P arty activists have played a leading role in "conflict extension"-the polarization of the parties along multiple issue dimensions-in contemporary American politics. We argue that open nomination systems and the ambitious politicians competing within those systems encourage activists with extreme views on a variety of issue dimensions to become involved in party politics, thus motivating candidates to take noncentrist positions on a range of issues. Once that happens, continuing activists with strong partisan commitments bring their views into line with the new candidate agendas, thus extending the domain of interparty conflict. Using cross-sectional and panel surveys of national convention delegates, we find clear evidence for conflict extension among party activists, evidence tentatively suggesting a leading role for activists in partisan conflict extension more generally, and strong support for our argument about change among continuing activists. Issue conversion among activists has contributed substantially to conflict extension and party commitment has played a key role in motivating that conversion.

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Parties need to win elections, but they also heed the policy preferences of activists to provide the incentive to mobilize. Moving beyond the debate as to whether parties as a whole are policy or office driven, we examine groups within parties and identify different factions that place differential emphasis on office-seeking versus policy-demanding. Using data from the 2012 Convention Delegate Study of Democratic and Republican Party national delegates, we identify distinct factional groups within each party. We map these factions within each party, finding policy-driven and office-driven factions of delegates in both Republican and Democratic parties. We evaluate each group’s response to political and party involvement, support for the larger party organization, and response to both intra- and interparty conflict. Finally, we make clear the picture of factional relationships within each party by accounting for how factional goals are integrated into the party organization over time.

Feminist scholars and activists alike have asked for decades whether a democracy that excludes women from participating equally in democratic decision-making structures can be considered legitimate. One key argument states that equal representation is a question of justice: Women make up half the population and should thus be included as elected representatives (Dahlerup 2017; Phillips 1993, 2003). Others have argued that equal representation allows women's lived experiences, expertise, and ideas to be heard and included in the decision-making process, improving the lives of women, men, and children (Carroll and Sanbonmatsu 2013; Dahlerup 2017; Dittmar, Carroll, and Sanbonmatsu 2019). At the same time, we also know and have long acknowledged that women are not monolithic. Certain subgroups of women look and behave differently from the group at largeand indeed, it is unclear if we can even talk about a "group at large" (Young 1994). Attention has rightly focused in recent decades on women of color, either collectively or as individual racial/ethnic subgroups (

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