POLITICS
Politics might already be factional, which calls for a different reform approach
A reflection on the Boston Review’s “We Need More Parties” forum
As a student of how electoral-system change happens, I read the Boston Review’s recent essay collection, “We Need More Parties,” with great interest.
It weighs the merits of several responses to a widely held view that the party system is out of step with the preferences of most Americans. These responses include: proceeding with reforms in the vein of nonpartisan ranked-choice (Danielle Allen), embracing ballot fusion instead (Lee Drutman, Tabatha Abu El-Haj), using proportional representation federally to break the major parties into factions that might recombine in ‘better’ ways (Lee Drutman, Grant Tudor & Cerin Lindgrensavage), twinning fusion with community organizing (Deepak Bhargava & Arianna Jiménez, Maurice Mitchell & Doran Schrantz), twinning it with stronger unions (Bob Master), uniting behind one of the major parties (Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld), sidestepping parties with reforms to promote citizen deliberation (Josh Lerner), prioritizing policies that might rebuild civil society (Joel Rogers), and having congressional leaders nominate candidates (Ian Shapiro). I will focus on the electoral-system reforms.
And, I argue that reforms most likely to help are least likely to get adopted, those less likely to help are more likely to get adopted, and these conjectures flow from an underappreciated possibility: the doom loop already has broken. Making this argument involves acknowledging that candidates want to win — they are ambitious — and that can be at odds with with a policy-based coalition’s interest in winning control of government.
Doom loop already broken?
The essays focused on electoral reform proceed from an assumption that polarization is too high. What this means is that — at least among elites — liberals can no longer be found among Republicans, and conservatives can no longer be found among Democrats. A slightly different view, also reflected in the volume, is that the parties have sorted on matters of ‘social identity’ while converging on ‘neoliberal’ economic positions. In either case, and as others have said in many ways, non-economic issues have come to do as much if not more than economic ones in structuring national-level party politics.
I am not so sure that polarization or even social-issues realignment has calcified the parties. Late in 2017, I began using the Voter Study Group dataset to examine what was happening inside the party coalitions. One of the resulting research notes probed whether the 2016 election met criteria implied by a popular theory of realignment.
My answer was yes.
Social issues had gone up in salience since 2012, economic ones had gone down, people who switched vote choice tended not to have changed their views on the survey items I analyzed, and the party coalitions were more internally divided on economics as a result. So far, all of this is consistent with either form of polarization above.
Not consistent with a polarization story is a set of plots in the paper’s appendix, one of which appears below. These seemed to show two different party systems existing alongside each other. Most voters did not switch the party whose presidential candidate they chose, and so for that group, the overall battle line reflected the same mix of social and economic positions that divided it in 2012. What about those who did switch? Their battle line was more social in content than it had been four years earlier.
In other words, vote switching might have given us a new “four-party system,” borrowing a phrase from Lee Drutman (2020). This observation is consistent with results from Jon Green that a group of voters was “floating” between the parties and could go either way depending on how those parties presented themselves with respect to salient issues. If the factions must be named, we might call them: liberals, conservatives, fiscally conservative social liberals, and fiscally liberal social conservatives. This naming scheme is an oversimplification but helps to make the point.
Another short paper I did with Joshua J. Dyck basically confirmed the existence and electoral import of four factions. We added questions on attitudes toward ‘elites’ and government’s responsiveness to ‘everyday’ people. Doing this produced a space with two dimensions: liberal-conservative and pro/anti-institutional. (I use the word “institutional” because it is becoming the conventional label for this issue dimension.) Those who say they supported Trump or Sanders in the 2016 primaries tended to show up in the anti-institutional part of the graph, then on right or left as appropriate to the primary in which they voted. Later work by Rachel Porter and Sarah A. Treul is consistent with the idea that ‘populist’ factions have been fielding candidates to Congress at greater rates in recent years.
Electoral reform in the new “four-party system”
When one surveys the landscape of where reforms are happening in practice, the picture that emerges is one of specifically local responses to already-factional politics — not a coordinated effort to break up the national parties. For example, Alaska has adopted no-nominations ranked-choice voting (RCV) mainly to hold together a preexisting coalition of Democrats and old-line Republicans in the face of MAGA insurgency. New York City’s version preserves the nominating primary and eschews RCV for the general election.
This can be interpreted as an effort to hold together an increasingly fractious Democratic Party, facing both quasi-socialist insurgency and calls for further reforms to facilitate electoral coalitions that straddle major-party lines. Other adoptions, such as one that recently occurred in Portland (OR), flow from a desire among political newcomers for literal seats at the table. The point is that prominent electoral reforms seem more a response to than a cause of multi-faction politics.
If the goal of reform, broadly speaking, is to manage rather than induce multi-faction politics, it makes sense to ask which reforms are more or less likely to work. By “work” I mean: generates a majority winner in a single-seat election.
In sorting through the reforms on offer, I find it helpful to ask the following question: does this electoral system put candidate ambition at odds or in concert with the interest of a latent majority coalition in securing control of government? Another way to ask the question is: would this reform reliably generate majorities if all four factions were fielding their own candidates?
Although I see value in fusion as a complement to PR for executive offices (and U.S. Senate), I am skeptical of any single-seat reform’s ability to square the ambition problem. The 800-lb. gorilla in ranked-choice-voting land is not ranking choices, possibly at the behest of candidates who think they can win with small vote shares in divided fields. (Hence, perhaps, why some candidates are backing out in Alaska.) Approval voting presents the same issue and does not give the option to register what RCV supporters call a “backup choice.” Fusion’s solution to ambition is to try to squelch it: multiple parties get behind a single candidate. Even here, however, ambitious lone wolves still might run (e.g., as independents), putting us back into a world where ‘too many’ people contest just one seat.
I know less about deliberative democracy, but it does not seem to contain a mechanism for managing the ambition of people who want political careers.
Reform that might work but without much chance of passage
So far, I have argued that we may already be in a situation of multi-factional politics — an “age of fragmentation” to borrow from legal scholar Rick Pildes. I also have suggested that fragmentation is propelling electoral reform, not the other way around. And I have suggested that the ‘single-seat’ reforms on offer might not be as effective as we hope in managing the factionalism. What now?
One way forward would be to create incentives for ambition and factionalism alike to find expression via parties. These could be the major parties, existing minor parties, or maybe even new parties (consistent with several essays in the forum) . Part of such an exercise would be signaling to factional candidates that there is room for them in government: assembly-size expansion. Another part would find reforms that are less sensitive to large numbers of candidates: party-list elections. Without going into too much detail, party-list systems ensure that a vote for a candidate also is a vote for the party as a whole. This mechanism, known among political scientists as “vote pooling,” represents one way to square candidate ambition with an underlying coalition’s interest in getting control of government — AKA not spoiling itself. Pooling lets a party run as many candidates as it wants.
So, I have argued once again for list proportional representation, and I have derived a case for larger legislatures. Can these things ever happen? Elsewhere I have argued that American addiction to nonpartisan elections closes off list PR, at least for adoption via initiative and referendum. Few want to vote for a measure that can be painted as “good for parties” — maybe. As for adoption by incumbents, “strengthens parties” is less of a problem. Here, the bigger issue could be disagreement about what mix of issues should define the party system that comes next. That disagreement makes people squeamish about two things: expanding representation and committing to one or another political party.
