Why the parties are broken (especially one in particular)
Dr. Jennifer Dresden on the crisis of a core institution of democracy
This week we have a special feature outside our normal briefing schedule.
It’s been a primary season like none in my lifetime. To me, the presidential primaries used to feel like playoff season but for wonks. Debate watch parties, delegate counters, shifting endorsements. All working up to the big event, a raucous party convention where balloons dropped and a nominee emerged.
Even in 2016 — when the excitement of it all was quickly eclipsed by growing dread — it still felt like a civic process, the parties working through their role in our democracy.
This year, much of that feels gone. One party seems poised to re-nominate an ousted autocrat after he received just 230,000 votes. (To be clear, that’s just .07 percent, seven percent of one percent, of the country — approximately the population of Norfolk, VA.) Next week, Nevada will host both a primary and a caucus, with different candidates in each (only the caucus will count for the nomination). In New Hampshire last week, Joe Biden won the Democratic primary despite not being on the ballot — although it doesn’t actually matter because the DNC stripped the state’s delegates. Democrats in South Carolina will vote on February 3, while Republicans don’t vote until February 24. All this adds up to, as Maggie Astor puts it, a “bewildering” election season for voters.
Clearly, something’s gotta give. Last year, Protect Democracy teamed up with the American Political Science Association to put together a task force on the state of our political parties. The report, More than Red and Blue: Political Parties and American Democracy, is a behemoth on the state of parties as democratic institutions. (Despite widespread dislike of our parties, almost all political scientists agree that parties are an “essential” feature of a healthy democracy.)
I asked Jennifer Dresden, Protect Democracy’s political parties expert who led our partnership with APSA and the task force, to explain some of the undercurrents to this strange primary season, the short-term consequences, and the long-term path to reform. Dr. Dresden is a political scientist and was previously a member of the faculty and the Associate Director of the Democracy and Governance Program at Georgetown.
Jen, it’s great to have you as our first guest Q&A. I want to start with a baseline: why are parties good things? After all, George Washington hated the idea. Was he wrong?
You’re right. Disliking political parties is as American as apple pie, and angst about parties is actually not entirely a bad thing. A little skepticism of parties is healthy, helping voters keep them accountable at the ballot box. So Washington wasn’t entirely wrong, but a lot has changed since he led the country.
The reality is that we need political parties for modern democracy to work. Voters rely on parties, partly to be places where folks with different interests and priorities can come together to make a coalition to try to win elections. We also have a ton of elections in the United States — we vote more often for more offices than almost any other democracy. Voters can’t do that much research on that many candidates with no help. Political parties give them a place to start — a general “brand” so that they know which candidates are likely to be broadly aligned with their preferred policies.
But it’s not just voters who need parties. Elected officials need them too. Imagine a world in which anyone who wanted to pass any kind of legislation had to start from scratch to build a new coalition in Congress or a state legislature. From a governance perspective, getting anything done would be nearly impossible. Political parties help with that kind of organization.
Ok, so tell me — what’s happened to our political parties that they don’t do those things well anymore?
The United States has gone through a few different eras of political parties. The earliest versions of our political parties were elite-driven. They were good at coordinating and self-regulating, but they weren’t terribly inclusive or participatory. These were the parties of the proverbial (and sometimes literal) smoke-filled rooms. Later, parties grew to be more participatory, a shift perhaps best embodied by the adoption of primaries as a means of choosing candidates, and the balance of power shifted somewhat towards voters.
But the shift wasn’t complete. Party leaders and influencers still held a lot of sway through endorsements and campaign finance. So there was still a little bit of self-regulating going on.
But in the last thirty years or so, some key changes have made a huge difference. Changes in campaign finance regulation have taken parties out of the driver’s seat when it comes to resources for candidates. Changes in the media landscape mean that you no longer need help from party leaders to gain media visibility to get attention. All you need is a strong social media game and a few good hits on whichever ideologically-leaning media outlets are viewed or read by your supporters. This is all part of a gradual nationalization of politics that has weakened parties, particularly at the state and local levels. People are left to identify with parties as a brand based on whatever the social media rage machine pumps out on any given day, but they’re not actually personally connected to an organization or an institution. We’re left with what political scientist Julia Azari calls “weak parties and strong partisanship.”
How do those things connect to the weird primary season we’re in?
From a comparative perspective, every primary season is weird — almost no other democracies choose their candidates this way. But this primary season in particular seems to me like just taking all of these patterns to the extreme. For better or worse, early primaries have always served a function of rapidly narrowing the field of presidential candidates. Since 2008 across both parties, fewer than half of the candidates on the ballot in Iowa have stuck around long enough to make it to Super Tuesday. And Iowa and New Hampshire have always been a poor microcosm of the country by any representational metric.
But the things I noted above — the weakening of parties as institutions and the nationalization of our politics — those were crucial to Donald Trump’s ability to clinch the nomination in 2016 as an outsider to the Republican Party and then consolidate his sway over the party. A strong party concerned about the long-term health of our democracy (or even just about maximizing its chances of winning in November) would probably prefer to nominate someone else. But that’s not how the party works anymore.
And the situation in New Hampshire for the Democratic Party has similar roots. The state Democratic Party in New Hampshire was unhappy with the calendar change adopted by the DNC. The DNC couldn’t prevent the state party from holding their primary, though they could make it not count for anything. But it also would be a very bad media moment for the Biden campaign if he were to lose the New Hampshire contest. Thus the write-in campaign.
Is it fair to say what’s happening to the parties is asymmetric?
Yes and no. The pressures that both parties have faced are similar, but those pressures have presented party leaders with choices. The Democratic party largely did away with superdelegates, for example, one of the strongest remaining tools left to the party to influence presidential candidate selection. So it’s not that this ceding of institutional power is happening only in one party. And presidential campaigns always have a lot of influence over national parties, once a candidate is nominated. So the influence of individual leaders in setting a party’s course is not unique to either side.
But what is asymmetric is the extent to which the parties have responded to these pressures with candidates and strategies that are in tension with democratic norms or are sometimes just anti-democratic altogether. The Republican Party today is far less racially diverse than the Democratic Party, for example. And while that’s partly a legacy of decisions made by different factions of leaders as part of the realignment that occurred following the Civil Rights movement, that legacy is not destiny. The famed GOP “Autopsy Report” that followed Republicans’ extensive losses in 2008 and 2012 included a recommendation from leading Republicans that the party seek greater support in nonwhite communities. A strong party would have followed that recommendation, purely out of self-preservation. The GOP ultimately didn’t really do that. That wasn’t destiny, it was a set of choices. And in a rapidly diversifying country, the alternative has too often been to look for ways to tilt the playing field or just reject electoral loss altogether.
How do strong parties help protect democracy from autocrats?
For all that they’re unpopular, democracy itself needs functional political parties. A lot of what stabilizes democracy is norms and the willingness of leaders to stick with those norms. Historically, political parties that have been willing to embrace some minimal democratic standards and hold their own members to them — really basic things like accepting defeat when you lose an election and eschewing violence — those parties have played a key role in stabilizing democracy in the face of authoritarian threats. But they have to actually do that and shut out would-be autocrats. This does actually happen — scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point to examples like Belgium and Finland in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, though, a dominant faction in the Republican party has ceased to follow that model.
It seems like there’s a bit of a quandary here. Strong parties can play a defensive role in sidelining dangerous or extremist candidates. But now we have a party whose central establishment has been captured by, to be blunt, dangerous extremists. I’m thinking of the RNC last week flirting with declaring Trump the nominee by fiat. What do we do now?
Well, if we’re looking for a ray of optimism, at least the RNC didn’t actually do it. But we’re in a place where simply handing centralized power back to the institutional parties isn’t going to be the solution. Revitalizing local parties and making them genuine places of coalition-building and political participation, rather than vehicles easily captured by the most organized or extreme faction is probably going to be part of the solution.
But ultimately the thing that parties respond to most is always going to be electoral accountability. So we need to take a more fundamental approach and look at things like electoral system reform — like fusion voting and proportional representation — that would shift parties’ incentives towards a more responsible role.
What are some reform directions that could help make the parties more responsive and representative? How do healthy parties fit into the broader electoral reform landscape?
Revitalizing parties at the local level is one way to start looking at that. The rules and the dynamics on the ground vary, but in general we probably want to make it easy for folks to get involved in their local party. If there are high barriers to entry, the only people who can jump those hoops are those with more motivation and time than the average person.
There are also things that parties can do at any level — local, state, or national — to improve their representativeness, like preserving or expanding reserved seats on leadership committees for representatives from various affinity groups or organized constituencies. They can invest more resources in genuinely engaging with communities that have been ignored or taken for granted.
Finally, one of the best ways to strengthen parties may be electoral reform, as I noted above. Things like proportional representation and fusion voting not only create more of a healthy role for parties in our system in general, but also could open the door for new parties to form. That wouldn’t just be good for voters — more choice and more representation — but could also help strengthen the existing parties. More competition would force them to, frankly, make different choices.
A new poll out this week found 52% of voters want more than two political parties. Why hasn’t that happened?
It’s all about the electoral system. Our winner-take-all electoral system really only allows for two parties to be viable in any consistent way. While it’s certainly understandable that many voters don’t love their options right now, in the current context of polarization and distrust, if a third candidate were to be partially successful and win some states, it could create a real crisis for our democracy. (I’m not just talking about being a spoiler — readers should search “contingent elections” and judge for themselves.)
The only way that voters are going to be able to choose between multiple competing parties is if we reform our system to make it possible. Otherwise, we’re all just fiddling while Rome burns.
Quick aside from me: while there are a lot of important outstanding questions about how the U.S. could transition to a multi-party presidential system (especially in how to avoid the contingent election danger that Jen mentions), there is a growing sense — at least among political scientists — that the goal is the right one. For an important development there, see how Scott Mainwaring changed his mind.
If you have other questions for Jen — or other topics you’d love a deeper discussion on in the future — let us know at digital@protectdemocracy.org.
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