Prop. 14 and California’s Minor Parties

So after not posting anything new for a while, you get a couple posts one right after the other.

My article, “Proposition 14 and California’s Minor Parties: A Case Study of Electoral Reform and Party Response,” is now available from the California Journal of Politics and Policy here (gated unfortunately; here’s the version I will be presenting at MPSA next month). Here’s the abstract:

In 2010, California voters enacted Proposition 14, the Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act, which changed California’s electoral system from single-member, plurality district elections to a top two (majority) runoff system. Although literature in comparative politics and formal theory suggests this change should help third parties in California, almost 80% fewer minor-party candidates filed for office in 2012 than in 2010. Indeed, 2012 saw the smallest number of minor-party candidates in California since 1966. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this paper examines different explanations for the decline in minor-party candidacies. Although most observers argue that Proposition 14 directly discouraged minor-party candidates from filing for office (because they likely would not make the runoff ballot), I argue that the decline results from three other factors: (1) a long-run decline in the California Libertarian Party, (2) a legislature-driven increase in the filing fee required from minor-party candidates, and, most importantly, (3) party elites foregoing candidate recruitment in 2012.

If their publishing schedule looks like last year’s, it will be in the upcoming June issue.

Candidate Positions and District Competitiveness

One of the recurring tropes we hear every election cycle is that district-level competition forces candidates to moderate their policy positions (i.e., move to the ideological center). The more competitive a district, the closer the candidates will be on ideological grounds. The less competitive a district, the further away from each other the candidates can be. This line of reasoning led to two recent institutional reforms in California–the Citizens Redistricting Commission and the majority runoff system of elections.

Do we see this relationship this year? Does competition breed ideological proximity? No.

The following graph plots the normalized Democratic presidential vote (NPV) in 2008 against the ideological distance between the candidates running in each House district. If competitiveness bred proximity, the red line in the graph should be u-shaped. As the district moves from safely Republican (extreme negative NPV scores) to competitive (close to zero) to safely Democratic (extreme positive NPV scores), the ideological distance should diminish then grow. Instead, the line is basically flat. The correlation coefficient for the two measures is 0.02. The OLS regression coefficient is 0.001 with a p-value of 0.649. There is no relationship between district competitiveness and the ideological positions of candidates in this graph.

The idea for this graph came from Eric McGhee’s post on the Monkey Cage. The candidate position data come from Boris Shor’s estimates. The presidential vote data come from Daily Kos.