In left-leaning state academic circles, two schools of academic thought have emerged about how to fix California’s failed system of governance—and they both agree that the 2/3 vote requirement needs to be replaced with a majority or 55% vote.
Political scientists on the right, on the other hand, support the 2/3 vote requirement because it restrains the size of government.
University of California Berkeley professor of public policy John Ellwood said one school, of which he is a believer, believes that the immediate governance crisis–characterized by perpetual partisan gridlock over the passage of a state budget–can largely be solved by eliminating the 2/3 vote requirement to pass a budget and raise taxes and replacing it with a simple majority vote requirement.
A second school of thought believes that California’s governance problems cannot be solved by solving one problem and that a number of things must be addressed including the lowering of the 2/3 vote requirement, reform of the direct initiative process, term limit reform, and reapportionment reform. Ellwood said Roger Noll, professor of economics emeritus at Stanford University, and Bruce Cain, Heller Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley, are believers of the second school.
All of the academics interviewed for this article are widely accepted to be among the foremost experts in California politics. Ellwood specializes in financial management and public sector budgeting at Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Ellwood has served as a staff member of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and was a member of the original management team of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Noll is a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where he directs the program in regulatory policy. Cain is the director of the Institute of Governmental Studies and director of the University of California Washington Center, based in Washington, DC.
Proposition 25 on the November ballot would lower the legislative vote requirement to pass a state budget from 2/3 to a simple majority, but retain the state’s 2/3 vote requirement to increase taxes.
Left-Leaning Political Scientists Agree that California’s 2/3 Vote Requirement is “Backwards”, Political Scientists on the Right Support the 2/3 Vote Requirement
Roger Noll said “the problem is that John [Ellwood], Bruce [Cain] and I represent the range of views on the left 55% of the political spectrum. The right 45% loves the 2/3 vote requirement because, they believe, it reduces the size of government.”
Cain said a consensus of conservative political scientists would likely “agree in principle that a majority vote is best but do not trust the legislature, and so are reluctant in this instance to favor the majority vote.”
A number of conservative academics were contacted to submit comments for this article but none of them submitted comments prior to the article deadline.
“I think that most academics believe that the process of amending the constitution through the initiative is too easy, but some of these do not oppose the 2/3 vote requirement. The standard position for moderate Republicans is that the initiative process should have tougher standards, but the 2/3 requirement is desirable,” Noll said, noting that he was answering the question as an economist who does some work in political science.
“You are correct to note that there is a consensus among academics that the 2/3 rule is “backwards,” while conservatives (including conservative academics) oppose this change because it might lead to bigger government,” said Thad Kousser, an associate professor of political science who is spending the 2009-10 year at Stanford University working on California constitutional reform.
“But I think it is important to note that us lefties don’t support shifting to a majority rule on the budget because it will lead to bigger government—in fact, most of us doubt that it will lead to much higher spending. I think the major justification is that it allows budget deals to happen more quickly, and for the final deal to represent what the median voter wants. It’s about representation and the lack of gridlock, rather than a preference for larger government,” Kousser said.
At a budget forum hosted by the University of California Berkeley last year, Henry E. Brady, professor of public policy and Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, says we have it backwards in California because the state constitution requires a 2/3 vote for budgets and taxes, which are every day business for the Legislature, but allows major constitutional changes such as Prop. 13 to be passed on a majority vote of the people (click here for a link to the budget forum).
“Right now you can change the rules of the game, as Proposition 13 did, with only 50% plus one person. Most political scientist say if you are going to change the rules of the game that should be hard, you should not make that too easy because that is going to mess things up often,” Brady said.
“Most political scientists, including all that I know, say this is just backwards. We got it backwards,” Brady said.
Kousser agrees that California has the vote requirement backward, noting that “another way to make the argument the current system is backward is to compare it to the federal system, where the filibuster puts a supermajority hurdle in front of policy legislation but the budget resolution and reconciliation are passed on a simple majority vote, because it is so important that the nation has a spending plan.”
Brady said that the California Republican party represents vanishing demographics and Republican lawmakers can only survive by playing to their base and standing tough on taxes. “I think they are doing the right thing from their perspective. It is a short term strategy. In the short term it is going to keep them in office for a while longer. So they have every incentive to keep doing what they are doing,” Brady said.
Brady said the solution is to repeal portions of Proposition 13, especially the 2/3 vote requirement for taxes and budget. “Perhaps going to something like a 60% vote would at least make it possible to get decisions made and to move forward,” Brady said.
First School: Replace 2/3 Vote Requirement for Budget and Taxes With a Majority Vote
“I have one change I want to do, I want to get rid of the 2/3 vote to raise taxes and pass a budget. I think that it would reintroduce politics, not that it would give you nirvana…it would lead to some bad policies, but it would force both sides to actually grapple with the real issues which they don’t have to now,” said Ellwood.
Ellwood believes that getting rid of the 2/3 vote requirement would largely fix the partisan gridlock that paralyzes the state legislature every year over the budget and taxes.
Ellwood said that if California gets rid of the 2/3 rule, the state would go back to rules had in 1977, prior to the passage of Prop. 13, when California was a big government state. “Prior to Prop. 13 California was a very high tax, very high service state. Its tax burden was third highest in the county. Now California is a high tax burden, high service state. Its state and local tax burden (measured as a percent of personal income) is somewhere between 15th and 20th among the states,” Ellwood said. Click here for a CA Budget Project chart about how CA’s tax burden compares to other states.
“If we went to a simple majority to raise taxes in all likelihood the Democrats would raise taxes to solve California’s budget problems. They would over reach. They would get thrown out of office and the Republicans would have their best chance of gaining a majority in the Legislature,” Ellwood said.
