Now is the season of the national political conventions ”“ historic but dying institutions.

Created in the 19th century to select the party’s candidates for president and vice president, and to adopt the party position on major issues, the conventions are now fading media events.

Because the candidates are now selected much earlier in the year and the party platform is irrelevant and ignored, the conventions take place later and serve mainly to give the candidates some free television exposure.

The national tickets get the chance to sell themselves to a large audience that is just beginning to focus on the election.  The parties seek a “bounce” from the conventions, though the effects do not linger long.

Contrast today’s non-event convention with the 1924 Democratic Convention, which took 103 ballots to select the presidential nominee. Deadlocked between the two frontrunners, the delegates picked a man who had been in seventh place on the first ballot. He lost in the national election.

Party “bosses,” who had loyal legions on public payrolls, selected the delegates, who voted as directed.

Because bosses controlled individual states, the candidates were often not selected until the conventions, after deals were made among them in smoke-filled rooms.

But that process dissolved in the 1970s, when both major political parties moved to allow their rank-and-file voters the major role in delegate selection. At that point, state primaries and caucuses displaced the bosses in selecting convention delegates.

These days, well before the national convention, a candidate accumulates enough delegates to wrap up the presidential nomination, and the nominee simply picks the vice presidential running mate. The convention formally ratifies the choices already made.

The conventions and bosses have largely been replaced by the big donors. Huge primary spending can produce support for delegates pledged to a candidate. That means that candidates with access to huge financial backing can line up the needed delegates.

Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, this year’s Republican race saw tens of millions of dollars flowing through so-called “super PACs” supporting the candidates, subject to no financial limits. Big donors and large corporations were in charge, and candidates openly sought their support.

With labor unions being added to the super PAC mix in the general elections, the Democrats are also enjoying big money support.

What about the party platforms? Doesn’t the national convention serve the purpose of defining a party’s program?

The platforms are mostly drawn up in advance and rubber-stamped by the delegates. But the nominees run on their own programs, not those adopted at the national conventions.

For example, this year the GOP platform calls for an outright ban on abortion, no matter the reason. Nominee Mitt Romney says he would allow abortions in case of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother. When the Republican National Convention chairman was asked about the difference, he said that the platform belonged to the party and not to its candidate. 

In practice, little attention will be paid to the platform position, raising the question of whether or not the platform and the convention that ratified it are even worth the trouble.

This year, many U.S. Senate and House candidates are staying away from the conventions to have more time to campaign back home. In part, their absence reflects their desire to distance themselves from party identification and their shifting priorities, which recognize the lack of importance of the conventions.

Clearly, the national political convention has come to serve two purposes:

It is a national pep rally at which the party faithful are exhorted to return home to work hard for the success of the party ticket. They may gain a sense of advancing broad national goals as they toil on low-level campaign work.

Secondly, the convention gives the candidates some free television coverage, despite the fact that the major over-the-air networks have cut back from gavel-to-gavel coverage to little more than one hour each evening. 

Cable television and computer feeds, able to appeal to more limited audiences, pick up some of the slack for those who care. Most people have lost interest in the conventions that serve little purpose and lack both suspense and relevance.

The conventions’ decline into political oblivion merits attention, because it may be one more sign of the public’s loss of confidence in the effectiveness of the political system.

Voters are not energized by the repetition of familiar political promises and half-truths by speaker after speaker, cheered by the party’s most faithful partisans.

Both parties seem more intent on clinging to no-compromise positions, packaged in the convention’s relentless rhetoric, than on finding middle-of-the road solutions.

Dropping the conventions might be a good first step for the parties to show they are listening to people and not just haranguing them.

— Gordon L. Weil is an author, publisher, consultant, and former official of international organizations and the U.S. and Maine governments.