Divisive Primaries: Party Organizations, Ideological Groups, and the Battle over Party Purity

Abstract

Of the many vital functions that political parties serve in American democracy, selecting candidates for public office is near the top of the list. Giovanni Sartori (1976) cites this purpose as their chief defining element—claiming that, at a minimum, a party is a “political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office” (64). Moreover, understanding how parties vet, groom, select, and promote candidates is central to empirically evaluating the strength of political party organizations, the quality of elected policymakers, and ultimately the effectiveness of government. For scholars of American politics, this has led to fruitful lines of research on the processes that the Democratic and Republican Parties use to select their candidates—namely the conventions, primaries, and caucuses that nominate individuals for various federal, state, and local offices. For example, many have investigated the effects of reforms to the presidential nomination process in the early 1970s (Aldrich 1993; Hagen and Mayer 2000; Reiter 1985; Wayne 2000), some arguing that it took power of choosing candidates away from the party organizations and towards other institutions like the press, interest groups, and small ideological factions (Polsby 1983) with potentially negative consequences for governance.