>So the parties from the grassroots level have the coherence of the
>collective choice of the voters in each party, not of power from party
>leadership.
-I can't follow the meaning of this last paragraph, could you -re-phrase it? It seems to be saying something along the lines of -party candidates being selected by the grass-roots of the party, -which is theoretically a good thing of course.
Which is the historic goal, to take power over selection from the "party bosses." The phenomenon of omeone like Ken Livingstone, popular with grassroots Labourites, being denied the nomination for mayor on the Labour tickett couldn't happen in the US. That's the good side of it all.
In the US, party leaders did once have much more power. At the Presidential level, most of the delegates at conventions were existing party leaders and primaries had relatively little role.
It was progressives during the Vietnam era who demanded and engineered a system where open primaries became the overwhelmingly dominant method for choosing the Presidential nominee.
For lower level officials, the fact that anyone can choose to register in any party they choose and vote in a primary is a legacy of anti-racist organizing in the US. In the US South, racists maintained white rule partly through choosing all elected leaders in a Democratic primary where blacks were excluded from membership in the party. Civil rights groups argued that such a power to exclude blacks from the primary election de facto made their vote meaningly given that all real voting happened in the primary and Democrats inevitably won the general election.
So the Supreme Court ruled that primaries had to open their membership to anyone who was willing to register as a member of that party. To this day, various progressive legal groups contest almost any method used to restrict who can participate in primaries.
>How can it
>possibly be intended to facilitate political parties in presenting a
>coherent and consistent platform and slate of candidates, when it is
>obvious that it has the opposite effect in practice? Our assumption
>must be that this is the main intention, rather than just an
>unintended effect of trying to achieve the exact opposite.
>After all, if the law intended to give the grass-roots of a political
>party control, wouldn't it be easier to simply legislate to force the
>parties to select their candidates by a ballot of party members?
At this point in history, it's actually hard to argue that the US parties are less coherent than parliamentary ones where party leadership have more control.
On many key issues-- the minimum wage, union labor rights, reproductive rights, -- the parties are far more polarized than they were before open primaries came to dominate. If you take the median Democratic and Republican elected leader (as opposed to comparing the most rightwing Democrat and most leftwing Republican), the difference between the party leaders in the US is probably starker than in Britain, Germary or almost any other European country.
>A small political party that threatened to get an
>electoral foothold could quite easily be sabotaged by opponents.
>Their preferred candidates, who agree with their platform, prevented
>from ever getting onto the ballot and in fact replaced on the ballot
>by candidates with a hostile political platform.
Possibly, but there's little evidence you can show for this. Various third, fourth and fifth parties get on ballots in various states without this happening.
-- Nathan Newman