Political Parties

Political party: a group of office holders, candidates, activists, and voters who identify with a group label and seek to elect public office individuals who run under that label. 

Governmental party: the office holders and candidates who run under a political party’s banner. 

Organizational party: the workers and activists who staff the party’s formal organization. 

Party in the electorate: the voters who consider themselves allied or associated with the party. 

Political machines: a party organization that recruits its members with tangible incentives and is characterized by a high degree of control over member activity. 

Direct primary: the selection of party candidates through the ballots of qualified voters rather than at party nomination conventions. 

Civil service laws: these acts removed the staffing of the bureaucracy from political parties and created professional bureaucracy filled through competition. 

Ticket-splitting: voting for candidates of different parties for various offices in the same election. 

Divided government: the political condition in which different political parties control the White House and Congress. 

Coalition: a group of interests or organizations that join forces for the purpose of election public officials. 

National platform: a statement of the general and specific philosophy and policy goals of a political party, usually promulgated at the national convention. 

National committees: make arrangements for the conventions and coordinate the subsequent presidential campaigns. 

National chairperson: selected by the sitting president or newly nominated presidential candidate; prime spokesperson and arbitrator for the party during the four years between elections. He/she is called on to damp down factionalism, negotiate candidate disputes, raise money, and prepare machinery for the next presidential election

National convention: a party meeting held in the presidential election year for the purposes of nominating a presidential and vice presidential ticket and adopting a platform. 

Think tanks: institutional collection of policy-oriented researchers and academics who are sources of policy ideas. Red states: states that predominantly vote for the Republican Party; South, Midwest, Southwest, the Rockies, and Alaska. 

Blue states: states that predominantly vote for the Democratic Party; New England, New York, the Pacific Coast, and a few Midwestern states. 

George Wallace: leader of the American Independent Party; firm geographic base in the south focusing on civil rights. 

Ross Perot: another third-party leader who ran for president in 1992 whose campaign was fueled by the deficit issues (as well as by his personal fortune). 

Ralph Nader (s): Green Party nominee in 2000 election, received 2.86 million votes; cost Democrat Al Gore the presidency. .

Proportional representation: a voting system that apportions legislative seats according to the percentage of a vote won by a particular political party.

Single-member plurality system (s): U.S. system requires a party to get one more vote than any other party in a legislative district or in a state’s presidential election to win. In contrast, countries that use proportional representation often guarantee parliamentary seats to any faction securing as little as 5 percent of the vote. Therefore, in the U.S., parties usually move to the left or right on issues in order to gain popular support. This tends to keep third parties remaining minor.  

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