If US congresspeople are primarily accountable to their parties (in the sense of being nominated by the parties) they will split into tribes along party lines.
In California and Washington, parties do not nominate candidates; they use a jungle primary. I haven’t examined the citation, but the Wikipedia article on Jungle primaries claims that this hasn’t caused politicians to moderate.
That finding does not surprise me, because parties are still the primary mobilizers of votes and distributors of voting information. It seems to me we shouldn’t expect any countervailing influence against partisanship until one party switches to an election strategy where they focus on expanding the electorate and it pays off.
News media broadcast things like polling locations, times, and procedures. They do very little in terms of what candidates stand for which positions in a level of detail sufficient to distinguish primary candidates. By contrast, the parties simply provide a list saying which candidates to vote for in elections where that isn’t already clear from the ballot itself.
If California and Washington prohibit distributing literature outside polling places, this effect is definitely less strong; but that is just a weaker push towards partisanship, not a push away from it.
Possibly the incentives on the parties are more important than the incentives on the individual candidates. We should then see a difference in issue-position flexibility between prop rep and single-member-district systems.
In California and Washington, parties do not nominate candidates; they use a jungle primary. I haven’t examined the citation, but the Wikipedia article on Jungle primaries claims that this hasn’t caused politicians to moderate.
That finding does not surprise me, because parties are still the primary mobilizers of votes and distributors of voting information. It seems to me we shouldn’t expect any countervailing influence against partisanship until one party switches to an election strategy where they focus on expanding the electorate and it pays off.
I would expect news media to distribute more voting information then political parties do in the US.
News media broadcast things like polling locations, times, and procedures. They do very little in terms of what candidates stand for which positions in a level of detail sufficient to distinguish primary candidates. By contrast, the parties simply provide a list saying which candidates to vote for in elections where that isn’t already clear from the ballot itself.
If California and Washington prohibit distributing literature outside polling places, this effect is definitely less strong; but that is just a weaker push towards partisanship, not a push away from it.
Possibly the incentives on the parties are more important than the incentives on the individual candidates. We should then see a difference in issue-position flexibility between prop rep and single-member-district systems.