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Changes in State Party Organization 1960–1980: A Preliminary Report and Request for Data
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
Extract
We are engaged in a study of the current and past condition of party organizations in the United States. The research examines parties within an institutional framework and seeks to measure the strength of party organizations at the national, state, and local levels. But in order to compare parties over time it is necessary to have longitudinal data. The purpose of this note is to ask interested researchers to share with us documented data on state party central committee staff and annual operating budgets or expenditures for the period 1960–1978. We would also appreciate suggestions for sources of such data for any of the state parties.
Table 1 presents the state party central committee budget and staff data collected to date. The 21-year period 1960–1980 yields 2,100 possible data points for the 100 state party organizations. We have collected budget data for 964 (45.9 percent) and staff data for 1,000 (47.6 percent) of the data points. These data have come from a variety of sources:
1. interviews with state party officials in 27 sample states (states selected for analysis in the cross-sectional portion of our research;
2. questionnaires sent to 556 former state party chairmen;
3. surveys by Roland H. Ebel, Cornelius P. Cotter, and Bernard C. Hennessy;
4. data collected and generously made available by William J. Crotty;
5. Jerome M. Mileur's 1977 survey of state party central committees;
6. Robert J. Huckshorn's collection of state party data;
7. surveys conducted by the Democratic National Committee in 1962, the Republican National Committee in 1968–69, and by the president of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen in 1974.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1980
Footnotes
*
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SOC 77–27020. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
References
1 Ebel, Roland H., The Role of the Professional Staff in American State Parties, Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1960, pp. 68–70, 348–355.Google Scholar
2 Mileur, Jerome M., State Central Committees: A Survey of Political Party Staffing, Activities, and Financing (Amherst: Institute for Governmental Services, University of Massachusetts, 1977), pp. 25–33.Google Scholar
3 Data collected by Huckshorn, Robert J. for Party Leadership in the States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976).Google Scholar
4 Agranoff, Robert, The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer Labor Party Organization: A Study of the ‘Character’ of a Programmaticc Party Organization, Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pittsburgh, 1967, p. 315.Google Scholar
5 Cotter, Cornelius P., Gibson, James L., Bibby, John F., and Huckshorn, Robert J., “State Party Organizations and the Thesis of Party Decline,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 27-September 1, 1980, Washington, D.C. Google Scholar