Richard M. Skinner

527 Committees and the Political Party Network

We investigate the links between 527s and other political organizations through the employment histories of 527 staff. We find that 527s are highly central to modern political party networks and are in positions to facilitate coordination within a party and to employ key party personnel. Furthermore, we find important differences between the networks charted out by the two major parties. The Republican Party, the majority party during the period under study, had a more hierarchical network than the Democratic Party did.

527 Committees, Formal Parties, and Party Adaptation

Abstract Political parties are not static organizations; they continually adapt to changes to the political, electoral, and legal environments. In this paper we argue that so-called 527 committees are another form of party adaptation. We investigate questions about their role in elections, using a dataset consisting of the personnel backgrounds of the largest 527s in the 2004 and 2006 election cycles. We examine the staffing of these groups and their ties to the formal party structures. We find that 527 organizations with stronger personnel links to formal party organizations have more connections to other 527s. The results suggest that 527s are not independent actors disrupting the party system, but rather well-placed participants in the party networks that helped parties adapt to a changing electoral context.

Joel D. Aberbach and Gillian Peele (eds), Crisis of conservatism? The Republican Party, the conservative movement, and American politics after Bush, reviewed by Richard Skinner

papers from a workshop, we should not be surprised by such a lack of homogeneity. Besides, dominant parties are studied in the same way in democratic, democratizing and authoritarian regimes in some contributions, while the rest of the book does not say a word about dominance in non-democratic regimes. In answer to the question ‘How could party dominance be measured?’ it seems that several scholars agree on the usefulness and the great scientific potential of voting power indices to assess dominance at the national, sub-national and intra-party levels. However, as promising as they might seem for measuring dominance at any level in democratic regimes, there is no evidence that they can be used in non-democratic regimes. And while we wonder ‘What are the origins of dominance and its consequences for the democratic process?’ the book fails to resolve the original ‘puzzle’. More comparative and empirical work instead of case studies could provide a better understanding of these dynamics. Finally, researchers looking for a uniform understanding of dominance could be disappointed with this edited volume. The collection of such different contributions does not offer a homogeneous theory of dominance that embraces and articulates the multiple dimensions and facets of the phenomenon, and the diverse arenas in which it occurs. But those looking for different ways of thinking about the concept, measures and dynamics of party and party system dominance will enjoy reading those chapters, and will certainly pick up recent methodological advancements on the topic.