I’m glad to say that in the last election cycle, we rejected that conventional wisdom. We elected a Republican mayor. It turns out that once enough people reject the self-fulfilling prophecy, it stops self-fulfilling. If no candidates will run as an X because they believe that party Y has it sewn up, of COURSE party Y has it sewn up. The answer isn’t that Xs should participate in the Y primary. The answer is that Xs should reject the silly and harmful conventional wisdom and work to elect an X.

Nancy – as well they should have been. If they don’t want to be part of a party, they shouldn’t have a say in selecting the party’s nominee. And if they want a say in the party’s nominee, they should join the party. Voters get to participate fully in the general election, and those who don’t want to join a party are welcome to do so.

I will have to look up the case, I can’t imagine what credible basis they have for the challenge described at your link.

WJ,
So far as I can tell, California has two particular non-institutional problems (a feckless GOP that can’t seem to comprehend the demographic realities of their state, and a feckless population that votes Democratic no matter what) that you’re trying to fix with an institutional solution. I don’t think it’ll work, and I think it’ll do harm. (Of course, California has a LOT of problems, not just those.)

Nick,
I’m pretty sure that there are specific examples, but I don’t have time to look them up, and even if I did, they aren’t really essential to my point. It’s sufficient that the institutional configuration of those countries makes it an entirely plausible outcome. I don’t want to get bogged down in what is essentially a side point.

Your point about intraparty multiplicity is well-taken, and it does pose obvious difficulties for the information-conveying value of party labels. (So too do public acts of apostasy, a la Bush, Frist, etc.)

And I agree with you about so-called independents who have never actually voted for members of both parties on occasion. They’re probably kidding themselves. But would your hypothetical so-called independent who had never actually voted for a republican like say Olympia Snowe vote for her if she was in a 3rd party comprising some set of quasi- independent politicians? I think the answer could quite possibly be yes under the right circumstances.

there is no possibility of one “truly viable 3rd party,” for a number of reasons.

Well, you love bright lines and absolutes, Simon. Here’s the thing…I agree with you that there are lots of powerful reasons why 2-party dominance endures and independent efforts wither. But that’s a chasm away from the notion that “it could never happen.” If both of the 2 existing parties went strongly towards their bases, or if one party had enough acrimony to split, a 3rd party could quite possibly emerge. And there’s no guarantee that one half of the split party would have to die out, even if that whig track is a possibility.

@WHQ: I feel that any “strong” libertarian wing in the GOP is always going to be doomed to being less equal (a la Animal Farm) than the social conservatives. So trying to work within the GOP as a libertarian is always going to mean being the less favored…permanently neutered IOW. No spreading seed. Libertarianism can’t ever truly flourish in the GOP as long as social conservatives are seen as the party’s true base.

I really like small-L Libertarians, the ones who aren’t real kooks about having a tiny government and hardly any regulations and all drugs legal and so on. My sense of human nature is that we just aren’t, by and large, good enough to handle that much freedom. But sensible small-L libertarians are not going to have a comfy home in either party. In the GOP, they get the back seat to socons. In the Democratic party, they get the back seat to politically correct scolds who want cap and trade, speech codes, junk food taxes, and so on.

I would rather have a party than a faction, factions don’t get air time during debates, smaller factions don’t get higher ranking members, factions are stuck being associated with bigots or irresponsible people.

They only major downside I see in proportional is that you don’t elect your leaders, your party does.

As for party multiplicity keep in mind that the major US parties function a lot like an Israeli coalition government. When the GOP has a House of Congress there’s a Libertarian-branch, a Social Conservative Branch, and a Business Branch. The Dems have a black faction, Blue Dogs, Labor, Greens, etc. You’re seeing that in the Health Care debate, where Pelosi only got 50.5% of the House votes because she couldn’t assuage all of the party’s factions and Reid is having a devil of a time getting all his people to vote for cloture.

So IMO we have all the practical problems caused by a multiplicity of parties, but as we technically don’t have all those parties most people don’t know it.

BTW, actual Westminster systems never have coalition governments. Some have minority governments, but those governments are not dependent on the will of any single other party. You may mean Parliamentary systems in general.

If anyone can come up with a practical, workable plan to get rid of gerrymandering here, I’ll support it vigorously. But I don’t see any sign of that.

Frank,
I have a lurking suspicion that many of those who complani about the process are actually dissatisfied with the result. If the process isn’t producing candidates that they like, they conclude that the system must be defective.

KK,
Respectfully, there is no possibility of one “truly viable 3rd party,” for a number of reasons. For one thing, parties can’t exist without a nucleus of common policy beliefs. The idea of independents “caucus[ing]” to “sketch out a good common ground that makes them sound like a real alternative” strikes me as deeply unrealistic: The people in that category do not have a common ground. Those who are truly independent are so precisely because they reject precisely the kind of dogmatic position-staking required for it. Is there really enough common ground between someone who left the GOP because it was too statist, and someone who left the Democratic party because it wasn’t statist enough, to build the keep of a party, let alone its ramparts?

