Small Power: How Local Parties Shape Elections [Mīkstie vāki]

"This book examines the role local party organizations play in the electoral process. It draws on dozens of in-person interviews with local party chairpersons, as well as findings from a national survey of these local elites. Part I of the book explores who leads local party organizations and what these organizations do. The findings demonstrate that these organizations play a critical role in converting citizens into politicians and supporting them as they navigate the campaign process. These efforts appear to pay dividends as candidates from a party tend to perform better in areas where the local party organization is active. Part II considers what local party chairpersons look for in a candidate, drawing on findings from an experiment included in the national survey of party chairs. The experiment asked chairs which of a pair of candidates they thought would be most likely to prevail in a primary in their area and varied an array of candidate characteristics, including their policy positions, family structures, and their purported ethnoracial identity and gender. The results offer novel insights into the attributes that elites who play a critical role in candidate recruitment see as enhancing (or degrading) an individual's electoral prospects. Throughout, the experimental evidence is bolstered by findings from the in-depth interviews with chairs"--

An insider's look into the largely anonymous volunteers in local party organizations who make decisions in elections with profound implications for American democracy.

Although scholars have long recognized that local American parties play an important role in elections, surprisingly little is known about the individuals who lead these typically small, volunteer-based organizations. As David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, and Michael G. Miller show in Small Power,
local party leaders influence the electoral process in myriad ways: They recruit and support candidates, interface with state-wide and federal campaigns, and get out the vote in their communities. Drawing from a survey of over 850 Democratic and Republican local party chairs, a nationally
representative sample of voters, and dozens of in-depth interviews, the authors describe how parties are organized, who party chairs are, and how they serve the party. Leveraging novel experiments that illuminate how chairs make choices about which individuals to recruit as candidates--as well as
whether those choices reflect voters' preferences--Small Power sheds new light on how seemingly mundane local decisions can shape party goals, influence candidate pipelines, and affect who ends up winning elections. The book therefore offers unprecedented insight into the substantial influence that
local parties and their chairpersons are positioned to wield and how they shape American politics.