It's Top-Two Friday!

[Updated]

Thanks to Richard Skinner and Rick Hasen for pointing out that the reformers are out in force today. The New York Times' Adam Nagourney and the Washington Post's Reid Wilson both have articles up today talking up California's top two primary system as a solution to hyper-partisanship in our country. This comes just two days after Amy Walter wrote a similar piece for the Cook Political Report.

I've written a good deal on this topic, so let me try to sum up my answer to the question of whether the top two primary system will reduce partisanship:

Probably not.

Why not? John Sides offers some great details here. And check out Eric McGhee's recent tweets. Also, here's some of what I wrote previously on this topic:

Allow me to link here to the paper I did with Nolan McCarty, Eric McGhee, Steve Rogers, and Boris Shor (now forthcoming from AJPS!) showing that variations in the openness of primaries seem to have no relationship to the moderation or extremism of a state's elected officials. It's still a bit early on the California case -- we're less than a year into their top-two experiment -- but there's not much evidence from other states that opening things up will give you more moderate officeholders. The people that show up in primaries still tend to be very partisan voters, and parties are pretty skilled at advantaging the candidates they like even in difficult circumstances....

In theory, the openness of the top-two system encourages the entry of moderate candidates. But ideologically extreme ones can end up doing quite well, for the simple fact that voters have a very hard time distinguishing between ideologically extreme and moderate candidates. Oh, and it turns out that parties have responded to the top-two by issuing endorsements for their favorite candidates, and those endorsements matter quite a bit. So now candidates have additional incentive to run to the extremes, rather than to the center, to win the favor of their party.

All of this has produced a situation in which California's legislators are no more moderate, relative to their districts, under the top-two regime than they were before. Indeed, they may even be a bit more polarized.

If you want to know why, as Nagourney writes, California has produced an impressive month of legislation and bill signings, look to the unified party control with massive Democratic majorities. If you want to know why, as Wilson writes, so few California Republicans signed on to the government shutdown effort, look to the fact that the Tea Party movement was never very well rooted on the West Coast.

Who knows? Maybe in a few years, we'll see real evidence of depolarization in California. But what early evidence we have reveals no moderating effect of the top two and, in general, no real relationship between primary rules and legislative polarization.