POS 1041 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Party System, Nonpartisanism
1 Mar 2020
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Document Summary
Political parties in u. s. - are teams of people united to win elections & coordinate policymaking. They elect officeholders, party staffers, allied interest groups, and like minded voters. Strength - a party is strong if it can get its officeholders to do things that they may not want to otherwise (ex: convince congress members) Anyone can run as any member they want, parties cannot control who runs. People can"t be kicked out of a party. Two party system - there are multiple factors to the u. s. having this system. Structural factors - the rules used in elections play a big part in competitiveness. Determines how many parties can be competitive. In the u. s. , our national elections, most districts use single member. District plurality voting, which means that there is one member per district for any election at any one time and that whichever candidate gets the most votes wins the election. Senators are elected in different elections from one another.
