Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2009 erstellt
Beschreibung:
Scholars of American politics have long treated parties as functional (or dysfunctional) for the constitutional system, for the socioeconomic order, or for the actors who use them. Consequently, when the environment around them changes, we typically assume that the parties will change, too. This article questions these functionalist assumptions by demonstrating that over the last sixty years, the Democratic and Republican parties did not change reflexively in response to external stimuli, nor did they change at the same time, at the same speed, or in the same ways. As each party confronted its own challenges and worked to resolve its own structural and operational dilemmas, each followed an organizational trajectory of its own making. By treating parties as political institutions of significance in their own right, this article explains these striking asymmetrical patterns of organizational development and offers a new theory of party change