What’s more, there are more soi-disant Independents than there are actual independents. My experience has been that most people who call themselves independents are far more committed to the conceit of their independence than they are to any substantive policy positions. I’ve met people who have voted straight ticket Democrat since the 1970s, who haven’t voted for a Republican in any non-municipal race at any time in their lives. They aren’t independents, and we should not indulge them their conceit. They’re Democrats. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) But since they disclaim that reality vocally, we should perhaps term them capital-i Independents: since they have no serious disagreement with the Democratic party yet reject association with it, we can conclude that what really matters to them is believing that they aren’t the kind of people to be in a party—an issue more properly in the realm of psychology than political strategy.

And even if it was formed and met with some success, American history suggests that it would be torn to shreds when the established parties appropriated first the essential planks of its platform, then the voters who liked those planks and only unhappily accepted the others.

WJ,
At most—granting, that is, the fiction that the democratic process is about obtaining a result you like rather than getting a say—that is an argument for dealing with gerrymandering, not for open primaries. I fully agree that gerrymandering is a serious problem; the fixing should be fixed. But like those who want a true runoff election, and instead propose open primaries as a substitute, I cannot understand why you would prefer to do immense harm something of great value in order to indirectly deal with the problem, when you could instead deal with the problem directly at no cost.

When it comes to re-establishing a strong libertarian wing in the GOP, that feels to me like opting for permanent neutering.

kk, I’m unclear on what you’re saying here. It seems at odds with the rest of your comment, or at least it doesn’t seem to fit.

I do harbor some libertarian tendencies in the sense of being liberally socially and in favor of fiscal sanity and some limits to government. But when it comes to the lib party, seems like the kooks rule the roost. When it comes to re-establishing a strong libertarian wing in the GOP, that feels to me like opting for permanent neutering. By far the most vocal and to me irritating faction in the GOp is the socons. Under currrent circumstances, I may on occasion vote for a REpublican if I am sure that they can’t do any damage to social liberty. But I could never voluntarily join with a party that includes so many folks eager to dictate personal choices in social matters.

I’m not gay, but I have had many gay friends and colleagues over the years. And I find the proud anti-gay strand among GOP so-cons not just reprehensible, but a total waste of time and energy. I have an extremely difficult time stomaching what I perceive to be very inhumane perspectives undertaken in the name of things like faith and tradition. If I join a party, it won’t include such closed-minded folks.

I don’t care what their rationalizations are. I respect their points of view as genuine and heartfelt. Yet I find their PoVs inaccessible to reason, so I don’t see the point in debating with or partying with them.

A GOP platform with a strong Libertarian bent would certainly be less to your liking than the actual LP’s platform, but the LP just doesn’t have the clout to get implement it’s platform. IIRC they have a semi-sensible plan to get more clout — the Free State Project wants tens of thousands of Libertarian activists to move to New Hampshire, and if that actually happens they’ll be a major force in the State Legislature.

But the rest of the third parties are still wasting their time on vanity candidacies. No matter how great your activist buddy is he’s not gonna go from activist in random third party to double digits in the Michigan Governor’s race. He might be able to win a State House seat without spending much money (they’re only 100,000 or so people in Michigan, and that’s about the maximum size district you can win simply by walking around and talking to voters), but not the Governor’s race.

Pathetic, but typical.

Ralph Nader did the best with .56% of the vote. Bob Barr, Chuck Baldwin and Cynthia McKinney were all under .40% of the vote. Ralph Nader qualified for federal matching funds, so he received $411,000 of your money for his sure-to-lose campaign.

Like Kranky, I’m more in the libertarian camp socially, but I’d rather work to see the libertarian wing of the Republican party gain more control than try and make the Libertarian Party viable.

(In Europe, by contrast, whose legislatures often have myriad parties and thus coalition governments, an extremist party whose views command the support of the barest fraction of the population may nevertheless obtain significant leverage by virtue of holding hostage a vote essential to the coalition’s grip on power. The combination of the westminster system with a mutiplicity of parties is truly poisonous.)

AFAIK this does not happen in any Westminster System countries. It happens in Israel, but the Israelis do not use major elements of the Westminster System such as Responsible Government — that all Cabinet Ministers are elected from as specific district, so that all Ministers are responsible to both the public and their political boss, the Prime Minister. They certainly do not have a Black Rod, or a Parliamentary Mace.

It should be noted that Responsible Government implies single-member districts (referred to as ridings), and thus true Westminster systems usually have a two-party system, with several smaller (frequently regional) parties.

Who were you thinking of?

Parties devote substantial resources to making their names trusted symbols of certain approaches to governance.

If it’s really so important for the parties to exclude folks who might pollute their brand, then let them do so on their own dime. And that’s what Scalia’s argument boils down to, some party right to protect their ideological brand from pollution.

If parties want to run these primaries on the taxpayer dole, then whatever brand pollution ensues is a more than reasonable tax on the parties unwillingness to pay their own way.

The great value of the two party system is its tendency to exclude the extremes from power.

So? If we had open primaries, would this great value be substantially diminished, or would the extremes be excluded? One could argue that the extremes might be excluded even more effectively. A 2-party system with open primaries could conceivably exclude the extremes not only from power, but from dominating the public dialogue as they often do now.

And we don’t know that establishing a 3rd party with substantial power would necessarily lead to the sort of complete balkanization that other countries experience.

It is true, though, that I’m a partisan not only of one party over another (a fair charge), but also of of the two party system against third or myriad more parties. And as is pertinent here, of parties against non-parties. Who, who has thought about it, could be for abolishing parties?

The great value of the two party system is its tendency to exclude the extremes from power. (In Europe, by contrast, whose legislatures often have myriad parties and thus coalition governments, an extremist party whose views command the support of the barest fraction of the population may nevertheless obtain significant leverage by virtue of holding hostage a vote essential to the coalition’s grip on power. The combination of the westminster system with a mutiplicity of parties is truly poisonous.) The great value of parties is to allow more-or-less ideologically cohesive groups of citizens to work together, aggregating and coordinating the use of time, money, and other resources in service of a mutually-agreed political agenda. This has a democracy-enhancing function: people are more likely to be politically engaged if they feel that they can make a difference, and parties provide a vehicle for those aspirations.

Can these functions be performed by necessarily ad hoc campaigns associated with independents? Yes. But only to an extent, and not so efficiently. And not for the sustained periods required to implement a long-term agenda, either.

The biggest problem with open primaries is their effect on these functions. Consider what Justice Scalia said in Washington State Grange, supra:

A political party’s expressive mission is not simply, or even primarily, to persuade voters of the party’s views. Parties seek principally to promote the election of candidates who will implement those views. That is achieved in large part by marking candidates with the party’s seal of approval. Parties devote substantial resources to making their names trusted symbols of certain approaches to governance. They then encourage voters to cast their votes for the candidates that carry the party name. Parties’ efforts to support candidates by marking them with the party trademark, so to speak, have been successful enough to make the party name, in the words of one commentator, “the most important resource that the party possesses.” And all evidence suggests party labels are indeed a central consideration for most voters.

(Citations omitted.) This function of parties expands the ability of rationally ignorant voters to participate in government, and it too is thus democracy-enhancing. (N.b., rationally ignorant voters. We would all be better off if voters who are simply ignorant declined to be voters at all.) And it is undermined by open primaries.

In this matter, we deal with almost the inverse of Washington State Grange. In that case, the court considered the effect on parties if the state facilitated the ability of individuals to associate themselves with a party on the ballot. In the case of the open primary, all the concerns raised by Justice Scalia in the passage just quoted are implicated in a different way: the concern is that if people who are not members of the party can participate in the selection process, the party’s imprimatur is compromised. With a closed primary, the Democrat who knows in great detail her views on issues and policy, but who is not so familiar with the down-ballot candidates (i.e. she is rationally ignorant but not at all ignorant), can participate meaningfully in the election and vote for the Democratic candidates, knowing that those candidates have survived a screening process provided by other like-minded Democrats. (Hence, if the reader will recall the various resource aggregation functions provided by parties that I mentioned above, this one falls under the head of time aggregation, in a manner similar to labor specialization.) But while we might observe that an open primary merely compromises rather than destroys outright this valuable function, the qualification should not obscure the observation’s central concession: the open primary does compromise or undermine this valuable function.

To be clear, I have nothing against independents running as exceptions to a broader two-party framework. But society can tolerate (indeed, benefit from) many things that exist as aberrations that would be thoroughly poisonous and unassimilable as normal activities. That the rule has (or will bear, or even will be strengthened by) the making of exceptions does not mean that those exceptions should become the accepted norm. Logrolling, for instance, may grease the skids of a particularly thorny legislative challenge, and have societal utility (a fortiori when done sub rosa) but it should not be accepted as a norm. Likewise, to deem as a boon the ability of candidates to run as exceptions the two party system is not to say that the normal situation is valueless.

Lastly, while it does not follow that taxpayer funding provides taxpayer right of access—see how far that argument gets you in accessing at the nearest restricted-access but taxpayer-funded military base!—it is reasonable to say that if primaries are to be closed affairs, why should the state pay for them at all? It would not be obliged to do so, to be sure. But it should anyway. While the benefits to society of a stable two-party system are positive externalities rather than the direct intent of the party in selecting its nominee, they are still very public goods that far outweigh the trivial cost of running an election.