So California’s Proposition 14 passed with 54% of the vote. California now has a “jungle primary.” It may yet be subject to litigation, although Richard Hasen doubts that the litigation will be successful. I noted earlier the research suggesting that the type of primary has little impact on legislative polarization, despite the claims of Prop 14’s proponents.
Here are some political scientists’ perspectives on Prop 14: Seth Masket, Jon Bernstein, Travis Ridout, John Pitney, and Barbara Sinclair. Reading these, I detect a theme!
Ridout:
But the lesson from Washington State is that politics as usual is unlikely to change much.
Pitney:
…don’t expect the new primary system to do much about it.
When California had a blanket primary for a brief spell, I was involved in some research on it. Based on that and other research, my sense of Prop 14, and a lot of political reforms generally, dovetails with what Ridout and Pitney say. In our research on the blanket primary (see this book), Jack Citrin, Jon Cohen, and I wrote this:
The blanket primary will lead to neither the millennium envisaged by its advocates nor the apocalypse predicted by its detractors.
I suspect the same will be true of the jungle primary.
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If a candidate gains a majority in the “primary” stage, are they automatically elected? If so, how is a jungle primary different from a French-style two-round runoff system?
Why do electoral-reformers in the US focus on this kind of stuff instead of either ranked- or proportional- voting?
John
Phil K. and I were a tag team on this in Oregon and I’d like to think I played a small part in defeating it here. It worry about it because of the strategic impact on candidates–if you follow the logic of Cox’s book, the top two is likely to result in a number of extremists making it to the general by holding onto their supporters in a low turnout primary. There are anecdotal examples (David Duke, Cleo Fields in LA: Fujimori in Peru; LePen in France).
Arnold’s quote today in the Times was great, something along the lines of “We don’t know what it will do but maybe it will do something.” Classic CA initiative rationale.
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Kyle unfortunately those are no-gos in the U.S. but you are right, those would make a significant difference. And no, this is not a 50% elected system.
My understanding is that you cannot win election by getting more than 50% of the vote in the new “primary.” The top two vote recipients must face off in the general election.
Why these kinds of reforms? That’s a question that requires a complex answer than can be provided here. My own quick guess is that (a) we have been socialized into thinking about politics only in terms of two major parties, (b) the parties and individual legislators (which control the laws governing elections) do not want to do anything that would make themselves less relevant, and (c) these kinds of reforms seem less drastic than switching to ranked- or proportional-voting.
FYI: I did a quick scan of the results yesterday and applied Prop. 14′s rules to the results. Based on the results, third party candidates would appear on the general election ballot in only four races and only because one of the major parties did not field a candidate for those contests. There would be eleven one-party Democratic or Republican run-offs in the general election: three House races (out of 53), one State Senate race (out of 20), and seven Assembly races (out of 80). Three of these would be because one of the major parties did not field a candidate and the other eight because the second-place finisher in one party received more votes than the first-place finisher in any other party.
The political science conventional wisdom may well be right with regard to the major parties, and to the vain hope that more “moderate” (really a code word for pro-business) candidates will be elected. But California’s version of Top Two differs greatly from the 1998-2000 blanket primary in terms of its impact on minor parties, and even differs from Washington’s version of Top Two.
First, Prop 14 and its enabling legislation eliminate the easier of the two existing tests for staying on the ballot. Two of the four minor parties currently do not met the harder test.
Second, they decrease the motivation that people have to register as anything other than non-partisan. Party membership now matters only for Presidential primaries. And minor party presidential primaries rarely provide any incentive to register as a member, while major party primaries often do. So registration in minor parties will go down.
Third, they limit the use of party labels to parties that are already ballot-qualified. Once you have been forced off the ballot by (1) and (2) above, you cannot (as you can in Washington) list your candidates as supporters of the XYZ Party so voters know who you are. (Granted, the Washington approach is a mixed blessing for minor parties because it encourages the formation of splinter groups barely large enough to collect nominating signatures.)
Fourth, they eliminate petitions in lieu of filing fees. At least one of the four minor parties relies almost exclusively on signature gathering because its candidates cannot afford the filing files. This provision is almost certainly unconstitutional, but why should minor parties have to go to the expense of getting it thrown out? Actually, the question answers itself: because that will further drain their limite resources.
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