Contentious Institutions and Party Orders in American Politics

Abstract

What are political parties, and how and why do they change? These questions are foundational to party research, yet scholars of American parties disagree about the answers. In this paper we present a new theoretical framework capable of bridging these scholarly divides and coming to terms with American party politics today. We argue that political parties should be seen as fundamentally contentious institutions. Due to their mediating position between state and society, parties are subject to rival claims of authority from a range of political actors, including elected officeholders, party officials, interest groups, and social movements. To manage intraparty contention, win elections, and govern, entrepreneurs construct and maintain party orders -- institutional and ideational arrangements that foster an operational degree of cohesion and constraint through time. Together, the dynamics of intraparty contention and the rise and fall of distinct party orders over time illuminate the patterns of American party development.

Between Movements and Parties: Placing Insurgents in American Party Politics

“…First, insurgents must win nomination in their host party. At the presidential level, the sequence of binding state-level primaries-itself a lasting legacy of previous insurgencies (see Hilton 2021)-creates space for insurgents to make a competitive bid for enough convention delegates to win the party leadership. (Though even prior to the modern period, the caucusconvention system also proved susceptible to insurgent incursions, as seen in Goldwater's 1964 nomination.)…”

“…As shown in the diagram, the five faces of party refer to the party's institutions, interests, issues, ideology, and identity (see Hejny and Hilton 2021). As electoral movements aiming to fundamentally transform a major political party, insurgents pursue non-incremental change across all five faces of their host party, operationalized as a shift in any and all of the (non-exhaustive) datalevel indicators displayed at the bottom in Figure 2.…”