Research Directions

An invitation to reflect generally on past and prospective parties research is appealing to an old-timer. I acknowledge the risk of drawing so much on earlier writing that my essay will be of a kind that I scorned a few decades ago when my senior colleagues repeated themselves. The risk is un-mistakable in my first section where I write about our discipline’s historical concern with political parties (Epstein 1986, 9-39). An abbreviated account of that concern, however, provides the intellectual context for the research questions that I shall later suggest for new or additional scholarly inquiry. In raising those questions, I am less likely to repeat myself because most of them are on subjects with which I have dealt only tangentially.