We need more (and better) parties

Why a healthy democracy depends on healthy political parties, not nonpartisan elections. Or, why doubling down on the failed median voter theory (and all it entails) is pure idiocy.

The new issue of Boston Review is out, and it features a terrific forum. I wrote the lead essay: “We Need More Parties.” Responses come from Danielle Allen, Deepak Bhargava & Arianna Jiménez, Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld, Josh Lerner, Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Grant Tudor & Cerin Lindgrensavage, Joel Rogers, Ian Shapiro, Bob Master, and Maurice Mitchell & Doran Schrantz. At the end, I respond to the responses.

If you like Undercurrent Events, you will love the Boston Review forum. So go ahead, read  it now, and come back to this essay later. I’ll still be here, in my disembodied words.

You’re still with me? Great.

Here, I’m going to take the Boston Review forum as a jumping-off point to explore something even broader than the need for more parties: the need to think about politics organizationally (as we rarely do) instead of individually (as we too often do, treating voters like atomized consumers in a political marketplace, asking what they think in isolated surveys and focus groups) . 

The problem with this individualist approach is that fundamentally, democracy is a thing we do together. And to govern ourselves together, we need to be connected to each other in meaningful ways. We also need to be able to negotiate our differences with a spirit of reciprocity. In a healthy democracy, healthy political parties (and political intermediary organizations more broadly) teach us these values. They help us feel heard and represented. In an unhealthy democracy, demagogues and grifters fill the void left behind.

Thus, when evaluating electoral reforms, we should ask one question above all: Does this reform encourage healthy political parties? By “healthy” I mean parties that are both representative and responsible; parties that not only give a political voice to diverse groups of citizens, but also teach them about the productive give and take of politics: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you have to make a compromise. But most of all, it's how you play the game. In a democracy, nothing is ever permanent. We can always re-evaluate and re-negotiate later, if we hold each other as equals. But if we poison the process, we’re screwed.

Elections and party competition set the broader political norms and possibilities. Thus: Get the electoral and party system right, and much is possible (though far from guaranteed). Get the electoral and party system wrong, and not much can grow on degraded soil.

Excessive focus on individual voters confuses political analysis

Too much of our political conversation and analysis pushes us to think about politics individually, not organizationally or socially. Political discourse is about individual voters — respondents in polls, participants in focus groups, persons on the street talking to a reporter.

We often find their answers confusing and inconsistent. But perhaps that is because their answers lack context. These voters are not isolated individuals. They are part of families and communities and workplaces and heritages and sometimes even organizations. We all are best understood as social creatures, with histories; We are confusing when considered as isolated survey respondents or out-of-context people at a diner.

I will call this model of thinking the Ideological-Individualist Model. And I want to argue here, this model is actively harming our ability to reform and strengthen our democracy. Yet it has so completely colonized our ways of thinking about democracy and the crisis of polarization that it is hard to see the world without it. 

So what is the alternative?

The Organizational-Social Model: A new old way to think about politics

I want to instead argue for an alternative that puts organizations and social relationships at the center.  I’ll call this the Organizational-Social Model. 

The Organizational-Social  Model  places people in social networks, and argues that we make sense of politics  through our organizational affiliations and identities— above all, political parties. It argues that ideology is a poor measure for understanding politics, even if it captures something. It also argues that to understand and explain politics, we should focus on political and civic organizations, not individuals. 

The Organizational-Social  Model says that the problem in America today is not really ideological polarization. The problem is social polarization and social isolation. Competing partisan coalitions have grown apart from each other, and have no understanding or overlap. And too many people are left entirely outside of political organization, prey for grifters and demagogues.

Weak civic institutions make for weak democracy, because civic institutions (especially political parties) teach citizens the basic ethical reciprocity of negotiating power.  When civic organizations and political parties become ceaseless digital marketing campaigns fueled by outrage, there is only the expectation of demand and outrage. 

