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Types of Primary and Party Responsibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Ira Ralph Telford
Ira Ralph Telford
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

A chief criticism of the American party system is the lack of party responsibility. In the view of some students, one characteristic of our political system that contributes to this irresponsibility is the practice in some states of allowing individuals to vote in primaries without regard to their partisan allegiances. In such an open primary Republicans may, if they wish, vote in the Democratic primary, and vice versa. The contrasting, and more common, practice is the closed primary, in which participation is restricted to party “members.” Some political scientists think that the closed primary, by subjecting legislators to the presumed discipline of periodic scrutiny by their party's members, induces a greater measure of party regularity than the open primary, in which the official has to satisfy a more motley clientele. This position was taken in the best-known statement of the “party government” school, the 1950 report of the APS A Committee on Political Parties:

The closed primary deserves preference because it is more readily compatible with the development of a responsible party system…. on the other hand, the open primary tends to destroy the concept of membership as the basis of party organization.

Other political scientists have expressed doubts about this presumed relationship between primaries and party responsibility, but there has been no systematic empirical evidence on the point. This paper will examine the relationship between primaries and party responsibility by comparing the party regularity of senators from open primary and closed primary states.

Type
Research Notes
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1965 , pp. 117 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1965

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References

1 “As a matter of fact, membership in a political party has none of the usual characteristics of membership in an association. In most states the party has no control over its own membership. Any legal voter may on his own initiative and by his own declaration execute legal formalities before a duly designated public official making himself a registered member of the party. The party as such is not consulted. It does not accept the application; it does not vote the applicant into the association; it may not reject the application; and, finally, there is usually no recognized and authoritative procedure by which the party may expel a member.” Schattschneider, E. E., Party Government (New York, 1942), pp. 55–56Google Scholar.

2 This proposition is based on an assumption about the electorate's information level that does not appear to be confirmed by voting behavior research, which indicates that most voters do not even know their Congressman's name, much less his voting record. See Stokes, Donald E. and Miller, Warren E., “Party Government and the Saliency of Congress,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter, 1962), pp. 531–546Google Scholar.

3 Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System (New York, 1950), p. 71Google Scholar.

4 The initial impetus for this study came from an article by Ranney, Austin, “Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System,” this Review, Vol. 45 (06, 1951), pp. 488–499Google Scholar. The article was a critique of the then recently published report by the Committee on Political Parties, and notably, of the Committee's recommendation that only one major reform was needed in the primary laws of the United States—the abolition of all primaries except the closed variety. On this proposal Professor Ranney commented in a footnote: “Is there any evidence to suggest for example, that Senator Knowland (from a crossfiling state) and Senator Magnuson (from a blanket-primary state) disagree with and stray from the programs and positions of their respective parties more than say, Senator Morse, Senator Tobey, or ex-Senator Elmer Thomas (all from closed-primary states)?” (p. 490).

5 Computations taken from the following volumes of the Congressional Quarterly: Vol. 2, p. 786Google Scholar; Vol. 4, pp. 38–39; Vol. 6, p. 59; Vol. 8, p. 67; Vol. 10, p. 72; Vol. 12, p. 126; Vol. 14, p. 126; and Vol. 16, p. 142.

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