Policy Leads Party

Soundcloud.com, accessed 1/27/2018

Current political parties in the United States appear to me to be driven primarily by candidates and their personalities and personal interests, than on the substance and effectiveness of either candidate or policy.  Public policy is determined by the individual candidates themselves, and seem to be of secondary significance to the candidates' personalities and the brand of the associated group(s) that support them.  I believe this is an inadequate way of making effective public policies and programs, and executing the business of government in general.  This is because I hypothesize that candidates for office (especially solitary offices, such as the Presidency or a city's mayor) need to have a comprehensive understanding of the social world they're working with, and the organizations they're working with to be successful at their jobs.  Officials elected to bodies of government (such as Congress, or the state legislatures) could have greater specialized skill sets and perspectives, largely because there are more people responsible, and can divide the labor among them in making policy. 

To promote greater organization, a more comprehensive and comprehensible view of how society is and where it could go, more effective policies and programs to produce those desired and desirable outcomes, and greater chances of more easily winning seats, I would suggest that political parties make the following reforms to their internal structures and organizational systems:

• Parties should commit significant and adequate time, attention, and resources to the design, production, and pre-implementation testing of policies and programs BEFORE they commit to candidates to run for office.  This way, candidates have quality, easy to communicate and show products to sell for people based on local through national contexts and conditions.
• Candidates become more like employees of the Party, selling themselves and the specific, well-vetted policies and programs that the Party has developed.  Candidates may have some flexibility and should be also given opportunities to tinker and evolve policies to suit conditions on the ground that the Party may miss.  Ultimately though, the Party should be so effective at understanding local needs, and developing policies and programs on its own as an organization that there is actually little the candidate needs to do when working out the specific goals, objectives, and methodologies needed to resolve big, hairy social problems.  The Party produces the toolkit, and it needs to be an outstanding and superior toolkit to alternative factions.  But the candidate needs to be the ones who effectively sell and maneuver the policies and programs into existence from office.  Thus, policy development and program design can be merged with real politik and the competitive nature of policy-making in most, if not all, human societies.

Once a party starts having success at designing and implementing effective policies and programs on local levels, it can use those successes to sell the platform in other areas that haven't adopted the program yet.  Through the production of superior outcomes in areas where the Party can get a toe-hold, the Party can grow and expand itself to other parts if it's able to find good candidates to match with the local population.  Ultimately, the Party has to prove that it and its methodologies are more effective than candidates on their own, making the candidates' job easier and more accessible to the general pool of the public.  It also means the Party can rely on relate-able, regular people for candidates, and not on an elite core group of prima donna candidates, thus increasing the pool of people who can participate in politics.

I predict that the political party that is able and willing to adopt this flexible and comprehensive path; where candidates are workers of the party, which defers to a common methodology of policy and program design, will do better at winning seats and preserving their power than those which work in ignorance of the actual world, or those which defer to personalities over effective policy and program design, development, and implementation.