The following is the text of the address I delivered on Thursday, May 1st at Princeton University, at a conference entitled "The American Electoral Process," sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics.

First of all, I'd like to thank Professor Larry Bartels and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics for extending an invitation to me to participate today.

I'd like to respond to our headline question, "2008: Where We've Been and Where We're Going," by discussing the national party organizations - and their capacity to manage an election like this.

This has been a terrific nomination contest. Edifying, exciting, a few sharp elbows thrown, but not too many. Above all, it looks like the public will have a clear choice between two distinct political visions come November. Hopefully, this campaign will yield meaningful election results from which the victor can claim a mandate to move the country forward.

However, this process has also exposed some weaknesses in our democratic institutions. Specifically, it is clear that the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee have been unable to manage their nomination processes. The RNC will probably pay no consequence for its impotence this year, but the DNC might. Its weakness might ultimately contribute to a brokered convention that would diminish its nominee's capacity to conduct a spirited fall campaign.

Let's step back and think about these national committees in general terms. This should provide some context for understanding the drama that has unfolded on cable news.

The purpose of these primaries is to secure the party's nomination. However, the nomination itself is only a means to an end - namely, victory in November. If a nominee has acquired the prize by a Pyrrhic victory, he or she might be at a disadvantage in the fall - and all who value the party's success will be worse off.

This implies that everybody in the party has a collective interest in a nomination battle that is efficient - one in which the nominee is selected with minimal cost to his or her general election prospects. The goals are therefore speediness and bloodlessness. The nominee should be chosen reasonably quickly so that he or she may pivot to the general campaign. Furthermore, the nominee's reputation should not be unduly damaged by the nomination battle.

Of course, the collective interests of a group often conflict with the personal interests of those within it. In those instances, individuals might pursue their immediate and tangible personal interests over the distant and hazy group interests. Thus, it is helpful to have a central authority with the power to induce individuals to support the collective good.

Ideally, this is the task of the RNC and the DNC. They are charged with managing their conventions, and by extension the nomination processes, to an efficient conclusion. However, they lack the power to constrain the actions of those within their respective parties. Instead, candidates, state parties, state governments, miscellaneous politicians, and interest groups can and do choose their personal good over the party's public good.

The national party organizations have never been powerful - and in the modern nomination era, their powerlessness has rarely been a problem. In most years, a frontrunner acquires an early, insurmountable lead, and the interests of the candidate and the party merge. In this candidate-centered age of politics, the presumptive nominee typically has the power to ensure that his interests are secured. This is essentially what has happened on the GOP side this year.

Meanwhile, there is no nominee on the Democratic side. There is instead a close race that the DNC cannot manage. The movers and shakers in the party have acted for the sake of their own interests, rather than the party as a whole. And so, the Democrats face the possibility of a brokered convention.

A few examples illustrate this point.

Last year, the DNC mandated that states and territories schedule their primaries or caucuses between February and June. However, it lacked the authority to enforce the mandate efficiently. When Michigan and Florida defied the DNC - the committee stripped them of their delegates. Unfortunately, this did not induce them to re-schedule, nor did it induce all candidates to remove themselves from all relevant ballots.

Obviously, Florida and Michigan were not motivated by the collective good of the Democratic Party. Quite unsurprisingly, they acted out of their own best interests. They wanted more influence in the process, as well as the economic benefits that accrue to the states with that privilege.

In another year, this story would have been an inconsequential footnote. The nominee would have been chosen quickly, and Florida and Michigan's delegates would have participated in the meaningless festivities of the convention. But there is no nominee yet, and there might not be one before the convention. In that case, there might be a showdown in the DNC's credentials committee over Michigan and Florida.

This poses two problems. First, this controversy might be enough for Clinton to perpetuate her fight to the convention - especially if she finishes strong. This, in turn, would distract Obama from preparing for the general election. Second, there might be confusion over who is the legitimate choice of the Democratic Party. Obama currently has a lead in pledged delegates and votes. However, factoring in Florida and Michigan will reduce the former and might eliminate the latter. It is conceivable that, after Democrats finish voting, both Clinton and Obama might be able to claim that they are the true choice of the party.

So, the DNC has been unable to manage the state parties, the state governments, and the candidates efficiently. Each has angled for its own good - and the good of the party is now in jeopardy.

Another difficulty comes with the superdelegates. These are elected Democrats, party luminaries, and party committee members who are guaranteed votes at the convention.

Ideally, there is some utility to the superdelegates. They effectively imply that a nominee must win a "super majority" of the pledged delegates to acquire the nomination. Thus, they can serve as a certification of the primary results.

