National Party Organizations and Party Brands in American Politics

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 *