PARTIES AND PARTY SYSTEMS| 163Parties and Party Systems
Political parties are organizations that run candidates for political offi ce and coor-
dinate the actions of offi cials elected under the party banner. Looking around the
world, we fi nd many diff erent kinds of parties. In numerous western European
countries, the major political parties have millions of dues-paying members, and
party leaders control what their elected offi cials do. In contrast, in many new
democracies, candidates run as representatives of a party, but party leaders have
no control over what candidates say during the campaign or how they act once they
win offi ce. America’s major political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats,
lie somewhere between these extremes. Many Americans have a deep, enduring
connection to one of these parties, and these organizations’ actions aff ect both
election returns and policy outcomes.
However, rather than being unifi ed organizations with party leaders at the top,
candidates and party workers in the middle, and citizen-members at the bottom,
American political parties are decentralized: they constitute a loose network of
organizations, groups, and individuals who share a party label but are under no
obligation to work together.^2 For example, the Speaker of the House of Representa-
tives, John Boehner, is the leader of House members from his party, the Republi-
cans, but he works independently of the party’s national organization, the Repub-
lican National Committee (RNC); neither one is in charge of the other. Boehner is
also not in charge of other Republican groups in Congress, such as the Tea Party
Caucus; while Caucus members may listen to Boehner’s arguments, they are under
no obligation to do what he asks. Similarly, the RNC cannot command state and
local Republican Party organizations to take some actions and not others. More-
over, while many Americans think of themselves as members of a political party,
neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have formal membership. Someone
SHOW HOW AMERICAN
POLITICAL PARTIES AND
PARTY SYSTEMS HAVE
EVOLVED OVER TIMEAMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES have three largely separate components: the party organization, represented here by Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee; the party in government, represented by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and
her leadership team; and the party in the electorate, exemplied by the crowd at a rally for Barack Obama.