However, the DNC places no constraints upon them. They are free to do whatever they like whenever they like. This year, this poses three distinct problems.

First, there is nothing to induce them to decide at any time prior to the first ballot on the convention floor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have seen a large portion of them hold back from endorsing one candidate or another. They seem to be waiting to move when the personal risks are minimal. As a consequence, the nomination battle drags on - and the last month has been very rough on the front running Obama.

Second, there is nothing that binds them to their endorsements. We saw this morning that former DNC chairman Joe Andrew switched his endorsement from Clinton to Obama to bring about a speedy end to the nomination. Ironically, Andrew's ability to switch his support might prolong the battle. Obama is closing Clinton's superdelegate lead now. If Clinton is ultimately able to make a credible claim that she is the choice of Democrats nationwide, what is to stop these superdelegates from returning to Clinton?

Third, there are no rules to guide the choices of the superdelegates. They can decide on whatever grounds they like. Thus, they could make the nomination process even more incoherent than it already is - as the collective choice of the superdelegates is merely an aggregation of irreconcilable individual motivations. If some choose based on electability, some choose based on legitimacy, some choose based on constituent instructions, and some choose based on personal preferences - the party risks a nominee who has acquired the nomination by seemingly arbitrary means.

All three of these issues imply confusion and delay. Howard Dean has said that he wants the superdelegates to decide by early June. This may in fact happen. Unfortunately, the absence of boundaries placed upon them mean that it might not happen, or that - even if it does happen - the event will be meaningless, as the apparent loser vows to try to flip the superdelegates to his or her side.

None of this implies that the convention will necessarily be brokered. There is a good chance it will not be - that Obama will find a way to push Clinton out prior to August. The point is that, for Democrats, the risk that it will be brokered is far too high. What is more, this is needless risk. There is no benefit the party receives for the risk of a brokered convention.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, it is too late for this cycle to intervene. Events will play out however they will - little can be done. However, I think this cycle provides an opportunity for both parties to think proactively about the next cycle, to consider strengthening their national party committees. Why not grant them the authority to control their own destinies, to manage their collective interests? It seems to me that such self-control would be a marked improvement over what we have now. I certainly think that - if Howard Dean had some real power to control those within his party's coalition - the Democrats would be in much less jeopardy.

Minimally, I would make the following suggestion. At its core, the current nomination system is a disjointed hybrid of the old, state party-centered way of choosing nominees and the new way that places power with rank-and-file partisans. The reforms of the 1970s did not amount to root-and-branch changes, but rather 20th century updates to a 19th century system.

Perhaps this accounts for the powerlessness of the national committees. They are tasked with bringing coherence to an incoherent system. I would suggest that whatever changes are made - whether the national parties are strengthened or not - the goal should be to impose coherence of form and purpose. Right now, both processes have one foot in the past and one foot in the present. This is, I think, unsustainable in the long run.

Thank you.

Posted by Jay Cost at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Howard Dean was on Wolf Blitzer's show yesterday, and Drudge picked up his admonition to the superdelegates with the splashy headline: "Dean To Delegates: Decide Now." In the interview, Dean says that he wants the superdelegates to begin "voting" now. "We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time," he said. "We've got to know who our nominee is."

Unfortunately for the party, Dean is in no position to tell the superdelegates when to decide. The reason? The chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee carries with it very little political power - certainly not enough to sway superdelegates.

It has been this way for a very long time. Fifty years ago, political scientists thought of the political parties as "truncated pyramids." The idea behind this metaphor is that it was the state parties that were really in charge. The national parties were powerless organization that few paid attention to. In fact, while digging through the scholarly literature on the parties from the 50s and 60s, I could only find two major works on the national committees. One of them is Politics Without Power. In it, Cornelius Cotter and Bernard Hennessy argue that the DNC and RNC were basically ad hoc entities without coherent organizational structures. They were there to be used by the president for his electoral purposes and, when the President was of a different party, to host the national conventions. That's it.

Flash forward to the 1970s. There's a convergence of two trends in electoral politics. First is the rise of television and the mass media campaign. This induced a great need for campaign cash. Second is the imposition of the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA) of 1972, and the 1974 amendments that limited the amount of money that candidates could collect from individuals. This gave the national parties a new task - legal money laundering. This is their essential function today. All six national party organizations (the two national committees plus the four Hill committees) collect large sums of cash by waving the party banner, and then distribute this money to candidates. The Hill committees help candidates for the House and the Senate. During presidential elections, the national committees primarily help the presidential candidates - which is exactly what John McCain and the RNC are working out right now.

The key word is "help." The consensus among political scientists is that the national parties do not impose some kind of "party will." My research has found that this consensus, while essentially true, is overstated. The national parties do exercise some political power over candidates. However, it is only a modest amount.

