In this study, I examine the state of the political science literature and make two main contributions. In the third chapter, I put this database to work on two of the important questions. California, one of the largest and most populous states, sends 12 percent of the representatives to the US
House; it is common to hear the state mentioned as one of the world's largest economies. For supporters of primary reform interested in reducing partisanship, the top two remains one of the few likely choices. The examination of the two major primaries in California is also a look at a possible future for primaries nationwide.
One of the ways in which advocates of the top two could achieve their goal (more moderate candidates winning elections) would be for parties of a weak party to abandon their preferred candidates and vote for electable moderates of the other party. The limits of voter strategic participation limit the success of the top-two primaries in nominating moderates (if indeed this is a desirable goal as proponents suggest).
Primaries in Political Science
12 They direct the reader's attention to the discussion of “Condorcet's Paradox” in Riker, William H. The motives of the political actors who imposed direct primaries—in the South or otherwise—are not just matters of history. In the history of primary election laws, of course all these motives affected some of the actors at one time.
To measure the ideology of the winning candidates, they used ADA scores (ideological measures developed by a political group, Americans for Democratic Action). The Gerber and Morton paper represents an important advance in our understanding of the effects of primary election laws. A closely related issue with the moderation of the candidates is the representativeness of the primary voters.
Alvarez and Nagler (1997) make one of the more extensive analyzes of crossover voting in the United States. Successive primaries, on average, select nominees closer to both the position of the median party voter and to the position of the median voter in the general electorate” (p. 775). The study of primary elections is not easy; make some aspects of the problems manageable.
This is not – to borrow from Churchill – the beginning of the end of the search for primaries;.
State Laws, 1945–2012
Alabama proves to be one of the easiest states to code: the state used a traditional. John Sparkman D-Ala., in the first primary election received most of the interest from the runoff. Wallace came in second in the first round of the election, with 42 percent to Brewer's 43 percent.
The Republican Party objected to the blanket system and the state negotiated to use a variant of the 'party choice' primary. Rowland, a 33-year-old conservative who has the support of more than 70 percent of the state's 914 delegates. The state will eventually adopt a less restrictive version of the "challenge primary," allowing candidates to gain access to the ballot by petition.
Interesting changes in Georgia's primary history occurred outside of consideration of the variables I included in the database. From 1970 to 1978 Hawaii actually used a closed primary; voters must vote in the primary election of the party for which they last voted in the primary election, unless they have registered a different preference. Stats, and appear to be in use today, except for the 23 month requirement (which remains on the books but is not enforced).
I have decided to code the state as "closed" through 1972, following the court's reasoning in Kuspar v. Due to the nature of secret ballots, a potential crossover voter need only swear to the majority of the nominees voted. at the last elections. Kansas uses a variation of closed primaries that allows unaffiliated voters to choose — once — on Election Day.
That difference can be important; in the first deployment of the top two in California, several candidates experienced a reversal of fortune. Candidates qualify for the party's primaries by winning 25 percent of the votes of the convention delegates. On appeal, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the district court's judgment that struck down the state statute.
Laws, Competitiveness, and Representation
For example, if a state used a partisan primary for a year, a senator might consider positioning himself to appeal to a broader segment of the electorate. Overall, elections for "top of the ticket" statewide offices tend not to be very competitive under any circumstances. On the other hand, the authors of the older studies also had a point: When one or both sides stop trying, the margin of victory doesn't measure much at all about that choice.
In particular, since I've pulled competitiveness data from the top of the statewide ticket, the multiple crossover effect in the general primary is much more likely to occur further down the ballot. If a voter wants to vote in their own Senate primary, the desire to vote in the other party's primary for other races—perhaps the lower house of the state legislature—seems unlikely to draw the voter to cross over. For most voters (in most cases, anyway), semi-closed primaries and closed primaries work identically; registered partisans cannot cast crossover ballots without changing their registration status.
Closed primaries appear to produce closer elections than some of the other alternatives, even when other potential sources of change are controlled for. Both models use the winning percentage of the "head of the ticket" candidate—either a senator or, in the absence of a senator, a governor. In the version of the model that replaces the “party choice” variable with the actual choice made (now excluding both statutorily closed and bipartisan closed primaries by choice), the overall results are the same.
This should not come as a surprise, although the relative size of the effect for established and open primaries might. Richer countries seem to have a slightly bigger win; this may capture some artifacts of American geography, as elections in some of the highest per capita states have been particularly lopsided in recent years (California and New York come to mind). Nevertheless, these results do not carry over to all possible specifications of the logit model.
A movement of magnitude .036, the effect of the "wide open" category, is enough to move half the distance from the median to the 1st or 3rd quartile of the data. The median is 0.43, with the boundary between the first and second quantiles at 0.35 and the boundary between the third and fourth quantiles at 0.50. From the results, it appears that the overall primaries have moderated the overall effect of the open primary; the coefficient is larger and still significant in the model presented in Table 3-8.
A Peek Into the Future: 2012 California Survey
182 In offices that fall under the “top two”, the second round of primaries always takes place. In the nonpartisan city offices, a runoff only takes place if a candidate does not receive 50 percent of the votes in the first round. This chapter provides many details about the original research I conducted in five California State Assembly districts in the two weeks leading up to the first “top-two” elections in the state's history.
Voter Behavior in California's First Two Primary Elections,” presented at the Midwestern Political Science Association Conference on April 13, 2013. This survey includes more than a thousand respondents from each of the five Assembly districts for a total of 5,615 registered voters. The core survey instrument uses only five questions about the June local assembly primaries.
As is relatively common with surveys, most respondents said they had either voted or planned to vote. There is much greater variation across districts with the three main measures of voter opinion of the candidates. In general, respondents could provide an approval rating for at least one of the candidates in their district; overall, 80% could do it.
Overall, only 70% of respondents provided enough information to construct a measure of ideological distance with at least one candidate. However, the simple combination of three core questions with voting preferences provides an important understanding of the data. In addition to the core questions of voter behavior, the survey also contained another series of questions about what voters thought about the first two elections.
In addition, between 11% and 21% of respondents did not answer each of these questions at all. Capturing a snapshot of the top two in California's first year preserves our understanding of the initial conditions of the long game and allows us to think about what will happen in the future. I chose five districts in this study because they demonstrated the range of strategic options offered by the first two primaries.
Voter Behavior in California’s 2012 Top-Two Primary
