goals and aspirations of politicians, and how these together shape policies adopted
by government.
1 Political Parties as Institutions
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The greatest scholar of twentieth-century American politics, V. O. Key Jr. ( 1964 ),
led us to understand the American political party as organized around its three
core activities. The party-in-the-electorate was the party of the campaign, the
creation of the party’s image and reputation in the public’s mind, and the way
the public used those sources as informational short-cuts and decision-making
devices or aides. One of these ‘‘informational shortcuts’’ stands out as particularly
important, creating a special role for political parties. Durable political parties
develop long-term reputations that the personalities of particular politicians or
variable agendas of policy concerns are generally unable to provide. While many
things can go into these long-term reputations, the most important are the policy-
based performances that create a partisan reputation and ideology. The party-
in-government is the party that organizes the legislature and coordinates actions
across the various institutions of national government, horizontally, and, for
systems with vertical divisions of power, across the federal structures (Hofstadter
1969 ; Cox and McCubbins 1993 ; Haggard and McCubbins 2000 ). The party-
as-organization is the party of its activists, resources, and campaign specialists;
that is, those who negotiate between the public and government, sometimes
rather invisibly, sometimes quite visibly, sometimes autonomously from the
party-in-government, but often times as its external extension (Cotter,
Gibson, Bibby, and Huckshorn 1984 ; Herrnnson 1988 ; Kitschelt 1989 , 1999 ). This
three-part structure applies to and certainly helps structure our thinking about
political parties in all democracies, even if Key primarily writes about American
politics.
Second, political parties diVer from many other political institutions covered in
this volume by virtue of being created, most often, external to the constitutional
and, in some cases, developed largely external even to the legal order, per se. It is,
for example, commonplace to note that theWrst parties, those in late eighteenth-
century America (Hofstadter 1969 ; or early nineteenth-century America, depend-
ing upon one’s point of view (e.g. Formisano 1981 )), arose in spite of the wishes
of their very founders and were unanticipated in writing the Constitution and early
laws. Instead, political parties are organizations that are created by political
actors themselves, whether emanating from the public (as, for instance in social
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