This used to be a mainstream view in political science, when the discipline was more oriented towards sociology. But starting in the 1950s, political science became more oriented towards economic models of democracy, and the emphasis on the social and organizational aspects of politics fell away. It’s time to correct for that.

Here’s the bottom line: A democracy is only as healthy as its civic organizations and its political parties. If these organizations can’t offer citizens belonging and representation, can’t inculcate a spirit of equality, reciprocity, deliberation, and pluralism, then democracy can’t function very well.

Thus, the core reform strategy for those who care about democracy has to be building healthier parties, and political organizations more broadly. As I’ve argued repeatedly, I don’t see how we can do this within a dysfunctional two-party system. This is why I see pro-party reforms like fusion voting and proportional representation as so crucial. 

Here is a simple table that compares the two models in broad generalizations. 

Now let’s expand on these competing models of democracy. 

The Ideological-Individualist Model makes all kinds of weird assumptions that would be really bad for democracy if they were actually correct

The Ideological-Individualist Model of Politics emerged in the 1950s as out of economics. Anthony Downs’ 1957 book, An Economic Theory of Democracy, popularized the “median voter theory” — a framework that became so universally accepted in political science that it has been dubbed the “master theory” of American political science. 

As I write in the Boston Review essay, it colonized the discipline because it came along at a particular moment to provide rigor to a discipline and a Panglossian justification for the greatness of the American democratic model:

Having just finished a PhD in  economics at Stanford, Downs deployed the tools of rational choice  theory to explain why two-party politics might converge in the middle.  It was not a crazy idea for the time. In the years following World War II,  the two major parties had largely converged across a wide range of policy  areas. Simultaneously, the academic study of politics was undergoing a  sea change as a new generation of scholars embraced economic modeling for its apparent rigor. Unlike the thick methodologies of the field’s — which drew heavily on sociological and institutional theory—the  new, “thin” models, it was argued, could be tested with data. 

 Both inside the academy and out, the median voter theory came  to stand for an ideal as well as a natural state of politics. It provided  a baseline against which commentators could analyze politics, campaign strategists could promote winning strategies, and political  scientists could test hypotheses. A simplistic version flourished in the  public sphere, offering a narrative that was both easy to understand  and delightfully boosterish about the American two-party system.  Array everyone on a single-axis line, assume most people are close  to the middle, and voilà! You get an American success story: a stable  two-party democracy of moderation and broad consensus. 

The model is extremely simple. It assumes citizens have a single left-right political ideology.  At election time, voters evaluate the two parties. They  vote for the party that is ideologically closer to them. Under this logic, parties should move to the political center to maximize their support. 

I call it “ideological-individualistic” here because the underlying theory relies on a single liberal-moderate-conservative ideological dimension to explain politics, and treats individual voters as independent individuals, outside of parties, and analyzes politics at the level of individual voters (and their ideologies). Thus, to win (say the pundits) candidate Z must move to the “middle” (whatever that is) and court “moderates” (whoever they are). 

This is indeed an economic theory of democracy, with individualized and atomized citizens as consumers maximizing some ill-defined utility, constructed as a one-dimensional ideology. If democracy actually worked like this, we wouldn’t have much of a democracy, since the health of democracy depends on thick civic institutions that teach citizens to behave very differently from utility-maximizing consumers! 

Unfortunately American democracy is actually resembling the model’s underlying expectations of atomized, independent (at least self-identified), ideological citizens more and more. And yet, the more citizens detach from parties, the worse our politics seems to get. I recognize that the causal relationship is complex. But I keep coming back to a basic observation: weak parties are hallmarks of weak democracies. 

Still, many want to hold on to this model of moderate convergence. To hold onto the model means that if the model is right, then something else has gone wrong. What explains the parties’ failure to converge? Explanations abound. But clearly, something must be interfering with the natural order of things.