Relevant to the issue of the Democratic nomination, there is no formal mechanism for Dean to exercise power over superdelegates. Nor, for that matter, is this a power the DNC chairman has ever typically had. He has not been a party strongman. As noted above, in the days when there were party strongmen, the state parties ruled the roost. They supplied the smoke for the smoke-filled rooms.

Dean, of course, might have some informal power - perhaps thanks to the "50 State Strategy," which has tried to rehabilitate atrophied state parties. Some superdelegates might owe him a favor or two. However, I doubt that this would imply influence over the congressional superdelegates. Furthermore, Dean is a bit of a lame duck. His term is up next year. If the Democrats win the election in November, what we will likely see at the DNC is an adjustment to fit the needs and preferences of the President. This is typical. For instance, David Wilhelm, Clinton's campaign manager, became DNC chair in 1993.

Here we can appreciate how the national committees are still a bit like the powerless organizations that Cotter and Hennessy found. Unlike the Hill committees, they are "captured" by the President for his term in office. This makes it difficult to develop long-range institutional goals, and therefore difficult to exercise real power. Ironically, if the Democrats do win the election in November, that might mean the end of the "50 State Strategy." If President Obama or President Clinton doesn't buy into it, we can be confident that the new chairman will discontinue it.

To understand this nomination battle, we need to adjust our image of the national parties. The best way to think of them is as little more than guidance counselors with bank accounts. The candidates are in charge. Contrary to what Blitzer says in the aforementioned interview, Dean is not the "leader of the Democratic Party." That's a mischaracterization of the role of the DNC and its chairman.

It is instructive to contrast the changes in the parties with the changes in the government. The 20th century saw a federalization of many governmental tasks. Matters previously entrusted to state governments were turned over to the federal government. The parties had a completely different experience. The powers of the state parties were handed over to candidates for office, not to the federal parties. The role of the parties now is essentially to serve the electoral needs of those candidates.

This is why the "Democratic Party" cannot stop this nomination race. There is no party entity with the power to say, "OK, you two. Enough is enough." In keeping with the "candidate control" model of electoral politics, the only two who can stop it are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. That's the modern party system for you. 20th century reformers thought the parties were meddling institutions that corrupted the political process. So, they stripped them of their power. Accordingly, the Democrats are at the mercy of their candidates.

Footnote: if you listen to Dean's interview, he says that some superdelegates have already "voted," and that he wants the rest to "vote" soon. This is not how the superdelegate system works. Dean knows that, and I think what he is trying to do is spin things a little bit. The fact is that the superdelegates have only endorsed candidates so far. They vote in Denver. Not before. What they say today does not necessarily constrain their votes in Denver. So, we should expect that, if the race remains close through the summer, both Obama and Clinton will work to "flip" superdelegates.

Posted by Jay Cost at 11:13 AM | Permalink

Last week I wrote an essay in praise of the Democratic super delegates. I argued that in comparison to the Republicans - they offer real advantages. They serve as a kind of "majority maker" for the party. When a candidate has not won a 3/5ths majority of pledged delegates, the super delegates break the "tie." The Republicans have a "majority maker" solution, too: most states free their pledged delegates after a few ballots. The Democrats' solution is better. Super delegates are free to negotiate whenever they like; they have an interest in finding a candidate who is best for the party; and they have the capacity to engage in the difficult process of negotiation.

However, there are problems with the super delegates. Democrats clearly sense this - perhaps this is driving their desire to wrap the primary up. From a certain perspective, this is a strange preference. Isn't this robust contest helping the party think about its future? Isn't it helping the candidates sharpen their skills? And yet, neutral Democrats would probably be glad to see the race end on Tuesday. From another perspective, this is a highly reasonable thing to desire. While the Democratic process is preferable to the Republican one, it is still inefficient. Democrats have reasons to doubt they can trust the super delegates to do a good job concluding the contest.

The core problem is that the Democrats have empowered the super delegates to break a tie, but they have not empowered anybody to manage the super delegates. There are no rules that demand the super delegates convene and discuss with one another. There is nobody in charge of regulating the debate. There is nothing to punish the super delegates who are small-minded, nothing to reward the big-minded. There are no time restrictions that require them to make up their minds prior to the convention. They are wholly unfettered.

Thus, the super delegates have a great deal in common with a mob. They're a mob of experienced, qualified politicos who care about the party. If the Democratic Party were to be put at the mercy of a mob - this is the mob you'd want. But it is a mob nonetheless. This is why large institutions - like the House and the Senate - have reams of rules governing member behavior. If the members of those institutions are to do their jobs ably, they need a framework for interaction. Otherwise, their talents may be squandered amidst the chaos.

