Abstract
Despite the well-documented decline of political parties in the electorate, the evidence shows that parties remain highly salient and visible within government, particularly in Congress, and the formal party organizations continue to play an active role in campaigns. Building on this evidence, we attempt to offer further insight into the goals and activities of contemporary American political parties by investigating the allocation of partycontrolled resources in congressional elections. In particular, we examine the resource allocation strategies employed by the Democratic and Republican partie's congressional (the DCCC and the NRCC) and national (DNC and RNC) campaign committees to assess if these resources are used to enhance party support within Congress or are motivated strictly by electoral concerns. Via tobit analysis, we test our specification using data for challengers and incumbents of both parties from 1989-96. Our results suggest that these resources, particularly for the Republican party, are prompted by campaign-specific factors and are not used to facilitate party support within Congress.
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