How Parties Swallow Insurgents

by Patrick Appel

Over the weekend, Ambidner wrote that national political parties are "withered." Hans Noel counters:

[T:]his parties-are-dead diagnosis makes three mistakes. First, itextrapolates from a small number of cases, forgetting that such caseshappen all the time. Second, it assumes that party insiders areincapable of learning from outsider challenges, despite all theevidence that they do. But most importantly, it misunderstands what an"intra-party squabble" really is. Today's outsider...