Let's look in depth at one potential problem.

Earlier this week, I argued that each super delegate has a personal interest and a public interest that could factor into their decisions. For instance, each House Democrat has an opinion about who is best for the party. This would be his or her public interest. Each also has a personal interest in being reelected, and this might include placating constituents by voting as they did. This would be his or her personal interest. For many super delegates, there would be no conflict. Their constituents voted the way they prefer. But for some, there will be a conflict - as seems to have been the case with John Lewis. These super delegates face a version of what is known as the dilemma of collective action. Do they pay personal costs for a public benefit, or do they sacrifice the good of the party for their own good?

Let's take a look at a simple, stylized interaction that teases out some implications. Assume there are just two super delegates, both of whom face a conflict between their public and personal goals. Each gets a choice to go one way or the other. Additionally:

- Suppose that if both delegates do what is best for the party - the party appears to be responsible to the public. So, both delegates get a benefit of P. But doing so sacrifices their personal interests, so they pay a cost of -C.

-Both delegates also have an option of doing what is best for themselves. If they do this, they get a benefit of C (regardless of what the other does). However, if one of them chooses to elevate himself above his party, the party will not appear responsbile - and both will pay a cost of -P.

-Accordingly, if both do what is best for the party, both get a benefit of P - C. If both do what is best for themselves, both get a benefit of C - P. If one works for the party and the other for himself, the first gets a benefit of -C - P, and the second gets a benefit of C - P.

These payoffs can be modeled in a two-by-two matrix. One actor "plays" the rows. The other "plays" the columns. Both choose whether to do what is best for the party or best for himself. The actor playing the rows gets the first payoff in each cell, the actor playing the columns gets the second. The generic form of the interaction would look like this:

Let's set C = 5 and P = 7. This implies that both candidates enjoy a greater benefit from helping the party than they do from helping themselves. In other words, this is what Democrats would want from the super delegates. What would the interaction look like then?

At first blush, one might think that there is a simple solution: both candidates do what is best for the party in the top-left cell. While this is a possible solution (or equilibrium), and it is socially efficient, there is another solution. The bottom-right cell, in which both candidates do what is best for themselves, could also be the outcome of the interaction. This one is socially inefficient. In other words, this interaction could result in the efficient outcome where both support the party or an inefficient outcome where neither does.

This is where some kind of institution could come in handy. That is, some rule or person could alter the payoffs to ensure that the delegates choose what is best for the party. How might this work? Suppose that the super delegates knew that if they support the party, they would be personally reimbursed for their loyalty. This might come in the form of flattering publicity, policy considerations down the line, campaign contributions to offset any electoral danger they may face, or whatever. The point is they know that supporting the party would offer some side benefit that is just theirs. They also know that this benefit is theirs regardless of what the other delegate does. That would change the game to the following by inserting a loyalty (L) factor for delegates who support the party.

That is:

Let's set L = 12 and re-run the interaction, retaining C = 5 and P = 7.

There is a single solution/equilibrium to this game. Review the options of the row chooser. Note that regardless of what the column chooser decides, he is best off serving the party. If the column chooser goes with the party, the row chooser gets -2 going for himself or 14 going for the party. If the column chooser goes for himself, the row chooser gets -2 going for himself or 0 going for the party. So, his rational move is always to go for the party. The same goes for the column chooser. Thus, both delegates will choose what is best for the party. The difference here is that loyalty factor. What it did was reward the delegates for supporting the party regardless of what the other does. This shifted their strategies.

This sort of personal payoff is actually quite common. If you have ever received a tote bag from PBS, you have received a personal payoff for helping a broader goal. This is what institutions can do. They can offer personal benefits to individuals to guide interactions to the socially efficient outcome. It need not be benefits. We could inverse the above interaction. Instead of a +12 loyalty benefit, we could have a -12 disloyalty penalty. It would have the same effect. This is one reason why the government is empowered to penalize tax cheats.

Mechanisms like this do not exist with the super delegates. They are in an institutional vacuum where there are no rules to govern their behavior, let alone dispense personal benefits if they put the party above themselves. Now, it might be that the preferences of the super delegates are arranged in such a way that an institutional mechanism like a tote bag is not necessary. Indeed, you could reassign the values of C and P in the first game so that both super delegates choose to support the party (e.g. re-run the first game setting C = 0). The preferences of super delegates need not be arranged in a socially inefficient way. But that misses the point. The point is that they need not be arranged in a socially efficient way, either. And if they are not - there is no "tote bag" provision to induce a socially efficient result.

