Jon Ward, Senior Political Respondent at Yahoo, published a piece last week titled “Power to the party: Why political reforms can be bad for democracy” that reiterated an argument I’ve heard over and over again since 2016.
The gist of his argument is this: "anti-party reforms [for example, getting rid of superdelegates] have gone too far and are now having a multitude of negative impacts on our politics." In other words, small-d democracy is not to be trusted, and the only way to save ourselves is to put power back in the hands of a small, wise elite who can save the people from themselves.
His top example how democracy has failed us is that in 2016, the Republican Party delegates were bound to vote for the candidate the their voters have chosen --- Donald Trump. If party officials were stronger, particularly if they could ignore the fact that primary voters picked Trump and pick someone else, he would never be President. [1]
I completely agree that Trump’s election has been a “negative impact” on the country/world (it’s probably the understatement of the millennium). However, I strongly disagree with his solution — to take power from the people and hand it over to party leaders. According to him, and several scholars cited in the piece, this leads to better outcomes for everyone.
WHY HAVE DEMOCRACY AT ALL?
The entire piece begs the question: If Ward is right, and giving more power to regular voters has "negative impacts on our politics," and increasing party democracy leads to "decreasing transparency, accountability, and other things we claim to hold important in our governing systems," then why have democracy at all?
The question is absurd, but it gets to a key flaw in Ward’s argument: he does not recognize the value of small-d democracy, nor acknowledge why parties became more democratic in the first place. He notes that "changes to party primaries after the 1968 election took power away from party bosses and put it in the hands of regular voters," but fails to mention why.
In 1968 Democratic primary voters voted 4 to 1 in favor of anti-war candidates, but the (white, older, male) delegates chose to ignore the ignore how the (younger, more diverse) primary electorate had voted and picked a pro-war candidate instead. This led to literal riots on the streets after the Democratic Convention. This is not a good system, which is why they got r. Allowing party bosses to pick the candidate reinforces existing power structures, suppresses new ideas, and (most importantly) decreases the overall legitimacy of the system.
Yes, the current system has flaws, but so did the previous system. Trying to fix the flaws system of today by embracing the flawed system of yesterday is a terrible idea.
MORE PARTY DEMOCRACY FOR LESS PARTY CHOICE
None of this is to claim the current system does not have flaws. I think Ward is correct at pointing out that, in the last 50 years, parties have moved toward greater and greater democratic party control and this has weakened political parties’ ability to remain unified, disciplined, and cohesive.
However, he fails to recognize that while parties have grown internally weaker, America’s two main political parties have grown much stronger at boxing out competitors over the last 100 years. America’s first-past-the-post political system has always been naturally biased against third parties, who can act as spoilers in close competitions. However, after the flourishing of third parties around the turn of the 20th century, the nation’s two main political parties began putting in place election laws that limited competition by restricting third parties’ ability to ever even make it onto the ballot, and thus limited them from making their case to the voters.[2] 100 years ago, an organization like The Grange was able to thrive and (through external competition) move the Democratic Party to the left. Under today’s election laws, it is unfathomable that an organization like The Grange could even come into existence.
In light of the heavy legal reinforcing of our political duopoly, voters who do not fit comfortably in either of the two main political parties in the U.S. have two options: A) push for greater reforms so the party can become more representative of their interests — which is what I believe happened in 1968 and is continuing to happen today with the reduction of superdelegates and other elements of party control, or B) attempt to take over one of the two main political parties — which is what I believe happened in 2016 with Donald Trump. [3]
I also don’t think the author is completely wrong when he says that a "less directly democratic system, with stronger parties, would represent more people rather than less." I think this can be true, and Europe has perfect examples of what such a system looks like. Many European countries that use the "party list" model of electing representatives. Those countries have much stronger parties, and the people have much weaker democratic control over the internal functioning of those parties.
However, in return, the people have a real choice over which party they want to support. If they do not what party leaders are doing, they can leave and support any number of parties without feeling like they are losing their voice. In the United States, people have only two parties to choose from — and for progressive Americans, less than that. Vote Democrat, or risk a horrible outcome like Trump. When people are given limited options, they are going to try to make those options better. That is all the Democratic Party reformers are trying to do.
I think that if the author wants stronger political parties, then he should advocate for election laws that elicit more multi-party competition. Reformers would not need to agitate for a more democratic control over the Democratic Party if they had more choice. If parties are “the greatest instruments for organizing elections, turning out voters, running government, and developing policy ideas and seeing them enacted that we’ve ever produced,” then let's have more of them! [4]
RATHER THAN MORE DEMOCRACY OR LESS DEMOCRACY, WHY NOT BETTER DEMOCRACY?
This leads to what I feel is the biggest flaw in the piece: The author implies that this is a black and white choice, more party democracy and chaos, or less party democracy and order.
That’s just not true. We can change the rules and allow for the legitimacy of small-d democratic control while still allowing for the "wisdom" of party leaders to influence the process. Just this week, Maine's Supreme Court announced it was allowing one of those reforms to go ahead: ranked choice voting.
Ranked Choice Voting allows groups with intense preferences to seriously shift the outcome, but at the same time makes it very difficult for a candidate who is strongly preferred by a sizable minority to win if he/she is disliked by the majority. In ranked choice voting system "a demagogue who ha[s] lots of money and fame, but not much credibility or qualifications" might win a plurality (as Trump did) of first round votes, but would struggle to win an outright majority. Those party insiders who can "see through" bad candidates, would still be able to voice the intensity of their opposition by ranking a candidate like Trump last and/or convincing other groups to do the same. It is a reform that would allow for more democratic party control, without failures the author is so concerned about.
Rather than hem and haw about political reforms, let’s think broadly about how to make those reforms work. We’re not going back to the old, broken way of doing things. At the same time, barring a major political shift, we’re not going to have a multi-party democracy anytime soon. Our best option (even with the risks!) is democratic party reform. Instead of fighting it, let’s do it right.
[1] He does not address the fact that if American democracy was more (small-d) democratic in other ways, for example, if there was no electoral college, Trump would not be President either. He in fact, wishes the electoral college was even less democratic, going as far to refer to original design of the electoral college as being “a ‘rigged system’ in a positive sense,”in that it made “sure ‘the people’ did not have too much say over who would govern them.” Why is that positive? Not sure.
[2] This flourishing, in turn, was brought about by earlier democratic reforms which weakened the nation’s main parties’ ability to keep their voters from turning third party: the widespread adoption of the secret ballot and the reduction of the party patronage system --- both of which did not occur around until the around the turn of the 20th century (!). Parties could no longer use the stick of social stigma to shame people for voting the “wrong” way (because they no longer knew how people voted) nor could they use the carrot of patronage (because the civil service was professionalized). For a relatively contemporaneous view of this trend, see the Columbia Law Review Article, Limitations on Access to the General Election Ballot, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1116953.
[3] In a multi-party system, Trump voters could have fractured the GOP and formed their own far-right nationalist party (which is happening in many places all over Europe). The rise of these far-right parties is bad, but at least in a multi-party system other parties can come together to oppose the far-right, rather than allowing them to take over the government.
[4] I know it would not be easy to reform our election laws so drastically. Still, I think it is probably more realistic to think about transitioning to a multi-party system than to think American voters would accept being denied both internal control over political parties (which is where political parties are moving in the U.S.) and a real choice between those parties (like in a party-list system).