NATIONAL PARTY ORGANIZATIONS AND PARTY BRANDS IN AMERICAN POLITICs
The Democratic and Republican National Committees, 1912-2016
(OXford university press, 2023)
This book examines the role the Democratic and Republican national committees play in party politics. The committees are the only national institutions in the organization of either party, but existing research has dismissed them as mere 'service providers' that assist the party through fund-raising and campaign advice, but lack decision-making power over issue positioning or candidate selection. In contrast, I argue that these national committees are essential in the eyes of party leaders because they view them as creators of their party's brand - defined as the understanding voters have of party positions on salient policy issues.
Modern parties rely on these brands to mobilize voters and achieve electoral success. By providing information on policy positions, parties create a heuristic that voters use in elections to decide which candidate to vote for - something which would be far costlier for individual candidates to achieve independently. I argue the national committees are important because they promulgate such national brands through their publicity activities. The committees have done so since the late 19th century when, due to Progressive Era developments such as the introduction of the secret ballot, local party machines declined and a new approach to voter mobilization became necessary. To achieve this, both parties began to rely on ''educational campaigns" through which the committees provide voters with publicity outlining the parties' positions on national issues.
While these publicity efforts are a core element of the committees' activities, I show that the extent to which they provide them is dependent upon the party's electoral success. When a party is out of the White House, the DNC and RNC step up publicity efforts in order to convince voting groups to (re-)join their coalition. National minority party committees prioritize their branding role by investing considerable shares of their budgets in their publicity divisions, inaugurating new publicity programs, and creating new communication tools to reach out to voting groups. Crucially, I also show that the committees of parties that do not hold the White House have considerable freedom to decide the type of party image to promulgate. Thus, they have agency to affect the crucial process that allows voters to connect parties to specific policies and ideologies. In contrast, when a party is in the White House, incumbent presidents control their party’s committee. As a result, the committee’s branding role is affected in two ways. First, the type of brand promoted is in line with what the president’s preferences - that is, the committee will promote the administration’s policies and the president as a political actor. Second, committee branding is likely to decline as presidents do not need to rely on their national committee’s publicity division to receive coverage. Additionally, presidents may be concerned that national committee branding can negatively affect their ability to build cross-party alliances in Congress.
To test this theory, I present a series of case studies covering the full history of both the DNC and RNC between 1912 and 2016. In analyzing these cases, I rely on primary sources I gathered from eight archival collections (including the Library of Congress, the Kennedy and Truman presidential libraries, and collections at several universities). In these cases, I show the relation between party brands and committee activities, and the role of party electoral performance in predicting when committees invest in their publicity programs. Additionally, I rely on a quantitative measure if DNC and RNC activity based on a new data set I compiled that codes the type of national activities mentioned in all New York Times articles referring to the DNC or RNC published between 1912 and 2016. This data set allows me to test quantitatively under what conditions the national committees increase and decrease their branding roles.
This view represents a major departure from the existing research on national committees. I argue that the committees' publicity services are different from regular 'services' because of the space committees frequently have as to what type of brand they promote. That is, the DNC and RNC can choose which image to promote and which voting groups to target. In doing so, the committees are not neutral: in major intra-party disputes about fundamental policy positions (e.g. Prohibition, civil rights) and ideology, the committees frequently take sides. In addition to reassessing the DNC and RNC as political institutions, this project expands our understanding of how parties create brands. Existing literature on American politics relies on party brands to explain Congressional party behavior and, because of this, also thinks of brands as being created by Congress. I argue that by bringing in other party institutions we get a more complete understanding of how parties communicate their positions to voters.
REVIEWS
"Heersink offers a fresh and important new perspective on American political parties, challenging claims that formal party organizations are merely in service to candidates. Drawing on wide-ranging historical evidence, Heersink demonstrates national party committees have played a pivotal role in shaping their party's 'brand,' defining the party's positions and identity for voters. This impressive account will be of wide interest to students of political parties and representation."
Eric Schickler, University of California, Berkeley
"The parties' national committees have long been disregarded as irrelevant. Drawing from new data on committee activities and careful case studies, Boris Heersink convincingly challenges that conventional wisdom, demonstrating that the DNC and RNC have been at the center of their respective party's battles since the early 20th century. In particular, Heersink details the ways in which the party committees seek to shape their party's all-important brands—key to the parties' democracy-enhancing roles as information shortcuts—in collaboration and competition with other party actors. An important read for scholars of American parties and elections."
Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame
"American political parties are studied as organizations and as conveyors of information, but not until Boris Heersink's masterpiece have these two perspectives finally, and properly, met. In his diligent, methodologically rich, and empirically sophisticated study of national party committees, Heersink recasts the organizational development of the twentieth-century Democrats and Republicans."
Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University
Buy at: Amazon, Oxford, Bookshop
Resources: Dataset and do-file available through Dataverse; full list of academic references.