The United States of Nebraska

Via Alex Pareene, an interesting tidbit from Matt Bai's recent interview with Bob Kerrey:

One of his central proposals calls for a constitutional amendment that would ban party caucuses in Congress and establish nonpartisan elections for the House and Senate, much like the unusual system that has governed Nebraska’s Legislature since 1934. The amendment, as Kerrey envisions it, would also eliminate the unlimited campaign donations made permissible by the Supreme Court. Practically speaking, what all of this would mean, he says, is that there would be no “party line” to follow but rather coalitions based on ideology or shared interests.

Now, as Pareene notes, "We already have coalitions based on ideology or shared interests and they’re called 'political parties.'" This is true, but that doesn't mean that these coalitions would look quite the same under a nonpartisan system. Let's just assume for a moment there's be enough support within the Congress and the state legislatures to pass such an amendment. (And yes, we'd have to assume that legislators elected through a partisan system would be willing to vote away the parties that got them into office and help keep them there.) What would American politics look like if it adopted the Nebraska model?

Notably, while Nebraska's state legislature is officially nonpartisan, it is not without partisanship. No, most voters probably do not know the party affiliation of their legislators, but the more politically active Nebraskans do, and the legislators, lobbyists, and journalists who hover in and around the statehouse certainly do, as do those who donate to the candidates for state legislature. As Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty have noted, the Nebraska statehouse has been polarizing rapidly in recent decades, and it is currently more ideologically polarized than 17 other state legislative chambers (which, of course, have parties).

All this is to say that there would certainly still be a "party line" in the Congress, even under Nebraska rules. Would such rules reduce the incidence of party line voting? Almost certainly. But keep in mind why this would happen: because it would be much harder for people outside of Congress to follow what's going on and to assign rewards and punishments. Most voters, even the politically interested ones, generally don't follow what individual members of Congress are doing. Votes on committee reports and legislative amendments and procedural rules are often strategic and inherently confusing for outside observers. What voters can observe, however, is the behavior of a party when it's in power. If they don't like the way things are going, they can vote in another party and get a very different result. The knowledge that voters will reward them if things go well and punish them if things go poorly creates an important (if limited) constraint on legislative parties. It helps make them responsible.

This responsibility is greatly attenuated under Nebraska's electoral rules. To be sure, it probably creates a nicer work environment for state legislators; it's easier for them to get along without the partisanship. But creating a nicer work environment for 535 people in Washington would carry with it a great price in terms of responsibility and accountability.

(h/t Jonathan Ladd)