CLOSED PRIMARIES AND PARTY SUPPORT IN CONGRESS

Nominating procedures in the American states rely on three types of primary elections: closed, open, and blanket. These systems vary with regard to the extent partisanship is injected into the process. The da ta show that members of Congress with the highest levels of party support in the House of Representatives are elected in states using closed primaries. However. this relationship between partisanship in office and use of the closed primary appears to result from the common determination of these two variables by regional differences and traditional patterns of interparty competition at the state level. In other words, the state systems that value partisanship the most will likely have closed primaries and elect representatives more likely to support their party. The primary election, unique to American politics, places the voters in control of the nominating process. The progressives who campaigned for adoption of state primary election laws saw them as a way of democratizing the electoral process to make leaders more responsive to the people. Their critics contended that the primaries would drive a wedge between the party organizations and the officeholders, eventually impeding partisanship in govern-ment and thereby reducing coordinated policymaking. Implementation of the primary has raised several issues about the linkages between the voters and the primary, between the primary and the general election, and between the primary and policymaking in office. The first of these has been most fully explored. Primary voters enjoy higher socioeconomic status than voters in general elections (Jewel1 and Olson, 1982: 133; Ladd, 1982: 61), and they tend to eschew “strategic ” voting (Abramo-Authorf Note: An earlier draft of this article was presented at the annual meeting of th