In two weeks, officials from the Democratic and Republican National Committees will meet at Harvard to discuss how each group selects its presidential nominee. At the three-day conference beginning December 4 at the Institute of Politics (IOP), party leaders, professors and pollsters will trade ideas on how best to pick the nation's leader.
Following the panel discussions at "The Parties and the Nominating Process," the two parties may meet in private sessions to draft a common statement. Whether two organizations antagonistic towards each other on budget cuts, tax cuts, defense spending and the Soviet threat can reach any sort of agreement on primary dates and delegate selection remains to be seen. Republicans, who currently occupy the White House, probably see far fewer faults in the process than their vanquished counterparts.
And traditionally, the two parties have varied as much procedurally as they have substantively. While Republicans have never conducted more than an informal review of their procedures. Democrats have gone through several thorough revisions. In the past 12 years, Democratic Party reform commissions have rewritten their delegate selection rules following each election--the McGovern-Fraser Commission met from 1969 to 1972, the Mikulski Commission in 1973 and the Winograd Commission in 1973 and the Winograd Commission from 1975 to 1978.
"The Republicans are a much more decentralized party." H. Douglass Price, professor of Government, explains, adding, "their activists tend to be more conservative, happy with the way it is."
Gary R. Orren, associate professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, describes the difference more sharply. "They are not the home of democratic party reforms. They are antagonistic to this kind of thing. They've been forced willy-nilly to adopt Democratic reforms."
Mark Siegel, a Washington lawyer, offers a similar assessment; "The Republican Party is basically one of white males over 50. They don't have the same concerns we do."
Orren and Siegel should know about Democratic Party reforms. Both serve on the 20-member Technical Advisory Committee which reports directly to the latest reform commission, chaired by Gov, James B. Hunt Jr. of North Carolina. The Hunt Commission began meeting in August and will make its recommendations to the DNC in February.
Though the decision to have another rules commission was made before President Reagan's mandate of November," the body's mission has been altered by the humiliating defeat. "When you've just taken a shellacking, you tend towards soul searching," says Orren, who worked as a pollster for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) last year.
At the first panel discussion, Hunt said, "The real truth is that we have problems." Changes are "essential," he added, to send a signal to "disaffected Democrats."
The Hunt Commission's predecessors drafted several rules which "opened up" the party. Since 1968, the number of states expressing preferences through direct primaries rather than closed caucuses has increased from 17 to 37. Rules have been adopted to reduce the role of power-brokers and to increase the representation of women and minorities. The current group, charged with undertaking "a complete review of the presidential nomination process," will focus its attention on reforming the reforms. Six issues have been targeted:
* I The length of the primary season. Many have argued that a delegate selection process beginning in January with the lowa caucus and ending in June with the California primary is too long. They cite exhaustion of candidates, boredom of the public, the expense and divisiveness of a prolonged campaign, and a bias in favor of candidates who can devote themselves to campaigning full-time for an extended period.
* I "Open" vs. "closed" primaries. The Democratic National Committee in 1980 tried to prevent states from allowing non-party members to vote in the presidential primaries. Crossover voting, officials said, encouraged raiding by Republican and Independent voters. Last February, the Supreme Court ruled in Democratic Party v. LaFolette [Wis.] that the Democratic Party had the authority to impose such regulations on state parties. The main question is whether it is worth antagonizing state party leaders to enforce the rules.
* I Proportional representation of presidential preference. Many feel that the current method of allocating to each candidate a number of delegates proportional to his share of the popular vote rather than some sort of "winner-take-all" system is disadvantageous, leading to a proliferation of candidates, preventing late, come-from-being efforts, and playing down the importance of big primary states.
* I The relationship between candidates and delegates. The commission is re-examining three main questions here: whether delegates should commit themselves to a candidate before the national convention: whether candidates should have the right of approval over their specific delegates; whether delegates' votes should be bound on the convention floor, with candidates granted the right to replace delegates who violate this rule. (The last question deals with the infamous "Rule 11H," the center of the rules battle between Kennedy and former President Carter in the 1980 Democratic Convention.)
* I Affirmative action, minority representation. Every commission has handled the question of increasing the representation of women and minorities. While direct quotas have been rejected, the Democratic National Committee, in the adoption of the Preliminary Call to the convention, provided for equal livision between delegate men and women.
