Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have almost nothing in common, except that each\u00a0campaign is now struggling with\u00a0its\u00a0respective party over the rules for selecting and binding delegates. Google News finds\u00a0these recent headlines: “Trump backers: ‘There will be war’ over disputed delegates,” “Superdelegate system favors Hillary Clinton, say Bernie Sanders voters”–and more than 100,000 more.<\/p>\n
Many\u00a0people will take a\u00a0side in this argument depending on who they want to win the nomination.\u00a0They don’t necessarily have an opinion about parties in general. But some Sanders and Trump voters may believe–as a general principle–that the major parties should play very limited\u00a0roles. That stance is consistent with other aspects of their candidates’ general worldviews. In that case,\u00a0they will have principled (not\u00a0merely tactical) reasons to\u00a0want to strip the\u00a0parties of discretion.<\/p>\n
There are at least two general and current theories of political parties in the US.<\/p>\n
On the\u00a0older\u00a0view, a party is an association in civil society. It is entitled to organize itself according to its own rules, and people will join\u00a0if they agree or can stay away if they don’t. Like all associations, a party should consider\u00a0rules that empower its leaders and core members over casual participants. For one thing,\u00a0associations want to reward dedicated service.\u00a0One reason that Democrats have Superdelegates is to make sure that their most devoted members–the ones who have given lots of time to the party itself–can attend and vote at the Convention. Second, like other associations, a party can select individuals\u00a0to be trustees of its long-term interests. In acting as trustees, the leaders are empowered to check\u00a0majorities to protect\u00a0what\u00a0they consider the best interests of the association. So Republican Rules Committee members who block Trump can argue that they are protecting the GOP.<\/p>\n
On the newer\u00a0view, the parties simply manage the first stage of a two-stage electoral process. In the\u00a0US, we could<\/em> use nonpartisan general elections<\/a> in which all qualified candidates appeared together on the ballot. But then, in most elections, no one would get a majority, and we’d either have to organize a run-off election for the two top vote-getters or allow a person with well under 50% of the vote to take office. Instead, we structure elections so that people first have to compete within one party, and then the parties’ nominees square off in November, producing (usually) a clear winner. Insofar as this\u00a0is simply a mechanism for organizing a two-stage election, the parties are responsible to the whole public for managing an open, equitable process. The candidate\u00a0with the most primary votes should always win each party’s primary, and probably the primary should be open to anyone regardless of party registration. That allows any citizen to exercise an equal right to vote in a two-stage election.<\/p>\n Note that the second theory would be appealing to anyone who holds\u00a0the view of the American Framers or French republican revolutionaries–that parties are odious factions that shouldn’t really exist at all. If parties evolve into highly regulated means for managing two-stage elections, they will\u00a0cease to be factions, in the bad sense. But then\u00a0it would be odd that in addition to managing one stage of our election system, they are also expected to campaign for candidates and issues.<\/p>\n The theory of parties as voluntary associations sustained a heavy–and well-deserved–blow when the Supreme Court made a series of rulings against discriminatory practices within\u00a0the Democratic Party. The Texas party, for instance, had restricted primary voting to whites on the basis that it was a private association devoted to white supremacy. Thurgood Marshall argued successfully against that rule\u00a0in\u00a0Smith v Allwright <\/em>(1944), in which the Court found:<\/p>\n The United States is a constitutional democracy. Its organic law grants to all citizens a right to participate in the choice of elected officials without restriction by any state because of race. \u00a0This grant to the people of the opportunity for choice is not to be nullified by a state through casting its electoral process in a form which permits a private organization to practice racial discrimination in the election.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That was only one of a long series of cases, and I am not\u00a0well informed about all the constitutional issues. However, I think that Smith v Allright<\/em> is\u00a0consistent with both theories of parties that I outlined above.\u00a0One reading of the case is that parties are private associations that can make their own rules; they just cannot discriminate on the basis of race (or other constitutionally relevant characteristics that may\u00a0arise in other cases). An alternative\u00a0reading is that the parties now fulfill\u00a0a state function in our “constitutional democracy,” and\u00a0they must fully honor the equal\u00a0rights of\u00a0all voters. Then any rule or practice that stands in the way of open primaries and majority rule would be unconstitutional.<\/p>\n The courts have not gone so far as reach that second conclusion.\u00a0What we have in practice is a hybrid. Parties are voluntary associations in civil society that are allowed\u00a0to protect their own interests and favor their core members. Yet they are seen as performing an essential function for\u00a0the democracy as a whole and must honor democratic principles. That means there is room for constant debate about party rules, and the disagreement is not just about who should be nominated but also about what kind of thing a party should be.<\/p>\n See also my article from last week, “The waning influence of American political\u00a0parties,” in The Conversation<\/a> and in US News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have almost nothing in common, except that each\u00a0campaign is now struggling with\u00a0its\u00a0respective party over the rules for selecting and binding delegates. Google News finds\u00a0these recent headlines: “Trump backers: ‘There will be war’ over disputed delegates,” “Superdelegate system favors Hillary Clinton, say Bernie Sanders voters”–and more than 100,000 more. Many\u00a0people will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16668"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16681,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668\/revisions\/16681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}