More democracy: The direct primary and competition in U.S. elections

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 190-205

  Ansolabehere, Stephen ^a   Hansen, John Mark ^b   Hirano, Shigeo ^c   Snyder Jr , James M ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

^c Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 78049264289     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X10000064     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 269.
2. See also E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960), 141.
3. And beyond: a Democrat did not win the governorship in Vermont until 1962. Vermont's gubernatorial elections were annual until 1970.
4. Unlike in the South, where Republicans were merely a nuisance after about 1880-and almost invisible after about 1900- Democrats in the North were rarely shut out even in the most Republican states. Republicans won fifteen of the seventeen gubernatorial races in Michigan between 1878 and 1910 but never once achieved 70 percent of the vote. Democrats in South Carolina not only won every race for governor in the same period, but their nominees failed only once to top 70 percent, in 1894, when the nominee drew just 69.6 percent.
5. On the history of efforts to reform U.S. political parties, see Austin Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction: Party Reform in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
6. Charles E. Merriam and Louise Overacker, Primary Elections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 267-70;
7. V. O. Key Jr., American State Politics: An Introduction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 85-97;
8. V. O. Key Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 4th ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1958), 411-13;
9. and Frank J. Sorauf and Paul Allen Beck, Party Politics in America, 6th ed. (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1988); 243-245
10. among others, cite limited two-party contestation as a central consideration in the adoption of the direct primary. For a critique and an alternative view, see AlanWare, The American Direct Primary: Party Institutionalization and Transformation in the North (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
11. The authorship of the remark is uncertain. It is most often attributed to H. L. Mencken, although it seems out of character for him to associate with the sentiments of "goo-goo" reformers. It is also often credited to Al Smith, on whom it fits more comfortably. It has been ascribed to numerous others as well, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Edward Abbey, Jane Addams, Winston Churchill (of course), and Sidney Hook.
12. Merriam and Overacker, Primary Elections, Chapter 5.
13. Allen Fraser Lovejoy, La Follette and the Establishment of the Direct Primary in Wisconsin, 1890-1904 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941): 36.
14. See also Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction, 115-26;
15. and Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Random House, 1955), 257-271
16. Merriam was both a social scientist and a Progressive reformer, but his evaluation of the direct primary reform, two decades into its operation, is also longer on exposition than empiricism. See Merriam and Overacker, Primary Elections.
17. From The Old Order Changeth, as quoted in Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 258.
18. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (Harper & Row, 1957).
19. The opposition to the direct primary, in fact, made this very argument, that nominees chosen by caucus were more likely to be "electable" than candidates chosen by primary. The critics warned that the primary would preclude ticket balancing and raise the chances that a weak candidate with limited support would win the nomination in a multicandidate race. See Merriam and Overacker, Primary Elections, 211-12;
20. Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction, 125-126
21. Key, American State Politics, 94-97;
22. Lovejoy, La Follette and the Establishment of the Direct Primary in Wisconsin, Chapter 3;
23. Merriam and Overacker, Primary Elections, Chapter 9;
24. Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction, 119-20, 124-25;
25. Sorauf and Beck, Party Politics in America, 244.
26. Merriam and Overacker, Primary Elections, 267-68;
27. Key, American State Politics, 85-92;
28. Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 411-13;
29. Sorauf and Beck, Party Politics in America, 243-245
30. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960);
31. Donald P. Green, Bradley Palmquist
32. and Eric Schickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
33. Massachusetts and Ohio voted Republican in every presidential election between 1864 and 1908. In the same period, Illinois and Nebraska each defected to the Democratic nominee just once, Illinois to Grover Cleveland in 1892 and Nebraska to its favorite son William Jennings Bryan in 1896.
34. Federalism also reinforced single-party monopolies at the local level. The ability to control state and local offices allowed party leaders to extract resources without competing for national political offices. For a theoretical treatment of this issue, see Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder, Jr., "Valence Politics and Equilibrium in Spatial Models," Public Choice 103 (1999): 327-36.
35. For an example of how this logic played out historically, see David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918-1932 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
36. See, e.g., Key, American State Politics, 104-16;
37. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), Part 1;
38. Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955);
39. Richard J. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
40. See Merriam and Overacker, Primary Elections, Chapter 10;
41. Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 419-421
42. As Key put it, "the ties of party-given the recency of the Civil War-made it simpler to advance popular government by introducing the direct primary than to proceed by a realignment of the parties" (Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 412).
43. Key, Southern Politics, Part 1.