Downs was clear that a two-party system “cannot provide stable and effective government, unless there is a large measure of ideological consensus  among its citizens.”  So, if we are to preserve the model, we must hang onto the assumption that there is still a large measure of ideological consensus among American citizens. So is there? 

On certain issues, sure. But most of these issues with broad agreement are not the issues on which parties campaign. Politics is about conflict. Disagreements on issues define elections. So, whatever latent consensus might exist on some issues, that latent consensus is not shaping the agenda of either party, nor is it the basis of any third party challenger. 

Yet, too many Mugwump reformers look at the conflict between the parties, and see that conflict as divisive. Well, it is. That’s electoral democracy! Elections create conflicts because elections have to be about something! No challenger party ever decided: let’s run a campaign showing voters how we agree on things. 

The Mugwump reformers then take another step and think, well, if parties are dividing us, imagine what elections might look like without parties? Or at least, with parties that broadly agree with each other, so elections are not really about very much? Then the parties can be in the background, and centrist, compromise-oriented candidates can be up front, offering gauzy promises of bipartisanship! 

This is obviously a playful caricature of a certain strand of thinking, so I don’t want to insult anybody. Yet, this assumption depends on a view of the electorate’s nature outside of partisanship as perfectly rational, only to be biased and blurred by partisanship.  

How the Ideological-Individualist Model took over American politics

The median voter theory and the individualist-ideological model that goes with it offers one model of the world. Mental models of all sorts guide our thinking. Without them, the world would be incomprehensible. So I am pro-models.

But all models make assumptions and direct expectations towards certain observations (and not others). So we should ask: are the assumptions reasonable? Are the expectations helpful?  Do they guide us to see the right things? As Einstein once put it, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”

Looking through an individualist-ideological lens, we see individuals with ideologies. Political science has many sophisticated survey research tools to measure this. But we tend to see what we choose to measure. And what we measure guides our behavior (we all “teach to the test”). If we are looking to prove that moderates exist on a one-dimensional ideological spectrum, we might see them.¹

Here, the parallels to “neoliberalism” are pretty obvious, so I’ll just call them out specifically. 

Starting in the 1940s, the “Chicago school” of economists developed a new approach to economics. They extracted select portions from Adam Smith’s work, and fit them into a theory that portrays markets as self-regulating, guided by an “invisible hand” (which, incidentally, is mentioned only once in the entire Wealth of Nations, as a passing comment).

Stripped of its nuance and complexity, the economists’ conclusion was much simpler: un-regulated free markets were the natural order of the universe. And therefore: any attempt to regulate markets was bound to fail. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” thus became an abused, out-of-context invocation. A new approach to regulation was born. 

In short, starting in the 1970s, the American economy was re-made to fit the theory. But something went wrong. Economic inequality rose. The middle class hollowed out. Many people got left behind. American life became more stressful. Loneliness and unhappiness rose.  “Deregulation” didn’t mean that the government got out of the way. It just meant that the government set different rules, which allowed for different behaviors. But the more policymakers tried to make the economy conform to the model free market, the more unequal outcomes it generated. 

Similarly, American politics starting in the 1970s came to resemble the underlying assumptions of the median voter theory. Voters became more atomized, individualistic, and independent of the parties. The simple left-right dimension came to explain more of political conflict, as the rich multidimensionality of America’s jumbled and over-lapping parties flattened out into a single dimension. 

And politics itself became more like a market — campaign spending skyrocketed. Most money went into advertising and messaging. Candidates sold themselves more like products than representatives. Parties didn’t disappear. They just became thin and hollow.  Politics became much more information-rich; In our digital world, it is easier than ever to learn about candidates and parties, and to find out where every candidate stands on a range of policy positions. 

Today, far more than ever, we have the basic conditions for a Homo Economicus style-politics. And yet… the more American politics resembles the basic conditions for an economic model of politics, the worse the median voter theory performs as a predictive model!

