Is the Cajun Primary the Answer?
By The comments to my Anarchy in the UK post on Thursday spawned an interesting discussion surrounding the cause of polarized politics in the CA state legislature. While I agree the damning variable that impedes compromise is the 2/3 rule for budgetary measures, I still maintain that closed primaries tend to produce candidates to the left or right of the party support writ large. There’s heaps of poli sci literature on this: the composition of a primary electorate is more engaged, and more ideological, on average, than either the support for either party in general, or the general electorate, thus you’re more likely (not always, but more likely) to get candidates more ideologically inclined than the general party support.
While I was reading my new Economist on Saturday (when my 2 yr 8 month old daughter would let me, that is) I was pleasantly surprised to see an article on the Washington State primary system (and the article juxtaposed the WA system against the mess in CA, which isn’t sporting). WA used to have a blanket primary, which is the system I grew up with: no party registration, vote for a single candidate for each office, and the top vote getters from each party proceeded to the general election. That is, until California adopted a similar system, which was in turn torpedoed by the USSC in California Democratic Party v Jones in 2000. As collateral damage, that case also stuck down the system used in WA and Alaska.
Washington would not be deterred, and wide opposition existed against a closed primary used in ’04. The resulting system results from the passage of I-872 in 2004, and was first used in 2008 (I believe — I now vote in the ‘Democrats Abroad’ primary; hey, we get seven entire delegates to the convention man, which I think puts us somewhere between Guam and the American Samoa in terms of influence). It’s very similar to the Louisiana system (insert gratuitous comment about the suitability of taking pointers on political systems from said state) in that the top two vote getters proceed to the general election, regardless of party. In theory, this should reduce the chances of ideological outlier candidates, as it creates an incentive for moderation.
I-872 was tossed by the 9th Circuit, but upheld by the USSC in 2008. Having essentially grown up in WA, and considering my normative view that elections ought to reflect the policy preferences of the electorate as closely as possible, I find much merit in such a system. However, a legitimate question regarding the role of parties in this process remains. In the UK, candidates standing for Parliament are selected by their party, not the electorate. The same is true in the NL, where I used to live; a candidate’s ordinal placement on the party list is a function of the party leadership. In the US, the closed primary is the norm, thus limiting candidate selection to a declared subset of the electorate. In WA, the party hardly matters.
