Blog
Why Strengthening Citizen Ties —Not Unleashing Big Donors— is the Way to Revitalize U.S. Political Parties
Scholars Strategy Network
28 Sep 2018
Abstract
Scholars and reformers increasingly agree that weaknesses in U.S. political parties contribute to the ills of American democracy today. What should be done? Some liberal and conservative commentators are calling for legal changes that would allow parties to accept unlimited contributions and engage in unlimited spending, thereby placing parties on a stronger competitive footing with the Super Political Action Committees (super PACs) that have remade campaign finance since 2010. But this approach, I argue, would further exacerbate the key weakness of contemporary parties: their lack of strong ties to citizen groups and networks.
Serious party reform, I argue, requires a fundamental rethinking of political parties and how to make them both more responsive to constituents and more capable of governing. Ideally, political parties should function as densely networked civic associations. From this perspective, the primary impediment to responsive politics today is not that the parties are fiscally weak but that they increasingly lack social ties and feedback loops through which party elites can learn about the concerns of ordinary Americans. The contrast between contemporary political elites and those in prior eras of American history is both stark and revealing.
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Details
- Title
- Why Strengthening Citizen Ties —Not Unleashing Big Donors— is the Way to Revitalize U.S. Political Parties
- Creators
- Tabatha A Abu El-Haj - Drexel University, Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Publication Details
- Scholars Strategy Network
- Resource Type
- Blog
- Academic Unit
- Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Other Identifier
- 991022199149904721