Fiorina, Morris. "Parties and Partisanship: A 40-Year Retrospective". Political Behavior, Vol.24, No.2 (2002): 93-115.

Fiorina, Morris. "Parties and Partisanship: A 40-Year Retrospective". Political Behavior, Vol.24, No.2 (2002): 93-115.

• The study of political parties has always focused on the organization of political parties, how parties act in government, and how parties act in the electorate (94).
• Already weak in the 1950s, political parties continued to decline in importance through-out the 1960s. This decline of the party system was taught as fact through-out the 1970s (94). It was expected that this decline in party power would continue and then plateau at some lower limit (95).
• A number of reforms starting with the Grant Presidency and continuing during the Progressive era undermined party control by professionalizing the civil service, establishing benefits separate from political patronage, campaigned against partisan graft, and broke party monopolies on politics by opening primaries to the public (94).
• Research in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated that trends of the previous post-war decades reversed dramatically, and political parties were resurgent. Party administration, especially that of the Republican Party, became a major force during the Carter administration as campaign funding became dominated by central party structures (99).
• After a nadir of disorganization under the Nixon administration, largely due to the split loyalties of the Dixiecrats, party organization rose since the Ford government as did the partisanship of leaders (99-101).
• During this period, the partisanship of the voter population still remained low, with over a quarter of voters being declared independents. Despite this, the partisanship of voting records had increased since the 1970s, pointing to higher partisan divides among voters even without identification with a political party (101).
• The author casts doubt on the claim that parties are actually in resurgence (103, 109).
• Some scholars hold that contemporary political parties are entirely different from the classical conception of a political party. Instead of providing ideological organization, parties now serve simply as giant campaign management centers and offices for super-PACs (103-104).
• There is a source mine of materials linking levels of partisanship to various other demographic statistics on page 107.
• The estimates used through-out this paper and in most political science research on partisanship excludes third-party voters, despite their importance in many American elections, and the proportion of non-voters. As such, the findings of increased partisanship may be skewed (108-109).