12 - Political parties and electoral mobilization: Political structure, social structure, and the party canvass

Summary

As agents of electoral mobilization, political parties occupy an important role in the social flow of political communication, and this chapter addresses several questions regarding party mobilization efforts. Whom do the parties seek to mobilize? What are the individual and aggregate characteristics and criteria that shape party mobilization efforts? What are the intended and unintended consequences of partisan mobilization, both for individual voters and for the electorate more generally? In answering these questions we make several arguments. First, party efforts at electoral mobilization inevitably depend upon a process of social diffusion and informal persuasion, and thus the party canvass serves as a catalyst aimed at stimulating a cascading mobilization process. Second, party mobilization is best seen as being environmentally contingent upon institutional arrangements, locally defined strategic constraints, and partisan divisions within particular electorates. Finally, the efforts of party organizations generate an additional layer of political structure within the electorate that sometimes competes with social structure and often exists independently from it.

One of the major good works of political parties is to engage citizens in the political process. Parties play an important role in democratic politics when they mobilize the electorate to turn out and vote, thereby involving citizens in democratic governance. These efforts on the part of parties are not unbiased attempts aimed at encouraging diffuse system support – they carry an explicitly partisan message. But in the necessarily free market of democratic electoral competition, such self-interest is a virtue because it serves to educate and inform the electorate in a politically meaningful manner.