The Role of National Parties in the American Political System

This article discusses the role of national parties in the American political system, focusing on the two main parties - Democratic and Republican. It explores their fundraising strategies, party committees, and their influence on elections and policies. The article also highlights the different paths to power followed by these parties and the impact they have on the state and local parties.

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The American political system is controlled primarily by the two main national parties.
Since the 1970s, both democratic and republican parties have grown through two separate paths
of power to become two independent but very strong party systems in the US. They have found
out ways of making money in terms of fundraising so that they could support their presidential
campaigns and other needs at their disposal. These parties have various roles that they play
especially during politics. They support their presidential candidates and other leaders at the state
level besides coming up with guidelines to balance the national, state and local parties (Lawson,
& Merkl, 2014). The national parties are driven by party committees whose role is to select
candidates for all political races and distribute polls and information, recruit training candidates
for major races and working closely with the local parties. The committee comes up with the
state representation whose number depends on party operations. The national parties operate
independently and are chaired by party delegates elected to head its operations. To simplify the
work of the main parties there are various local party groups that help in running operations on a
local level. These include congressional campaign or Hill committees whose roles include
carrying out house elections and funding senate races with support from the main parties
(Tremblay, 2012). The other group includes the democratic and republican associations of
governors. These are key figures in national parties as they form potential candidates for
presidential races. The women’s and youth groups train filed representatives on how to recruit
campaign volunteers at all levels. Party networks that include groups and unions of the women
rights, environmental and civil rights help the national party committees to achieve various
national objectives on local levels.

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The two parties have followed different paths to power. Republicans followed service
path through muscular operations of fundraising that catered all candidate needs and state parties.
The democrats had a procedural path that involved looking for national authority in coming up
with presidential candidate (Sundquist, 2011). This also included the support for reforms such as
the US involvement in the war of Vietnam. However, both parties can be said to follow the
service path as they try to improve their fundraising, increase activities in localities and state and
reducing debts. Of late, the parties have solved the challenge of new finance rules of campaign.
In 2004 various observers saw how parties lost their soft money that would weaken their parties
(Bird, Saalfeld, & Wüst, 2010). The BCRA (bipartisan campaign reform act) can only allow the
transfer of money that is federally regulated. The parties have managed to come up with hard-
money donations. Most of the party money comes from the congress members and individual
citizens. The main impact of national parties is that they can highly influence the outcome of
politics and the way presidents carry out their normal duties. In most cases, the president has
been depended on the ruling party for support and lobbying of important policies locally and
internationally. The parties also influence the growth of the state and local parties or important
groups that fight for national reforms and people’s rights.

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References
Bird, K., Saalfeld, T., & Wüst, A. M. (Eds.). (2010). The political representation of immigrants
and minorities: Voters, parties and parliaments in liberal democracies. Routledge.
Lawson, K., & Merkl, P. H. (Eds.). (2014). When parties fail: emerging alternative
organizations (Vol. 911). Princeton University Press.
Sundquist, J. L. (2011). Dynamics of the party system: Alignment and realignment of political
parties in the United States. Brookings Institution Press.
Tremblay, M. (Ed.). (2012). Women and legislative representation: Electoral systems, political
parties, and sex quotas. Palgrave Macmillan.