ABSTRACT
Political parties and interest groups are two forms of political participation that are central to American democracy, yet are entirely unmentioned in the Constitution. Indeed, James Madison, in Federalist 10, famously warned against the “mischief of faction” in which groups pursuing their own goals undermine the collective good. Yet it would be hard to imagine how the U.S. political system would function in the absence of political parties to provide broad alternatives to the electorate and interest groups to aggregate and articulate the political agendas of a profusion of smaller, more specialized subgroupings.
