The role of state political parties in modern American politics and a measure of state party professionalization
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State political parties are underappreciated and understudied aspects of state politics. These organizations have large amounts of variation between levels of staffing, revenues, time requirements, and efforts to separate themselves from the national parties. This dissertation first looks at these party organizations in Chapter 1, gathering information from their bylaws, constitutions, and governing documents. In Chapter 2, this information is used to create a state party professionalization index which is used to answer theoretical arguments about state political parties in later chapters. Chapters 3 and 4 are quantitative chapters that address multiple hypotheses about what these state political party organizations do to influence state politics. This dissertation contributes to the literature by fully analyzing state party organizations, something that has never been done before. Previous work analyzed one or two aspects of state party organizations, most of it surrounding party platforms, but the goal is to get a fully fleshed out picture of what these organizations look like. It creates a new, novel index that is then used to address several theories on the role of state political parties in relation to state legislatures, state executives, and the nationalization of politics. It then ends with thoughts on where to go from here.
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Ph. D