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One recent standard text, State and Local Politics, by Straayer, Winkle, and Polinard (2nd edition, 1998, St. Martin's Press) puts the standard view of nonpartisan elections this way: [The] public is deprived of the use of the party label as a way to identify politicians...and their stances on issues...Most social scientists addressing political partisanship and elections contend that the absence of the party label in local elections works to the advantage of the higher income, higher-status class in a community. When elections are nonpartisan, voter turnout declines, and it is more difficult for the voters to keep track of the candidates or identify the candidates' policy positions. It is argued that less educated, poorer, and lower status voters are disadvantaged by nonpartisan elections because they are less likely than other members of the community to .be associated with the groups that function as alternative sources of information and voting cues....As a result, the upper-class...of the community may exert a disproportionately high impact on political outcomes.
Historical Role of Political Parties
Political parties are agents of continuity and stability in the political system. In the United States, one of the origins of political parties was the need of Alexander Hamilton and other supporters of George Washington to line up votes in support of Washington's legislative agenda in the first Congress. Not surprisingly, Washington's supporters on one issue tended to be on his side on most issues, and forming an alliance with the legislative party was the logical way to enact Washington's agenda. This structured alliance provided by political parties facilitated governing. It encouraged moderation and coalition building in the name of forging legislative majorities. It took politics away from the extremes and empowered the center.
Political parties thus provided not only for collective behavior, but for collective responsibility-and thus for accountability to the electorate. Once it was possible to decide that an organized party was responsible for government policies, the voters would be able to decide to hold the governing coalition responsible for its policies. Voters who supported the government were enabled to re-elect it; those who opposed it were able to vote to throw the rascals out. Absent political parties and collective responsibility, the voters lose their ability to distinguish the officials whose behavior they, on balance, supported from those they thought should be replaced.
The parties, as agents of stability and continuity in a political system, serve to anchor citizens' perceptions of the system as a whole, as well as serving as a cue for the evaluation of new political objects, notably issues and candidates. The citizens, quite rationally, associate the parties with competing philosophies of government. If a party takes a position on an issue or nominates a candidate, citizens have a reasonable expectation that the issue position is consonant with the party's philosophy and that the candidate shares the party's general perspective. Thus, the single bit of information that a party has nominated a candidate facilitates rational voting behavior. Absent the cues for evaluating political objects that parties provide, the citizens are relatively disadvantaged in their efforts to act rationally to advance the general values that they view as being in the public interest, as well as to act in their own self-interest.
Professors of political science and political activists receive psychological gratification from paying attention to politics. For us, politics is fun and we make the time to do it. We also enjoy thinking about politics and arguing about politics. Most people do not share in these pleasures when paying attention to politics. They, instead, use the shorthand provided by party identification and tend to reach electoral decisions every bit as rational as those that we reach.
In this sense, parties encourage citizens and politicians alike to view issues as interrelated and to apply general visions of a good society to the specific questions raised by individual issues. Parties encourage cohesiveness and rationality in politics.
Nonpartisan Dis-organization The alternative to party politics is the politics of everyone for him- or herself. In election campaigns, we might be urged to vote for the strongest candidate or the best administrator and not for the party or the philosophy. In government, this leads to the politics of gridlock. Officeholders are under no pressures to act together. Rather, they are under considerable pressure to do everything possible to make their names well-known. This encourages demagoguery because, absent party labels, candidates must do everything in their power to obtain name recognition. As a result, racial and ethnic appeals and outrageously flamboyant behavior-the sorts of things we associate with the most retrograde politics in the American South in the 1930s and 1940s-are encouraged.
Nonpartisan elections also encourage inaction because candidates get elected on their own rather than collectively as a slate nominated by a political party. The nonpartisan process does not create the opportunity for parties to nominate candidates who compete on the basis of distinctive philosophies or for voters to choose an entire government on the basis of these competing views. Officeholders know they will have no common fate, thus they are under no electoral pressure to act cohesively in government to enact policy. It becomes significantly easier to block initiatives than to enact them, and government grinds into ineffectiveness. Having nonpartisan elections of citywide officials and partisan elections of the city council strikes me as sheer folly, guaranteed to reduce the power of the mayor dramatically. A nonpartisan mayor is likely to have much less impact on a city council member's future in electoral politics than a partisan mayor-and the mayor will not be able to claim that his or her presence on the top of the ticket had any impact on the election of council members. I cannot understand why a commission appointed by a mayor would want to recommend an electoral system that will reduce the political power of the mayor.
In addition, nonpartisan elections emphasize the political clout of wealth. Candidates running without the advantage of being able to attract votes on the basis of party identification will have to raise and spend much more money to achieve desired levels of name recognition. This not only will increase the power of campaign contributors, it will encourage some bizarre practices by short-lived committees and organizations that may well escape regulation. Temporary, fly-by-night, committees will raise and spend funds in allegedly independent campaigns. Candidates, unable to rely on parties' traditional fund-raising structures, will have to devote much more time to fund-raising than is currently the case-and we know that candidates already spend way too much time raising money. The alternative to such fund-raising is to act like a demagogue in order to get free press coverage. This, of course, is not healthy for the body politic.
Who Benefits from Nonpartisanship?
All of this, finally, serves to disadvantage those citizens who are least well off in society. Those who are most involved politically will have less difficulty than the average voter when it comes to gathering and interpreting political information. They may well be the ones most likely to reject extremist appeals and appeals to racial and/or ethnic loyalty and prejudice. They are likely to be best able to act in their rational self-interest.
The citizens whose political involvement is most marginal-the young, the poorly educated, the immigrant, and those lacking in wealth-are the ones who most are in need of the cues that party identification provides for evaluating candidates. The same holds when it comes to recruiting candidates and running campaigns. Those communities and groups that have the most resources will be at an advantage. As E. E. Schattschneider has taught us, atomized voters are without influence. Thus, democracy requires political parties.
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