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There Is No Perfect Way to Design Institutions

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Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin winks as she speaks during her vice presidential debate against Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008.  (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin winks as she speaks during her vice presidential debate against Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

This is a very important point:

Masket’s case, in other words, is that our institutions should have protected us from this undesirable outcome. Brendan Nyhan also raised this point a while back in a series of tweets.

But I think it’s time to interrogate whether this is really true. Can we really design institutions that protect us from anti-democratic ideas?

[…]

One of the reasons advocates for human rights and other freedoms tend to also favor open political processes is that we assume good institutions will choose leaders who will protect freedom and justice. Open elections are certainly better in this regard. But they’re not a guarantee that parties and candidates who rely on bigoted appeals or talk about curtailing freedoms won’t win sometimes.

This is especially important when we talk about American institutions in historical context. I’ve often criticized the anti-partyism and incomplete notions of democracy that have shaped 20th-century party reform in the US. The old convention system, with its brokers and geographic organization, was more pluralistic — it was easier, under the pre-reform convention system, to ensure that a party nominee was acceptable to most factions within a party. As we are now learning, the current primary system allows a candidate to be nominated with a plurality of voters if no strong opponent emerges.

But here’s the thing: While these old institutions were far better at avoiding a conundrum in which a party nominates a candidate that many of its members don’t really like, they were hardly a bulwark against failures of substantive democracy. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with American history can point to at least a few instances of racism, sexism, and xenophobia.

The pluralistic structure of old-school nominations — especially in the Democratic side, where a rule stipulating that nominees had to win two-thirds of delegates held up for 100 years — protected the veto power of the states that became the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South. It wasn’t until after the elimination of the two-thirds rule that the Democratic Party began to take up the issue of civil rights.

In the wake of Trump winning people (especially dismayed Republicans) will tempted to romanticize a period in which party nominations were controlled by party elites. Some already have. But this would be misguided. Proverbial smoke-filled rooms of party elites had a distinctly flawed track record in choosing nominees, both substantively and in terms of reading the electorate. John W. Davis, one of the candidates produced by the rules Julia mentions, was not only substantively illiberal but earned a robust 29% of the popular vote. And unlike certain malfunctioned attempts by Democratic bosses to choose a nominee that I could name, at least nominating Davis didn’t literally lead to civil war. In the last decade, a non-democratic nomination process gave us “Sarah Palin, potential president should something happen to John McCain” with the enthusiastic support of party elites. I’m not sure what the basis for a high level of faith in these elites would be.

Seeing too much democracy as the problem also ignores the extent to which Republican elites made their own bed. As we’ve already discussed, Republican elites have mobilized a variety of racial and cultural resentments to generate support for candidates advancing an agenda whose key priorities notably lack support not only among the public at large but even among Republican voters. This just isn’t a recipe for a stable coalition in the long term.

In this case, the general election is likely to provide a check on the Republican primary electorate. And if it doesn’t — democracy is never a guarantee that the voters will get it right according anyone’s judgement. There’s no institutional framework that can guarantee substantively good results, not least because politics largely involves disputes over what substantively good results are.

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