Question

• What institutional rules influence American political parties (3)? What contextual factors influence American political parties (3)?

Answer 1

While people love to criticise political parties,the reality is that the modern political system could not exist without them.

Collective action problems are very common in soceities,as groups and entire soceities try to solve problems or distribute scarce resources.There are many groups,all with opinions about what should be done and a desire to influence policy.But at some point, a soceity must find a way of taking all these opinions and turning them into solutions to real problems.That is where politucal parties come in.

Political parties are organised groups of people with similar ideas or idealogy about the function and scope of government, with shared policy goals that work together to elect individuals to political office,to create and implement policies,to further an agenda, and to gain control of the government and the poicy-making process.Parties gain control over the government by winning elections with candidates they officially sponsor or nominate for positions in government.Political parties nominate candidates to run many levels of government including the national level,Congress, and the Presidency:but, they nominate for state and local levels as well.They also coordinate political campaigns and mobilise voters.

Political Parties are points of accesss/linkage institutions available to the public,though they are not themselves government institutions.Neither interest groups nor political parties are directly mentioned in the U.S Constitution. Where interest groups often work indirectly to influence our leaders,political parties are organisations that try to directly influence public policy through nominating and officially sponsoring members who seek to win and hold public office. This is a key difference.Interest groups do not officially nominate or nominate candidates for public office,although they may support them politically and even contribute dollars to their campaign.

Parties accomplish this by identifying and aligning set of issues that are important to voters in the hopes of gaining support during elections. In this respect,parties provide choices to the electorate,something they are doing that is sharp contrast to their opposition. These positiona on these critical issues are often presented in campaign documents or political advertising. During a national presidential campaign, they also frequently reflect the party platform, which is adopted at each part's presidential nominating convention every four years.

Party Idealogy and Polarisation

Political Parties exist for the purpose of wining elections in order to influence public policy. This requires them to build coalitions across a wide range of voters who share similar preferences. As identified in a prior discussion of political idealogy, of liberalism and conservatism,while not representing the entire spectrum of U.S political idealogies are predominantly concentrated where conservatism, find their major home in the Republician Party while liberals primarily associate with the Democrat Party. In considering libertarianism and populism, these idealogies historically add many libertarians to the Republican ranks and many populists to the Democrat ranks.

Critical Elections and Realignment

If voter's preferences remained stable for long periods of time, and if both parties did a good job of competing for their votes,we could expect Republicans and Democrats to be reasonably competitive in any given election.Election outcomes would probably be based on the way voters compared the parties on the most important events of the day rather than on electoral strategy.

There are many reasons we would be wrong in these expectations,however.First, the electorate is not entirely stable. Each generation of voters has been a bit different from the last.

The realignment of the parties did have consequences for Democrats. African Americans became an increasingly important part of the Democratic coalition in the 1940s through the 1960s, as the party took steps to support civil rights. This impacted a critical element of the 1932 FDR Democratic party coalition-the solid south support for the party. Most changes were limited to the state level at first, but as civil rights reform moved to the national stage,rifts between northern liberal Democrats and Southern conservative Democrats began to emerge.Southern Democrats became increasingly convinced that national efforts to provide social welfare and encourage racial integration were violating state soverignty and social norms. By the 1970s, many had began to shift their allegaince to the Republicab Party,whose conservative idealogy shared their opposition to the growing encroachment of the national government into what they viewed as state and local matters

Most elections are not critical elections, but are known as maintaining elections in which the coalitions of population groups and geographic regions supporting one political party's presidential candidate over the other party's candidate remain somewhat stable. Even in these types of elections political analysts will look for shifts seem to endure for several elections might it be concluded that another electoral realignment has occurred.

Partisanship and policy preferences have long been among the most studied determinants of vote choice in presidential elections. Classic studies like The American Voter found party identification to be of central importance for ballot choice. While individual-level models of voting behaviour consistently reveal effects of issues and partisabship,variation in these effects across elections has received less attention.

Issues and their influence on the vote have long had a place on the mass behaviour research agenda.As commonly observed, in order for issue preferences to influence ballot choices, the choice presented to voters must provide policy alternatives.If voters are choosing between two alternatives both of whc=ich represent identica-real and perceived-idealogical and policy options,then there is no reason the votes of those with liberal preferences to differ from the ballot choices of those with liberal prefernces to differ from the ballot choices of those with conservative prefernces.When there is a contrst betweeb the alternatives, voters issue preferences may influence them to choose on over the other,and the larger the idealogical and policy divide, the more influential voters prefernces are typically exptected to be.