One way or the other, the super delegates will make a choice, and the party is going to have a nominee. The question is how costly it will be to get this nominee. And this is what efficiency is all about - achieving an outcome while minimizing costs.

What are some of the costs that the Democrats will face because there are no rules? So far, we have hinted at the specter of illegitimacy. That is, one candidate wins because he or she is good for particular super delegates, not the party. Another cost could be delay. Because they are not required to do anything until Denver, they might not do anything until then. This would mean that Democrats will face a primary battle that ends six months from now. While I think most would agree that it would do the party no harm to have the primary last another two months, six months would be genuinely harmful. Waiting until Denver also means making a decision under intense, worldwide scrutiny. Party politics is not meant for such a close look. It's inevitably narrow-minded: personal concerns always come to influence what non-partisans think is a strictly public matter. Party deal-making is an illiberal part of any liberal society such as ours, but that does not mean the public will accept it. On the contrary, it will probably turn off the average voter who sees the deal go down on live television.

There are all sorts of other costs. None of them derive from the super delegates themselves. As I argued last week, the super delegate provision is a good "majority maker" solution. The problem is that they are free to do whatever they want.

Personally, I find this lamentable. It seems to me that the Democrats are in the midst of a robust, valuable debate about the future of their party. The fact that it does not involve sharp policy differences is a non sequitur. One need not discuss policy to be substantive. If the RCP average is any metric - it is an argument that neither side has won. And yet, lots of worried Democrats want it over. They doubt the capacity of the party organization to resolve the conflict. They are wise to have these doubts. Because they are unbound by rules of any kind, the fact that the super delegates will break the tie is a disaster waiting to happen.

But why are the super delegates so free? The Democrats have lousy rules that nobody cared to revise in the last quarter century because the best and brightest in American politics don't give a damn about the party organization. This is part of a decades-long trend in American politics. The party institutions have been taken for granted. They no longer play a vital role in daily American political life, so they are left to decay - until we need them. At which point, they are incapable of doing their job.

Americans like to think that strong parties are an impediment to democracy - and so, the weaker they are the better we are. They are wrong. Strong parties are an asset to democracy. The happenings on the Democratic side indicate what can happen when the parties are weak. The Democrats are in the midst of a animated discussion that many of the conversants want to end because the party organization is incompetent. What a shame.

Posted by Jay Cost at 12:00 AM | Permalink

With the Democratic race as close as it is, analysts are paying attention to the so-called "super delegates" - namely, the 800 or so party leaders who get to vote however they want, regardless of any primary or caucus result.

What should we make of these delegates? Many analysts seem to approach them with a critical, negative assumption. I think that is presumptuous. I'd like to approach them from a neutral starting point to delineate the strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the nomination process. Tomorrow, we'll look at the weaknesses. Today, let's review the strengths.

At the outset, we should note the super delegates could only be a factor when no candidate wins an outright majority with pledged delegates. This indicates one way the nomination battle differs from most American elections: a plurality of votes is insufficient for victory. A corollary is the Electoral College. If no candidate wins an outright majority of electors - the House of Representatives decides the race.

Just as the Constitution uses the House in the absence of a majority winner, the Democrats use the super delegates. This demonstrates the need for a contingency plan in a majority rule election. Most of us usually never think about this because, outside Louisiana, American elections are decided by plurality rule, i.e. where the winner is simply the person who gets the most votes. There are costs and benefits to both rules. Obviously, with majority systems you need some sort of mechanism to sort out the mess when nobody wins a majority. Plurality systems do not require this - and so they may seem less arbitrary. On the other hand, plurality systems can and often do yield a "perverse" result - a candidate whom most voters opposed nevertheless wins.

One might respond that the Republicans have no such contingency plan for their nomination - even though their nominee is also selected by majority rule. So, why must the Democrats? In fact, the Republicans do have a plan. Theirs is just informal. The Republican solution is that most delegates become like super delegates after a few rounds of balloting. Some Republican delegates are obligated to their candidate as long as he is in the race - but most of them are free to vote their consciences after a few rounds.

This offers a different way to understand the super delegates. Perhaps they seem more reasonable than they first appeared. Every majority system must have some kind of contingency plan for when nobody has won a majority. If we accept the legitimacy of the majority requirement (and why wouldn't we?), we necessarily accept the need for a "majority maker" clause. The Constitution uses the House. Louisiana uses a run-off. The Republicans create de facto super delegates out of the rank-and-file. The Democrats give that power to party leaders.

So, the real question is how good is the Democratic solution? I think it has several advantages over the Republican one.

