Back in the Game: Political Party Campaigning in an Era of Reform

Chapter 2: What We Know—and Don’t Know—about Party Campaigning

TWO WhaT We KnOW—and dOn’T KnOW— abOuT ParTy CamPaigning In the previous chapter I reviewed some of the events that altered the landscape for American election campaigns in the critical era of 1996–2008, including campaign finance reform, technological advances, and reforms in the way elections are regulated. These changes allowed political parties to adapt to maintain—and even increase—their influence over electoral politics , to the point that they are now partners with their candidates in influencing election outcomes. However, we have not fully come to grips with the extent of this new role for parties—what they are doing and why they are doing it. In this chapter, I delineate the changes and present circumstances that the parties face. I argue that they clearly face a new environment and that we have every reason to expect that they have evolved in a way that enhances their influence in American politics. The hisTOriCal rOle Of The ParTies Before I address the current state of the parties, it is important to review the broad role that political parties play in American politics. Described by V. O. Key (1952) as “the party in government, the party in the electorate, and the party organization,” the three facets of political parties have factored significantly into the workings of the American political system. Their role is so significant that E. E. Schattschneider (1942, 1) wrote, “Modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties.” But with this broad definition of parties and the numerous roles they play in the American political system, a “comprehensive” treatment of parties would be either extremely lengthy or extremely superficial. As a result, I intend to focus on one aspect of the parties’ role in American politics: the role that national party organizations 15 16 BACK IN THE GAME play in election campaigns—those that they themselves conduct as well as the assistance they provide candidate campaigns. The role of political parties in election campaigns is rooted in two assumptions about the origin and evolution of political parties in the United States. As John Aldrich (1995) noted, political parties are institutions created by strategic politicians to help the latter pursue their own goals. Strategic politicians, or those who seek and those who hold elective office (Schlesinger 1975), are seen as ambitiously pursuing one primary goal: the winning of elections (Mayhew 2004). Thus, with the exception of a few small parties that seek only to influence the issue agenda (or perhaps influence the issue positions of the larger parties), it is reasonable to assume that American political parties consider other goals (enacting public policy, for example) only after they have achieved their primary goal to have their members elected to office. As a result, I assume that parties strategically allocate resources in order to maximize electoral success. It is unlikely, however, that a party’s candidates will all win, so it remains an empirical question as to how a party goes about allocating resources to maximize the number of races its candidates do win. The assumption that parties will allocate resources strategically leads to a second, though related, assumption about the electoral behavior of political parties. As described by John Frendreis and Alan Gitelson (1993), parties tend to evolve in order to remain relevant to election campaigns. Dubbed the “adaptive brokerage” model, Frendreis and Gitelson noted that local parties respond to changes in the electoral environment by developing new capacities and altering the electoral roles they play. Applying the adaptive brokerage model more broadly, I assume that political parties react to the opportunities and challenges they face at a given time, and as context changes, so too do the parties. In the next section I will (briefly) review how political party organizations have adapted over the course of American political history. Yet that adaptive process is a product of the flexible nature of the party organization. While the explicit focus of this analysis is the campaign behavior of national party organizations in the United States, that behavior cannot be understood without recognizing that the national party organizations are but one part of a larger whole. Joseph Schlesinger (1965, 775) called this whole the “party nucleus,” or the “collective effort devoted to the capture of a single public office.” For Schlesinger, parties in the aggregate are the product of the relationships among the various party nuclei. Thus, I envision the national party organizations as the all-encompassing nucleus, the organization that concerns itself not only with its own effort...