Legitimacy and Intraparty Democracy: The 2016 Election in Historical Context

• In Event: Contours of American Political Parties

Abstract

The 2016 primary contest between Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought out a number of disagreements within the Democratic Party. One of the most prominent ones was about the legitimacy of the party organization itself; throughout the primary season, Sanders supporters accused the Democratic National Committee of deliberately undermining their candidate in favor of Clinton. Intra-party democracy – the right and ability of different candidates to run and of supporters’ voices to be heard – emerged as a highly contested issue in 2016. Clinton’s eventual loss in the Electoral College raises even more questions about the party’s tactics and practices.

Our research puts these debates over intra-party democracy into historical context. We compare the Democrats’ response to the 2016 election to party reforms in the wake of Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 loss, and, reaching further back into history, the colossal coordination failure that was the election of 1824. The 1968 parallels are straightforward: the chosen successor of a sitting Democratic president loses a close election in a tumultuous year. The 1968 Democratic nomination also featured the selection of a party insider favorite over candidates preferred by the party’s left-leaning activist base, and the result was a major effort to overhaul the selection process. The results of this effort, the McGovern-Fraser reforms, opened the party process up to rank and file voters through a strengthened primary system.

While these reforms were about making the process more diffuse and open, the 1824 coordination failure led to a more structured system of mass mobilization. Elites coordinated to select candidates in the new convention system.

In the wake of the 2016 election, we examine how, historically, parties have debated whether to open up their processes or make them more closed off and structured. While much of the scholarly attention has been directed, understandably, at the ways in which parties alter their strategies in order to be more electorally competitive, we are interested in how election losses and coordination failures lead parties to debate and decide about how democratic to be.

Authors

• Julia Rezazadeh Azari, Marquette University

• Seth E. Masket, University of Denver