If there was one issue discussed during the Government of the Student Body debate on Tuesday night in which everyone was in agreement, it was that GSB needs to communicate better with students.

Senatorial candidates (at least, the seven who actually attended the debate) offered several ideas regarding how to accomplish this task, which included making a permanent PR position, creating a “kitchen cabinet” and Web site for each GSB senator and increasing communication with the Daily. Not bad ideas.

However, the question of how they could communicate with students is irrelevant until GSB senators can answer why they should communicate with their constituents.

In the real world, politicians don’t need to be prodded into communicating. At the expense of much time and money, they send letters, make phone calls, knock on doors, hold town hall meetings and attend debates. It’s called a campaign.

Unfortunately, GSB elections do not follow the same logic. Of all the possible ways to win or, more accurately, acquire a senate seat, running a campaign on issues is the least common. A look at the candidate profiles shows that those who run for office think it’s more important to state what clubs they participate in than what legislative goals they have.

This year’s ballot, which features no competitive senate race, is by no means an anomaly. Of the previous three year’s elections, only one can boast of having more than two competitive senate races.

Wednesday’s editorial addressed some reasons for the lack of involvement in this year’s election. Now we would like to suggest a solution. The key to responsive, communicative student government is competitive elections, and the key to competitive elections is candidate recruitment. In the real world, political parties perform that function, and they could do the same for GSB.

As far as we can tell, GSB members have made no serious attempts to recruit candidates for an obvious reason: They are the direct beneficiaries of non-competitive elections. Nevertheless, we ask GSB to sanction the creation of political parties and allow candidates to be identified with parties on the ballot. Everyone could greatly benefit from a system in which voters can more easily discern positions of candidates and assign credit or blame, in which senators can form coalitions to pass legislation and organize campaigns and in which the institution as a whole can retain continuity over time and gain the kind of legitimacy that comes from a competitive electoral process.

Of course, some may object that it is ridiculous to create political parties in which there are no real divisive issues on which people disagree. We concur. But they’d also have to admit that, if that were the case, it would be even more ridiculous to hold an election.

Political parties are no panacea to GSB’s problems, and it’s difficult to guess how much influence they could have. One thing is for sure, however: it can’t get much worse than this.