Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives with Kathleen Bawn and Knox Brown (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a study of political parties and party nominations for the House of Representatives in 55 winnable open-seat nominations in the 2013-14 electoral cycle. Based on a combination of field interviews, fundraising and spending data from the Federal Election Commission, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and exit polls of voters in four contests, it argues that the most important actors in most nominations are those who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These "policy demanders," as the study calls them, consist mainly of standard interest group actors - business, labor, agriculture, professionals - but include faith-based activists and Tea Partiers as leading actors in some nominations. Among the study's main arguments are that policy demanders care more about their particular interests and values than general ideology, put serious effort into vetting candidates before supporting them, and often either work through local parties or coordinate among themselves. The study analyzes the competition between establishment and insurgent candidates in the Republican Party in terms of its general arguments. Progressive reformers sought the adoption of primary elections to empower voters to control the direction of their parties, but this study finds that most primary electorates pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity.

Professor Kathleen Bawn is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published her work in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science.

Professor John Zaller is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His other books include The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.

Host Dr Ursula Hackett is Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the University of Oxford. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State and a forthcoming book on redistricting. 

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