A rolling primary?

Inspired by the preceeding and born of the water cooler is this potential solution to two primary season problems:

1) Why does it make sense to stagger elections by state while forcing residents of the same state to vote on the same day?

2) Forcing everyone to vote on the same day presents a problem for strategic voters in early states; they have little idea what the outcomes will be in later states.

An interesting solution would be an extended, nationwide primary with frequent updates of the running tally. Sincere voters have an incentive to vote early to demonstrate the potential strength of their preferred candidates. Strategic voters, by contrast, face an incentive to follow the tally and vote after sincere voters. This is in order to maximize the effectiveness of their votes.

What, if any, constitutional and legal hurdles exist to implement this reform? Would this violate current interpretations of “one person, one vote?”

Would knowing the race were close in advance present an incentive to turn out?

This post is the product of substantial groupthink.

How the Iowa caucuses mirror preferential voting

Now that Putin has stolen an election and the Venezuelans will keep democracy, TDP can return to more important topics.

The Iowa caucuses are a peculiar institution. Seen globally, primary elections are anomalous enough. Yet Iowa’s delegates to the parties’ nominating conventions are chosen by people walking around a room and revealing their preferences to everyone else. Two features of the Iowa caucuses strikingly mirror the logic of preferential voting systems: iterative preference flows and strategic coordination among rivals.

My old friend at FairVote wrote this overview of how the caucuses work. In a nutshell, candidates must achieve threshold levels of support to win delegates. “Support” or “votes” are the number of people standing in a part of the room that represents a given candidate.

When candidates fail to reach the threshold, deal making and cajoling begins, and things get complicated. In 2004, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards agreed that if either of them failed to reach threshold in any precinct, their supporters would line up with the other…

In other words, rival candidates bargain for second choice support. When one is eliminated, voters walk across the room, casting “votes” for successive preferences.

Equally interesting is that, depending on the size of the precinct, the threshold to win delegates is about 15-20%. That means the caucuses use a rough form of quota-based proportional representation in which each candidate winning delegates (i.e. “seats”) is analogous to an effective party.

Institutions, Australia and the Democrats in ’08

Last weekend Labor trounced John Howard’s conservative government Down Under, and the result continues to reverberate. Even Howard lost his own district (they’re called divisions in Oz). As E.J. Dionne notes in the Washington Post:

For the first time in the country’s history, wrote Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald, a government was tossed out in unambiguously strong economic times.

Americans who care about Australia’s election are divining lessons for the Democratic Party, namely, how to smash the GOP in 2008.

Lesson one: be a Democrat. For Dionne, Labor’s Kevin Rudd reached out to unions and the middle class, constituencies that felt the squeeze of 11 years’ conservative rule. Iraq no doubt played a role. Howard had been in lock-step with Bush there.

Lesson two: galvanize Progressives. Rudd supplemented his old-left flank with a “generational” set of new-left positions: Internet access, education and, above all, the environment.

Writing for Brookings, Justin Vaisse sees both lessons as given features of a completing cycle. Worse yet for conservatives, there was long-term electoral suicide in Bush’s failure to ram immigrant “amnesty” through Congress last summer. “Pour le Parti républicain, les défis s’accumulent.”

Lesson three: take election reform seriously. Rudd campaigned on environmentalism. Greens like environmentalism. Greens accounted for 8% of the vote. Because Australia uses instant runoff voting (IRV) to elect the House, those votes transferred to Rudd’s Labor party.

Without the environment, Green Party and IRV, the Man of Steel still would be running Australia. In her blog at the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel spells it out:

In Australia, IRV was introduced in 1918, and has historically benefited parties on both the left and the right. Last Saturday, it helped the Australian Labor Party – but not before the Australian Greens were able to run a strong campaign and collect 8 percent of the parliamentary vote, and perhaps push debate further on issues like climate change and the Iraq War than Labor wanted to go. In the initial tabulation Labor won only 44 percent of the vote, but with IRV most of the Green votes ended up being awarded to Labor. The party had worked hard to be the second choice of Green voters, and designated former Midnight Oil lead Singer Peter Garrett – “a-rock-star-environmentalist-turned-politico” – as their likely environment minister. In the end, Labor ended up with 54 percent of the two-party tally.

I would add two other institutional factors to the mix: compulsory voting and a rational election day. Australians vote on the weekend, and they have to pay fines to avoid the polls. Turnout is regularly over 90%.

IRV has worked to Australian conservatives’ advantage in the past. Though my sympathies are evident, the point is not to rig results à la Putin. If a partisan cycle is completing, it would be nice to see our leaders expand democracy as we enter the next. Lonely issue dimensions cry out for it.

Giuliani and Democracy Promotion

The journal of Foreign Affairs has been running a series of articles from the various major presidential candidates from both parties. The articles have been presented as an opportunity for the candidates to present their view of the world and what each of them believe should be the priorities of the next president. The last issue (July/August 2007) included essays from Mitt Romney and Barak Obama. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet, but I will in the coming weeks and include my take on their stance on democracy promotion. The current issue (September/October 2007) includes essay from Rudolph Giuliani and John Edwards. I will also follow up with my thoughts on Edward’s piece later this week, but I feel pretty compelled to take up Giuliani’s essay now given that it has gotten so much attention – both positive and negative.

First off, I will limit my commentary to the portion of his essay that deal with democracy promotion. I have a lot of additional opinions about his overall world view, but I don’t think they are relevant to this forum which focuses on democratization, US foreign policy, and democracy promotion.

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