First, I think that if you are going to make any type of delegate "super" - it is best to make it the party leaders. They are most likely to have the interests of the party as a whole close to heart. To appreciate this, imagine what would happen if there were a knockdown, drag-out fight between McCain and Romney. The only concern on the minds of McCain delegates would be getting the nomination to McCain. Ditto the Romney delegates. But who is looking out for the party? Which delegates will calmly recognize that the elevation of their man would require a nasty battle that might do damage to the party's prospects? Neither. The McCain delegates would probably prefer a nasty floor fight that McCain wins to a cordial process that he loses because their paramount concern is the success of their candidate. Ditto the Romney delegates.

Of course, it is possible that no Republican delegates would behave in such a "narrow" fashion. The trouble for the GOP is that it is also possible that all of them would. This chance is much reduced on the Democratic side because party regulars are intimately involved. They are more likely to care deeply about the party's broader interests. Thus, they can help broker a deal that brings peace to the convention, which is good for the party.

Second, party regulars are more "qualified" to handle a situation in which a deal must be brokered, and making them super delegates gives them the power to do it. To appreciate this, consider the relationship between the House and the Senate. The House was originally envisioned to be the body with the direct link to the public. Accordingly, all tax bills must originate in the House. On the other hand, the Framers gave the Senate functions like ratifying treaties, and confirming officers of the executive and judicial branches. The Senate was ideally to be populated with wise men who could negotiate situations that might be too sensitive for the more raucously democratic House.

We can see a similar logic differentiating the pledged and super delegates. Pledged delegates are certainly politically active - but they need not be professional pols, schooled in the ways of political horse-trading. The super delegates, who are professional or retired political operatives, are well-suited for the negotiating what would have to happen if no candidate wins a majority of delegates. This kind of wheeling and dealing might not be as easy as it appears. If no candidate has a majority, somebody is going to have to switch their votes. They are not going to do that out of the goodness of their hearts. They will need some kind of consideration in return. This type of situation requires a deft touch, which a professional politician is more likely to possess. If the job was left entirely to rank-and-file delegates, all of whom are passionately committed to their candidate - it is easy to envision one faction alienating or offending another due to their inexperience at negotiation or their enthusiasm for their cause.

Third, the super delegates are free to coordinate well in advance of the convention - whereas pledged delegates are not. To appreciate the value of this, it is again instructive to compare the Democrats to the Republicans. Modern communications technology has altered the role of the convention. Party members no longer need to gather in one place to determine whom they prefer. This, in turn, enables them to coordinate long before the convention. That being said, most Republican delegates face an impediment to early coordination that the Democratic super delegates do not. Most Republican delegates are usually bound to one candidate or another for at least a few ballots. This surely complicates pre-convention deal making. It would be hard to work out an arrangement that cannot take effect until the third (maybe even the fourth) ballot. Participants in the deal might have to vote insincerely for the first few rounds to prevent an undesirable result. This enhances the likelihood that a mistake, misunderstanding, or just a shifting situation will kill the deal. It is just a level of complexity that gets in the way of a quick, easy resolution. The Democratic super delegates do not face this problem. They could begin working on a deal right now that could be put into effect on the first ballot.

These three traits are all strengths because they enhance efficiency. That is, they help secure the party a nominee while minimizing the "transaction costs" inherent to any kind of mass gathering. This is an important characteristic for a process like this. Being the nominee brings nobody - be it the candidate or the rank-and-file - any real benefit. It is simply a means to an end, which is victory in November. The more efficient the nomination process, the better positioned everybody in the party is for the general election. Nobody in the party has an interest in a tortuous convention that takes a long, painful time to find a nominee. The super delegates serve as a preventative measure. By virtue of their interest in the health of the party, their experience with deal making, and their freedom to maneuver - they can help the party avoid a messy floor flight.

All in all, I think the Democrat's "majority maker" solution is much more efficient than the Republican's. Of course, it might not seem to matter in a year like this. This is not a three-way race; thus, one candidate might be able to win a bare majority of the pledged delegates. However, it all depends on how strict the definition of "majority" is. I think the Democrats have a stricter definition of "majority" than the Republicans, and this is a prudent move.

To win the nomination without the intervention of the super delegates, a candidate must win 62.25% of all pledged delegates. [i.e. He or she must win a bare majority, or 2,025, of the total delegates. There are 3,253 pledged delegates; thus, a majority that comes through only the pledged delegates would be 2,025 / 3,253 = 62.25% of pledged delegates.] So, winning the nomination through the primary/caucus route is more like getting a bill passed in the Senate than in the House. You need a super majority of pledged delegates.

