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Does politics impact happiness? This paper evaluates how being a political "winner" or "loser" – whether one's preferred party controls government or not – is linked to multiple measures of life satisfaction. Using Gallup survey data on self-reported well-being for Democrats and for Republicans within the U.S. states for 2008–2016 (a time period when party control of government changed in several states) and a difference-in-difference model with two-way fixed effects, I find consistent evidence that citizens report lower levels of well-being when the opposing party controls state government. The substantive effect is particularly large for Democrats living in Republican controlled states. Conversely, there is little evidence that citizens' well-being is boosted when their own party controls state government. These findings have important implications for our understanding about how partisan competition and election outcomes can impact subjective well-being and further highlight the significance of negative partisanship for American public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the two conventional explanations of the Republican Party's adoption of supply-side economic philosophy in the 1977-81 period: first, that the position change was induced by the Sunbelt component of the party; and second, that the doctrinal shift was brought about by widespread concern with tax policy among the public and the Republican mass in particular. We reveal both arguments to be flawed and suggest that the party's advocation of large across-the-board tax cuts was the result of calculated and coordinated decisions by Washington elites within the party. We provide empirical and theoretical justification for a national elite-led explanation of this event. As a result, our study helps solidify contemporary scholarship that counteracts conventional wisdom in comparative politics and suggests that national American parties, at least when it comes to policy formation, can be relatively hierarchical institutions that shape as much as respond to mass and local behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces a change in status of the journal, becoming the official publication of the Political Organization and Parties Section (POP) of the American Political Science Association (APSA); the history of organized sections in APSA is also discussed. Initial efforts to organize APSA by academic subfield in the 1970s are discussed, including the founding of what would become POP. "Party Politics," founded by SAGE Publications in 1995, had no connection to POP, but dealt with the same issues, and formal ties were established in 2008.

Only a few studies of the lower federal court confirmation process consider the role of the race/gender of nominees in that process and none consider the intersection of party politics with those characteristics. We address this deficiency, arguing that the different electoral incentive structures of the two major parties have consequences for the treatment of minority and female nominees. The levels of minority and female support enjoyed by the Democratic Party, as well as the Republican Party's desire to shed its reputation as being insensitive to issues of importance to those constituencies, lead us to expect the nominations of minorities and women will be handled most expeditiously under conditions of united Republican control, followed unified Democratic control, divided control with a Republican president and divided control with a Democratic president. Our empirical analysis provides partial support for this hierarchy and demonstrates the importance of considering the conditioning effect of partisan politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political parties in the United States do not have formal members as is common in most other Western democracies. We suggest direct-mail contributors are similar to party members in many respects. The 1996 presidential election offers an interesting opportunity for study because of the campaign run by Ross Perot and the newly formed Reform Party. We explore the sources of campaign activism in 1996 using surveys of national samples of contributors to all three parties. We find traditional left-right issues and evaluations of the party and the party's nominee motivated major-party activism. Reform contributors, in contrast, were motivated by the issues Perot emphasized in his campaign, which were distinct from those that divide the Republican and Democratic parties. They were also influenced by their distrust of politics as usual, and their evaluation of Perot, rather than of their party. We also show that the Republican Party benefited in 2000 from Reform contributors' mobilization, which suggests a connection between third-party decline and major-party change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly the Internet, can facilitate the rapid exchange of information that is essential to coordinating political activity. This case study examines a cyber-advocacy campaign in which the Internet was employed effectively to impact public policy and regulatory change in US telecommunications. The Internet facilitated collective action not only by altering the costs of communication but also by reshaping access in ways that enabled the campaign to reconfigure the networks of communication among key political actors and an otherwise fragmented group of citizens. However, the dilution of these outcomes over time raises further questions about the longevity of such virtual cyber-advocacy networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1860, the issue of slavery's status in the nation's territories ruptured the national Democratic Party despite the party's long history of successfully compromising on the slavery issue. When southern Democrats walked out of the party's national convention and initiated the formation of an alternative national party organization, they anticipated the South's later secession from the Union. If southern Democrats would not remain within the Democratic Party and could not cooperate with northern Democrats, there was little or no possibility that southerners would remain within the Union, since the national debate over slavery was much wider and more robust than the Democratic Party's internal discussion of that issue. While the Republicans' anti-slavery and anti-extension beliefs fundamentally challenged slavery's existence, northern Democrats confined their disagreement with their southern colleagues to the procedural dimension, i.e. to a discussion of what the Supreme Court had or had not decided in its 1857 Dred Scott decision and what the national party had agreed in 1856. Therefore, the internal conflict within the national Democratic Party provides a new perspective on secession, not because it reproduced the wider national disagreement about slavery, but precisely because it was so much narrower than that national conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]