On Monday I sounded off about the relationship between Ron Paul and the Republican Party. My argument was that the fact that such a "bad" Republican like Ron Paul could maintain his position in the party is a sign that the party itself lacks mechanisms to manage its brand identity.

I received a lot of email from Paul supporters. Most of them argued some variant of the proposition that Paul is the only true Republican - and George Bush and the "neocons" are the cheaters. This is all well and good - but this is not what I was on about. I was not speaking in normative terms - hence the consistent use of scare quotes. You can argue that the Republican Party has become corrupted, and Paul is the only pure one left - but all you are doing is changing the adjectives around. What matters is that Paul diverges greatly from the caucus average, and that the caucus lacks the power to keep Paul in line - thus, it has trouble establishing a brand. So, I was not assigning moral blame.

Furthermore, I was not arguing that Paul is the major contributor to the problem of establishing a GOP brand. I used him only as an example because he is in the news a lot. Personally, I think that more damage has been done to the Republican Party brand by George W. Bush.

This brings me to my final point of clarification. Paul's supporters also argued that George W. Bush and the Republican caucus are the ones who have strayed from what they promised they would do, and that they are the ones to blame. I agree - so much so that on Monday I made this exact argument! The caucus lacks the power to induce members to enact what the party promised during the last campaign. Hence, it has trouble maintaining a brand.

With that digression now ended, I want to continue working through the ideas I began on Monday. I'd like to offer some tentative thoughts on how we can induce more responsibility from our governing party. How can we get the party to make coherent campaign promises on the vital issues of the day, and then actually deliver on those promises if electoral victory is obtained.

Ultimately, the Constitution itself prevents the full realization of responsible party government. One of the most obvious impediments is staggered elections. This has created a problem for Democrats - in the person of George W. Bush. He was elected in 2004 when the public had a very different view of matters - and that old view has thwarted the Democrats' attempts to translate the new view into policy. Old electoral returns are "sticky" in our system. A single election will not necessarily undue an old governing majority. That is what happens when a House seat is up every two years, a Senate seat is up every six years, and the presidency is up every four years.

Another impediment to responsibility is the geographical basis of representation. A Democratic legislator from Georgia may be acting according to the state party's wishes and against the national party's wishes at the same time - in which case, it becomes difficult to identify whether he is being responsible or not. So, when we talk about responsibility, we are talking about increasing party responsibility given the nature of our system of government. The goal should be a system that is responsible relative to the current one. So, with this in mind, how to we increase party responsibility?

There are, as best I can tell, two general ways to do this. On the one hand, you could increase the power that the legislative caucus leadership has over rank-and-file party legislators. On the other hand, you could increase the power that the party organization - defined however you'd like - has over the legislators. You could also do both. I think that empowering the party organization is more viable and more desirable. It also happens to be within my domain of professional knowledge (at least more so than the organization of Congress). So, that is what I am going to discuss today. Let's modifiy the question. How do we empower the party organization to induce legislators to be responsible to the electorate?

Obviously, this question is more of a concern for Democrats than Republicans these days. The Democrats are the ones who now have to govern. Unsurprisingly, you'll find Democratic activists in the blogosophere struggling with the question.

Matt Stoller comes instantly to mind. He has been advocating that the netroots begin to tend to wayward Democratic legislators. He wants to monitor a set of congressmen whom he calls "Bush Dog Democrats," and he wants to make more use of the primary - to take the Ned Lamont prototype and mass produce it. This is basically a way to induce partisan responsibility. The underlying logic of his thesis - which is encapsulated here and here - is that if Democrats face a significant threat from the party base, they will be much more likely to be "good" Democrats when they are in office. Thus, the party as a whole will be better able to make clear promises in the electoral campaign, and it will be more likely to fulfill those promises once control of government has been acquired.

Over on another corner of this site, Kevin Sullivan has labeled this kind of activity "purging." I disagree with Kevin's word choice here - or at least with what his choice of words implies, which is something unjust and undemocratic. I view the activity of monitoring and potentially punishing wayward Democratic legislators as something perfectly just and highly democratic. The only way that the Democrats are going to do what they promised as a party they would do is if they have control over their wayward members.

Now - Stoller is a partisan Democrat. And regular readers of mine know that I am far from that. But I would argue that both Republican and Democratic activists have an interest in increasing party responsibility. So, I think there is some common ground to be found here. We can disagree on substance, but agree on process.

