Political parties are widely reviled. Around the world, people have little confidence in party organizations, and many even view them as corrupt. They seem clubby and opaque—often making decisions behind closed doors and with little input from citizens. They exert undue influence on elected officials, who regularly act on the preferences of the party rather than on those of their constituents. Their ardent supporters seem to toe the party line blindly, unthinkingly. It is no wonder so many political reformers seek to undermine parties.

The reformers have it exactly backwards, however. As Seth E. Masket forcefully argues in The Inevitable Party, it is not parties but the efforts to weaken them that undermine American democracy. Using the states as laboratories of anti-party reform, Masket examines how the major parties fared in the face of intensive efforts to impair their influence. In every case, reforms hardly hurt the parties. What they did hurt was the public’s ability to hold their elected representatives to account.

In Colorado, campaign finance reforms hindered the party’s formal ability to influence elections. But a network of more opaque organizations allowed party leaders—and a new network of well-heeled donors—to exert their will anyway. Although it can be hard to uncover whether campaign donations change election outcomes, Masket creatively demonstrates that the districts targeted by Democratic strategists saw less ballot roll-off and an above-average Democratic share of the two-party vote. Campaign finance reforms were supposed to undermine the parties, but the parties found other ways to exert their influence.

In an effort to cut off a key source of party power, Nebraska and Minnesota made their states’ legislative elections nonpartisan. Nebraska has held nonpartisan elections since the 1930s. For a time, its state legislature was less polarized than others in the country. But it quickly caught up, particularly once the state adopted term limits in 2006. With more and more nonincumbent candidates, the parties began to exert more influence, channeling resources to their preferred, more ideologically committed, candidates. As a result, Nebraska’s state legislators were both more ideologically polarized and more beholden to their party. Their election may be nonpartisan, but their donor base and their legislative behavior are very much partisan.

Minnesota’s flirtation with nonpartisan elections between 1913 and 1973 was similarly fruitless. By the late 1930s, the legislature split between liberal and conservative factions that were strongly affiliated with the major American parties. Masket shows that this split basically persisted even after party affiliations were reintroduced. He finds little evidence to suggest that legislative behavior became more partisan or more polarized than before. As in Nebraska, nonpartisan elections seem to have done little to make state legislatures less partisan.

Perhaps the most unusual—and most telling—of Masket’s cases is California’s 2003 recall election. In a single referendum, Californians were simultaneously asked whether they wanted to recall their sitting Democratic governor and who they wanted as a replacement for him. But there was no mechanism for the major parties to select a preferred replacement candidate, and getting on the ballot required only 65 signatures and a $3,500 filing fee. And yet the Republican and Democratic Parties quickly coordinated. Democrats coordinated first around mobilizing against the recall and, later in the campaign, behind Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante. Republicans quickly rallied around Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though he was less than attractive to the party’s conservative wing. Out of 135 candidates on the ballot, the two candidates with de facto support from the major parties attracted more than 80% of the vote. Even in a wide-open election, the major parties managed to narrow the field.

In each of these cases, reformers attacked the basic means by which political parties support their preferred candidates: giving them money, lending their party label, or winnowing the field. And in each case, the major parties adapted. With a little creativity, the parties continued to influence elections just as before. Masket’s book makes a highly persuasive case that in American politics, the parties are just about inevitable.

The Inevitable Party also stands out for its exceptional—and exceptionally compelling—methodology. Each case study weaves together qualitative evidence from elite interviews or archival research with quantitative analysis of legislative voting behavior, campaign finance, or disaggregated election results. These days, it is a rare breath of fresh air to see scholarship in American politics take such a multimethod approach. Unlike many in his field, Masket actually spoke to the politicians, operatives, staffers, and donors involved in the contemporary cases he studies. His interviews make not only for more interesting reading but also for far more convincing case studies. He makes a strong case that anti-party reforms in the U.S. states are doomed to fail.

For a comparativist like me, the main unanswered question is how to generalize these findings. For Masket, “focusing on the states allows us to examine some 50 different party systems rather than one national one” (p. 13). But a crucial feature of these state-level party systems is that they mirror (almost) exactly the national party system. While Nebraska and Minnesota held nonpartisan elections at the state level, Nebraskans and Minnesotans continued to vote for the parties in federal elections. National media continued to cover politics in partisan terms. The careers of national politicians and their operatives—as well as Nebraskan and Minnesotan politicians with national career ambitions—still centered around the two-party system. Would the parties have been so resilient had any of these reforms been adopted nationally?

From a broader perspective, parties and party systems typically look far more fragile than Masket’s American parties seem to be. Electoral reforms severely weaken existing parties, as when New Zealand adopted a more proportional system in 1993 or when Italy became more majoritarian the following year. Public financing of parties is also widely thought to have undermined many of Western Europe’s major parties. In the part of the world I study most closely, Latin America, economic crises and international policy constraints brought down some of the region’s oldest political parties. Nonpartisan elections in a couple of Canadian territories appear to actually be nonpartisan. Outside of the United States, parties seem far less inevitable.

Of course, that does not diminish Masket’s broader point, that interest groups and elites with policy agendas—actors he calls policy demanders—will tenaciously adapt to new environments in order to exert influence on the policymaking process. Anti-party reforms are regularly couched in populist terms, as though eliminating parties will bring politics closer to citizens. Masket’s cases—and many others outside of the United States—show that this is almost never the case. But whether policy demanders inevitably adapt through parties seems less obvious. In the U.S. states, the enormous national influence of the two major parties may give them unusual staying power.

Masket’s masterful study shows not only that anti-party reforms in the U.S. states fail to undermine the parties but also that they end up reducing transparency and accountability. Campaign finance reform in Colorado only made campaign finance harder to track. Nonpartisan elections in Nebraska and Minnesota only made it harder for voters to hold the parties accountable. And California’s recall provisions might have made for an impossibly complex election—what voter could possibly keep track of 135 candidates?—if the major parties had not managed to coordinate.

The Inevitable Party also makes the larger point that parties are necessary for democracy. “Pundits often lament the lack of an informed electorate,” Masket notes, “but parties are the instrument by which the electorate is informed” (p. 163). Without party cues, voters often resort to less informative heuristics, like incumbency or name recognition, or they just stop voting altogether. Masket even argues that the polarization of the U.S. parties is a good thing because it makes it easier for voters to tell the parties apart.

Stable political parties are crucial to a well-functioning representative democracy. They structure political competition, narrowing the menu of options for voters and making election outcomes more predictable. They bundle policy issues, simplifying the complex political space. And they provide voters with an informative heuristic: In a stable party system like the United States, a candidate’s party affiliation signals his or her position on most major policy debates.

To the tide of anti-party reformers, The Inevitable Party thus offers a crucial corrective. Parties are not what is wrong with American democracy; they are part of the foundation of American democracy.