How National Parties Are Colliding with Subnational Election Administration
Jacob M. Grumbach, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Washington
Welcome back for a new year of “Constitutional Conversations,” a publication of the Center for Constitutional Design at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. In this week’s post, Jacob Grumbach argues that the centralization of national political parties, combined with the customary decentralized election administration in the United States poses a renewed challenge to the integrity of national elections. As a result, he calls for “a centralized and independent election administration” in the United States.
American democracy is under strain. Senate malapportionment continues to increase. A number of states have passed new restrictions on voting and gerrymandered legislative maps to an unprecedented degree. Perhaps most acutely, the 2024 presidential election faces the risk of subversion, in which a state legislature might try to give their state’s Electoral College votes to a candidate who doesn’t win their state’s electorate.
Legal scholar Rick Hasen offers a powerful argument for how the American system of highly decentralized election administration makes the US more vulnerable to election subversion and democratic backsliding. Hasen puts forward three reasons why decentralization is destabilizing. First, a decentralized electoral system is only as strong as its weakest link. Second, threats to the system might not be contained in a single state or county, but rather present a risk of contagion. Third, the partisan politicization of election administration gives election administrators new political (and sometimes also economic) incentives to rig elections in favor of their party.
Hasen’s argument is compelling. Democracies around the world successfully protect the integrity of elections through centralized, independent electoral administration at the national, rather than subnational, level. Yet there are lingering questions about why new threats to US elections are arising now. As we know, decentralized election administration has been the standard in American politics since the country’s founding—but the severity of risks of democratic backsliding in the US have varied across time. In some periods of history, such as in the 1960s and 70s, US elections were becoming freer, fairer, and more open. In other periods, such as the one we’re living in, electoral democracy is weakening in some states—and the entire system is at risk of subversion in the next presidential election.
In my new book, Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, I argue that it’s not just decentralized election administration, but rather the combination of this decentralization with highly centralized national political parties. Since the 1970s and especially since the 2000s, the Democratic and Republican parties transformed from decentralized networks in which politicians in the same party varied tremendously depending on their region, to two highly coordinated national partisan teams. In other words, while US electoral institutions remain highly decentralized, the parties no longer are. Campaign fundraising, political media, activist groups, and partisan identities are no longer confined to states or regions; they flow across the country instantaneously.
This nationalization of the parties changes the incentives facing politicians. Now, as part of a national party team, there are new incentives to use state and local institutions to pursue national power. To rise in the ranks of their national party, state and even local politicians and election administrators have to help their national coalition achieve national power. State and local actors administer elections from local dogcatcher all the way up to president, giving them numerous opportunities to bias or rig elections in their party’s favor.
Importantly, the current state of electoral democracy is nowhere near as bad as in earlier periods such as the eras in which some states legalized slavery or enforced Jim Crow disenfranchisement of Black Americans. But in contrast to the Jim Crow period, today’s democratic threats are national rather than regional.
The incentives to use state and local institutions to increase the party’s national power apply to both parties. In this current historical moment, however, it is the Republican Party that has the clearest incentives to threaten electoral integrity. This is because the Republican Party, somewhat uniquely compared to other conservative parties around the world, combines a policy agenda of unpopular economic policies that help the wealthy with cultural appeals to rightwing populism on issues of immigration, race, and cultural change. (Most other conservative parties in developed democracies either pursue economic conservatism or rightwing populism, but not both.) The destruction of the labor movement provided a key foundation for this growth of antidemocratic mass politics, as the principle organization that connected the working class to politics and policy declined and left an opening for culture war politics—a topic I study statistically in a paper with political scientist Paul Frymer.
The response to this threat therefore must be twofold. First, Rick Hasen is absolutely right in advocating for a centralized and independent election administration in the US to match those of other countries (or, as a second best, at least centralizing some parts of election administrations in the states rather than counties and localities). But second, we also must consider how to change the incentives of the newly nationalized major political parties in American politics, especially on the Republican side. That begins with revitalizing labor unions, as well as considering reforms to media, investments in state and local journalism, and the redevelopment of state and local party organizations that are less beholden to their national parties.