Political Science
Retrenchment or reform? Changes in primary election laws, 1928–70
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Although there is a substantial literature on the causes and consequences of the initiation of primary elections in the United States, there is little documentation of changes in primaries after the 1920s, and most research on the subject typically argues that political parties reasserted control over the candidate nomination process through changes to primary rules. In this article, I seek to make two contributions. First, I catalog and categorize changes in primary laws between 1928 and 1970. Second, I evaluate claims about why primary laws changed. I find no evidence that there was a consistent effort to increase party control over primaries. Rather, the states that had been most likely to experiment with primaries in the early decades of the twentieth century continued to do so in later decades, and these experiments were often driven by defects in existing laws or by changes in two-party competition. However, parties did adapt primaries to their ends.
Publication Title
Polity
Publication Date
2019
Volume
51
Issue
1
First Page
126
Last Page
160
ISSN
0032-3497
DOI
10.1086/700260
Keywords
direct primaries, nonpartisan league, political parties, primary elections, progressive era
Repository Citation
Boatright, Robert G., "Retrenchment or reform? Changes in primary election laws, 1928–70" (2019). Political Science. 44.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_political_science/44
