Political Parties in State and Nation Party Advantage and Party Competition in a Federal Setting

• Published in: Party politics Vol. 8; no. 6; pp. 635 - 656
• Main Authors: Brown, Robert D., Bruce, John M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London SAGE Publications 01.11.2002
• Subjects: Competition; Elections; Federalism; Partisanship; Party systems; Political Parties; Political science; States (Political Subdivisions); U.S.A; United States of America; federalism; political parties; elections; party competition
• ISSN: 1354-0688; 1460-3683
• DOI: 10.1177/1354068802008006001

Research on party competition in the United States suffers because existing measures do not allow for an examination of national-level competition in the states. We view this as a significant oversight, and argue that party competition in the United States must be evaluated within a federal context. Toward that end, we develop measures of partisan electoral advantage and competition based on margin of victory in state and national offices for the legislature and executive. These measures allow us to examine, for the first time, patterns of competition for both state and national offices within and across the states. The patterns seen in the data are interesting and preliminary insights promising. We believe the measure developed here will permit a more expansive and theoretically interesting examination of party competition, and that these descriptive analyses point to a wide variety of interesting future pursuits.