Environment and Party: The Impact of Political and Demographic County Characteristics on Party Behavior

Abstract

While many scholars have recognized that decentralization encourages American party organizations to tailor activities to the local environment, few have studied systematically the relationships between that environment and party behavior. This study examines the impact of certain political and demographic county characteristics on the activities of a national sample of county party organizations in 1964. Three dimensions of party behavior—organization, mobilization, and persuasion—are utilized as dependent variables. The relationships between the environment and these dimensions of party behavior in the North support a revised “machine theory” of environment and party: organizational effort does not vary with environmental conditions, while mobilization and persuasion activities are opposites in their relationships with the concentration of parochially-oriented voters. Additionally, the division of partisan strength influences party activity: parties perform their “natural” activities well where they have strong support and the other party's “natural” activities well under competitive conditions. Few significant relationships are found in the South, but their similarity in direction to those in the North suggests that the normal relationships may have been attenuated by circumstances unique to that region, particularly one-partyism and decades of “whites only” politics.