As this dialogue makes clear, scholars can reach rather different conclusions on the durability of parties depending on where they look. Noam Lupu’s very generous review of my book includes some important examples of weakened parties outside the United States, including New Zealand’s parties after the adoption of proportional representation and many parties in Western Europe following the move to public financing. These examples reinforce the lesson of party fragility in Lupu’s own research examining the demise of prominent parties in Argentina and Venezuela.

It is worth reflecting on why the major political parties of the modern United States have not faced similar fates. No, they have not experienced quite the same set of dire circumstances confronted by Argentina’s UCR or Venezuela’s AD, but they certainly have faced substantial crises. Massive voter rejection of the Republicans in 1964 and the Democrats in 1972 led to substantial soul-searching within the parties, but those parties nonetheless found their footing quickly, with each managing to regain the presidency one term after being routed. Indeed, the Democrats were widely—and rightly—blamed for instigating the American Civil War in defense of slavery, resulting in the death of some two percent of the nation’s population. This seems like a good enough reason for a party to be extinguished, but it nonetheless captured a majority of the popular presidential vote just a decade after the war’s end.

The durability of America’s parties may be at least partially attributable to their highly fragmented design. These parties saw their genesis at the state and local level in the 1800s and only became functional national organizations much later. Moreover, the civil service reforms of the nineteenth century, the Progressive anti-party reforms of the early twentieth century, and other later campaign finance reforms have compelled America’s parties to outsource. The formal parties have strong ties to organizations that can raise and spend funds, plan and deploy ground campaigns, hire substantial numbers of campaign workers, conduct surveys, etc., even if they don’t or can’t do many of those things in-house anymore. This makes those parties highly adaptable when confronted with a new regulation or political catastrophe.

This resilience could also be viewed as a way to avoid, or at least disperse, accountability. Americans have a very difficult time determining who the leader of a party is, and if an election or a policy goes very poorly for that party, it’s usually not obvious just who should be punished.

Nonetheless, Lupu’s book reminds us of how dangerous a political system can be when parties collapse. Americans may largely despise their major parties and find the stability of the party system a great source of frustration, but it may well be protecting the nation from far worse fates.