Political Spectrum

This CNN article - hyperlink in the title - discusses Charles Percy, a "liberal conservative" from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Percy, a "Republican from the Rockefeller wing of the party who had made his name promoting affordable housing and combating urban poverty," represented the moderate-Republican population. The author contrasts Percy with the current, further right, presidential hopeful Rick Perry of Texas, and shows how Percy's loss of political power represents the "Republican Party's mutation from a vibrant and diverse coalition to the dogmatic cult of conservative ideology that it has become today."

In class we are examining voting systems and the interaction of party ideologies. We said that one of the main criterion for judging alternative voting systems is minimizing opportunities for strategic behavior, or minimizing incentives for a voter to vote contrary to their true preferences in order to affect the outcome. In the mid-1970s when Percy wanted to make a run at the presidency, the New Right party, a group of extreme conservatives, formed in an attempt to move the Republican population vote further to the extreme right side of the spectrum. New Right politicians, who turned out to be insignificant in the long run, began eliminating politicians like Percy by "defeating them in primaries or fatally weakening them in general elections." In 1984, the New Rights failed to take out Percy in a primary election, and proceeded to eliminate Percy by endorsing Percy's Democratic opponent. This is an example of the type of flaw we discussed in class; the New Rights, motivated by the desire to eliminate moderates like Percy, supported a Democratic candidate, against their true preferences, to influence the outcome. Although they were successful in keeping Republican control of the Senate, and still eliminating Percy, their actions exemplify the strategic behavior we said is the opposite of what we want in terms of a pure voting alternative.

In Downs' article "The Statics and Dynamics of Party Ideologies," he discusses the same situation, where an extremist group forms a party with the main priority of pulling the modal center of the party back towards the extreme. Downs claims "when one of the parties in a two-party system has drifted away from the extreme nearest it toward the moderate center, its extremist supporters may form a new party to pull the policies of the old one back towards them." He says even if the party knows it cannot possibly win, the party is satisfied with simply taking votes away from the moderate party, or moving the party back to the extreme wing. This is precisely the goal of the New Rights in combating Rick Percy - they knew the outcome would either be moving Percy farther right (which was unlikely because of party immobility, as Downs illustrates), or allow a more conservative-Republican to win.