The prudence of this requirement can be seen if we imagine the process without the super delegates: all a candidate must do is win a bare majority of the pledged delegates. Now, factor in all of the quirky twists and turns we have seen this cycle. Start saying aloud all of those questions you have been whispering for a few weeks. Should we seat the Michigan delegates? What about the Florida delegates? Is the caucus system appropriate for selecting delegates, or should we stick with the primary system? What happens if a candidate wins the big states but loses the little states? What happens if a candidate comes on strong at the end, but does not win enough delegates? What if the party as a whole starts to feel buyer's remorse after a candidate has won a bare majority of pledged delegates? There are all sorts of ways in which a simple majority of delegates might not be sufficient to give the impression of legitimacy, which is a very important value for a nominee to possess. By requiring a candidate to win 62.25% of the pledged delegates - you greatly reduce the likelihood that all of those lingering, partisan-twinged (don't forget the Republicans are watching!) questions could influence perceptions of legitimacy.

And what happens when there is less than this super majority? The decision is left to the super delegates, who - by virtue of the three aforementioned qualities of interest, capacity, and freedom - are in the best position to disentangle which candidate is the "legitimate" nominee. The super delegates are majority makers if we take the definition of majority a bit more strictly. This, I think, points to a counter-intuitive advantage that they offer. Whereas most analysts seem to assume that they are inherently de-legitimizing - I think the opposite is true.

Nevertheless, there are problems with the super delegates. While they might be an improvement over the Republican way of doing business, they present some difficulties that might cause real headaches for the Democrats. We shall discuss this tomorrow.

Posted by Jay Cost at 12:00 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jay Cost at 11:34 AM | Permalink

Last week I wrote a column about how the dust up with Larry Craig reveals some overlooked truths about the American political party. My point was that the contemporary party is not very powerful. It cannot exercise much control over its members in the legislature, and therefore it is difficult for the party to be responsible to the electorate - to do in government what it promised to do during the campaign. Our politics is "candidate controlled," and the party's impotence in dealing with Larry Craig points to the truth of this proposition.

In other words, the party has very little power over candidates - who they are, what positions they take, what issues they emphasize, how they choose to campaign, what they do once they acquire office, and so on. My argument last week was that the idea of a powerful political party is really a trick of the light. It is a consequence of the fact that individual legislators and candidates happen to have relatively uniform issue positions. If a candidate wants to "cheat" on the party, there is very little that the party can do to stop him.

This brings me to Ron Paul. He is perhaps the greatest example today of party impotence. Ron Paul is not a good Republican as far as the GOP caucus is concerned. If you examine Paul's voting record, it appears as though he is a moderate. His average National Journal economic policy rating from 1997 to 2004 is 51.6% conservative. For social policy, it is 53% conservative. For foreign policy, it is 40.5% conservative. One would think, based upon this data, that Paul is ideologically similar to representatives like Chris Shays or Mike Castle - with the exception being that he is a little on the dovish side. But, this would be wrong. Paul's ostensible moderation is really a consequence of the fact that National Journal's ranking system is two-dimensional. Paul is a libertarian - and his ideology cannot be captured by a simple liberal-conservative metric.

I would argue that Paul does indeed "cheat" on the party brand.

The party brand is the mental image that people have of what it means to be a member of a particular party. It is the commonly accepted answer to the question: if that party acquires control of government, what will it do? The brand is something that benefits all party candidates for office because it reduces uncertainty. It is a quick heuristic device for the average voter to use to guide his vote choice. Because it provides voters with low cost information, it makes their actions more predictable, and therefore reduces the uncertainty that office seekers face when they run for election.

The brand is maintained only through the issue positions that those candidates take during the campaign, and the votes they cast in the legislature. If Republican candidates take divergent issue positions in the campaign, there is no coherent sense one can get of what it means to be a Republican. Over the long run, the brand will decay. If the Republican majority does not do in office what it said it would do during the campaign, it again becomes difficult to understand what it means to be a Republican. Again, the brand will decay.

Importantly, note that a strong party brand is closely related to the concept of responsibility that I discussed last week. A responsible party is a party that runs on distinct issue positions in the election, and proceeds to do what it said it would do when it wins. So, a party with a strong brand identity is more likely to be a responsible party. A responsible party is more likely to have a strong brand identity.

Ron Paul "cheats" on the party brand because he does not contribute to its maintenance. His votes in Congress diverge greatly from the party line - and, as anybody who watches these debates knows, his campaign rhetoric is not even close to the party line. Now - before I start getting flamed by Paul's very web-savvy supporters, let me clarify what I mean by "cheats." I do not mean the word in a normative sense. I mean it in the rational choice sense of the term. My referent here is the concept of public goods.

