Ever since they emerged in the early 1800s, political parties have been a target of public scorn. But they have always had their defenders — a smaller, less influential camp that holds that parties are more beneficial than harmful because they play an essential role in mediating political disputes.
The anti-party forces fitfully succeed in enacting laws and rules to restrain party organizations and bosses, including the adoption of referendum and recall procedures; requirements that states pick delegates to the national conventions through primaries and caucuses; bans on closed-door meetings; the prohibition of legislative earmarks; and legislation that restricts the size and source of contributions to the national political parties.
The intensity of polarized politics at every level of government now puts the dispute over political parties at the center of a debate among office holders, political scientists, legal experts and partisan activists. Is it possible that strengthening the parties could lessen polarization?
The pro-party camp contends that many reforms have unintentionally fostered polarization: diminishing the clout of parties and party leaders undermines their role as a force for moderation and compromise.
Nathaniel Persily, a professor of law at Stanford, is a proponent of strong, well-financed parties. Polarization, he wrote in an email to me, “is a cost of many of these good government reforms. It is almost an intended cost if you think about it.” Why? Persily argues that the purpose of
good government reforms is often to make politics more about ideas and less about material or private gain. Well, we have ideological parties now, with clear distinctions and a broad gulf between them. There is nothing wrong with that in the abstract. However, a separation of powers system requires compromise between the parties. Transparency, open meetings, bans on earmarks, and weaker party machines make compromise more difficult.
In “Strengthening Parties,” a chapter in the forthcoming volume “Solutions to Political Polarization in America,” Persily contends that in the case of campaign finance, “the good good-government reforms that have been tried have, if anything, made things worse.”
The claim that reforms have made things worse is based on the interaction between the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which regulated campaign finance, and two 2010 court decisions, the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United and the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decision Speechnow.org v. F.E.C.
The McCain-Feingold Act prohibited political parties from accepting unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and rich people, which had come to be called “soft money.”
The federal court decisions, in contrast, explicitly allowed independent political groups – including both super PACs and politically active nonprofits – to accept all forms of soft money.
Pro-party advocates argue that McCain-Feingold in particular has undermined political parties, while court rulings have empowered donors and independent committees, many of whom have agendas more polarizing than those of the parties.
At a Bipartisan Policy Center conference in Washington earlier this month organized to explore the current campaign finance situation, Ray La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, made a case, like Persily, in support of political parties:
Campaign finance laws that limit party money tend to encourage party polarization. Anti-corruption laws diminish the mediating and moderating role of party organizations because they compel candidates to rely more on ideological sources of money.
La Raja, who has been working with Brian F. Schaffner, another UMass political scientist, presented slides comparing states that limit contributions to political parties with states without such limits. In the states without limits, a much higher proportion of the total contributions to candidates, especially to centrist-moderate candidates, comes from the parties than it does in states with limits. In addition, the degree of ideological polarization between Republicans and Democrats in legislatures in states without limits is substantially lower than it is in states with limits, as Figure 1 demonstrates.
Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is a strong supporter of McCain-Feingold, disagrees with Persily and La Raja. At the conference, and in later email exchanges, Mann made a number of key points.
First of all, Mann contends, Republicans are the driving force behind polarization. Their opposition to Democratic proposals is based less on ideological principle than on a strategic political decision to oppose President Obama on every front, even when he takes a position previously advocated by conservatives. Examples of the latter include the individual mandate under Obamacare and end-of-life counseling.
“Much of the acrimony and gridlock is not a consequence” of ideological issues or campaign finance, Mann told participants at the conference. Instead, he argues, “it’s strategic – it’s all about capturing a majority in the House and Senate, and the White House.”
According to Mann,
The Republican Party leadership has largely embraced the ideological positions of Tea Party activists and uses its campaign resources to help elect Republicans wherever they have a good chance of winning, not to favor less extreme candidates or to try to discipline their most extreme or recalcitrant members. Lifting campaign contribution limits to help them raise more money is unlikely to make much of a difference.
Michael Barber, a political scientist at Brigham Young University who supports strong political parties, provided evidence to the conference that altering campaign finance laws has significant costs and benefits — trade-offs in every direction.
Barber presented slides that showed that individual contributors to candidates are strikingly ideological and partisan, thus fueling polarization. That is, contributions from traditional PACs, which give relatively small amounts directly to candidates, are focused on the goal of gaining access, and thus are far more politically centrist (Figure 2).
In a working paper on the impact that campaign finance regulation has on state elected officials, Barber found that “legislators who raise more money from individuals are more likely to be ideologically extreme,” while “higher limits on contributions from PACs yield more ideologically moderate legislators.”
One interpretation of Barber’s findings is that a reduction in the number of contributions from individual donors, including small donors, would diminish ideological conflict. This would mean, in effect, abandoning the long-sought goal of increasing participation in the campaign finance process. Conversely, by this reasoning, advocates of increased participation by small donors will have to tolerate exacerbated polarization and gridlock if they are successful.
I asked Barber in an email about these conflicts, and he wrote that
there’s no easy answer. In my opinion it really becomes a question of which we prefer more: a more moderate legislature greased by the money of interest groups, or a gridlocked legislature that stands on principles and ideological purity.
Not an attractive option for either side. Reformers and party loyalists both face what Persily describes as “a devil’s choice.”
McCain-Feingold does appear to have contributed to a decline in Republican Party fund-raising, and to the end of rising cash totals for Democratic Party committees. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, Democratic Party fund-raising grew from $229.8 million in 1992 to $626.5 million in 2000, the last presidential election year in which soft money contributions were permitted. Since then, Democratic totals have remained virtually level, reaching $631.1 million in 2012 (all these figures are adjusted for inflation).
On the Republican side, the post-McCain-Feingold election years have produced a substantial decline in donations, which fell to $697.7 million in 2012 from $815.3 million in 2000.
But insofar as the parties are struggling, it is far more the result of court rulings that have led to an explosion of outside spending, which, in key battleground contests in the current election cycle, often eclipses spending by the parties.
Experts who are at the heart of these developments argue that the courts over the past four years have tipped the balance in favor of independent political committees. Bob Bauer, a prominent Democratic campaign finance lawyer who spoke at the Washington conference, noted that “there are enormous differences between parties and outside groups,” but the legal system now “privileges the groups.”
The result is a distorted balance of financial and political power with the least accountable organizations gaining the most leverage over our campaigns. And yet, as we try to fix that problem and to address the general disrepute into which American politics has fallen, we have to think hard about how the unintended consequences of prior efforts at reform have helped to bring us where we are now.