Justin Raphael: Party system the solution to apathetic student electorate

The presidential campaign has to date been nastily partisan, a quality with a long history of ignominy in American political culture. It is a buzzword objection, infinitely valid, that is used to denigrate the self-aggrandizing and the merely strategic alike. Our founding fathers were not themselves fond of parties. Thomas Jefferson went so far as to write, "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go at all."

But here at Penn, where our Undergraduate Assembly is far from heaven, we should not equate partisanship with political damnation. It is an open question as to whether American democracy can survive more partisan rancor; it is certain that Penn's student government cannot afford anything less. Say what you will about the rhetorical Kerry-Bush war -- at least you're talking about it.

Our current UA members are, in my experience, well intentioned and smart. But their effectiveness is doomed by systemic weaknesses. In its current nonpartisan form, the system is based upon a de facto, though perhaps unintentional, incumbency principle of divide and conquer. Though character and leadership matter in our candidates, the task of comparing thirty-some-odd personalities is politically Herculean, particularly among students who don't seem to care in the first place.

In fact, the more candidate choices we have, the less we know about any of them. Hence, we are more likely to rubber stamp the incumbent names we read in The Daily Pennsylvanian, or even worse, our friends. The result is a neutered, stifled debate and nothing close to a legitimized UA.

The division principle applies on the legislative level as well. The UA's committee system seems well suited, but its proposals are the brainchildren of individual members who can count on no institutional support (or opposition) when they come to the floor. Each UA resolution is therefore a personal crusade, making it difficult both to pass legislation as well as to present even the semblance of a mandate to the administration. The Trustees can always say, not wholly incorrectly, that the proposal was merely some eccentricity to which the general body assented.

This description could apply to Congress as well. But the fact remains that UA actions are weakened by the appearance that they are not products of a principled, philosophically cogent majority, a status that only a party system can bestow.

The current UA system is also, in terms of its executives, largely undemocratic in that its chairmen, who sit on myriad committees of vital importance, are elected by the members themselves. This sounds like the original constitutional method of electing senators or like the parliamentary system, but there is a crucial difference.

In the parliamentary system, because of its inherent partisanship, a vote for a legislator is in theory a vote for a similarly inclined executive. In the UA, executive elections consist of members -- about whose principles we know next to nothing -- voting for officers based on reasons about which we have no idea. (And which the UA presumes we don't need to know since, in an affront to the very notion of democracy, it tried to close its executive elections in a referendum last week.)

A party system seems to be a potential solution. The competition endemic to a bipartisan system would, in theory, catalyze a real debate and force the elected and the electorate alike to craft a principled, coherent vision for Penn's future. It would simplify student choice -- picking one party over another is far easier than picking 13 candidates out of 35 -- meaning more students might have the time, if not the inclination, to vote or even consider the UA important enough to take note of the issues. Parties would make the UA quantitatively representative of a student majority, thus giving its resolutions and executives the authority of real democracy as well as leverage in administrative tussles. At the very least, some partisan rancor might get people to listen.

I sense several objections to the proposal. First, some might say that students will not be able to find issues on which they diverge. Yet if this is the case, why do we have a UA at all? If we are so united, if the future of Penn and what its students want is so utterly obvious, presumably the administration, if it cared, could merely stick its finger in the Superblock wind and divine what it is we're thinking.

Second, the UA might say that the details of such a proposal would be difficult to implement. Fair enough; but who said effective democracy was easy? And didn't our UA members tell us on their colorful signs that they would give us better government at any cost?

The least we can do is hold the UA to its word. The least it can do is to recognize, as did a very popular yet partisan president, that political problem-solving sometimes means government must acknowledge that it is itself the problem.

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

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