 

But what if the Ideological-Individualist Model is wrong? (spoiler alert: it is) 

When a simple mental model (like the median voter theory, or the neoliberal theory of economics) does not conform to the world, there are two ways to respond. 

One response is to admit that the theory is wrong, and develop a new theory. 

I had hoped something like this might start to happen by now. In 2016, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels published a terrific and widely-read book, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. I read the book as a devastating blow to the “rational individualism” that had long dominated political science, accumulating decades of evidence into a slam-dunk case against the idea of rational models of politics, including the median voter theory.

Achen and Bartels concluded by arguing for a “Realist theory” – which they explained, “A realist theory of democracy," they wrote, "must be founded on a realistic theory of political psychology.” But as they noted, “At present, nothing of that kind exists." They also suggested more focus on organized groups, a throwback to an earlier era of political science grounded more in sociology and groups.

But for all their evidence (which I found extremely convincing), it is hard to replace something with nothing. No new theory has emerged.

The other response to a failing theory is to double-down on the theory, and try to make the world conform even more to the theory. This is what many free-market economists did for a long time. When their predictions failed, they argued that the problem was not with their theory, but with the world — there was still too much government interference in markets. If only, the free-market devotee says, we got the government out of the way even more, then markets could finally work well. This is a bit like the die-hard communist activist, who upon learning about Stalin’s purges, is undeterred and instead argues, “but we’ve never tried true communism.”  

In politics and political reform, I see a version of this thinking:  “liberate democracy from partisanship” 

Again, the underlying idea is that there is some kind of hidden moderate, political center, that would exist outside of partisan conflict. But the political center is an abstract relational concept.

Asking “What is the political center?” is like asking “What is the geographic center of the United States?”  Well, that depends, doesn’t it. 

Are we talking the contiguous Lower 48? If so, the center is in Lebanon, Kansas. Or do we include Alaska and Hawaii? If so, the geographic center moves roughly the intersection of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. But there is nothing inherent about any of those locations. If we are going by population center, we’d move further east. The median center is roughly where Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana border each other. 

Source: Wikipedia

But there is nothing inherently “centrist” about any of these places on their own. They just happen to be in the center of a particular distribution. If the borders of the country were different, a different piece of land would be in the center.

Similarly, in politics, the center shifts based on the positions candidates and parties take. But we keep trying to fit them into a single left-right dimension to make the idea of a median voter sensible. Consider J.D. Vance. Very conservative on cultural issues. Very populist on economic issues. Or Trump himself. Is he far-right? Is he more conservative than Liz Cheney? He is now, apparently. 

We can certainly try to place everyone on a one-dimensional model. But in doing so we lose the nuance and multidimensionality and pluralism that makes politics vibrant and healthy. To align the world with a one-dimensional model, we must thin out politics. We lose the richness of democracy to fit the individualist-ideological theory of moderate convergence.

It would obviously make no sense to say that we should structure our electoral institutions so that we privilege representation for the geographic middle (in Kansas) over representation for the outer edges of the country. Rather, the basic premise of democratic equality says that everyone should get as equal representation as possible. 

The median voter theory, and the ideological-individualistic model of politics on which it depends, has a diminished space for pluralism. This is not only unfortunate. It is also destructive. It flattens out the complexities of organizational and associational life in search of some abstracted, thin, economic, consumerist vision of elections. And the more politics comes to resemble this vision, the worse our politics becomes. 

Yet, many reform efforts are continuing in this mode…

 

When the individualist-ideological model drives reform: nonpartisanship in search of moderation is a recipe for confusion and incoherence. 

The most popular current version of reform in search of  recovering lost state-of-nature “moderation”  is the the “Alaska Model” of elections — nonpartisan “open” primaries, advancing four candidates to a general election decided by ranked-choice voting — a new system that voters will get to decide on this fall in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada.

Unfortunately, the Alaska model continues the logic and model of our current system, but with some small tweaks that double-down on its most individualist, candidate-centric elements. It also doubles-down on underlying logic of the median voter theory — that we should funnel all political energy to an abstract “moderate” center.  

