Podcasting

October 20, 2026

Listen to my latest podcast with the New Books Network

Who actually shapes the candidates that parties nominate? In Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Kathleen Bawn, John Zaller, and colleagues study political parties and party nominations for the House of Representatives in 55 winnable open-seat nominations in the 2013-14 electoral cycle. Based on a combination of field interviews, fundraising and spending data from the Federal Election Commission, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and exit polls of voters in four contests, they argue that the most important actors in most nominations are those who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These "policy demanders," as the study calls them, consist mainly of standard interest group actors - business, labor, agriculture, professionals - but include faith-based activists and Tea Partiers as leading actors in some nominations. Progressive reformers sought the adoption of primary elections to empower voters to control the direction of their parties, but this study finds that most primary electorates pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity.

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