Primary Elections and American Politics

The Unintended Consequences of Progressive Era Reform

Chapman Rackaway, Joseph Romance

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781438490588, 9781438490571
• eBook ISBN: 9781438490595
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Argues that Progressive Era reforms had the counterintuitive effect of weakening political parties and their role in representative government.

The last twenty years has seen a series of changes to American party politics: polarization, negative partisanship, decreasing voter turnout, and decreasing faith in elections and government. In Primary Elections and American Politics, Chapman Rackaway and Joseph Romance trace the origins of these and other problems to one of the most controversial reforms in American political history: the direct partisan primary election. With a comprehensive history of the primary election, the authors link the rise of primaries to the many political ills the nation faces today. They argue that the Progressives who created the primaries mistook direct democratic reforms, like the primary, for participatory democratic reforms like deliberative polling or participatory budgeting.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Making Parties into Machines
• Chapter 2 Parties Ascendant
• Chapter 3 What the Progressives Were For
• Chapter 4 Why the Machines Were Targeted
• Chapter 5 The Early Primary Era
• Chapter 6 The Pivotal 1968 Democratic National Convention
• Chapter 7 What Direct Primaries Have Done
• Chapter 8 The Problem with Primaries
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover