party-as-choice should be more commonplace. Other convergences may be
exploitable to examine whether party-as-assessment is, in fact, valuable for citizens
in many nations as they seek to negotiate a complex political world. Indeed the
Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) are making such explorations and
convergences increasingly possible. Note, interestingly, that the question wording
for ‘‘party identiWcation’’ questions in the CSES (and, of course, that means as
generated from comparative scholars from their own research traditions) are about
howcloseone feels toward the various parties. Such a format leaves open the
question of whether respondents mean they feel close to a party in the sense of
identifying with it, or being close to what theystand for, and thus having a higher
ideological proximity.
Partisanship, however deWned and understood in the literature, focuses on the
individual citizen. But the questions as to meaning have turned out to depend
upon how they observe politicians and the parties they belong to. Thus, as Key
taught us long ago, we can spend a good deal of time looking at, say, the
party-in-the-electorate, but we cannot, in theWnal analysis, really understand it
in isolation from the party-in-government or the party-as-organization. Our
questions about what the party means to the voter have taken us to the party-
in-government.
4 The Party Inside the Legislature
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In this section we again ask two core questions, the two that emerged above. It
should not be surprising that the core questions about the value of the political
party for citizens and for politicians are closely related. That was Key’s point. The
questions are when and why do politicians support their party in the legislature—
how united are parties—and when and why do parties align with, or oppose, one
another? These questions have tended to be the focus of the literature on American
parties and Congress, on the one hand, and on comparative parties and legisla-
tures, on the other hand, and it is fair to say that the two party-and-legislature
literatures are often close to dominated by their respective questions. Increasingly,
new questions and new data are emerging especially within comparative politics,
but we will only brieXy touch on them. The core questions form the end points of a
continuum, with the US two-party system candidate-centered elections at one end
to a multiparty system with party-centered elections at the other.
Let us begin at the American exemplar end of the continuum. What forces shape
the roll call vote? There has been considerable variation in the level of support the
566 john h. aldrich