In the Boston Review forum, Danielle Allen makes the case for the Alaska Model. I am skeptical. Like Joel Rogers, I worry that open primaries and ranked choice voting put too much “focus on individuals, not the parties and rules that define our system. If our broken system is a room, these proposals  amount to changing its drapes rather than its furniture.”

Many boosterish pieces have been written about how the Alaska Model was a huge success story because it preserved the bipartisan governing coalitions that have long been a feature of the Alaska state legislature. Alaska’s political culture has long been distinct, and uniquely independent. 

However, now in just its second go-around, Alaska Republicans have already coordinated to subvert the system by agreeing that if two Republicans run the first-round nonpartisan primary, the one who gets fewer votes will drop out before the general election to avoid any confusion, effectively re-creating the old partisan primary.² The 2024 Alaska primary was also the state’s third lowest turnout primary in 50 years. 

Ultimately, like the overly simple median voter theory, The “moderate” vision assumes a simple answer to a hard question. As Misha David Chellam helpfully writes in his excellent substack, Modern Power (which I recommend),, those who think of themselves as moderates “envision a shorter path to address shallower problems…As a result, they tend to resonate with the notion that "This shouldn't be so complicated, so we won't allow it to be." This leads to a certain susceptibility to silver-bulletism. The specifics of the silver bullets can vary widely, but the commonality is the solutions tend to be reasonably clear, actionable, ~quick, and ~easy.”

Chellam is one of the leading intellectuals behind the “abundance” movement, and is thinking hard about how to build a new faction within the existing party system. You should also read Steven Teles and Rob Saldin on “the rise of the abundance faction.” We all agree on the importance of making politics more multidimensional and less binary, but are taking complementary approaches. I just think it’s prohibitively hard for factions to emerge in a nationalized politics without electoral rules that make them valuable. But I’m very glad they are trying to build those factions nonetheless. 

Indeed, focusing on organization building is crucial, essential work in democracy. Which is why I think we need to prioritize that vector in democracy reform! 

 

A healthy democracy requires healthy political organizations, especially parties

Last summer, I published a very long white paper on the case for pro-party democracy reform, titled More Parties, Better Parties: The Case for Pro-Parties Democracy Reform. As I argued in that 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. 

Healthy political parties do many things. They connect citizens to the government. They structure and organize political conflict. They mobilize and engage citizens in elections, and give meaning to those elections. They represent and listen to diverse groups of citizens. Parties also communicate commitments to the basic foundations of democracy — a commitment to political equality, a commitment to treating opponents as legitimate, a commitment to free and fair political competition, and a commitment to accept political losses peacefully.

I’ve written versions of this political science catechism for a while now. But lately, I’ve been thinking more about the institutional robustness of the political parties as a marker of their health. As I wrote in a recent TNR article on the state of the Democratic Party:

When political scientists analyze the health of political parties, one question they ask is whether the parties are institutionally robust. A weak party is a personalized one—an extension of just one leader. A healthy party is bigger than any one person. A healthy party shares leadership and transfers power across generations, and boasts many party committees and offices, in many places and communities. It is grounded and responsive to its constituents, is integrative and complex, and exists beyond the ambitions of any single group or person. A healthy party, like democracy itself, is a collective enterprise.

We often discuss and analyze parties in the context of whether they are “strong” or “weak.”  I’ve been involved in these debates for a while. I still haven’t found a satisfactory definition of strength or weakness. 

So, perhaps instead evaluate parties on their civic health:  Are political parties operating as robust civic institutions, with meaningful presence in real life? Are political parties listening and listening to the concerns of non-elite citizens, and representing these concerns? Are political parties teaching the important civic democratic values of tolerance and forbearance and compromise?  

