2 - Theory

Summary

The United States Constitution never mentions a political party. Seemingly few constitutions for representative democracies do (except, perhaps, to ensure that it is illegal to prevent their formation). Yet, parties organize both elections and legislatures in every political system that conducts free and fair elections on a large scale.

The standard explanation for the ubiquity of parties in representative democracies is that they are political organizations that provide solutions to a host of problems confronting politicians (cf. Aldrich 1995). For example, parties provide a potential solution to problems of social choice in legislatures (Schwartz 1977); parties provide economies of scale in the organization of election campaigns (Osborne and Tourky 2007); and parties provide office-seekers with brand names that reduce voters' uncertainty about candidates' issue positions and ideology (Cox and McCubbins 1993; Snyder and Ting 2002). Politicians, recognizing these and other potential benefits to themselves, therefore incur the costs of developing and maintaining partisan institutions.

The argument for why politicians might create political parties is compelling, but it does not address an essential ancillary question: namely, how is it possible for a political party to ever capture a majority of seats in a national legislature if it performs the functions that party theorists claim that it performs. The root of the problem is that if party theorists are correct, then politicians create parties to (1) distort election outcomes in favor of a political coalition with a particular set of ideological convictions and/or (2) influence the legislative process so as to achieve non-median or non-centrist policy outcomes.