To start out, decentralizationeffects political parties in a number of ways. First off decentralization creates the parties. Without government decentralizing there wouldn't be distributed power to states or institutions. Decentralization allows individuals to coordinate with one another. This coordination and cooperation of these people help form political parties. The political parties are made up of individuals who share similar goals which primarily is to win elections and get their party voted into office.

As for party discipline this is difficult because across state boundaries each state has different view points such as a state being Republican and then switching over to being more Democratic. Decentralization is also a challenge for parties because they vary across the board. For example from our module video Professor Tofias mentions how different Mitt Romney and Mike Huckaby are, yet both are part of the Repblican Party.

For heterogeniety, decentralization is logical because our country is large as well as diverse therefore we need large and diverse parties. Because of the diversity in large parties this causes disparity across the major political parties.

Obviously when Bush was in office the government was run by the Republican Party. As the elections approached people were very dissatisfed with Bush and his administration. The elections in the past have been close, but this one was not. The states that were normally battleground states this time around had shifted. They had shifted to the Democratic Party. This goes to show that decentralization helps politicla parties change and evolve from year to year, election to election.

So we will just have to see where the economy takes us and where the newly in office Democratic Party leads.