Throwing the Party: How the Supreme Court Puts Political Party Organizations Ahead of Voters

by Wayne Batchis

Overview

The Supreme Court's jurisprudence on political parties is rooted in an incomplete story. Parties are, like voluntary clubs, associations of individuals that are represented by a singular organization. However, as political science has long understood, they are much more than this. Parties are also the voters who choose and support their candidates, the elected officials who govern, the activists and volunteers who contribute their time and energy, and the individual and organizational donors who open their wallets. Unfortunately, the Court's framework for understanding America's two-party system has largely ignored this broader conception of political parties. The result has been a distortion of the true nature of the two-party system, and a body of deeply inconsistent and contradictory constitutional case law. From primaries to campaign finance, partisan gerrymandering to ballot access, law and politics scholar Wayne Batchis interrogates, scrutinizes, and offers a proposed solution to this problematic jurisprudence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009089425
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2022
Series:	Cambridge Studies on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Wayne Batchis is an associate professor of political science at the University of Delaware. He is the author of The Right's First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech and the Return of Conservative Libertarianism (2016).

Table of Contents

Part I. Foundations: 1. Introduction; 2. The Supreme Court's approach to political parties; 3. The association versus the individual; Part II. Party Primaries: 4. Setting the stage; 5. Primaries and the party in the electorate: the right to vote; 6. Double standards: organizations over individuals and major over minor parties; 7. Doubling down on the party organization in service of the major parties; Part III. The Party, the Court, and Campaign Finance Law: 8. Party speech through money; 9. An ill-fitting party campaign finance jurisprudence; 10. Parties and the current campaign finance landscape; Part IV. Passé Equal Protection and a Way Forward; 11. Party and equality; 12. The political question: is there room for equal protection in partisan gerrymandering?; 13. A potential solution: the party system as a public forum; 14. Conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

'Wayne Batchis’s Throwing the Party synthesizes the disparate threads of the Supreme Court’s political-party jurisprudence and puts that doctrine into conversation with the political science literature. Lawyers and political scientists will learn a lot about how the other field views the world after reading this terrific book.' Travis Crum, Associate Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis, former law clerk to Justices Anthony Kennedy and John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court

From the Publisher