527 Committees and the Political Party Network

We investigate the links between 527s and other political organizations through the employment histories of 527 staff. We find that 527s are highly central to modern political party networks and are in positions to facilitate coordination within a party and to employ key party personnel. Further, we find important differences between the networks charted out by the two major parties. The Republican Party, the majority party during the period under study, had a more hierarchical network than the Democratic Party did

Networking the Parties: A Comparative Study of Democratic and Republican Convention Delegates in 2008

Parties‐as‐networks is an emerging approach to understanding American political parties as decentralized, nonhierarchical, fluid systems with porous boundaries of a wide array of actors. Parties‐asnetworks include interest groups, social movements, political consultants, and advocacy organizations, in additional to the usual suspects of elected officials, party officials, and citizen‐activists. This approach ameliorates several deficits of the traditional, tripartite view of parties in government, in elections, and as organizations. The authors apply the parties‐as‐networks approach using data from surveys of delegates at the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions. Analysis of delegates’ memberships in a wide variety of organizations demonstrates that Democrats have larger networks than do Republicans; Republican networks tend more toward hierarchy than do Democratic networks; and the content of Democratic networks is tilted toward labor and identity organizations, while Republican networks are more populated by civic, religious, ideological, and professional organizations. The parties‐as‐networks view is a potentially revealing source of insight on the dynamic evolution of party coalitions. Theoretically, approaching parties as networks deepens the understanding of how intermediary institutions matter to the functioning of democratic politics

Mobilizing marginalized groups among party elites

The Democratic Party has long used a system of caucuses and councils to reach out to marginalized groups among convention delegates. This article tests two hypotheses about how this system works within the party. First, the Parties in Service to Candidates Hypothesis holds that caucuses and councils mobilize elites from marginalized groups to increase support for the party nominee. Second, the Group Solidarity Hypothesis holds that caucuses and councils mobilize elites from marginalized groups to enhance group solidarity. Regression analysis of data drawn from an original survey of delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention provides no support to the Service Hypothesis, while the evidence supports the Solidarity Hypothesis in the case of the Women’s Caucus, which became a rallying point for women who were disappointed that Hillary Clinton was not the Democratic Party nominee. A similar survey of delegates to the 2008 Republican National Convention did not uncover a parallel system of representing marginalized groups within the Republican Party

Polarized networks: the organizational affiliations of national party convention delegates

Previous research has documented that the institutional behaviors (e.g., lobbying, campaign contributions) of political organizations reflect the polarization of these organizations along party lines. However, little is known about how these groups are connected at the level of individual party activists. Using data from a survey of 738 delegates at the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions, we use network regression analysis to demonstrate that co-membership networks of national party convention delegates are highly polarized by party, even after controlling for homophily due to ideology, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, educational attainment, income, and religious participation. Among delegates belonging to the same organization, only 1.78% of these co-memberships between delegates crossed party lines, and only 2.74% of the ties between organizations sharing common delegates were bipartisan in nature. We argue that segregation of organizational ties on the basis of party adds to the difficulty of finding common political ground between the parties

Gender Attitudes, Gendered Partisanship: Feminism and Support for Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton among Party Activists

Activists in the Democratic and Republican parties have distinct concerns about women’s place in American politics and society. These views lead them to evaluate female candidates through different ideological lenses that are conditioned, in part, on their divergent attitudes about gender. We explore the implications of these diverging lenses through an examination of the 2008 candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, using data from an original survey of Democratic and Republican National Convention delegates. We find that delegate sex did not affect their evaluations but that evaluations were influenced by the interaction of partisanship and attitudes about women’s roles