Are American Political Parties Resilient? Campaign Finance Party Networks

• In Event: Parties and Ideologies in American Politics

Abstract

Are political parties resilient to disruptive events or actors or are they vulnerable to these? As scholars have increasingly begun to treat parties as extended networks of policy-demanders, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives (Bawn et al. 2012; Noel 2014), we can examine networks for endogenous structures that suggest resilience or vulnerability. In the modern American politics landscape that is dominated by asymmetric partisan polarization we expect that Republican and Democratic party network may not have the same resistance or vulnerability to disruption. In this paper, I develop the theoretical concept of resilience and apply them to the modern major parties in the United States. I develop theoretically driven hypotheses that suggest the Democratic network will be more resilient to disruption than the Republican network. Empirically, I examine campaign contributions in 2016 and 2018 to construct party networks, then examine these for various forms of resiliency. Parties are naturally relational and the networks have inherent properties that can give us clues to how they function and how they perform. We should develop rich expectations specific to each party based on what we know about the internal rules that govern the parties and the relationships between the actors. Observing these structures in campaign finance data reveals the strengths and weakness of the American political parties system.

Author

• Jennifer Nicoll Victor, George Mason University