예비선거제로 가는 긴 여정: 미국 대선 후보 지명제도의 변천

A Long Journey toward the Primary Election : The Historical Development of Presidential Nominating Process in America

All would-be presidential candidates of both parties, the Democratic and the Republican Party, are expected to run the primary election without choice in the United States today. But it has just been decades since the Democratic Party reformed its nomination process for the presidential candidate in 1970. In terms of the long history of American democracy, it is a very recently developed method. Why did it take that long time for American democracy to take the primary election as a mandatory process for all presidential candidates and what does this change mean to Korean democracy now?When the founding fathers of the United States formulated the federal constitution in 1787, they did not expect the political parties would play the most important role in American politics. They rather believed that the political parties would have ruined the new nation. Conceived in that point of view, the constitution did not mention anything about how the presidential candidate would be nominated except that the president would be elected by the electors, who would be chosen by the states. In the beginning, the caucus nominated the presidential candidate until the late 1820s when several candidates of the same democratic party competed each other and eventually brought the division of the Democratic party. Since 1832, therefore, the national convention method was adopted by the Democratic Party and later by the Republican party also in the 1850s and worked as the standard nomination method for the presidential candidate until 1968. The national convention contributed to formulation of American political culture-boss controlled politics. The political boss in the local communities dominated local politics. They decided the delegates to attend the national convention that the presidential candidate was inevitably nominated through negotiations among the political bosses. However, the nomination process experienced fundamental change in 1970 when the Democratic Party reformed the nomination process emphasizing on the primary election. Now the presidential candidates are decided by the primary election instead of political deals among party leaders in the party convention, People became eventually the key in the presidential election. This long experience of America related to the presidential nomination process shows us how hard it is to reform the nomination process in a society in which the party bosses control the nomination process. Can our politicians reform our nomination process?