STATE GOVERNMENT was facing a crisis of public confidence, fueled by inefficient lawmaking and a pattern of legislators failing to approve an on-time state budget, opening the door for the idea of reshaping elections to gain traction among voters.

Familiar as that scenario might sound, it’s not Massachusetts’s history — at least not yet. It’s California’s.

Out in the Golden State, voters in 2010 approved Proposition 14, which replaced traditional partisan primary elections with an “all-party primary” system. Since then, more than 1,000 contests have been decided by funneling all candidates from every party through a single primary ballot and allowing the top two to advance to the general election, even if both are Democrats or both are Republicans.

Massachusetts voters will consider a similar change this fall when they go to the polls to decide on Question 3. So what can the results in California tell us about what to expect if voters here approve the measure?

This week on The Codcast, Chris Lisinski interviews Andrew Sinclair, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, who specializes in American political reforms, including all-party primary elections.

Sinclair said the top-two system has somewhat increased voter turnout in primary elections, but by less of a margin than some supporters hoped. It’s had a “mixed” impact on moderating the field and encouraging candidates to move toward the center to appeal to more voters, he said.

General elections between two candidates from the same party have occurred with some regularity, especially in districts that already lean heavily one way or the other. That, Sinclair said, means “there’s no genuinely safe district.”

“If you’re going to have real competition in some way, [if] you’re going to try and encourage people to have to work hard to get your vote, then there has to be a risk that they might actually lose,” he said.

Sinclair doesn’t think changing the primary election system has significantly favored one party over the other or triggered a noteworthy change in the makeup of California’s Legislature and congressional delegation.

He’s also skeptical of the arguments raised by opponents that an all-party primary gives more influence to wealthy donors and well-funded candidates.

“This problem is really old,” Sinclair said about money in politics. “It works in lots of different kinds of systems, and so I wouldn’t focus on that as the bigger issue.”

Still, there’s a chance Californians will turn their back on the system. Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio is leading the charge for a new ballot question, which could go before voters in 2028, that would repeal the top-two, all-party primary and return to more traditional Democratic and Republican primary elections.

About 59 percent of likely California voters say the top-two system has been mostly a good thing for their state, compared to 39 percent who think it’s been mostly a bad thing, with Democrats tending to view it more favorably than Republicans, according to a May survey published by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“The challenge always is that you have to get these things through some political process where the voters really don’t like parties,” Sinclair said of the repeal effort. “That’s always been the dynamic — do you go more towards these types of populist reforms or away from them? It’s a lot easier to go towards them than away from them.”

In this episode, Lisinski and Sinclair discuss the political roots of California’s all-party primary system (3:00), the likelihood of a “spoiler effect” in which two candidates from a single party sneak through because so many candidates from the other party split their base (11:20), and similar campaigns that have unfolded in other states (29:15).