Comment on “Changing the Rules Changes the Game”

Since the bright summer and dark fall of 1972, Democrats have been disputing whether the McGovern-Fraser commission's reforms were a triumph for justice and democracy or a recipe for electoral disaster. Party-watching political scientists, however, must surely agree that they provide us a veritable mother lode of research material. The dispute reminds us forcefully that however unimportant party rules and processes may seem to some academics, most of the people who operate in our political system's inner circles believe the stakes of intraparty fights are well worth fighting for and recognize party rules as a major factor in determining their outcomes. The reforms demonstrate that the parties' rules and structures are not fixed forever beyond the power of human volition, and thus teach us that henceforth we must be more sensitive to the possibilities of change and more concerned with its probable consequences. As a former commission member who freely accepts one twenty-eighth of whatever praise or blame our reforms deserve, I have read with fascination Mr. Cavala's account of California's delegate slatemaking rules and practices in 1972. I recall that California concerned us more than any other state: our Guideline C-6 was written and adopted mainly to open up its closed slate-making processes; our Guideline B-6 was an effort to persuade California and a few other states to repeal the winner-take-all provisions of their presidential primary laws; and most of us hailed as a great triumph the new slate-making procedures worked out through long and often painful negotiations between the California party and the national commission's chairmen and staff. As a political scientist who has come to believe that impact studies offer the most promising way our discipline can make a scholarly contribution to the formation and evaluation of public policies, I welcome Cavala's focus on the interpretation, application, and consequences of California's new slatemaking rules. I regret that his data consist so largely of his own undocumented participant-observer's impressions, but perhaps that is the best one can do so soon after the fact. I should add that his observations are quite consistent with those I have seen in newspaper accounts and heard from other participants, including those who worked for candidates other than Cavala's. Accepting his account as essentially accurate, then, what does it tell us about the reforms' impact? Cavala's central conclusion is that the new rules were intended to serve new purposes and that the efforts of the candidate organizations to bend them to the old purposes failed miserably. In 1968 and before, he tells us, the typical presidential candidate organization in California put together its delegate slate for the primary so as to broaden its appeal and thus improve its candidate's chances of winning. After the primary the winning organization sought to increase the party's chances of carrying the state in November by adding prominent party leaders and contributors who had supported losing candidates or no candidate in the primary. The main object of the old closed procedures was thus to maximize what might be called "combat effectiveness," first for the primary and then for the general election. There was no nonsense about "open access": if the slatemakers thought you would help them win, you were in; if not, you were out. Cavala relates how the leaders of the candidate organizations in 1972 (including McGovern's, in which Cavala held a high position) hoped to serve these same purposes under the new rules and even take advantage of them to jettison some deadwood. But the rules routed them. Guideline C-6's requirements for open access resulted in district caucuses dominated (he do.s not say "packed") by people with little or no past service to the party or feelings of obligation to its leaders. Consequently, he reports, they were less likely than the slatemakers of earlier years to pick delegates for the purpose of enhancing their candidate's chances of winning the primary, and even less likely to step aside after the primary to make room for party notables. And the injunction in Guidelines A-1 and A-2 that the state delegation should include women, young people, and members of minority groups "in reasonable relationship to their presence in the population of the state" became a prime criterion at each district caucus as well. Moreover, Cavala reports that most of the people attending the