44. Key, American State Politics, Chapter 4.
45. See Cortez A. M. Ewing, Primary Elections in the South: A Study in Uniparty Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953);
46. Craig H. Grau, "Competition in State Legislative Primaries," Legislative Studies Quarterly 6 (1981): 35-54;
47. Malcolm E. Jewell, Legislative Representation in the Contemporary South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967);
48. and Malcolm E. Jewell and David M. Olson, American State Political Parties and Elections (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1978).
49. Grau, "Competition in State Legislative Primaries," 35-54;
50. Robert E. Hogan, "Sources of Competition in State Legislative Primary Elections," Legislative Studies Quarterly 28 (2003): 103-26;
51. Harvey L. Schantz, "Contested and Uncontested Primaries for the U.S. House," Legislative Studies Quarterly 5 (1980): 542-562
52. Julius Turner, "Primary Elections as the Alternative to Party Competition in 'Safe' Districts," Journal of Politics 15 (1953): 210;
53. see also Malcolm E. Jewell and David Breaux, "Southern Primary and Electoral Competition and Incumbent Success," Legislative Studies Quarterly 14 (1991): 129-143
54. John R. Alford and Kevin T. Arceneaux, "Isolating the Origins of the Incumbency Advantage: An Analysis of House Primaries, 1956-1990," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, 2000;
55. and Elizabeth R. Gerber and Rebecca B. Morton, "Primary Election Systems and Representation," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 14 (1998): 304-24;
56. Mark C. Westlye, Senate Elections and Campaign Intensity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991);
57. William D. Berry and Bradley C. Canon, "Explaining the Competitiveness of Gubernatorial Primaries," Journal of Politics 55 (1993): 454-71;
58. Grau, "Competition in State Legislative Primaries," 35-54.
59. These sources are listed in Table A1 in the Appendix.
60. For more information on the general election data, see Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder, "The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections," Election Law Journal 1 (2002): 313-338
61. The Democratic share of the two-party vote itself consists of the underlying partisan division of the state, or "normal vote"; the "personal vote" attributable to the candidates' own characteristics, including incumbency advantages and challenger quality; national party tides, which take the form of year effects; and idiosyncratic variation. For a decomposition of the vote into these components, see Ansolabehere and Snyder, "The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections."
62. The inclusion of "empty" primaries that draw no candidates for nomination has no substantive effect on our analysis. The same conclusions hold for primaries with single unopposed candidates.
63. Key, Southern Politics, Chapter 14; and American State Politics, 104-118
64. We do not have estimates for competition in Democratic or Republican primaries in Republican states in the 1960s and 1970s. No states met the normal vote threshold for Republican domination in the 1960s, and only Alaska and Wyoming met it in the 1970s. For more on the estimation of the "normal vote," see Ansolabehere and Snyder, "The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections." 30.We follow the literature in examining the electoral tests that officeholders face. By omitting the degree of competition in the primary won by the losing nominee, we do not introduce the bias that would result from introducing a large number of cases in which nominations were not worth enough to contest. In the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, the Republican Party did not regularly even hold primaries in most of the states in the South. Later in this article we compare competitiveness in dominant- and subordinate-party primaries in one-party states.
65. As one would expect, the statewide offices at the top of the ticket, governor and U.S. senator, were more competitive in the primaries than the down-ballot offices like attorney general and secretary of state. From 1910 to 1938, about half of gubernatorial and senatorial primaries were competitive, versus about two-fifths of the primaries for the lesser statewide offices.
66. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People, Chapter 5.
67. JohnW. Swain, Stephen A. Borelli, Brian C. Reed, and Sean F. Evans, "A New Look at Turnover in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789-1998," American Politics Quarterly 28 (2000): 435-457
68. Andrew Gelman and Gary King, "Estimating Incumbency Advantage without Bias," American Journal of Political Science 34 (1990): 1142-64;
69. Steven D. Levitt and Catherine D. Wolfram, "Decomposing the Sources of Incumbency Advantage in the U.S. House" Legislative Studies Quarterly 22 (1997): 45-60;
70. Ansolabehere and Snyder, "The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections."
71. See also Turner, "Primary Elections as the Alternative to Party Competition in 'Safe' Districts."
72. As we have already shown, statewide elections are more competitive than U.S. House elections, both overall and at the primary stage. Incumbency accounts for part of the difference. Because of term limits on many statewide executive offices, more than 30 percent of statewide elections compared to fewer than 10 percent of House elections fill open seats. See Ansolabehere and Snyder, "The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections."
73. In a separate analysis, we find that the value of incumbency rose sharply in primary elections a decade or so earlier than it did in general elections. We treat the topic of the incumbency advantage in primary elections more fully in a forthcoming article.
74. Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction, 127-29;
75. Key, American State Politics, Chapter 5;
76. and Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 415-416
77. See, e.g., Key, American State Politics, Chapters 4-6;
78. and Nelson W. Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
79. Progressives differed among themselves on the wisdom of the reform; see Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 264-265