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For American political parties these are the best of times and the worst of times. The major parties dominate elective office to a degree seldom seen in American history. More than ever before, their official organizations are well staffed, they exist at all levels of government, and they operate continuously between elections. By any measure of substantive activity the parties today are at their peak. Moreover, the two parties compete with each other throughout the country more evenly than ever before. In government the two parties have never in this century voted more cohesively.

To understand changes taking place within political parties we must work from a realistic theory, one that accepts these parties as office-seeking coalitions. On that premise I lay out three interacting sets of variables: 1) The structure of political opportunities, or the rules for office seeking and the ways they are treated, and 2) the party system, or the competitive relations among parties, define the expectations of politicians, and thus lead them to create 3) party organizations, or the collective efforts to gain and retain office. Hypotheses derived from the relations among these variables allow us to examine changes in American parties in the twentieth century. They explain why the Progressive era reforms, in tandem with the post-1896 party system, produced an uneven distribution of party organization and weak linkages among candidates and officeholders. The same theory also explains why changes taking place since the 1950s are producing greater organizational effort and stronger partisan links among candidates and officeholders.