Everything about Nonpartisan totally explained
In
political science,
nonpartisan denotes an
election in which the candidates don't declare or don't formally have a
political party affiliation. It also denotes organizations that don't have formal alignment with a political party.
Nonpartisan elections are generally held for
municipal and
county offices, especially
school board, and are also common in the election of
judges. In some nonpartisan elections, it's common knowledge which candidates are members of and backed by which parties; in others, parties are almost wholly uninvolved and voters make choices with little or no regard to partisan considerations.
Some nonpartisan organizations are truly such; others are nominally nonpartisan but in fact are generally identifiable with one or the other of the two major national parties. For example, the
National Rifle Association is technically a nonpartisan organization, but at the national level at least functions almost as an adjunct of the
Republican Party. Conversely, although technically a nonpartisan organization, at the national level the
NAACP has for many years functioned as almost a subsidiary organization to the
Democratic Party. The same can be said of most
right-to-life organizations with regard to the Republicans and of most U.S.
labor unions with regard to the Democrats. Churches are by law supposed to remain nonpartisan in order to retain the status of contributions to them being tax-deductible (contributions to overtly partisan groups, even
tax-exempt ones, are not); this has recently been called into question with regard to both many predominantly
African-American churches being involved in Democratic activism and with many predominantly
white evangelical churches being openly aligned with activist groups largely associated with Republicans such as the
Christian Coalition. On the other hand, the
Brookings Institution, a
Washington, D.C. think tank, has at various times in its history been headed by both identifiable Republicans as well as identifiable Democrats and hence would be judged by many to be nonpartisan in practice as well as in theory.
In
U.S. history, the
Nonpartisan League was an influential
socialist political movement, especially in the Upper
Midwest, particularly during the
1910s and
1920s. It also contributed much to the ideology of the former
Progressive Party of Canada. It went into decline and merged with the Democratic Party of North Dakota to form the
North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party in
1956.
The
unicameral Nebraska State Legislature is the only state legislature that's entirely nonpartisan.
Further Information
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