In sum, the study of political parties necessarily entails two central aspects of thenational party system, regardless of how focused one may be on the internal
workings of a particular political party. First, the famous Schattschneiderian
position on partisan necessity for democracy does not mean that it is this or that
party that is necessary. Rather, it means that there must be a system of parties, and
that every party forming or being in the government has to be at reasonable risk of
electoral defeat in the next election. And for that to be true, there has to be a system
of two or more parties. Second, it is equally true that representation requires not
just a desirable option in the election for any particular citizen to choose. Rather,
representation requires comparison between or among options, and thus also
requires there to be a party system. Further, representation entails not only choices
for the citizens as to how best to articulate their desires in government; it also
requires the ability of the citizenry to hold the successful parties accountable for
their actions in the government. The argument here is that both aspects of
representation,Wrst, require a party system, and, second, are not as diVerent across
the various types of party systems, two- or multiparty systems with greater or lesser
degrees of party discipline, as often assumed. Indeed, in some ways, the account-
ability problem—how the public can try to ensure that their preferred choices
really do represent them in government and in policy-making and not just on the
campaign trail and in the manner needed to win votes—is greater in multiparty
than in two-party systems.
3 The Party Outside the Legislature
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In this and the following section, we consider the two major arenas of action for the
political party. In this section, we look at the party as it is perceived by the public
and as it thus helps the public negotiate the political process, make electorally
relevant assessments, and take actions, particularly with respect to the turnout and
vote decisions. In the next section, we examine the party as it operates in the
legislative arena.
As was true above, so it is true here that a good place to start is with V. O. Key,
Jr. In his magisterial account ofSouthern Politics in State and Nation( 1949 ), he made
the relevant comparison. Imagine the workings of a democracy with an established
party system in comparison to the workings of a democracy without such a system.
In this he was aided by the unique ‘‘natural experiment’’ of the embedding of a
putative democracy in the American South, but one that had no party system
throughout the sixty years of the ‘‘Jim Crow’’ system that Key was studying (that is
political parties in and out of legislatures 561