Emma Green: What has changed in the three and a half decades since you published your book?

James Ceaser: Not very much. The ideas [for reform] were laid in the Progressive era: to take control over the nomination process from the party leaders and transfer it to a popular following within the party or even outside, in a primary. That was the fundamental transformation. It was finally implemented fully in 1972 when the majority of the delegates came to be chosen by primaries. Even in the non-primary states, the caucuses reflected public opinion.

It has gone through some modifications. There was lots of experimentation with things like the order of the primaries. There’s been experimentation with whether the primary should be winner-take-all or proportional.

But the essential change—the people are the source of the nomination—came in ’72.

Green: Has there been any push to walk that back, so there’s less influence from popular primaries on who gets the nomination?

Ceaser: There was some modification of that deliberately in the Democratic Party in the ’80s with the Hunt Commission—they felt they had gone too far in some ways. They pulled back a little bit and instituted these superdelegates, which was a way of making sure party officials would be at the convention. In a marginal case, where it was close, there would be enough of those to make a bit of a difference. That’s not quite the case this time, but it’s made a bit of difference—the fact that Hillary Clinton has got most of the superdelegates.

The difficulty of really walking it back substantially would be to ask the American people to have a different conception of what’s legitimate in the nomination. [The parties] would have to be willing to come out and say, “We’re no longer operating on the method of this full, open deliberation,” and take their chances about whether the American people would abandon the party.

Green: What are the downsides of a popular primary model?

Ceaser: The argument made when parties were established was fear of demagogy. It’s a vague word—sometimes one man’s demagogue is another man’s fate. But [it was fear of] popular appeals that emphasize emotion—in short, getting people elected who don’t have the qualifications that people think would be good for a statesman and leader.

When Woodrow Wilson proposed [a popular-vote nomination system], the idea was that the types of appeals made to the public would be high-minded, and we would have these very deliberative debates by great statesmen. The minute this got underway, though, people started believing more in propaganda, public relations, and advertising.

When you look at recent races, you notice something in play: people for whom running for the presidency is their entry into politics rather than the capstone of a career. Jesse Jackson, Pat Roberts, Pat Buchanan—these people, even if they didn’t win, they got pretty far. This is the antithesis of what some had in mind originally—this shouldn’t be an entry-level job.