campaign. For convenience’s sake, this text often presumes that it is a political-party
organization doing the campaigning being described. This is a useful shorthand for several
reasons: for one, it’s the British and German rule, and for another, it allows for a useful
distinction between, say, “the SPD (as a campaigner)” and “the SPD campaign (of 2005).”
However, two important clarifications are in order: First, not all campaigners are parties. In
some contexts – such as the United States – campaigns are conducted to a much greater extent by
organizations formed around individual candidates than by party organizations, and the
distinction between candidate- and party-centered campaigns will play a part in the theoretical
discussion below. In this sense, it is not the ‘party’ necessarily but an abstract ‘campaigner’ –
sometimes more a party, sometimes more a candidate – that makes choices about campaign
organization. Second, it bears mention that campaigning isn’t political parties’ only function
(although, in democracies, it is often a necessary condition for the other things they do), and that
campaigning organizations are neither the only nor the oldest party organizations: the latter
distinction probably goes to the legislative caucus. It is parties as campaigning organizations,
however, that are the focus of this paper.
Studying parties as organizations: Precedents
In his survey of organizational theory, W. Richard Scott (2003) warns students of organizations
against the potential dangers of reification on the one hand and reductionism on the other. There
are pitfalls both in treating organizations as coherent, unitary actors and in regarding them as no
more than aggregations of individuals: the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but without
reference to the parts no full understanding of the whole is possible. Another way to look at this
dilemma, however – as Scott is well aware – is to see the problem not in terms of hazards to be
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