaps.