Party-centered reform vs Voter-centered reform: which should be the priority?

The American Political Science Association and a handful of political scientists have decided that political parties are (gulp) threatened and need to be saved. Really?

You may not have seen the headline or received the memo, so I’m alerting you here on DemocracySOS:  the next threatened species to save is not baby seals, or black rhinos, or unicorns, it’s – POLITICAL PARTIES.

That’s what we are hearing from the American Political Science Association (APSA) and a handful of political activists like Lee Drutman and others. Recently an APSA task force co-published with Protect Democracy a report, More than Red and Blue: Political Parties and American Democracy, in which the breathless take-away is that “political science shows we need to reform political parties rather than sideline them…Reforms that try to sidestep political parties in elections, or that ignore their role in legislating, are unlikely to improve democracy.”

Sideline or ignore political parties? Who’s doing that? Is that even possible?

In reflecting on this diagnosis, a cognitive dissonance takes hold. We are bombarded in headline after headline, tweet after tweet and via TV talking head chatter about the omnipresence and über-influence of political parties. There’s Speaker McCarthy at the podium, ordering an impeachment inquiry of President Biden. Here’s Senate Majority Leader Schumer in front of the TV cameras, averting a government shutdown. Yet somehow the parties are weak and endangered? Something doesn’t add up.

Founded in 1903, the APSA is the leading professional organization for political scientists with more than 11,000 members. Protect Democracy is a helpfully vigilant NGO endeavoring to defeat the very real “authoritarian threat” plaguing US democracy. Their report offers up 14 articles from two dozen political scientists, many of them noted scholars in the field. Throughout the report, the roles and functions assigned to “healthy” political parties include activities like candidate-vetting, organizing and coalition-building. In some of the authors’ telling, parties also should prevent dangerous populist candidates from gaining traction.

Indeed, the specter of Donald Trump hangs heavily over this report. In the narrative of the report, the fact that Trump, a political novice with no governing experience, was able to barnstorm into Republican primaries in 2016, ride roughshod over traditional GOP leaders and win not only the Republican nomination but the hearts and minds of most of the party’s voters seems self-evident proof of the sidelining of the Republican Party.

But what if it’s not the GOP that failed, but the voters? Aren’t they culpable for going along with Trump’s delusional rants about a stolen election? In a short period of time the US has experienced an astonishing level of the unthinkable: a rush of political violence, including physical attacks on people and institutions; threats against election workers; intensifying voter suppression, and an attempt to steal a presidential election. This can’t just be blamed on a sidelined political party or a handful of its debased, unethical leaders. After all, it has long been recognized that parties have always been little more than “vote maximizers” – it’s the voters who substantially decide the behavior of parties, not the other way around. 

James Madison once wrote, “A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which Knowledge gives.” The only thing many Trump supporters have armed themselves with are guns and QAnon ignorance. This failure is more Downsian than Trumpian, it’s more about what resides in the “mean GOP voters’” heads.

Digital media has played a toxic role as well (which the report gives a mention to) — for example Facebook’s private groups. That's where the conspiracy crazies of the world have been able to find each other online and hang out together, like the cretins and trolls in the bar scene in Star Wars.” Rather than being ignored and isolated wherever they reside as “the nutty next-door neighbor,” they can all virtually congregate and learn from each other, and organize and strategize and add the final Bricks in the Wall of their demented world view. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for inventing encrypted digital hideouts.

Beyond the voters and digital media, what if the problem is not political parties but the electoral system itself? What if the methods of elections that we use in the US are providing the wrong incentives and optimizing polarization and division, leaving voters with no good choices so they pick among the two bad choices, or increasingly stay home as America descends into post-democracy? (I’ll return to the impact of election methods in a minute)

Blaming the sidelining of political parties seems too easy and simplistic to me. Certainly healthy political parties are essential to a stable democracy, I don’t know anyone who would argue the opposite. But how does one “improve and strengthen parties” to stop a Donald Trump, or to vet other candidates? What kind of special powers should political parties assume? Is there, like, the equivalent of a vitamin regimen or a special diet we can put parties on in order to bulk them up from their apparent 97-pound weakling status?

Charles Atlas ad to strengthen political parties

Apparently there is. The report offers several diagnoses on page 8, among them:

“Changes in campaign finance law have empowered groups at the expense of parties themselves, inhibiting the ability of parties to serve as gatekeepers…”

and

“The innovation of party primaries democratized the nomination process but also lead to a loss of control of the party by its leaders…the significant coordination difficulties posed by the current campaign environment limits their ability to provide effective gatekeeping.”

That word “gatekeeper” pops up in several crucial places in the report, and on page 180 we are told “Parties are essential gatekeepers.” In one of the 14 contributions, political scientists Seth Masket and Hans Noel propose (p. 80) that “party leadership can assume greater control of the nomination process.” How might leaders do that? Parties could “assert a level of ‘peer review’ to the nomination process, requiring party officials to approve of candidates before those candidates can run.” Of course, right…like the way the Chinese government approves which candidates are allowed to run in Hong Kong elections?

This “gatekeeper obsession,” which blames open primaries and campaign finance laws for the inability of the GOP to stop Donald Trump and other populist demagogues, feels a bit like sticking a finger in the dike to stop the flood, even though the flood has already occurred and there’s no water left behind the dam.

One person’s “strong party” is another person’s Boss Tweed

These political scientists should come to California, where party leaders regularly put their thumbs on the scale of political power. I remember attending a honcho-politico event in Sacramento, one of these high profile affairs on the social calendar, in which the three Big Name speakers were Pete Wilson, former (and the last) GOP governor of California, who was the face of the anti-immigrant Prop 187 that eventually buried the Republican Party’s prospects in California; Willie Brown, the wily, scheming former Democratic speaker of the California Assembly whose main claim to fame was to so soil the birdcage of his office that the California voters enacted term limits in 1990 to get rid of him; and powerful state senate leader John Burton, chair of the California Democratic Party, whose previous career as a US Congressman was derailed by a cocaine habit.

All three of these powerful politicians were classic gatekeepers, and their parties were strong under their leadership. What were the secrets to their success? They regaled the audience in realpolitik terms.

Governor Wilson told a story about how if he needed to win some votes from members of his party, or if he needed to find some votes from Democrats, he would pull out the booze and they would share some swagger over ice, mano a mano. Whiskey and gin apparently oiled the machine.

Senate leader Burton told the story about needing some support from a GOP leader, and so he took him to see some strippers in Barbary Coast San Francisco. As Burton told the tale, the Republican said to him, “John, I woulda crawled across glass to see that broad’s t*t*!”

Not to be outdone, the master manipulator Willie Brown told a story about how in his day, when he needed to twist some recalcitrant arms, there weren’t so many campaign finance laws and transparency rules back then so he could call together the handful of people necessary into the back room where they would, yes, smoke cigars and drink booze into the wee hours to fix the deal.

So there you have it:  booze, broads and back rooms, the unholy trinity of powerful political (male) leaders…of GATEKEEPERS. As I read through chapter after chapter of the APSA report, I couldn’t help but wonder if this report isn’t mostly a nostalgia trip about the “good ol’ days” that never really existed.

No question, strong political parties, or healthy political parties as they are framing it in this report (more on that below), are an essential component of a stable and functioning democracy. The same with strong and healthy political leaders. But the problem is that one person’s “strong” is another person’s “Boss Tweed.” In fact, many of the factors outlined in this report as contributing to the weakening of parties, such as campaign finance laws, open primaries, nonpartisan elections and more, were all reforms from a bygone era in which advocates were trying to rein in the substantial abuses of political parties and leaders that had become scheming and unscrupulous patronage machines.

Have the incentives and enticements of those bygone eras changed so much that these reforms are no longer helpful? It seems unlikely. But there is little recognition of this in most of the offerings from this report. Instead, the report mostly has a “turn back the clock” feel.

But here’s what has truly upended my ability to understand this perspective. When it comes to the functions of political parties, namely candidate-vetting, gatekeeping, organizing and coalition-building, are these political scientists saying that the current major political parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, do not currently do this? That seems like such a “thin ice” argument to me. Perhaps they could play it better, or differently – yes, if we had a closed list proportional system like in Italy, Sweden or Israel, their gatekeeping role would be even stronger.

But in many of those democracies, party bosses call the shots like Russian autocrats. Dissent by junior parliamentarians – backbenchers, as they are called – is not tolerated at all. If an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pops off with even a single off-tune note, her career turns downright Hobbesian, i.e. “nasty, brutish and short.” Is that what these political scientists are advocating? I’m guessing probably not. In that case, then it sounds to me like they are asking the Democrats or Republicans to do something that they already substantially do, albeit imperfectly.

In short, I am confused by this report.

“Healthy” and “political party” is a contradiction – like wearing a bikini at the North Pole

But my confusion grows exponentially when I read a sidebar contribution from New America’s Lee Drutman to this keening funeral oration for political parties. Drutman, for those readers who do not know, is the most prominent anti-ranked choice voting opponent in the US today (after strongly favoring RCV in his well-received book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Drutman now says he has “seen the light” and changed his mind). His viewpoint was not included in the APSA report, so instead he wrote his own 30,000 word exegesis as a parallel document. Calling his contribution “More Parties, Better Parties: The Case for Pro-Parties Democracy Reform,” Drutman piled on this notion that the endangered political parties are being sidelined, and that the US needs more “party-centric” reform.

As a solution, he extolls the virtues of Fusion Voting rather than RCV as a vehicle to, yes, strengthen political parties. Apparently for Drutman, fusion is the Charles Atlas “secret sauce” that will bulk up the 97 pound weaklings, and actually conjure up more of them (despite there being no evidence that fusion has accomplished that in the handful of states where it is used).

Drutman accompanied his fusion homily with an even more curious series of Twitter haikus extolling the virtues of what he calls “healthy parties.” Who can argue against health? His series of apple pie tweets included such solemn bromides as:

* Healthy parties engage and mobilize voters.

* Healthy parties vet and support qualified candidates for public office.

* Healthy parties make elections meaningful

* Healthy parties do not lie to voters.

* Healthy parties do not engage in corruption.

* Healthy parties police extremism and authoritarianism in their ranks.

* Healthy parties also perform all these roles with honesty and integrity.

On and on and on, across nearly a dozen tweets, sounding like the Beatitudes of political science (the Beatitudes are a series of biblical blessings allegedly orated by Jesus to his disciples during his Sermon on the Mount). Like a high priest of political parties, Father Drutman has been at the forefront of this effort to restore the reputation of political parties so that the public will want more of them. Indeed, his own 30,000 word bible for this newfound religion of “party-centric reform” pits that against what he calls “candidate-centric reform.” The reviled candidate-centric reform includes ranked choice voting and open primaries, while party-centric = fusion.

However Drutman’s polarized presentation is riddled with contradictions and is, empirically speaking, inaccurate and a false choice. There are elections in a number of US states and other countries with strong parties yet voters are selecting individual candidates. Look at North Carolina, where the Republican Party drew a heavily gerrymandered legislative map in 2018 that allowed it to win 77 percent of US House seats with only a minority of votes (49.3 percent). Doesn’t that require a pretty darn strong party to pull that off?

And look at the ranked choice voting elections in Ireland, Australia, Malta, and in the US states of Alaska and Maine -- all of those places use partisan elections with vibrant political parties, even as voters rank individual candidates instead of a political party. The Irish and Australians would be quite surprised to hear that their system is “candidate-centered” to the detriment of political parties, given the robustness of their multi-party competition.

Even more puzzling in his ongoing political evolution, Drutman now states that he favors an open-list PR system. But depending on what kind of open-list system you select, those would certainly be called candidate-centered by any credible observer. In Finland’s “fully open” PR list, the voter can only vote for individual candidates, not political parties. According to Drutman’s way of thinking, that is “party-centered” -- but Ireland’s recent election using a ranked ballot method of proportional representation, in which voters merrily ranked individual candidates and nine parties won seats, is somehow “candidate centered.”

The same in Australia, where Aussie voters ranked their candidates and eight parties won seats in its proportional voting elections. Unfortunately for Finnish voters, they don’t enjoy the advantage of the Aussies and Irish who benefit from transferable ballots, which helps to ensure that voters do not waste their votes on longshot candidates or parties who do not reach the victory threshold.

Drutman’s confused categorization is not only muddled and inaccurate, it’s also not helpful toward enacting credible political reform.

Why Voter-centered reform makes more sense

There are two offerings in the APSA report that deserve deeper consideration, and that’s because they point the way toward a better approach than so-called party-centered reform, which is bound to fail given the unpopularity of political parties (one recent survey found that just 11% of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in political parties). These two articles point the way toward what I call “Voter-centered” reform, by exploring the primary factor that determines how political parties behave -- the electoral system.

The most interesting paper of the bunch, from political scientists Benjamin Reilly and David Lublin, entitled “Encouraging Cooperation and Responsibility” on page 138, explores some of the impacts of using ranked choice voting in conjunction with a Top Four primary in Alaska in the 2022 elections. All political parties ran at the same time and the four highest vote-getters competed again in the final November election, with the winner elected by a majority using RCV. Alaska voters were liberated to pick the candidates they really like instead of being stuck voting for the “lesser of two evils.” They could rank candidates from whatever political parties they wanted, giving them maximum choice and allowing them to engage at the level that politics makes sense to them.

As the authors write, this combo means that “both traditional and insurgent candidates…can potentially make it to the general election.” It also “mitigates the need to speak exclusively to party diehards” and “makes it unlikely that only more extreme candidates make it through to the general election.” Unlike closed partisan primaries – which some hope would allow for more “gatekeeping” -- this innovative electoral system “prevented winnowing out of more centrist candidates,” such as incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (who won re-election under the new system but likely would have lost a closed primary election) or Alaskan House Rep. Mary Peltola (a moderate Democrat in this very conservative state).

Did this open primaries/RCV combo undermine the strength of Alaska’s political parties? Not at all. Even a cursory glance at the headlines during months of campaigning, which resulted in Peltola beating right wing GOP celebrity Sarah Palin twice within a few months, revealed that these elections were intensely focused on parties, even as voters ranked individual candidates. The fact that the GOP vote split among two Republican candidates is not reflective of a weak party as much as the fact that 60 percent of Alaska voters, most of them conservatives, are registered as independents of one kind or another, not Republicans. And many of them detest their failed former Governor Palin who ran off to the Lower 48 to become a Fox News celebrity.

Contrary to the claims of the “party-centric” theorists, the authors conclude RCV performed admirably in Alaska, and within a very intense partisan environment, at the same time that it empowered independent and moderate voters over partisan diehards and hardliners. According to Reilly and Lublin, the combo of Final Four Voting and RCV unleashed a centripetal pressure for candidates to move toward the center, potentially mitigating “the polarization that reduces the propensity of parties to act responsibly and negotiate the compromises necessary under the American constitutional system” (p. 145); promoted coalition building; incentivized candidates to campaign less dirty, since they may need reciprocal support from each other’s voters; and “offers the strongest incentives for more cooperation amongst campaigning politicians, with potential flow-on effects in government.”

Indeed, the Alaska state legislature now features a most remarkable phenomenon – moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats have formed governing coalitions in both the state House and Senate, kicking to the margins the right-wing, obstructionist Trump Republicans.

Party-centric fundamentalists like Drutman and the APSA apparently seem to claim that this kind of centrist-incentivized centripetalism resulting from RCV and Final Four Voting undermines political parties. But their rationale is not convincing. Instead, it forces political parties to look themselves in the mirror and existentially ask: “Why do we exist as a party? Is it merely for our own self-perpetuation? Is it just to beat the other side? Or are we here to get things done on behalf of the voters?”

A second paper looked at the impact of electoral systems, but ultimately failed to think through the full impacts of their proposal. In “Toward a Different Kind of Party Government: Proportional Representation for Federal Elections,” political scientists Matthew Shugart, Jack Santucci and Michael Latner sketched a vision of multiparty democracy founded on the bedrock of proportional representation (PR). They provide ‘pros and cons’ of three PR forms: mixed-member proportional, single transferable vote, and open-list proportional. Their preference is for a type of open-list PR system in which a voter’s one vote would count for both a candidate and the list as a whole, and candidates’ position on the party’s list would be determined entirely by how many votes each candidate received. This method certainly has great merit, as it empowers voters and gives them a number of electoral choices in a multiparty democracy.

But it has the troubling downside of promoting intra-party competition among each party’s candidates. Ironically, the method for determining each party’s top candidates is a “plurality wins all” election, which would likely result in spoiler candidates and split votes. Often times in party list systems there is a designated lead candidate known as “the puller,” who is the most recognized and popular candidate on the list. That candidate is likely to win the vast majority of votes from that party’s voters, at the expense of other candidates from the same intra-party faction. While the party itself would still win overall its fair and proportional share of seats, the intra-party competition between individual candidates could well result in the puller’s faction losing a disproportionate number of seats to another intra-party faction due to the lack of ballot transferability. This in turn would undermine the teamwork necessary within that party’s legislative caucus, and impact the party’s effectiveness.

That’s why transferable ballots are desirable, because they help voters to not waste their votes on unelectable candidates, or on popular candidates that have more than enough votes to win a seat. For the same reasons that RCV is useful for electing representative winners in single-seat elections like a president or mayor, or in multi-seat elections like a legislative parliament, it would also be extremely useful in an open-list PR system to ensure proportional representation within a political party. Open-list PR that allows voters to rank their favorite candidates would be a very voter-centered reform, but the authors’ proposal fails to include that crucial feature.

Voter-centric vs party-centric vs candidate-centric

The artificial, as well as inaccurate, division of party-centric reform vs. candidate-centric reform does nothing to advance reform. And to the extent that it pits the two against each other, it actually sets reform efforts back by dividing reformers’ collective efforts. In this political moment, in this urgent time when so much is at stake – climate change, inequality, global insecurity, indeed democracy itself – what America desperately needs is voter-centered reform.

Voters are the constituency that needs to be empowered if we are to save our democracy. Political parties are not about to go away or get relegated to the sidelines, and any suggestion to the contrary misses the forest for the trees. If we change the electoral system to a method that provides the right incentives, the political parties will find their way – toward voter-centered reform.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776