comprehensive briefing books for candidates, which demonstrated their interest in generating
programmatic proposals that might be politically useful (Milkis 1999: Chapter 6).
Many state parties followed the example of the national parties, acquiring increased
capacity to serve candidates, and even the local parties in some (mostly urban) areas expanded
their activities by the late 1990s (Reichley 2000; Bibby 2002: 28; Paddock 2005). Nonetheless,
the rebirth of the parties as service vendors was accompanied by a trend toward nationalization
of the party system. The national parties, aided by favorable court decisions, reined in their state
and local affiliates with numerous procedural and substantive rules (Aldrich 1995; Maisel and
Bibby 2002). In response to campaign finance laws, which encouraged the transfer of “soft”
money to state parties, the Republican and Democratic national committees increased their
influence over state party practices and targeted spending in the states to achieve national party
objectives (Maisel and Bibby 2002:71; Bibby 2002: 42). As a result, the traditional apparatus of
both parties, based on patronage and state and local interests, gave way to a more hierarchically-
organized, programmatic party politics, based on the national organization (Milkis 1999).
The State of the Party-in-Government: The Resurgence of Congressional Partisanship
Just as the party organizations underwent a period of transformation and renewal, so
congressional partisanship experienced resurgence (Sinclair 2002a, 2002; Davidson 2001;
Pomper 1999, 2003). The dramatic intensification of partisanship in Congress was the product of
equally dramatic shifts in the electorate following in the wake of the Civil Rights struggles of the
1960s. The Republican candidacy of Barry Goldwater and the passage of the Voting Rights Act
in 1965 (Carmines and Stimson 1989) catalyzed a partisan realignment in the American South,
with Southern white conservatives defecting in increasing numbers from their traditional
Democratic allegiances to the Republican Party, and newly enfranchised (and generally liberal)
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Convention