Can we boycott bipartisanship instead?

In the NY Times, Joe Nocera advocates boycotting donations to political campaigns as a way to get politicians to "begin acting responsibly." Somehow, he considers this idea "hardheaded and practical." There are so many things wrong with this column it's hard to know where to start, but I'll give it a shot.

The first and most important point here is that the column bespeaks an outright hostility to democracy. Nocera approvingly quotes Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz* as saying, "The fundamental problem is that the lens through which Congress approaches issues is re-election." A word of advice: avoid reform suggestions from people who claim that the re-election incentive is a problem. The re-election incentive is the entire point of a representative democracy. It's what distinguishes members of Congress from tyrants. It ensures that elected officials will try to do what the people who elected them want them to do, rather than just doing whatever they want or following the lead of the most charismatic politician in DC.

Okay, that issue aside, the whole idea of boycotting contributions to candidates has a serious collective action problem associated with it. As Nocera admits, the boycott would have to be bipartisan to work, otherwise one party would dominate the party that refused to give to candidates. Yeah, that's kind of a big stumbling block there. Since those who donate to candidates tend to be the most loyal partisans, you're going to have a hard time convincing them to lay down arms while trusting that the other side is doing the same thing.

Third, Nocera and Schultz seem to be confused about the role money plays in politics. Note this paragraph:

Schultz began doing some research. In 2000, he said, total campaign contributions, to all politicians, amounted to $3 billion. Four years later, it was $4 billion. In the 2008 election year, he said, "it went up another billion, to $5 billion. I was astonished.... It is a sad state of affairs that the only thing they’ll listen to is money."

It's really not clear to me how they get from point A (donations are increasing) to point B (money controls politicians). You might as well say that the only thing politicians will listen to is votes. (After all, turnout has been increasing!) And that, of course, would be just fine.

Finally, seriously, a boycott? According to the 2008 ANES, about 10 percent of Americans donated to candidates that year. That just has to be a huge overstatement, given how inflated self-reported voting tends to be. So, very few people are even doing this activity that Nocera wants to see boycotted, and those that are are the most committed partisans in the country. This is a "hardheaded and practical" idea?

(h/t Michael Tofias and Hans Noel)

*Just two weeks ago, Tom Friedman was being seduced by the Americans Elect CEO in his "swank offices, finance with some serious hedge-fund money." What is it about wealthy CEOs that makes NYT columnists swoon?

Turning "Republicans and Democrats into Americans"

Brendan Nyhan flagged this recent article by former Rep. Mickey Edwards (R-OK) in the Atlantic. The article's title, "How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans," is really obnoxious, suggesting that Republicans and Democrats are not already sufficiently American when they advocate for the things they care about. But I have no idea if Edwards actually came up with the title, and the rest of the post is pretty thoughtful, so I'm going to try to give it its due.

The piece has a clear insidery perspective; Edwards was clearly bothered by partisan divisiveness during his time in Congress and doesn't like what he's seen in the two decades since. While I am a longstanding defender of parties and partisanship, I am sympathetic to concerns raised by members of Congress about such divisiveness. No one likes divisiveness in the workplace. Members of Congress -- most of them, anyway -- put in long hours trying to advance issues they and their constituents feel are important, and it can't be fun to see people opposing you just because of the "D" or "R" that appears next to your name on the ballot or to have people questioning your motives all the time. So while I believe that parties are very useful for voters and for legislators, I certainly understand why an experienced congressman (particularly one who saw a pretty substantial rise in partisanship during his tenure) would want some sort of reform.

That said, I believe the reforms Edwards is pushing are pretty misguided. Here are his six reforms and some brief responses to them:

• Blanket primaries - I've addressed this issue before. I don't think it helps anyone if Democrats can pick Republican nominees and vice versa or if the general election is between two candidates of the same party. But even if you like this idea, there's very little evidence to suggest that it makes much of a difference. Washington state has had a blanket primary for a while now but maintains a pretty polarized state legislature. The legislators California elected during its earlier experiment with the blanket primary were no more moderate than in other years. Maybe it will make a modest difference, but I wouldn't bet good money on it.
• Nonpartisan redistricting - There's no real evidence that this makes a difference, either. State legislatures in nonpartisan redistricting states are no less polarized than those where the majority party in the legislature draws up the districts. Polarization has definitely been occurring over the past few decades, but the fact that both states and counties -- which have fixed borders -- are polarizing just as rapidly suggests that redistricting hasn't had much to do with that.
• The remainder of Edwards' reforms are quite insidery and would really only affect members of Congress and their immediate staffs. They including allowing more open rules in the House, increasing the power of the ranking minority member on each committee, filling committee vacancies by lottery, and professionalizing committee staff. I don't have terribly strong feelings about these, but I would note that the first two, which basically enhance the power of the minority party, would serve to make the House somewhat more like the Senate. If I were a minority member in the House, I'd be all over that, but is the Senate really a model of efficiency or collegiality right now?

In sum, Edwards' reforms would likely have little effect on partisanship, and any effects they have would be felt almost exclusively by members of the House of Representatives. That doesn't make them bad ideas so much as ineffectual ones. 

What does make them bad ideas is that they seek to undermine political parties, the greatest tool we've ever devised for representation in a democracy. The parties, which Edwards dismisses as "private clubs," consist of people who are volunteering their time, labor, and money to advance issues and candidates they care about to improve the country in some way, at least from their perspective. All that activity, aggregated into two large national parties, creates a great deal of constraint on members of Congress, who understandably chafe under that yoke. But it's that yoke that creates accountability and ensures that the government behaves in a way that is at least somewhat consistent with what the American people demanded in the most recent election.