I certainly think we can all agree that this is a tricky problem, and that it probably contributed to the end of the GOP majority. I talked about this earlier in the week. The Republicans never changed any of our democratic institutions - and so, incumbents were left free to do as they wished. Unsurprisingly, most of the promises they made in 1994 were eventually sacrificed for the sake of electoral expediency. Indeed, it was never my impression that GOP activists put much thought into institutional reforms - at least after they stopped talking about term limits. Today, the laments of GOP activists often seem to me to be reducible to the "great man" theory of politics: "Why oh why did a new Reagan not emerge to maintain the revolution? When oh when will our next Reagan come to restart the revolution?" Republicans would have been much better off had they instead taken Madison's view of things: "Reagan blazed a trail for us. But we can't always depend upon a Reagan. How do we move forward on this trail, assuming that we have leaders who are distinctly less estimable than Reagan?"

Democrats like Stoller seem to be a step ahead - recognizing that our democratic institutions, being utilized as they are today, are not going to help achieve responsibility. Perhaps this is because the left does not at present have a folklore hero the way the right has Reagan. I do not know. I do think that the left is putting more thought into these types of questions than the right did during its time in control.

So, far from a purging, I see this essay by Stoller as an attempt to answer the type of questions that a new majority needs to answer if it wishes to be responsible.

Stoller suggests that Democrats reinvigorate the primary system. He identifies four positive consequences that a reinvigoratzed Democratic primary process would engender:

(1) It makes it easier for Democratic activists to be involved in party affairs.
(2) It gets more people involved in politics.
(3) It gives Democratic voters a voice in party affairs.
(4) It is a "check on calcification and corruption within the party."

I see all four of these being related to the concept of responsibility that I have been discussing on this blog. Stoller wants Democratic legislators to be responsive to the priorities of voters in their districts, to run for election promising to solve these problems, and then to solve those problems once victory has been obtained. His vision of the primary process is one that would engender mass participation among Democratic voters, and great responsiveness from Democratic candidates.

The problem with this, at least as I see it, is that it does not account fully for a necessary operating assumption about electoral politics: serious candidates for office are rational goal-seekers, and their goal is electoral victory.

If the strategy is to increase party responsibility by offering intra-party electoral challenges, you are going to need quality challengers. There is no other way around it. Only good candidates can invigorate elections. Stoller seems to agree with this point - but it seems that we disagree about whether quality challengers can emerge in a nominating process dominated by primaries. I do not think they can - at least in any kind of systemic fashion.

The reason I think this is reducible to a simple cost-benefit calculation that every quality challenger will conduct for himself. Quality challengers run because they are ambitious. They run to win, and they know that incumbents bring major advantages to any electoral contest, especially the primaries. They know that these advantages are so great that it is not worth the trouble. The costs outweigh the benefits.

In the primary, not only do incumbents have great financial benefits - they can also expect to have the party establishment behind them. The establishment will always prefer a partisan legislator who does not toe the party line to somebody from the opposition - just as it prefers an irresponsible majority to the minority. What is more, the establishment knows that incumbents, all things being equal, are more likely to win. So, the party establishment will almost never support the challenger. More than this - it may also attempt to quash serious opposition. Indeed, I have seen it happen. I have talked to "insurgent" candidates in state legislative races, party regulars who decided to take a shot at "jumping the line" and who, as a consequence of their insolence, were deprived of resources that they once had access to as members of the local party.

All of this has the effect of discouraging serious primary challengers. They want to win, they expect that they will not, so they do not run. It is a simple matter of costs versus benefits. You'll find exceptions here and there - but the cost-benefit calculation that a serious potential candidate conducts will almost invariably come out in the negative. Stoller identifies the cultural context of the primary as a principal barrier to a more robust set of challengers. I would agree that there is such a cultural context - that a primary challenge is just an "untoward" thing to do in our political culture - but even if these barriers are mitigated, the economics remain decisive.

Accordingly, I would encourage party reformers on both sides - Republicans who lament the irresponsibility of the GOP in the most recent Congresses, and Democrats who fear the same fate will befall them - to be more adventurous in their thinking, and not presume that the democratic mechanisms currently at their disposal will help them achieve responsibility. I don't think they will. Reformers should also be skeptical of the hidden assumption that the primary is the only truly democratic way to nominate party candidates - and all other mechanisms are less democratic. The primary system was not handed down to Moses by God on Mount Zion. It was a solution established at a particular point in time to deal with a particular set of problems. It may have outlived its usefulness.

