An Incremental Approach to Presidential Nomination Reform

In a book published four years ago, Andrew Busch and I divided proposals to reform the presidential nomination process into two categories, which we called comprehensive and incremental (see Mayer and Busch 2004, chapter 5). Like any attempt to classify a complex reality, this distinction blurs a bit at the edges, but the basic idea should be clear. Comprehensive proposals call for major, far-reaching changes in the basic operations of the presidential nomination process; incremental proposals make more limited, marginal changes in the rules, while retaining the fundamental structure of the existing system.