Measuring Democratic and Republican National Committee Activity Quantitatively

• In Event: New Approaches to American Party Development

Abstract

Political science assessments of the role of the Democratic and Republican National Committees in American politics thus far have almost entirely relied on qualitative historical case studies (Klinkner, 1994; Galvin, 2010, 2012; Conley, 2012; Rosenfeld, 2018; Baylor, 2018; Heersink, 2018; Hilton, forthcoming). The main reason for this dominance of historical qualitative work in the study of the national committees as political institutions appears to be a lack of access to consistent quantitative data capturing DNC and RNC activities from within the committees. That is, because neither committee has to release its internal records, and existing archival sources are spotty and – occasionally – difficult to access, creating a quantitative data set covering committee activity for both parties based on their internal records across a longer period of time is practically impossible. This has limited our ability to study American political parties as organizations: while existing studies have produced multiple theories about what the DNC and RNC do and when they do it, and the evidence testing these theories generally is of high internal validity, these test generally have fallen short in terms of their external validity.

While collecting data such as budgets or internal memos consistently across long periods of time may not be possible, in this paper I argue that it is possible to collect an alternative source of data that can help produce a consistent measure of committee activity from an external source: newspapers covering the DNC and RNC’s activities at the time they occurred. To assess the viability of this measure I collect and code each New York Times article discussing activities by the DNC and RNC in the period 1913-1968. I use this new data set to test the core theories presented in Heersink (2018) – a historical qualitative article: that is, I assess whether publicity activities increase when the national committees are in the national minority. The results will provide an additional test with higher external validity in addition to the existing study, and provide a blueprint for possible paths forward to studying the national committees through quantitative methods.

Author

• Boris Heersink, Fordham University