Electoral reform must strengthen parties, not sideline them
We know because today's reformers have two advantages their predecessors did not: hindsight and data.
It should come as no surprise that electoral reform is having a moment. While the majority of Americans believe democracy remains the best system of government, one recent poll suggests that only 28 percent are satisfied with how our democracy is functioning.
Citizens and advocates across the country are energetically debating and pursuing changes to some of the most fundamental aspects of how the United States “does” democracy. Proposals range from altering our primary system to changing the way we elect our legislatures to expanding the House of Representatives. Like many past reform efforts, these initiatives tackle questions about how the large mass of American voters participate in the democratic process, how their interests are represented, and who has influence over which politicians. And whether we like them or not, political parties and how they operate are central to all of them. Historically, reformers’ efforts to sideline parties have rarely worked out the way they expected. Today’s reformers would do well to instead consider reforms that will encourage party-building as a critical tool for pursuing a more representative and responsive democracy that is also more resistant to authoritarian threats.
As reformers advance through the current moment, they have two advantages that many of their predecessors did not: hindsight and data. When the Progressive movement was running at full steam in the early 20th century, the country’s flagship political science journal, the American Political Science Review, had only just begun publication. Most scholarship was what we would today call descriptive—it cataloged and categorized legal systems, for example. But relatively little research examined why systems operated the way they did or what measurable effects past changes had wrought.
When the American Political Science Association (APSA) published its first landmark report on political parties in 1950, there were still limitations to understanding the consequences of reform. Large-scale surveys, the ability to collect and analyze huge quantities of data, and methods for answering questions about how people actually act—individually and in concert—were not widespread. The massive evolution of qualitative and quantitative methodologies in political science have fundamentally changed our ability to analyze the potential benefits and risks of reform. Even a brief comparison of that report and the successor report that APSA issued last year in partnership with Protect Democracy illustrates the difference.
Don’t stop the party
So what should reformers of today take away from past reformers’ efforts and the mountain of research that has become available in the last 50 years? To put it bluntly: reformers ignore political parties at their peril. Much of the history of democratic reform in the United States has been framed as a choice between empowering voters or empowering parties. With that choice, it’s little wonder that most reform efforts take an anti-party bent. Only 11 percent of Americans express high confidence in political parties and our political culture’s suspicion of the “mischiefs of faction” has deep roots. But efforts to sideline parties typically either fail, or have unintended consequences that leave our democracy less transparent or less effective.
Take the primary system, for example. As Robert Boatright has laid out clearly in his recent work on the topic, the introduction of primaries as a means of selecting candidates was intended to wrest control away from party bosses to reduce corruption, ensure high quality candidates, and make elected politicians more accountable to voters. But the last hundred years of experience suggests that few of these goals have been met. By Boatright’s analysis, various efforts to reform primaries in intervening years have similarly had limited effects on the outcomes that reformers intended.
Read the whole series: Partisans without parties.
Campaign finance reform is another example. Few would argue with the goal of reducing the role of money in our politics. American political campaigns involve more spending than those in any other country. But framing campaign finance reform as a choice between candidates who are responsive to voters and candidates who are beholden to party elites has turned out to be a false binary. As scholars like Seth Masket have pointed out, money has not left our politics—it now just flows through non-party entities that are even less transparent and accountable than parties.
Why have efforts to marginalize parties and empower voters so rarely turned out as expected? As Mark Brewer put it in the preface to last year’s APSA report, “parties will exploit anything and everything they think will give them an advantage.” They aren’t passive recipients of new rules and restrictions, and the vital functions they perform need carrying out. For democracy to work, candidates have to be selected, campaigns have to have resources, voters have to understand their choices, and elected officials have to coordinate at least well enough to pass and execute laws. Someone is going to make all of those things happen, one way or another, in better or worse fashion.
