The following is a guest post by Julia Azari, a professor in the Department of Political Science at the Marquette University and 2019 Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center.
Partisanship shapes American politics, and, indeed, many parts of everyday life. Americans are increasingly negative about the possibility of their children marrying someone who affiliates with the opposite party. Many see the other party as a threat to the nation’s very well-being. In the 2016 election, about ninety percent of party identifiers pulled the lever for their party’s presidential nominee.
Yet, despite these fierce party attachments, institutional parties play a weak and unclear role in American political life. Party organizations face competition for volunteers and donors from issue-based and candidate-centered groups, and members of the public generally do not trust the two major parties. In fact, many Americans say they want a third party, even though third party candidates rarely attract high levels of support.
My research this spring at the Kluge Center focuses on this puzzle of weak institutional parties and strong partisanship. I seek to understand what this means and to put it in historical context. Here are three questions I hope to address in my research.
What function do parties serve?
Scholars of party politics don’t really agree on the answer to this question – some insist that parties are formal organizations like the national and state level Democratic and Republican parties. Others suggest that we are better off defining parties as broad networks of organized interests (like the National Rifle Association and others on the Republican side or Planned Parenthood and others on the Democratic side), that coordinate to help elect candidates.
But I’m also interested in figuring out what parties mean in the mind of the public at large. I look at survey research dating back to the 1930s to try and get a sense of what Americans really think about political parties and their place in politics.
A striking feature of the polling about political parties is that there isn’t a clear idea of what to ask. While polls question people on a core of common concepts – satisfaction, representation, the performance of the two-party system – there appears to be little consensus about how to frame these concepts. Polls also vary in the target of their questions. Some ask about political parties in a very general sense, investigating attitudes about whether parties improve democracy or are necessary in modern politics. Others ask about satisfaction with the two parties or the party system.
As a result, it’s actually pretty hard to know what people really think about parties. But we