A healthy democracy requires healthy political parties
Making the case for pro-parties democracy reform, one blockbuster think tank report at a time.
This week, a new report from yours truly went live into the world. World, meet More Parties, Better Parties: The Case for Pro-Parties Reform.
It’s a 30,000-word-view paper, but the basic argument is pretty straightforward. So, for the tl;dr junkies out there, here are the four key premises:
Premise 1: Political parties are the central institutions of modern representative democracy. We cannot have effective, robust democracy without effective, robust political parties. A healthy democracy depends on healthy parties.
Premise 2: A key reason democracy is failing in the United States is because our two-party system is failing. Our parties are not healthy or robust or effective institutions. Thus, democracy reform must focus on improving the health of our political parties.
Premise 3: The US two-party system no longer works because the parties are too polarized and do not face adequate competition in most places. One of our two parties has been captured by authoritarian extremists. In order to rehabilitate our party system, we need to make space for new and better political parties to emerge. The two-party system will not rehabilitate on its own.
Premise 4: Building more and better parties requires pro-parties democracy reforms. Specifically, it means supporting fusion voting and proportional representation, reforms that make more parties (that play a constructive role, as opposed to wasting votes or spoiling elections) possible, and restore vibrant competition and representation to our democracy.
But there’s so much more. The full report really will give you the 30,000-word view.
So why did it take me more than a year and so many words for me to get this out into the world? Well, if I’m going to put out a major report, I like to do my homework. I read lots of history. I went deep into the 1830s, the Progressive Era, and the 1960s, to understand how reformers of those previous reform eras made the same mistake over and over again.
Here’s the repeated mistake: Reformers have always sought a way around political parties. They have never succeeded. They tried to tear existing authority down. They didn’t think enough about building up new, sustainable sources of organized power.
Over and over, reformers kept wishing and hoping and hoping and wishing that more direct democracy, without partisan mediation, would be better democracy.
But each time, they ignored a basic reality of modern mass democracy: In politics, power comes from organization. Reforms that rely on “independence” and spontaneous citizen participation and “reason” cannot succeed because they do not take political parties or political organization seriously.
This point will not be news to political scientists. After all, if you don’t believe in the foundational centrality of political parties to modern democracy, no respectable institution will grant you a Ph.D. in political science. I kid, but only a little. The gospel quote is this 1942 chestnut from the great E.E. Schattschneider: “Modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties.” (you may have heard it before)
Political parties are essential because they provide structure and order to politics. They aggregate policy demands and commitments among diverse groups. They bring democracy to the voters by subsidizing information and participation. They support candidates and tell voters what those candidates stand for with their labels. They assemble governing majorities. These are all essential functions of modern democracy. No other organization can do all these things simultaneously or at scale.
Democracy without political parties is not independence and freedom. It is chaos and demagoguery.
In other words, without political parties, modern democracy is unthinkable.
But, in reading the history of democracy reform in America and then looking at the current anti-partisan stirrings of reform today, I had an oh sh*t moment. We are about to make the same mistakes again. And the stakes are too high to screw up again.
I fear we are once again embracing a failed vision of reform that attempts to find a way around the political parties in search of some desired ideal of “moderate” representation, rather than building up and strengthening the health of the core institutions of modern representative democracy — political parties.
I’m particularly concerned about the embrace of open primaries and nonpartisan primaries (including “jungle” primaries). If parties have no say over who their nominees are, and multiple candidates can claim a party label without any official party endorsement just by running a primary, parties become brands anybody can purchase for enough money — not meaningful labels signifying genuine consistent standards.
The stated goal behind reforms like this is “moderation” and building back the political center. I get it. A political system without a vibrant center is in danger of collapsing. So, regardless of one’s political values, we should all want a vibrant center. But the center is also a relational concept, and “moderation” is a loose and fungible concept if it exists only in relation to other forces in our politics.
To build a firmer political center requires building political parties that cohere around particular values and identities,1 not particular candidates, who can come and go. Parties can be engines of inclusion. Candidates are engines of personality cults.