Indeed, I think it has. One of the purposes of the primary system was to obliterate the power of the irresponsible machine parties. These were organizations that did indeed possess power, but used them not for the public good, but to provide supporters with personal benefits. The primary system undermined these old parties - and it certainly did us all a favor in that regard. But, it never created a responsible party. Instead, we have candidate controlled - or should I say incumbent controlled - electoral politics where hardly any incumbent gets a serious general election challenge, let alone a primary challenge.

What is needed is some kind of electoral mechanism that lowers the costs to both quality candidates and the party establishment. What we need is a situation in which serious candidates are more likely to think that a challenge of a "bad" incumbent is worth the effort, and a party establishment that does not believe that a successful primary challenge means a loss in November. Simply stated, we need to get the top tier candidates and the party leaders comfortable with challenging the louses in Congress.

At this point, I have not settled upon a solution to this problem - but the more I think about it, the more attracted I am to a return to the convention system. Now - if you are younger than 40, your idea of a convention is probably the silly, staged media event that the parties throw every year. If you are older than 40, you idea is probably something akin to Chicago '68. The former viewpoint is a consequence of public disgust with the latter viewpoint. Conventions were largely done away with because they had become the domain of plutocratic party leaders who imposed their will on the mass public.

But they were not meant to be that way. They were not the creation of plutocrats. They were co-opted by plutocrats. They were originally a product of the "revolution" led and inspired by one of America's greatest democrats (and first Democrat), Andrew Jackson. Their initial intention was to democratize the nomination of candidates, which was previously done by legislative caucuses. Personally, I think that the convention process could be revitalized, and it could move us toward responsibility. With an eye to the errors of the past - reformers could redesign the system to serve as a check against "calcified" incumbents.

What I would like to see is a convention system where party leaders, party workers, and party activists come together to nominate party candidates for state offices. A convention system could drastically reduce the cost of getting rid of a legislator who "cheats" the party. The cheater simply loses the floor vote, which is cast by the people who are most knowledgeable about party affairs, most interested in party success, and most dedicated to the principles of the party. This would change the incentive structure of legislators all over the country. If they knew that, before they had the privilege of facing the voters in the general election, they must stand before the people who make up the party whose label they carry - they might begin to behave much more responsibly, i.e. to do in government what they said they would do during the campaign.

A major concern would be representativeness within the convention. Does the convention reflect the wishes of the broader partisan public, or has it been "captured" by elites with their own agenda? In this regard, the findings and suggestions of the McGovern-Fraser commission could be quite useful - at least as a guide to keeping the process open. It would be important, I think, to have a mix of professionals and activists. They tend to have different goals. Professional party members prefer electoral victory first and foremost because it is in their professional interests. Activists, on the other hand, are much more interested in policy. This could create a good mix of pragmatism and idealism at a party convention.

But isn't this less democratic than the primary system? Stoller argues that the primary system is a core Democratic value. Again, I'm not a Democrat - but I can't help but wonder about that. My feeling is that - so long as participation in the convention process is left relatively open - measuring the "democraticness" of the primary and the convention is somewhat like comparing apples to oranges. Ideally speaking, the primary process is open to everybody. So, it maximizes participation. But, on the other hand, the primary itself does not induce deliberation among the voters. A convention would. Delegates at a convention would have to argue with one another, and hammer out an agreement. This would probably be more in line with the ideal of deliberative democracy. So, there is a tradeoff between the two.

But I think that more can be said in favor of the convention idea. Back in the 1950s, V.O. Key found that the primary system seemed to have the effect of atrophying party organizations. This makes intuitive sense. In districts where the party is split 60/40, there is no reason for the "40" party to maintain a robust organization. After all, it will almost always lose. But, if the party in that district gets to participate in the state convention - there is a reason for the party to maintain itself. It has the job of selecting members for the state convention. This, Key speculated, had the effect of making 60/40 districts more competitive. After all, in some years 60/40 districts can become 50/50 or even 40/60. And, in years like that, the out party is only going to be able to take advantage of the shift in voter opinion if it is organizationally ready. The convention process therefore had the effect of keeping the party organizations prepared for their once-in-a-decade opportunity. And what is the net result? Better choices for the electorate and more competitive elections.

As you might have inferred, these suggestions are still somewhat tentative. Through the course of my research, I have become well aware of the problems that I discussed on Monday. However, I have not yet fully settled upon any ideas as to how to solve it - I have more research to do. I would encourage party reformers on both sides to take a long, hard look at the reforms of the first party system that Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren instituted. I think there is a great deal of promise there. It is something that I intend to look more closely at as I "wrap up" other projects which I am currently involved in. Their system was corrupted and coopted by plutocrats - but that is not to say that their initial vision cannot be reworked into a viable program for party responsibility.