Primaries:

Harry Brighouse writes:

As the primaries creep up on us (in the US), I want to make a point against the primary system that seems obvious to me but I’ve not heard made elsewhere. It is simply this: it constitutes an unwarranted violation of the principle of freedom of association.

The States which have primaries effectively impose on political parties a process for selecting their candidates that the members of those parties have no (collective) choice about. I know that in some (perhaps all) states the primary is not binding, and can be overridden by a party convention. But suppose that Candidate A wins the primary and Candidate B is nevertheless selected by the party. Then Candidate B works at a tremendous disadvantage relative to a world in which he was selected by the party without the State having organized an independent vote against it. Why on earth shouldn’t party members (that is, people who have chosen to join and pay membership dues in a party) have the right to decide collectively which candidate they want to represent them, without any interference by the State? Closed primaries are bad enough; in open primaries the State effectively forces political parties to allow open opponents of their party to participate in candidate selection. Sometimes when I think about this I feel like a naïve European — there must be some justification that I am missing. State interference in the process of party formation is so extensive in the US already (it varies by state, but mechanisms include having non-partisan local races, restrictive ballot access rules, restrictions on out-of-state contributions, and the gerrymandering, sorry, redistricting process, quite apart from the stupid winner-take-all system); it just seems flat out wrong to force people who have freely associated for the purpose of contesting political power to share the process with their avowed (and paid up) opponents. So, what am I missing?

AT some level Harry’s not ‘missing’ anything; he’s perfectly right. The parties in the U.S. have been rendered less-than-wholly independent of the state, and of the states.

As to explanations:

1) The Constitutional structure. The Constitution a) allows each state to determine most of the rules of most of its elections, conspisuously including the rules for electing members of the House of Representatives. This acts as a genuine barrier to the adoption of anything like a party list system. (The Constitution also mandates that House members must be residents of the state– though not necessarily the district– they represent.) Whether chosen by primaries or by caucuses, U.S. House candidates are going to be chosen by state-level procedures. One of the primary (no pun intended) mechanisms of party autonomy in other FPP systems, and even moreso in any PR/ STV system, is party listmaking. (There are mechanisms for candidate selection by local party members in at least the UK and Australia, but I genuinely don’t understand how those interact with the centralized party-list formation that also goes on. I suspect that most of the time the local selection is a formality.) That simply can’t operate here.

Proviso: The Constitution does not mandate single-member districts. California, for instance, would be free to have a single at-large district for the state, and to allocate its eight hundred and thirty or so U.S. House seats by PR or STV in a single statewide election. In that case, the state party would gain tremendous power through its ability to determine a party list. Similarly, states are free to experiment with such things in their state legislative elections.

2) Race. The parties ceased to be regarded as purely private voluntary associations in substantial part because, when the south was a one-party region, the Democratic Party used whites-only primaries to select their candidates. It was decided that the Democrats’ status as a non-state actor didn’t immunize this practice from the obligation to protect voting rights for blacks.