chapter 28
...................................................................................................................................................POLITICAL PARTIES IN
AND OUT OF
LEGISLATURES
...................................................................................................................................................john h. aldrich
Richard Fenno explained his career-long devotion to the study of the US Congress
by saying that Congress is where democracy happens (pers. comm.). It is, meta-
phorically, the crossroads of democracy, where the public and politician, the
lobbyist and petitioner meet. If legislatures are where democracy most visibly
happens, political parties are the institutions that let us seehowit happens. It
may not be true that parties are literally necessary conditions for democracy to exist
as Schattschneider ( 1942 ) famously wrote, but their ubiquity suggests that they are
virtually, if not actually, a necessity for a democracy to be viable.
Political parties—in and out of legislatures—are the subjects of this chapter. As
the chapter title suggests, we are to look at parties speciWcally here, but we cannot
fully decouple parties from electoral systems (nor from other aspects of political
institutions), and in particular from the virtually co-companion of electoral
systems, party systems, nor can we decouple that from the study of parties as
institutions. But we shall cover those extraordinarily rich literatures only to aid our
focus on the speciWc questions considered here: how political parties mediate and
integrate the goals and aspirations of the citizens with the often quite diVerent