Reform or Retrenchment?

Abstract

Abstract This chapter catalogs changes in primary laws between 1928 and 1970. It evaluates four theories about the reasons for changes in primary laws: the argument that the decline of Progressivism enabled political parties to reassert control over primary nominations; the claim that nonparty movements frightened state parties into adopting restrictive rules about primaries; the claim that many primary laws were poorly written and in need of change; and the claim that primary rules were changed as two-party competition increased after the 1930s. The quantitative analysis in this chapter shows that there is little evidence that there was a decline in the openness of primaries. It finds that the states that had been most likely to experiment with primaries in the early twentieth century continued to do so in later decades, and that these experiments were often driven by defects in existing laws or by changes in two-party competition.