The Interest Group-Minor Party Connection in the United States

• In Event: Historical and Contemporary Issues in the US Party System

Abstract

Studies of minor political parties in the United States focus heavily on their emergence due to major-party failure, the conditions under which voters support them, the electoral rules that limit their success, and the general decline in minor-party voting since the early 20th century. In these works, little emphasis is placed on how these political parties were created; this is a severe detriment to understanding them and then connecting them to theories on political party formation in the discipline. Here, I argue that the group-centric theory of political parties developed by Bawn et al. (2012) can be applied readily to minor parties in the United States. In developing this argument, I show how existing literature on American minor parties overlooks their group-centric development, how the theory itself can be applied to minor parties, and then elaborate on how existing historical evidence on a wide array of minor parties finds that these parties arise from interest groups. Ultimately, this is a scholarly advancement for research on minor parties in the United States, specifically, while also providing additional support to theoretical inquiries into the nature of political parties, more broadly.

Author

• Adam Chamberlain, Coastal Carolina University