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An “associational party” is a political party where the emphasis is on the party as an association rather than as a vehicle to finance campaigns. Associational parties understand that winning elected office requires figuring out how to address voter concerns and that investment in party organization is critical to the effective and responsive governance that parties are meant to deliver. Any party, including the two major parties, can operate as an associational party.

An associational party has five basic components.¹ The first is investment in state and local parties with staff and year-round organizational capacity. Such investment manifests as party organizations with a physical presence across the jurisdiction (city, county, state, or nation) and is critical to building political power at a scale capable of winning elections and governing. Associational parties also invest in staff, understanding that the work of party staff and leadership extends beyond running elections. Year-round parties regularly engage with the people and communities they seek to represent while also cultivating a pipeline of future staff and officeholders. This first element is consistent with a range of other reform proposals.²

Second, an associational party provides an in-person, face-to-face experience of party membership, offering meaningful year-round opportunities for the party faithful—ordinary people who opted to invest in party politics—to engage with the party. The party integrates volunteers and members by providing regular opportunities to engage with the party and bring the fun back into politics, hosting picnics and potlucks, not just get-out-the-vote drives. Associational parties thus make the party tangible to ordinary voters and impart feelings of affiliation, solidarity, and agency. By prioritizing face-to-face communication, they seek interpersonal depth—strong ties—within the party association and institutionalize a participatory form of membership-based politics and association.

Third, beyond engaging with voters as individuals, associational parties integrate existing civic and community organizations into the party fold, focusing first on those that are participatory or membership based. An associational party embeds itself in local communities through connections to civil society, actively seeking to integrate local civic organizations with an active membership, such as churches, unions, and grassroots advocacy groups.

Associational parties complement interpersonal depth with social breadth through their sustained linkages with civic groups, professional associations, and labor unions. When combined with year-round engagement with individual voters, these connections mean local party organizations have deep ties to civil society and the electorate.³ These connections can then be leveraged by the party as it seeks to build power state- or nationwide.

Fourth, associational parties institutionalize mechanisms for hearing from their voters and members. This can take many forms, from listening structures to recruiting and cultivating a pipeline of candidates from the constituencies the party represents, rather than selecting candidates (as major parties do today) primarily based on how much money they can raise through their private networks in advance of the primary. Cultivating candidates who have experiences in common with their constituents requires investment in an operation that works year-round and off-cycle, and an associational party makes the requisite investments.

Finally, an associational party delivers realistic and responsive policies and prioritizes delivering goods back to their supporters—not in a corrupt way but through legislative policies voters favor and other concrete forms of support. They are thus willing to make compromises to deliver tangible goods and services to their voters. 

The basic features of associational party-building are captured in Figure 1.

Ultimately, the key difference between an associational party and the parties we have today is the relationship that party leaders have with their constituents and ordinary folk. 

Political parties are inevitably elite, but party elites in an associational party understand that the ability to win and govern depends on being attuned to the electorate and its needs. This shapes its every choice, from how it recruits candidates to the partnerships it creates to how it proceeds when in office. Each of these choices, along with the decision to embed in local civic associations and meaningfully engage the party faithful in institutional decision-making, supports a two-way street of communication between party elites and their constituents. They allow associational parties to strengthen their connection to local communities and individual voters and to enhance their capacity to serve their most basic intermediary functions: “link[ing] citizens to their government, socializing citizens into politics, and providing a consistent mechanism for citizens to have a voice in government.”⁴