That political parties stake out positions on policy is clear. How party position taking fits into electoral competition and democratic processes more generally, however, is subject to debate. In our two days in Binghamton, we seek to integrate research on party position taking as an aspect of electoral competition with broader questions both about the conduct and outcomes of elections and about democratic governance. To this end, we sketch in the following paragraphs what we see as the key aspects of political parties' role in shaping and maintaining democratic politics.

Democracy might take many forms, but at its core is the notion that policy outcomes reflect the desires of the governed. This connection between societal desires and policy outcomes depends on three basic characteristics that one might expect of a democratic government in the real world: representation, regime stability, and the ability to overcome societal conflict. Representation is fundamental; it is the definition of what we have called a core notion. Without regime stability—manifest as a general conviction that today's losers will be able to compete and perhaps emerge victorious tomorrow—there would be little point in subjugating short-term disagreements to long-term interests. Finally, because no matter how desirable the ends might be policy change virtually always implies at least short-term losses for some individuals and groups, government must have the wherewithal to ameliorate the conflict, whether through judicious application of resource transfers or by some other means. In short, if society is to amount to more than a disparate collection of disconnected individuals, parties and the governments they animate must reflect preferences, stabilize the rules of the political game, and transact utility transfers among individuals and groups.

Absent parties, a democratic policy making process is difficult to imagine. Political and policy—and even institutional—outcomes seem to be consistent with some kind of structure. As yet, however, no deep structure of collective preferences among publics on the scale of modern states has been uncovered. We feel assured, however, that two years hence the scope and generosity of welfare states in Scandinavia still will be larger than in democracies of southern Europe. We are just as confident that the military budget of the United States will dwarf Canada's next year, and the year after, and the year after that. More basically, the outlines of political debate in any given polity tend to be remarkably stable, contra the possibilities for chaos endemic to the essential multidimensionality of individual preferences and policy possibilities. Simply put, policy regimes are far more stable than we might expect. What is more, and particularly relevant in relation to democratic processes, the observable structures that define policy regimes differ across systems and ebb and flow across time within systems in response to election results that alter partisan balances of power in parliaments and governments.