Bridging American and comparative research on political parties

Abstract

We need a better bridge between the comparative study of political parties and the study of parties in the United States. The articles in this issue of JEPOP represent an attempt to build such a bridge. They were all originally presented at a March 2018 conference that brought convened more than 20 scholars to present and discuss 15 papers over two days in the hills above Florence, Italy. The fault for a lack of communication lies mostly with Americanist scholars such as myself. Too often, scholarship on American political parties not only ignores other countries, it is ignorant of the findings from scholarship outside the United States. Recent theoretical developments on political parties in the United States (e.g. Aldrich 1995; Bawn et al. 2012; Schlozman and Rosenfeld 2019) are not only not tested on other cases, they are not always developed in a way that could be. In the area of theory, the United States runs a trade surplus, as more comparative work draws on theories developed on the United States than the other way around. But American scholars could do better at developing theories with an eye to other cases. Meanwhile, however, much comparative work also omits the United States. This is understandable. The United States is an unusual democracy. It is the only developed democracy with a presidential system and single-member districts and only two major parties. U.S. parties use primary elections in a way that makes them far more open to outsiders. The regulation of the media and campaign finance in the United States is far less than in most systems. The end result is a democracy that looks very different from the rest in the world. Not surprisingly, then, sensible research strategies often isolate the U.S. case. Comparative scholars focus on parliamentary systems, or democracies in a particular region, or some other set of cases that, while coherently defined, happens not to include the United States. Americanist scholars are content to explore their one very unusual case. This sort of narrowing of