“Now the Democrats can propose anything because they know that with the Republican veto nothing will pass. And the Republicans know that they can get away with simply saying no,” Ellwood said, adding that “nothing gets done either way” and we are just stuck with gridlock.
“The problem is, I’m not sure the voters want it,” Ellwood said, noting that Proposition 56, which proposed a 55% vote for a budget and taxes was handily defeated in the early 2000s.
“If you have a supermajority to raise revenues in an American state, your state and local revenue burden is 8% points lower than it would otherwise be,” Ellwood said, citing this as one of the conclusions reached in a 2003 study by Timothy Besley and Anne Case titled “Political Institutions and Policy Choices: Evidence from the United States.”
“For those of you who are conservatives you should love the 2/3 vote because it leads to smaller government. It might lead to inefficiencies but it is effective and that is the problem. People are acting rationally. We have to figure out a way of breaking out of this or live with the consequences that we have now,” Ellwood said.
Eliminating 2/3 Vote Would Empower Governor
“Eliminating the 2/3 vote requirement mainly empowers the Governor (by bringing back the veto as something that matters—it does not matter now because by the time the budget passes the legislature has a veto-proof majority,” said Professor Noll.
“California’s normal state of affairs is to have a Democratic legislature and a Republican Governor. Under a simple majority, the most likely result is that a budget bill is passed on time, then vetoed, then a failed veto override, and then the gridlock we know and love,” Noll continued.
“At present the Democrats in the Legislature probably could make a deal with the Governor that he would not veto and that would not get Republican votes in the Legislature, but I would not rely on this as a normal state of affairs,” Noll said.
Second School of Thought: Broader Series of Reforms Needed to Restore California Governance
Ellwood said a second school of thought exists that believes California’s governance problems cannot be solved by solving one issue and that a multitude of things must be addressed including the lowering of the 2/3 vote requirement, term limit reform, initiative process reform, pay as you go budgeting, and redistricting reform, among others.
Professor Bruce Cain said he is a member of the second school but would “qualify this by saying that all of these things that are easy to do (e.g. pay-go, majority vote on budget) are less important than the things that are politically harder to do (e.g. initiative reform, term limits reform).
“First, changing the budget vote to a majority is better than doing nothing but it would be far, far better to change the tax vote to a simple majority as well,” Cain says.
Cain said the state needs to fix the fiscal problems and adopt measures to restore legislative competence. Specifically, he says the six most important things to do are: 1) ballot box budgeting reform which only allows statutory fiscal measures to be passed by initiative and allow the legislature to amend the measures after a time, 2) take existing fiscal policy measures out of the constitution, 3) make all budget decisions that violate the pay-go automatic referendas, 4) end the statewide 2/3 vote provisions on local expenditures, and make every local jurisdiction responsible for adopting its own taxing rules, 5) provide for 12 year term limits to be served in either house, and 6) mandate serious oversight activity by the legislature.
“I agree that I’m in the second school. I think the larger series of comprehensive changes that you list me as supporting are important to address the range of problems in California today. I also think that pushing multiple changes at once—especially paired changed in an area that attempts to strike an ideological balance—is important both for the political prospects of reform and for their policy consequences,” Kousser said. Kousser recently wrote a paper that pitches a change that could help conservatives, eliminating majority party control over the suspense file, that could be paired with eliminating the 2/3 rule, with both united by the principal of majority rule.
At budget forum held at UC Berkeley last year titled “What Ails California?, Kousser suggested a series of reforms that include initiative reform, term limit reform, and changing the 2/3 vote requirement to a simple majority or 55% vote.
Kousser said California should end “ballot box budgeting” in the initiative process by requiring initiatives to identify a funding source. He said Arizona does this and that 75% of Californians support this idea, according to a recent Field Poll.
Kousser said term limits needs to be changed so that legislative leaders in charge of the budget in boom years will have to face the consequences in the bust years. He suggested that term limits be set at 12 years overall, which could be served in the Senate, Assembly or combination of both houses.
Lastly, the state’s 2/3 vote requirement to pass a budget should be reduced to a simple majority or 55% vote to reduce gridlock.
“The only revision that I’d suggest is that I don’t see many academics pushing for redistricting reform, because I think the literature is very clear that redistrictings are not what have made districts so much safer in recent decades, and that states with commissions do not have more competitive elections,” Kousser said.
USC Professor Roger Noll, said political scientists on the right “also love the initiative because the ideological distribution of people who vote is right-skewed compared to the distribution of the total population and the Democratic majority in the state legislature (whose districts are based on population and not just voter turnout).”
“I believe that the initiative process is the fundamental problem, partly because it creates inflexible budgets and partly because it creates bad institutions. The problems that Thad listed are all products of initiatives,” Noll said.
“I also believe that the recent reforms of the primary process will help some, but they are not a cure. The 2/3 vote requirement would not be such a hurdle if the parties were less polarized,” Noll said.
“More fundamentally, the initiative has created inflexibility in both revenues and expenditures beyond the 2/3 vote requirement. These also typically require a 2/3 vote to overcome. These 2/3 vote requirements also could be eliminated, but that amounts to either repealing these initiatives or letting the Legislature override constitutional amendments by a simple majority, both of which do not seem plausible to me,” Noll said.
Alternative View: California is Too Large and Too Diverse to Be Governable
“Although I am not of this persuasion, another view is that California is too large and too diverse to be governable. The mix of taxes and policies that make the Bay Area happy will never be acceptable in the Central Valley, and vice versa,” Noll said.
“In addition, unless one wants to have a huge Legislature, Legislative districts are too large, which leads to a greater emphasis on name recognition and causes campaign finance to be more important—meaning that Legislators will be excessively responsive to organized interests in their districts. To these people, the only real solution is to divide the state,” Noll said.