In search of responsible parties
This brings us to current discussions. Much of the energy in today’s reform space is focused on reforming our electoral system, as it should be. Most elections in the United States take place as winner-take-all contests in single-member districts. Voters cast their ballot for one candidate per race, and whoever gets the most votes wins (regardless of whether “the most” is 39 percent, 51 percent or 83 percent). This system facilitates polarization and extremism, entrenching an us-vs-them binary and over-producing districts that are electorally safe for one party or another. It has made the country exceptionally vulnerable to authoritarian factions and left large numbers of Americans perennially underrepresented as localized political minorities.
In our current era of polarization and division, it is entirely reasonable to look to reforms that promise moderation. But given the history, we should not lose sight of the fact that voters are not the only ones who will be operating within new systems. Political parties and the constellation of interest groups, donors, and others who surround them will be there as well. Hindsight tells us that they will not fade quietly into the background. The vast amounts of data available from the last few decades of research can give us clues as to what to expect. Designing reforms that either do not anticipate how parties will adapt, or intentionally try to weaken parties, will almost certainly have unintended consequences.
Reforms that either do not anticipate how parties will adapt, or intentionally try to weaken parties, will almost certainly have unintended consequences.
Again, an example may be instructive. Some electoral reforms, such as the Final-Four system recently launched in Alaska, would have multiple candidates from the same party running against each other not only in the primary, but also potentially in general elections. What should we expect from the party in such circumstances? How will jockeying amongst candidates in the primaries spill over into the general election? Will state parties support all their general election candidates equally, or consolidate behind the candidate with the broadest appeal?
Research on Alaska’s experience is ongoing and the findings that emerge will be valuable for understanding how parties respond to this kind of reform. But one challenge to extrapolating lessons from Alaska is that its political landscape is unusual. For example, it has one of the highest proportions of independents, with 57 percent of registered voters declining to affiliate with a party in 2022. In the age of strong partisanship and weak parties, this is not the norm.
Parties are not going anywhere, and candidates will always have to contend with pressures from organized interests. Some reform options anticipate these dynamics.
Fortunately, Alaska is not the only source of data for understanding what happens when candidates from the same party compete. Washington and California now have years of experience with co-partisan general election races, thanks to their Top-Two primary systems, which advance the top vote-getters to the general election, regardless of party. Research from those states indicates that when co-partisans face off in general elections, it doesn’t result in elected officials who are more ideologically representative of their overall districts. Candidates may attempt to reach a broader spectrum of the electorate with their campaigns, but the reform has not been a success for related indicators of democratic health: Without interparty competition to inform and mobilize voters, participation declines. And the overall impact on polarization in state legislatures has been minimal. Nor has a reform that could reasonably be considered anti-party been successful in sidelining state parties. State parties understandably don’t particularly want the internal conflict of their candidates running against one another in the general election (particularly if one is an incumbent), and research suggests they try to avoid this with strategies such as party endorsements.
(Even in Alaska, we may already be seeing comparable effects. Where multiple candidates from the same party have advanced out of the primary, some have withdrawn in order to keep their party’s vote unified around one candidate, apparently unwilling to rely on voters to use the general election’s ranked choice ballots to partisan advantage.)
So when reformers in this moment look for ways to build the democracy of tomorrow, reforms that better represent and respond to voters are crucial. But if we want to maximize the impact of reform, those goals cannot be pursued with blinders on. Voters do not exist in isolation, parties are not going anywhere, and candidates and office holders will always have to contend with pressures from organized interests. Some reform options anticipate these dynamics. Adopting proportional representation would incentivize parties to do the hard work of mobilizing and responding to voters through the increased general election competition provided by multimember districts. Expanded use of fusion voting would empower voters to use minor party ballot lines to send important signals to elected representatives without wasting their votes.
For a century, reforming our electoral system to reduce the influence of political parties has not borne the expected fruit. Future reform paths should instead focus on incentivizing more responsible behavior from parties, given their central role in our political system.
Jennifer Dresden is a policy strategist at Protect Democracy. She was previously a member of the faculty and the Associate Director of the Democracy and Governance Program at Georgetown University.
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