I conclude my lead Boston Review essay like this:  “But the bottom line is that there is no nonpartisan “state of political nature” to which we can return. American politics is not in crisis  because of too much partisanship but, in a sense, because of too little.  Multiple, vibrant political parties are the only way to organize power in  modern democracies, and if we don’t change the party system we have,  the two-party doom loop will only grow worse.”

As for building something like a political center (fuzzy as that concept may be), fusion voting can do that. The center is less fuzzy when a party organizes it around something more proactive. Currently, the political center is minimal, and hence very incoherent because it is just a residual and relational space – defined by the absence of organized parties.

A “Common Sense” party that draws in compromise-oriented Democrats and Republicans who feel abandoned by their respective parties is probably a 5-10 percent party, depending on the election. Enough to sway elections under fusion voting, giving voice to disenfranchised folks.

Any such party needs to establish an identity and organization to succeed. There is no obvious “center” without a political party to give it an identity and coherence. This is behavior fusion voting encourages and makes possible. Thus: Fusion voting has a key advantage over candidate-centered reforms like nonpartisan primaries or ranked-choice voting. Candidates are transient. Individual candidates lack the ability to build anything beyond their own ambitions.

The Organizational-Social Model of politics: Democracy is about belonging, social networks, and collective action

In their Boston Review response, Deepak Bhargava and Arianna Jiménez write:

“Electoral reforms, including fusion voting, can certainly help  drive democratic revival. In fact, one of the strongest cases for fusion  voting is one that Drutman doesn’t make: it can work synergistically  with community and labor organizing, by incentivizing community  organizations to build political organizations that more directly  bring their members’ voices into the democratic arena. Likewise,  broader structural reform must surely be part of how we unrig a  system that fails working-class people..”

They’re right — it’s a strong case, and I wish I had made it! But I’m glad they did. It prompted me to reflect more on the significance of organizations in politics at every level. 

I get sick thinking about how much social media platforms like Facebook benefit from massive digital advertising campaigns that now dominate our campaigns and pollute our politics with toxic threats about the existential stakes of each election, send out to individual consumers. Every time I watch a video on YouTube, I have to pass through at least five seconds of a leading Democrat telling me to give money (presumably so they can advertise more on YouTube).  

If all that money went instead to community organizing, we’d be a healthier democracy. But then, what would all the campaign consultants and digital strategists do? 

But this is a different way of thinking about politics — it is not about ideology and individuals. It is about organizations and communities. 

Politics is about people. People are social creatures. Ergo, politics is social. Democracy works when most people feel connected, represented, and legitimated.  It fails when too many people feel disconnected, un-represented, and un-heard. 

Connection, representation, and legitimation are not about choosing candidates that maximize ideological proximity. Connection, representation, and legitimation are ongoing processes. They fundamentally involve being part of something bigger than oneself. Almost all of us have this group instinct. We want to belong. 

The crisis in American democracy is not solely about polarization. It’s also about the decline of civic and political institutions. Politics has turned into consumerist marketing, focused on winning narrow majorities through over-promising. And then inevitably under-delivering, but maintaining the currency of outrage and anger to fundraise upon. This is decidedly unhealthy. 

I don’t want to diminish the problem of partisan polarization — But to me, it is not a problem of ideological polarization. It is a problem of organizational sectarianism, and binary one-dimensional conflict. The substance of political conflict is constantly changing. But the group animosities are stable (and not ideological), and getting worse.

In practice, “moderation” (a spirit of compromise) is more like an emergent property that comes from an underlying ethic of equality, reciprocity, deliberation, and pluralism. And this ethic can only emerge when power is reasonably balanced, and most people can see their values and perspective heard and represented somewhere in the policymaking process. They don’t need to always win. The process of resolving differences should feel fair and open, without demeaning autonomy and humanity. Political Organizations, particularly political parties, are in the crucial intermediary organizations that make this possible.

