Amazon.com description: Product Description: The third edition of this best-selling collection includes over a dozen new essays and several revised chapters from earlier editions. Current coverage of national, state, and local parties includes chapters on hot topics like technology, money, and campaigns. Major party activities are presented in the context of presidential elections, legislatures, and in the courts. Minor parties - especially the Reform Party - are covered here more comprehensively than anywhere else. Thorough, original, and challenging OanchorO pieces by leading scholars serve to ground the book in the key scholarship on parties even as they launch into new explorations of party evolution. The parties in flux is the theme of this new edition, a theme which is sure to be played out in the elections of 1998 and 2000.