A hypothetical Moderate Party, for example, could build an identity and collectively organize moderates. A moderate candidate has built nothing if she loses the next election, which she may well, particularly without a party to support her.
Focusing more on parties has made me much more enthusiastic about fusion voting as a powerful pro-parties democracy reform.2 I write quite a bit about fusion in the larger report. It’s become clear to me that fusion offers a promising lever to build towards more political parties. I wrote more about fusion in a recent post on Steven Hill’s Democracy SOS substack (which I recommend subscribing to, if you care about democracy reform issues.) And, I wrote about fusion with Protect Democracy’s Beau Tremitiere in the Bulwark.
To emphasize the importance of party building, let me quote briefly from the paper:
We cannot have a functioning, representative, participatory democracy without organized political parties. Political parties provide the coherence and framework of electoral choice and governing accountability. No modern democracy has ever succeeded without organized parties, and for a good reason.
Absent parties to structure and organize politics, democracy crumbles. A failing party system is a hallmark of democratic backsliding and instability. Dictators hate nothing more than organized political opposition capable of mounting any electoral challenge. One recent study of authoritarian dictatorships found that in 43 percent of such countries, only one party—the ruling party—was legal (no organized opposition). In 18 percent of such countries, parties were banned outright. Only 39 percent allowed multiple parties to exist, and even there, opposing parties were often restricted and hobbled by ruling authoritarians.6 In the Soviet Union, only one political party was allowed. In China, only one political party is allowed. A single political party—or better, no parties at all!—is a promise of unity and harmony. It is a historically false and brutal hope. Among the countries where politics is entirely nonpartisan today (because political parties are banned): Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
Yet, I also understand the temptation right now to disparage political parties, and praise “independence” as the most important value in politics. After all, assessing the parties as they currently operate can be depressing. But as I write:
The “rotten at the core of the party system” is a familiar trope in American political reform. In every era of reform, leading activists have railed against the evils of the party system. The traditional approach to American reform has been to treat political parties, particularly party leadership, as an obstacle to democracy in America. The classic reform "move" in every era has thus been a variation on the same theme: more direct democracy. In each era, reformers have sought a way around parties.
But there is no way around political parties in modern mass democracy. Improving democracy hinges on robust political parties. Rather than treating political parties as obstacles to healthy democracy, this paper treats political parties as facilitators of healthy democracy. Political parties make modern representative self-governance possible.
We need better parties. By better, I mean parties that can honestly and effectively carry out the essential activities that parties perform in modern democracy. Thus, effective and representative governance in modern democracy requires better parties.
Here, the lessons of the past become especially powerful. As I write, summarizing the history …
First, in the 1830s, reformers smashed the centralization of party leadership in Washington, DC, and brought presidential nominations to the states. The first modern mass parties were organized in response to this decentralization. But to hold the parties together, leaders simply replaced the clubby caucus rooms of Congress with the patronage “spoils system” politics that stymied the development of American state-building capacity.
In the 1900s, progressive reformers again set their sights on party leadership, replacing party bosses with direct primaries for most elected offices, setting up “nonpartisan” government and new administrative agencies that only the “public interest” would guide. This did not solve the problem of organized interests. It only moved organized interests into the shadows, where they could, ironically, operate with less scrutiny and more power.
In the 1960s, a new generation of reformers, angered by this hidden power elite, borrowed the familiar moralizing populism. They broke open the presidential nominating process and gave it over to direct primaries, weakening political parties even further. They also took a new approach to administrative agencies, setting up new agencies as more open to the public, which would presumably act as a bulwark against the cozy corruption of government and business that the progressive reformers had failed to anticipate.
But as we enter the 2020s, we are dealing with the new problems created by excessive opening up. As parties weakened, organized interest groups became more powerful. Government agencies became hobbled by process requirements. Organized lobbying interests have repeatedly abused transparency and openness to delay and undermine government regulations. Unorganized citizens have not taken the same advantage of the expanded participatory opportunities.
If my new More Parties, Better Parties report accomplishes one thing, I hope it lifts up the history of democracy reform in America and helps us learn from previous mistakes. Not everyone is a history buff, so I hope some of this will be new to you. To borrow from Harry S. Truman, “The only thing new in the world is history you don’t know.”
And the history is simple: American reformers have tried candidate-centered reforms over and over, and failed over and over.
Maybe it’s time for a new approach that puts political parties at the center, not on the margins. That’s what this paper tries to argue.
I also hope this report provides a useful framework of evaluating reforms as party-centered or candidate-centered.
Again, if the health of democracy depends on political parties, we should prioritize the health of our political parties. Parties can’t be healthy without competition, and party competition won’t come without systemic party-centric reform.
To be sure, some candidate-focused reforms can be useful as stopgaps. In a democracy emergency, we should try whatever works in the moment. But some reforms only work for the moment. Others last because they build beyond the moment. That’s what my reading of history makes clear.
I know 30,000 words is long, so maybe you just want to start by reading the Executive Summary, a thick and nutritious soupçon designed to be consumed in one sitting. From there, you can move onto the Introduction. Soon you may be hooked. (It’s not Succession, I know. But if any HBO execs are reading this, the TV miniseries option on this report is still available.)
If you want to read something shorter, you might also enjoy my Washington Post op-ed, “Our two-party political system isn’t working. The fix? More parties.” which I wrote as the very condensed version of the longer paper.
And finally, you might ask yourself… could multiparty democracy really catch on here in America? A growing number of reformers believe the answer is yes. The Atlantic has this story.
Or, as I write in the new report:
The signs are powerful that U.S. democracy is now entering a fourth significant period of reform. Though still early, increasing interest in structural change is real. During the initial phases of a reform period, it’s critical to be rigorous about the institutional legacy we wish to pass on. Yet, given the clear democracy emergency alongside this opportunity, it is sometimes hard to think straight. It is easy to rely on the near past. It is harder to learn from the more distant past. Perhaps the greatest challenge in moments of deep pessimism is imagining a different, better future.
Yet we must retain some optimism. We must see that the urgency of combating extremism is equally a chance to build a more representative, effective, and full democracy for the twenty-first century. There are no shortcuts. If we succeed, it will be only because we did the hard work to make more and better parties possible.
Postcard from Apsen, CO
Ideas, Ideas, Ideas.
I spent last week in Aspen, CO, at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Anything I write about it will sound pretentious and humble-braggy (OMG, it was sooo amazing. So many Ideas. And yet how small I felt surrounded by those mountains!)
So I’ll just note that I participated in a panel discussion entitled “Is Our Political System an Ill Fit for the Times?” The answer was: yes. Video exists.
And yes, we discussed IDEAS:
Also, I want to highlight two recent episodes of Politics in Question, featuring two great guests.
We spoke with Lisa Disch, a professor of the political science at the University of Michigan, and an elected representative to the Ann Arbor City Council. We had a delightful and insightful conversation about the importance of representatives and political parties in making democracy possible, drawing a lot on her recent book, Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy
We also spoke with Daniel J. Hopkins, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. We discussed his new book Stable Condition: Elites’ Limited Influence on Health Care Attitudes. We talked about why nothing seems to matter in politics, despite everything seeming to be important. It’s a great conversation and a great book that helps explain why arguably the most consequential legislation of the 21st century (so far) had so few political consequences.
That’s all for this edition. And if you need an IDEA for what to do next… go ahead, press all my buttons …
1 For example, a Moderate Party could stand for the impartial rule of law, a balanced economy, a view of American history that accepts both the good and the not so good, a pro-markets, pro-climate approach, or any other platform. But note these are values, not candidates.
2 Fusion voting allows for multiple parties to nominate the same candidate, and thus encourages parties to form.
Very nice Lee.
Would be great if there was an epub version of the report so I can read it on my ebook where I have less distractions. Couldn't see one on the New America website