Hayley Manges, "Parties as Organizations: Measuring Subnational Party Power in the Progressive Era"
For much of U.S. history, the country’s two major parties operated as federations of relatively autonomous state and local organizations. The common narrative holds that over the course of the twentieth century, the power of these organizations gradually declined. Functions previously performed by party professionals—for example, candidate recruitment and slating, voter mobilization, and platform construction—are said to have fallen into the hands of ideologically motivated activists and interest groups, candidate-organizations, and in the case of nominations, primary voters. How, when, and to what extent did the power of formal party organizations fade? Lacking a systematic measure of party organizational strength overtime and across states, the ability of existing scholarship to answer this question has been limited. I propose using historical newspaper coverage as a proxy for the relative power of subnational party organizations. I apply this approach to a dataset of roughly 10 million structured article text from 3,000 local US newspapers over the years 1870–1920 and validate it through a set of descriptive analyses. I hope to use this measure as a dependent variable in future work examining the relationship between party organizations and institutional reforms.
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260414T160000Z DTEND:20260414T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR