Name the political scientist who argues that parties are designed to serve the needs of ambitious politicians (namely candidates and officeholders).

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

John Aldrich's central thesis is that political parties are instruments created and shaped by office-seeking politicians to solve the coordination and collective-action problems they face.

Relevant knowledge points and concepts:
- Rational-choice institutionalism: actors (politicians) create institutions to maximize goals (winning office, policy influence).
- Parties as coalition/coordination machines: they recruit candidates, structure choices for voters, aggregate preferences, and organize legislative behavior.
- Key reference: Aldrich’s book Why Parties? (1995), which frames parties as endogenous responses to politicians’ ambitions.

Step-by-step reasoning:
1. Identify the core claim in the question: a scholar who argues parties are designed to serve the needs of ambitious politicians (candidates and officeholders).
2. Recall major works that treat parties as created by actors’ incentives rather than as exogenous social cleavages. Aldrich is well-known for explicitly making this claim within a rational-choice framework.
3. Connect the claim to Aldrich’s arguments: he shows how individuals seeking election need mechanisms to coordinate nominations, signal credibility to voters, assemble legislative coalitions, and reduce electoral competition costs. Parties emerge because they help candidates solve these practical problems.
4. Confirm that Aldrich’s account focuses on office-seeking incentives (ambition) rather than primarily on social structure or ideology.

Why the correct answer is correct:
Aldrich directly articulates that parties exist because ambitious politicians need them to win elections and govern. He models parties as strategic tools crafted by candidates and officeholders to organize competition, manage reputation, and create collective action—matching the wording in the question.

Why other explanations would be less accurate:
- Classic cleavage theories (Lipset and Rokkan) emphasize social groups and structural origins of parties, not politicians’ ambitions.
- Duverger explains party systems from electoral rules, not primarily as instruments of ambitious politicians.
These views differ from Aldrich’s emphasis on individual ambitions, so they do not match the question.

Conclusion: The political scientist described is John Aldrich, which matches the provided answer.

Name the political scientist who argues that parties are designed to serve the needs of ambitious politicians (namely candidates and officeholders).简答题

类似问题

In their book The Party Decides, Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller suggest that political parties are driven and shaped by party activists and __________ who seek certain policy goals.

“Party organization” refers to one part of a connected three-part system that is ______.

What are the two major political parties? and

How did Egyptian culture and governance change during the Ptolemaic period compared to the pharaonic period?

Name the Supreme Court decision that removed financial constraints on PACs.

Political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman find that senior policy makers made themselves available to _____ between three and four times more often than they did to constituents.

Name the political scientist who said this famous quote about the problems of pluralism: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly choir sings with a strong upper-class accent.”

What is the name of the third party candidate in 2000 who was not allowed to participate in the presidential debates? Hint: We watched a video clip with him in class.

更多留学生实用工具

智能学习助手

风格化写作助手

论文查重助手

文献引用助手

课堂转译助手

课堂笔记助手

Quiz搜索助手

学校历年真题

智能刷题助手

智能匹配练习

希望你的学习变得更简单