Who Has the Body? Party Institutionalization and Theories of Party Organization

Abstract

This analysis seeks to codify and elucidate an emerging consensus among party scholars concerning the phenomenon and significance of the institutionalized party. More than the mere bureaucratization of party organizations, by adapting to environmental challenge an evolving “web of party” has sprouted new linkages between elites and non-elites, as well as among national and subnational executives and legislatures. Party scholarship, dominated until recently by non-institutional perspectives such as progressivism, behavioralism, and pluralism, needs to examine party institutionalization in a broader institutional context, i.e., as compared with Congress, the Presidency, and other prime political institutions, for which the advent of the institutionalized party has far-reaching implications.