A small but important group of thinkers are taking political organizations seriously

Beyond the Boston Review forum, some scholars are doing important work on the role of political organizations and pluralism. In my thinking on this topic, I’m drawing inspiration from some recent work thinking about civil society, and the associational nature of party politics. I highly recommend a great essay by Hahrie Han and Jae Yeon Kim, called “Civil Society, Realized: Equipping the Mass Public to Express Choice and Negotiate Power.”  As they write:

Democracy demands that people commit to pluralistic self-determination, which means that people must be willing to seek power and also share it. We argue that civil society plays two important roles in sustaining people’s willingness to do both: first, civil society cultivates a capacity for expressing choice; and second, it teaches capacities and provides opportunities for people to negotiate power… in recent decades, civil society’s emphasis has moved more toward expressing choice and away from the creation of venues for negotiating power.

Tabatha Abu El-Haj and Didi Kuo offer a similarly engaging vision of political parties that are rooted in communities and civil society. In their recent essay, “Associational Party-Building: A Path to Rebuilding Democracy,” they make a compelling argument for why we need to put political parties at the center of our democratic vision:

Effectively channeling political engagement into responsive governance requires political parties. Political parties are the only institutions capable of political organization at the scale necessary to produce accountability and responsiveness in a nation as vast and diverse as the United States.

Relatedly, in a new report, “Taking Democracy for Granted: Philanthropy, Polarization, and the Need for Responsible Pluralism” Daniel Stid makes a compelling case for a robust civil society that enhances the spirit of democratic culture — a “responsible pluralism.”  Stid, a longtime democracy program officer at the Hewlett Foundation, and now head of Lyceum Labs, chastises philanthropy for supporting top-down and polarizing organizations, rather than a more pluralist, bottom-up vision that builds longer-term organizational capacity in many communities and takes the longer-term health of democratic culture more seriously. 

In short, a growing group of thoughtful scholars are taking pluralistic political organizing seriously. This is important work. And we need more of it. 

The Boston Review forum is one vector in this conversation of thinking organizationally and socially about democracy reform. There are many others. I hope we will see more overlap and interweaving ahead. 

Allow me one final humble-brag, if you will…

Oh, and one final note — a bit of humble-brag, I suppose: I was delighted to be included among The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s featured list of “nonprofit leaders to watch” in the electoral reform space. A lot of great folks in this space.

However, I do note that of 17 “leaders” in this space, I’m the only one focused on party-centered reform. It’s still an uphill battle in a reform space that continues to marginalize a foundational Political Science 101 lesson: political parties are the central institutions of modern representative democracy. When political parties are failing as healthy intermediaries between citizens and their government, democracy is in trouble.

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1. There has recently been some debate in political science as to whether moderates exist. A 2023 paper, entitled “Moderates” argues that a one-dimensional model can place many moderates in the political middle of a one-dimensional axis. 

However, I am much more convinced by David Broockman and Benjamin Lauderdale’s subsequent critique, in which they eviscerate the methodology and argue that the one-dimensional approach is malarkey.

Likely, this academic back and forth will continue. Different measurement methods can give you different realities. That is the point.

2. Most Alaska Republicans signed a pact that if they are not the top Republican in the first round (primary) election, they will drop out. So, in the single congressional seat, currently held by Mary Peltola (D), Peltola finished first in the nonpartisan primary, Nick Begich (R) finished second, and Nancy Dahlstrom (R, the Trump-backed Lt. Gov.) finished third. Dahlstrom dropped out, allowing Republicans to consolidate their support around Begich. 

This shouldn’t be surprising. Had designers of the Alaska system read Jack Santucci’s important history of ranked-choice voting in US cities (More Parties or No Parties), they would have expected parties to circumvent the ranked-choice voting system. Had they read Seth Masket’s book, The Inevitable Party, they would have seen how really any reform designed to get around political parties is bound to fail. Parties are inevitable. The question is not how to avoid them. The question is how to make them healthy, vibrant, and pro-democratic forces.