Educated by Initiative: The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States

6. The Education of Political Parties

6 The Education of Political Parties Political parties represented one of Progressive reformers’ principal targets, second only to the problem of economic interests unduly swaying elected state of‹cials. Many Progressives offered vociferous criticisms of how party bosses routinely disregarded public opinion. The “wishes” of the political machines, scholar William B. Munro noted bluntly in 1912, “do not usually run parallel to those of the electorate.”1 John Shafroth, a reform-minded Democratic governor of Colorado, complained that rather than promoting the public good, party machines were doing the bidding of the “combinations of capital.”2 Shafroth, California governor Hiram Johnson, and other reformist public of‹cials routinely denounced the corruption and “representative turpitude” that accompanied the two major parties’ spoils systems.3 By the ‹rst decade of the twentieth century, Progressives had reached a broad consensus that party machines were too powerful. “Control of political parties,” as professor Walter Weyl succinctly observed in 1912, “is the very beginning of political democracy.”4 Progressive Era reformers envisioned that the initiative process, through its educative involvement of citizens directly in policy decisions , could effectively weaken political parties. By petitioning measures onto the ballot, citizens could circumvent state legislatures controlled by the party machines. Nathan Cree, an early proponent of direct democracy in the United States, conjectured that the initiative would “break the crushing and sti›ing power of our great party machines, and give freer play to the political ideas, aspirations, opinions and feelings of the people.”5 Drawing on Cree’s work, the 112 The Education of Political Parties 113 in›uential Oregonian newspaper opined in 1906, “The method of initiative and referendum permits each voter to express his individual opinion upon every question standing entirely by itself and without admixture of personal or partisan bias.”6 Party elites would no longer control the message, much less the machinery to make policy. The following year, William U’Ren, the father of the Oregon system of direct democracy, maintained that “party political organizations are in failing health” in that state. For U’Ren, citizens’ “absolute power . . . to decide many questions at one election and each separately on its own merits appears to be fatal to the perfection of party discipline and organization.”7 In Oregon, as in other states, even critics of direct democracy conceded that it occasionally allowed citizens to sti›e “the sel‹sh and the dishonest who would use the government to enrich themselves personally and the class which they represent, the ‘Boss’ and his men who are the curse of the system in America.”8 “Unless the machine and its bosses could be broken, unless the corrupt alliances between greedy corporate interests and the machines could be smashed,” political scientist Thomas Cronin summarized, “it seemed that no lasting improvement could be achieved” during the Progressive Era. Yet according to Cronin, the reformers did not intend to create “a revolution, merely a restoration. The remedy would be the initiative, referendum, and the recall.”9 In this chapter we explore political parties’ involvement in the initiative process, arguing that a symbiotic relationship has emerged between parties and citizen lawmaking. Drawing primarily on examples from California and Colorado, two trendsetting states that are among the leaders in terms of the number of initiatives placed on their ballots both recently and since the advent of process, we call attention to the partisan nature of direct democracy campaigns. Interviews with state party of‹cials reveal how the initiative has educated them. We ‹nd that party of‹cials are interested not only in the substantive outcomes that ballot measures may produce but also in the partisan advantage that initiative campaigns may generate. We also test the partisan underpinnings of votes cast in recent initiative elections in California. While it is widely accepted that political parties in the United States have not been major players in most 114 EDUCATED BY INITIATIVE statewide ballot contests, our empirical ‹ndings challenge this assumption. In the analysis that follows, we demonstrate not only that political parties are engaged in citizen lawmaking—as they use ballot measures to stimulate voter turnout, drive wedges into the opposing partisan coalition, and generate campaign contributions— but also that party of‹cials’ efforts to use citizen lawmaking can pay real dividends, as voters often respond to ballot questions along partisan lines. Party Avoidance or Involvement in the Initiative Process? The idea that during the Progressive Era, direct legislation “strictly limited, more...