In Small Power: How Local Parties Shape Elections, David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, and Michael G. Miller tackle the role of local parties, and especially of local party chairs, in elections. In doing so they build on a long (albeit small) history of surveying local parties in the United States. Doherty, Dowling, and Miller bring new types of data to these questions though, which makes this book a very useful resource for scholars and teachers. In particular, the authors leverage a survey experiment and interviews with 38 party chairs across a variety of states to better understand how party chairs recruit candidates and work toward electing them.
Small Power is divided into two sections, each of which could stand on its own if necessary. In the first section the authors investigate the demographics of party chairs and the activities that parties pursue. They end this section by testing whether the activities of parties matter to winning elections. The authors find that local parties do matter, but only in areas where the party has historically been disadvantaged. Parties that work hard in areas where there is room to grow, and where the headwinds are not too strong, can help push the vote total up (at both the local and federal level).
In the second section the authors use a conjoint experiment to test what types of candidates are more likely to be recruited by party chairs. For the experiment, party chairs were given two potential candidates with a list of attributes and asked which they think would be most likely to win a party primary. The authors performed a similar experiment through the Congressional Cooperative Election Study, allowing them to compare the chair’s responses to how primary voters might vote.
What the authors find through these experiments will not necessarily be surprising for most, but some of the details and the specific measures are eye-opening. For example, they find that Democratic chairs and voters are all interested in candidates that are open to compromise. However, Republican voters are unconcerned with how willing to compromise versus ideological pure a candidate is, while Republican Party chairs view a candidate that is willing to compromise as unlikely to win a primary.
The authors also examine racial and gendered differences in candidate recruitment. In addition to testing whether differences exist they also examine some of the potential reasons for differences. For example, they find, in line with existing research, that party chairs are more likely to believe that a White candidate will win a primary than a Black or Latinx candidate. They then test to see whether this difference might be a function of assumptions about candidate background or about local opinions on race and immigration, neither of which seem to matter. They do find that the demographics of a county matter, the less White a county is the more likely a Democratic chair is to believe that a non-White candidate will win (though even then there are interesting complications).
In the context of gender, the authors do not find any significant differences for party chairs across male and female candidates whereas voters indicate they are more likely to support a candidate with a female name. The authors are concerned, rightfully, that the nature of the conjoint experiment, which presents a fair amount of information about the candidate, might hide some of the gendered effects that are often the result of stereotypes regarding female candidates. To alleviate these concerns, they test for gendered bias while holding a variety of other variables (marital status, the willingness of a candidate to compromise, political experience, and military experience) constant. Overall, they find few differences, indicating that gendered stereotypes might not play a major role in how chairs think about women candidates. It is worth noting that because of sample size issues they pool Democratic and Republican chairs together.
One of the real strengths of the book, and what sets it apart from other work on local parties, is the interviews that the authors completed in addition to the experiment. The interviews flesh out their results by providing useful details of how party chairs do their work. For example, the authors are able to discuss some of the strategies that local parties use to vet candidates. This varies from simply relying on word of mouth and social networks to professional background checks. The interviews also make this a useful book for an undergraduate class as the authors take time to provide examples of the mechanisms that underlie their theories in both sections of the book.
Small Power also opens a number of questions for future research to answer. In particular, the interviews identify interesting differences across parties and regions that are only partially explored. For example, the authors find that Republican Party chairs in the North are much more combative when discussing race than Republican Party chairs in the South. The variation within the Republican Party opens the question of why some local elites are substantially more hostile to discussion of race.
Another interesting question that lurks in the background of the second section of the book involves the differential chances for candidates recruited by the party. As is made clear in the first section, in many cases parties are less interested in winning races and more interested in making sure they have candidates fielded. This is especially true among Democratic parties as there are many counties where Democratic candidates have poor chances and a few counties where they have a strong chance of winning. Numerically then there are relatively few local Democratic parties whose candidates win while there are many that work hard to recruit candidates, only for them to consistently lose. If there are systematic differences between the types of candidates the parties in strong Democratic areas recruit versus weak Democratic areas, then the types of candidates that are elected might not be reflective of pooling all Democratic parties together. Future work could examine variation in how parties recruit as a function of the chances that their candidates have of winning.
Overall, Small Power is a strong book that provides useful empirical data on how local parties currently function in the United States. It might be especially useful in an undergraduate course, as the authors explain their methods and assumptions well. The interviews make the book a more interesting read, providing detail that would be missing without it.
