Day 19 - The Decline of Political Parties: Is the Party Over?
Learning Targets:
Students will be able to explain why and how...
- Political parties change and adapt.
- Parties have adapted to candidate-centered campaigns, and their role in nominating candidates has been weakened.
- Parties modify their policies and messaging to appeal to various demographic coalitions.
- The structure of parties has been influenced by:
- Critical elections and regional realignments
- Campaign finance law
- Changes in communication and data-management technology
- Parties use communication technology and voter-data management to disseminate, control, and clarify political messages and enhance outreach and mobilization efforts
1. Describe the overall trend and pattern in the chart above.
2. Explain why this may be the case and what impact will it have on the political process?
Activity #1 - Read one or both of the articles below to help understand some of the causes for the decline of parties over the last half century.
- https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0202-goldberg-party-paper-tigers-20160202-column.html
- https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/modern-political-parties-weak-and-ineffective/
After you have finished reading, describe in your notebook how each of the following contributed to to this decline:
- The role of the media
- The rise of interest groups
- Political reforms like primaries and the Australian ballot
- Money and candidate-centered campaigns
- However, not everyone believes the rise of independent voters and the decline of political parties is real. Read this article and summarize the author's argument.
Activity #2 - State your claim and provide a line of reasoning to the prompt below:
To what extent would we be better off with a nonpartisan (non-party focused) system?
Close: Evaluate how have parties changed the way that they campaign.
1. Will political parties continue to decline?
2. Predict what this might mean for our Two-Party System
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