Public goods are susceptible to this kind of cheating because they are non-excludable. Think of national defense. This is something that benefits all of us - but wouldn't you individually be better off if you did not pay for it (assuming, of course, that the IRS did not exist to audit you)? It is not like the government could punish you by not defending you. If they are defending your taxpaying neighbors, they will have to defend you, too! So, you have a rational incentive to "cheat" on a public good like national defense. In that situation, it is in your interests to receive all of the benefits and not pay any of the costs. This is cheating in a rational choice sense of the term (again, it is non-normative - so spare me your wrath, Paulites!)

The party label is a public good like national defense. It is non-excludable. By winning a party nomination, all of the benefits of the party label accrue to you regardless of whether you constrain your issue positions so they fit the broader party message. So, if it is not in your interests to contribute to the provision of the good, we should expect you not to do so.

This is how I see Ron Paul. Like all candidates with an "R" at the end of his name, he uses the label to acquire electoral office. He accrues the benefits that the party label provides. However, because he takes so many divergent issue positions both in the campaign and in Congress - he does not contribute to the maintenance of the brand. To put it intuitively, he's a libertarian who dresses up as a Republican. This is why I chuckle whenever he argues - which he often does in the debates - that he is the only true Republican in the field. If you define a Republican as a libertarian - then that would be the case!

So, why is it that the Republican Party stands beside him every election? It is because there is nothing it can do about him. Return to the national defense metaphor - and ask yourself why a rational person actually pays his taxes. It is because the federal government has established mechanisms to monitor people and punish those who fail to do their part. National defense is a public good - but the federal government has instituted a private bad to make sure that nobody cheats.

Simply stated, the party lacks the ability to impose such private bads. The party has few viable enforcement mechanisms to ensure that its members do their part to maintain the party brand. Paul ran for the seat in 1996 as the "insurgent" candidate against the Democrat-turned-Republican Greg Laughlin, who had the support of the party leadership both in Washington and in Texas. Paul used his network of libertarians and "gold bugs" to raise nearly $2 million and win the seat out from under the party establishment. Since then, the GOP establishment has never challenged him, despite the fact that he is - according to Michael Barone - the least reliable vote in the entire GOP caucus. The reason is that the mechanism for intra-party staff changes, the party primary, is a highly inefficient enforcement mechanism. The expected costs to the party for challenging Paul in the primary greatly outweigh the benefits it could expect to accrue from the challenge. Imagine what would happen if the GOP establishment got behind a serious challenge to Paul. He would probably survive - but could a weakened Paul survive a general election fight against the Democrat who would surely emerge? If Paul did win the general, who knows how he would respond in the next Congress. Maybe he would refuse to caucus with the GOP altogether. And, should Paul not survive, it would take a great deal of resources to take him down, leaving the GOP nominee low on funds, and a Republican electorate badly divided by the contested primary.

What is the lesson in this? It is, as I suggested last week, that the party does not have much control over its members. Ultimately, our system is not at all efficient for the development and maintenance of a strong party brand. If a party candidate decides to run away from the party, and therefore diminish the brand, during the campaign - there is little the rest of the party can do. If a party official decides to vote against the party brand in the legislature - there is little the rest of the party can do. Importantly, it does not take a lot of "cheaters" to stultify the party agenda altogether. At its largest, the GOP majority was never more than twenty seats over a majority. So, less than ten percent of the party caucus could derail it. The Democratic majorities between the 1950s and the 1990s were much larger - but they were so full of southern, conservative Democrats that in many sessions the alliance of the southern conservatives and the Republicans had effective control over the chamber.

The civic consequence of this is irresponsibility. If the party cannot maintain a strong party brand - it lacks the ability to make coherent promises to the electorate during the campaign, or it lacks the ability to deliver on the promises that it makes, or some combination of both. This is the state of today's American political party - it is not responsible to the electorate. It has a hard time making promises during the electoral campaign because many Republicans run as something other than a Republican (ditto the Democrats). It has an even harder time delivering on those promises it manages to make because office holders can vote as they like in the legislature. The reason for both is that the parties lack enforcement mechanisms to "punish" their "cheaters." An office seeker or office holder can "cheat" on the party brand as much as he likes - and there is little that the rest of the party can do about it. The primary is not a viable enforcement mechanism. It virtually guarantees that incumbents will get an opportunity to face the general electorate, regardless of how loyal they have been to the party whose label they carry.

Ron Paul is a great example of this problem. The Republican Party has so little control over its members that the 1992 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president can run and win as a Republican just four years later - and persist as a Republican as long as he chooses.

I'll continue this post tomorrow - and offer some tentative suggestions about what could be done to enhance party responsibility.

Posted by Jay Cost at 12:00 AM | Permalink