American Political Parties: Reform

For Tuesday:

For Thursday:

Populism
Urban and Rural America
The Squad and Ideological Factions

Ranked-Choice Voting

Alaska system: Top Four Primary, with RCV in the general:

Misgivings in Oakland and New York

Drutman:

Use in primaries
Impact in general elections

Top Two -- only CA and Washington in congressional elections -- Most states do not have the initiative

Top Two: A professional team v. a pickup team

The advocacy coalition framework (ACF): The difference between the “long coalition” of a political party (see Bawn et al. 2006, 4) and the coalition of the ACF is that the larger coalition must, by necessity, have a wider variety of deep core beliefs; it must somehow address the true multidimensionality of politics. When we conceptualise individuals as participants in nested (and overlapping) policy coalitions, it becomes easier to imagine how severely competition for office within the same party might disrupt or rearrange coalitional opportunities as well within the type of policy-making coalition imagined in the ACF. The new requirements for getting elected to office can reshape the ACF-type coalition’s (in one domain, so conceptualised as one dimension) deep core beliefs because some camel got its nose under the party tent to win the election (in a multidimensional space).

The dimensions do not have to be partisan:

. Our model gives California’s AD47 in 2012 a 50% chance of having a copartisan election – and it did. Two Democrats entered and fought it out with two nearly irrelevant Republican spectators (Alvarez and Sinclair 2015). This district also featured a Black woman against a Latino man as Democratic copartisans in a Latino majority district. This race’s outcome suggests how that process might work, with each building on separate pathways to power, but the driver of the high probability here is just the extremity of the vote share difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. AD47 would have a copartisan election again in 2014 and again in 2016, with Cheryl Brown eventually falling to Eloise Reyes. One potential explanatory factor here is the district’s low 2016 Trump support relative to its 2012 Romney vote – an opposition lacking in rancorous spirit appears to reduce the chance of credible entry.

Evidence for impact on the legislature? Dan Walters:

As Republicans became largely irrelevant in the Legislature, business groups such as the California Chamber of Commerce nurtured business-friendly Democrats, using the top-two system. Although Democrats have supermajorities in both legislative houses, the substantial blocs of moderates have blunted efforts by progressive groups to enact their left-leaning agendas — single-payer health care being the most obvious example.

Problems:

2012 nightmare scenario for Democrats: United States Representative District 31

Gary G. Miller*, REP 16,708.... 26.7%
Bob Dutton, REP 15,557 ...........24.8%
Pete Aguilar, DEM 14,181 ........22.6%
Justin Kim, DEM 8,487 .............13.5%
Renea Wickman, DEM 4,188 .....6.7%
Rita Ramirez-Dean, DEM 3,546 .5.7%

Top two in 2016: Meh! See exit poll results

Top two in 2018: 59 percent of Republicans voted for the more liberal candidate!

Gamesmanship in 2024

Proportional representation? The biggest barrier is state representation.

House size