Do We Americans Really Need Political Parties?

Our speaker, Christopher Baylor, PhD, previews his talk: "Democrats and Republicans disagree about a great deal, but they tend to agree on one thing: The other party is a major part of what is wrong with American politics. What if the problem goes deeper than either party?

I ask whether political parties are really as necessary to democracy as other political scientists say. Political parties provide informational shortcuts for voters and mobilize turnout, but doing so at the cost of undermining political checks and balances as well as encouraging a form of motivated reasoning toward the in-group and against the out-group. What would we gain, and what might we lose, if parties as such played a much smaller role in American political life?”

Christopher Baylor is a political scientist and author of "The Case Against Political Parties" (2026, Palgrave Macmillan) and "First to the Party: The Group Origins of Political Trans¬form¬ation" (2018, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press). His research focuses on American political parties, interest groups, and political reform. His writings have been published by Studies in American Political Development, Political Science Quarterly, the Washington Post, and Fortune.

He received his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his master’s degree from Brown University. He was also a Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has taught at Wellesley College, the College of the Holy Cross, and currently as a lecturer at UCLA.

For more information, visit sdscholars.org.

The lecture will also be available on Zoom. See the newsletter.