Voting rights are under attack, both by Republican state legislature and by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. Given Congress’s rejection of voting reforms in January 2022, Didi Kuo and I argue, in our new article, that it is time to reconsider strategies for democracy reform. Our argument, however, is not just strategic. To suggest that reformers need to choose between legislative efforts to secure voting rights and political organizing through parties is obviously a false dichotomy. But it is also the case that too often federal voting rights legislation is presented as a panacea to our democratic ills without sufficient consideration of its limitations as a reform strategy.

First, it is not clear that the sweeping federal reforms that have been proposed would pass constitutional muster. The Supreme Court has reduced the scope of both federal voting rights and federal oversight over voting rights—and, thereby, the extent of voting rights violations by states. There is also a high likelihood that if pushed the Supreme Court would have extended its federalism concerns to its Elections Clause jurisprudence.

Second, reforms to election procedures are not a panacea. Voters should have easier access to the ballot. Redistricting should be less partisan, and there should be greater transparency in campaign financing. But creating uniform federal standards for election administration and increasing voting access would not necessarily reduce polarization or make it easier for congressional majorities to pass policies. Several procedural reforms (eliminating the filibuster or mandating rank-choice voting in party primaries) might have more traction restoring confidence in Congress, but those are rarely part of the package of election reforms and were not part of the package rejected in 2022.

By comparison, political participation as evident from recent high-turnout and civically engaged elections have yielded important policy results at the state and local levels. In 2020, Floridians passed a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars. Tellingly, more Floridians voted to raise the minimum wage than in the presidential election. The stories of ballot initiatives in 2018 and 2022 are similar. Bipartisan majorities have also led to the direct enactment of a variety of election reforms, from Kentucky (which made early in-person voting permanent) to Vermont (which mandated absentee ballots for all registered voters).

Our argument, however, is not that we should have more direct democracy. Our argument is that:

“Mass participation would be more consistently effective . . . if it were channeled through participatory party organizations. Associational parties, as we call them, can do even better than idiosyncratic mass partici­pation to promote the demands of voters and begin to restore the fraying trust between citizens and government in the United States.”

Jennifer Rubin makes a key point in this Opinion piece in the Washington Post, arguing that the problem in American politics today is not polarization but “right-wing extremism”: Democrats are not selecting extreme candidates. For example, as of July, in “the 22 primaries in safe Democratic seats in which a progressive candidate challenged a more moderate one, the moderate candidate won 14 — or about two-thirds — of the races.”

“It’s not polarization when one party recognizes the results of a democratic election and the other does not. That’s radicalization of the GOP. Nor is it polarization when the GOP reverts to positions it has not held for decades (e.g., banning abortion nationwide, ending the protected status of entitlements) while the Democratic Party accommodates its most conservative members as it crafts popular legislation (e.g., paring back proposals to allow the government to negotiate prices for pharmaceutical drugs).”

Today was the 10th Anniversary of the Mischief of Faction Blog, which started from the premise that “on balance, a nation is better off with parties than without them.” Seth Masket and Julie Azari took the opportunity to reflect on the state of American political parties. As Masket notes, “The past decade has taught us a lot about the dark side of parties.” Ultimately, Masket, like many in this field, points to the party primary as the problem. Azari, by contrast, urges political scientists to consider whether the traditional goals and assumptions of the field match political realities and institutions. The former is a more comfortable space for election law reformers. And yet, as Azari recognizes, institutions matter. And for the foreseeable future, the Supreme Court (an institution) and its doctrine (part of that institution) significantly constrain the feasibility of many of the most promising ideas for reforming party primaries.

The question then is what options remain for encouraging democratically functional parties. One idea that appears to be gaining ground in public discourse is fusion politics. Just today, Andy Craig published a short but clear argument in favor of fusion politics for Cato. It offers a particularly nice history of efforts to ban fusion candidacies and posits fusion politics as an answer to polarization, one that will bring more independents into politics–and presumably by expanding the electorate increase democratic accountability and responsiveness. While I generally agree with those goals (the latter in particular), I do think we should all pause to reflect on Azari’s most provocative question, what if polarization is “the result of progress on race and gender issues”? Viewed in this light, should we worry that a return to moderation and compromise (even if possible) would be backsliding?

Rick Pildes, in the Wash Post:

Three major elections on the same Sunday in June — in France, Colombia and Spain — tell the fundamental story of democracy in our era: the continuous disaffection with government, the collapse of traditionally dominant parties and figures, and the constant search for alternatives — which is quickly followed by yet more disaffection and the search for yet other alternatives. This is no longer a narrative of dysfunction distinctive to one country, if it ever was. The Conservative Party in Britain is now scrambling to find a new prime minister; the government in Italy is near collapse. The nature of political authority has fundamentally changed. Political power has become fragmented, as voters abandon traditional parties and turn to upstart, insurgent parties or independent, free agent politicians from across the political spectrum.

In multiparty democracies, such as the three that held elections last month, the fragmentation of political power makes it more difficult to form governments, causes those governments to be fragile and prone to collapse, and weakens their capacity to deliver effective policies. Politics in the United States, with our well-entrenched two-party system, are nonetheless being shaped by similar forces — although here fragmentation means the Democratic and Republican parties are torn by internal factional conflicts that party leaders struggle to surmount. 

The N.Y. Times is reporting on the Proud Boys’s successful efforts to join the leadership of the Miami-Dade Republican Party, once the locus of Jeb. Bush’s power. “[A]t least a half-dozen current and former Proud Boys who have secured seats on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee, seeking to influence local politics from the inside.” A few are running for local offices. “For now, longtime party stalwarts remain in control amid an internal power struggle, but the influx of Proud Boys and the radicalization of other members have created considerable upheaval.” And this appears to be a nationwide strategy.