Reform and Retrenchment

A Century of Efforts to Fix Primary Elections

Robert G. Boatright (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

344 Seiten

2024
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-777408-3 (ISBN)

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The direct primary, in which voters rather than party leaders or convention delegates select party nominees for state and federal offices, was one of the most widely adopted political reforms of the early twentieth century. Yet after decades of practice and study, scholars have found little clear evidence that direct primaries changed the outcomes of party nominations. The conventional wisdom has always been that once the Progressive movement declined and voters became distracted by more pressing issues, parties slowly reasserted their control over candidate selection. This book shows that the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Exploring changes in American primary election laws from the 1920s to the 1970s, Robert G. Boatright argues in Reform and Retrenchment that the introduction of the direct primary created far more chaos in American elections than most scholars realize. As he shows, political parties, factions, and reform groups manipulated primary election laws in order to gain an advantage over their opponents, often under the guise of enhancing democracy. Today there is widespread dissatisfaction with primaries, and we are again in a period of experimentation. Boatright looks at how this history can help us understand the reform ideas before us today, ultimately suggesting that, for all of its flaws, there is likely little that can be done to improve primaries, and those who would seek to change American politics are best off exploring reforms to other areas of elections and governance.

Robert G. Boatright is Professor of Political Science at Clark University and the Director of Research for the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the effects of campaign and election laws on the behavior of politicians and interest groups, with a particular emphasis on primary elections and campaign finance laws. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Deregulatory Moment? A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws (2016); Getting Primaried: The Causes and Consequences of Congressional Primary Challenges (2013); and Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform in the United States and Canada (2011). He has served on many different task forces studying political reform, campaign finance, and primary elections, including the Bipartisan Policy Center's Task Force on Campaign Finance, and the Campaign Finance Institute's advisory board.

List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
Part I: The Middle Years: Primary Election Reforms, 1928-1970
2. Reform or Retrenchment? An Overview of Changes in Primary Election Laws, 1928-1970
3. The Direct Primary and the Decline of the Progressive Movement
4. Hostile Takeover: Nonparty Group Capture of Primaries
5. Defective Primary Laws
6. Primaries and Partisan Advantage
7. Are Southern Primaries Different?
Part II: What the History of Primary Elections can Tell us About Contemporary Reform Ideas
8. Contemporary Primary Reform Efforts
9. Why Primary Reforms Rarely Work
10. The Future of the Direct Primary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	25.04.2024
Zusatzinfo	33 b/w figures; 29 tables
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	226 x 150 mm
Gewicht	567 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-19-777408-3 / 0197774083
ISBN-13	978-0-19-777408-3 / 9780197774083
Zustand	Neuware