Measuring Party Organization in the United States: An Assessment and a New Approach

Debate about the decline and revival of American political parties proceeds unabated in political science. Related to this debate is the attempt to link electoral outcomes with party organizational activity. A continuing impediment to resolving this conflict is the asymmetry in our ability to measure the two central concepts. While standard measures of electoral success and partisan competition abound, measures of party organization are less abundant. Although the methods introduced by the authors of the Party Transformation Study (PTS) for measuring party organizational strength have been influential, their survey-based technique has greater utility for some purposes than for others. We argue for the use of state party archives as a means for gathering the data necessary for building appropriate measures of party organization. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by linking data gathered in a pilot study of three such archives to the PTS framework.