Divergent Democracy
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An innovative examination of the shift by American political parties toward issue-based differentiation Recent Democratic and Republican party platforms display clear differences on such issues as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, gun control, and the environment. These distinctions reflect a programmatic party system--that is, one in which policy positions serve as a key basis of electoral competition. Yet party politics were not always so issue-oriented; the rise of policy positions as the dominant marker of party appeal occurred largely over the last fifty years. In Divergent Democracy, Katherine Krimmel examines this transformation of the American party system, using innovative machine learning techniques to develop and present the first measure of party differentiation on issues since Democrats and Republicans began competing with each other in 1856. Why did the shift to issue-based party competition take more than a century to materialize? Krimmel offers a groundbreaking theory, focusing on what aids and constrains parties' abilities to do the difficult, conflict-ridden work of developing issue positions. She argues that clientelistic subnational party organizations, promising material support or jobs in return for votes, long impeded programmatic partisanship while the growth of national party organizations facilitated it. Moreover, institutions and agents of racial oppression extended the life of nonprogrammatic practices, as they attempted to shield discriminatory laws and institutions from interparty competition. Following the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, space opened for programmatic competition to grow. Using both quantitative and qualitative tools, Krimmel offers a vital view of the foundations of today's issue-based party competition and its alternatives.
Small Power
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An insider's look into the largely anonymous volunteers in local party organizations who make decisions in elections with profound implications for American democracy.Although scholars have long recognized that local American parties play an important role in elections, surprisingly little is known about the individuals who lead these typically small, volunteer-based organizations. As David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, and Michael G. Miller show in Small Power, local party leaders influence the electoral process in myriad ways: They recruit and support candidates, interface with state-wide and federal campaigns, and get out the vote in their communities. Drawing from a survey of over 850 Democratic and Republican local party chairs, a nationally representative sample of voters, and dozens of in-depth interviews, the authors describe how parties are organized, who party chairs are, and how they serve the party. Leveraging novel experiments that illuminate how chairs make choices about which individuals to recruit as candidates - as well as whether those choices reflect voters' preferences - Small Power sheds new light on how seemingly mundane local decisions can shape party goals, influence candidate pipelines, and affect who ends up winning elections. The book therefore offers unprecedented insight into the substantial influence that local parties and their chairpersons are positioned to wield and how they shape American politics.
Subsidizing Democracy
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In the wake of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the case that allowed corporate and union spending in elections, many Americans despaired over the corrosive influence that private and often anonymous money can have on political platforms, campaigns, and outcomes at the federal and state level. In McComish v. Bennett (2011), the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the matching funds feature of so-called "Clean Elections" public financing laws, but there has been no strong challenge to the constitutionality of public funding as such. In Subsidizing Democracy, Michael G. Miller considers the impact of state-level public election financing on political campaigns through the eyes of candidates. Miller's insights are drawn from survey data obtained from more than 1,000 candidates, elite interview testimony, and twenty years of election data. This book is therefore not only an effort to judge the effects of existing public election funding but also a study of elite behavior, campaign effects, and the structural factors that influence campaigns and voters. The presence of publicly funded candidates in elections, Miller reports, results in broad changes to the electoral system, including more interaction between candidates and the voting public and significantly higher voter participation. He presents evidence that by providing neophytes with resources that would have been unobtainable otherwise, subsidies effectively manufacture quality challengers. Miller describes how matching-funds provisions of Clean Elections laws were pervasively manipulated by candidates and parties and were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court. A revealing book that will change the way we think about campaign funding, Subsidizing Democracy concludes with an evaluation of existing proposals for future election policy in light of Miller's findings.