The Structural, Legal, and Electoral Reasons the United States Has Two Parties, Has Always Had Two Parties, and Will Continue to Have Two Parties
The Structural, Legal, and Electoral Reasons the United States Has Two Parties, Has Always Had Two Parties, and Will Continue to Have Two Parties
The Iron Law Nobody Voted For
Maurice Duverger, a French political scientist, observed in 1951 that single-member district plurality voting systems – where the candidate with the most votes wins and everyone else gets nothing – tend strongly toward two-party competition. This became known as Duverger’s Law. It is called a law because it operates with something approaching physical regularity: show Duverger’s Law a first-past-the-post electoral system and it will show you two parties, every time, with the reliability of a demonstration in a physics lecture. The United States has used single-member district plurality voting for its entire history. The United States has had two parties for its entire history. Duverger’s Law is not surprised.
The mechanism is simple and ruthless. A voter who prefers a third-party candidate but knows that candidate cannot win faces a choice: vote sincerely for the preferred candidate and potentially help elect the most disliked candidate, or vote strategically for the lesser-evil major-party candidate. Most voters, most of the time, choose strategic voting. Third-party candidates who poll strongly see their support collapse as election day approaches and voters calculate. Ralph Nader received 2.7% of the popular vote in 2000. Green Party supporters who contemplated voting for him in Florida were advised by Democratic operatives that their votes might cost Al Gore the state. Florida was decided by 537 votes. George W. Bush became president. The argument about what those Nader voters should have done has not yet concluded, though everyone involved has aged considerably.
Ballot Access: The First Wall
Americans sometimes wonder why third parties don’t simply compete. The answer begins with ballot access laws, which are set by state legislatures – controlled by members of the two major parties – and which impose requirements for third-party and independent candidates to appear on ballots that vary from mildly burdensome to practically prohibitive. In some states, a third-party presidential candidate must collect hundreds of thousands of signatures, verified against voter registration rolls, within a short window, to appear on the ballot. The major parties face no such requirement; their candidates are automatically listed. The people who wrote the ballot access laws are members of the parties the laws protect. This is not a conflict of interest anyone in a position to change it has felt urgently compelled to address.
Campaign finance adds another wall. The Federal Election Commission provides public financing for presidential campaigns to parties that received at least 5% of the vote in the previous election. Only the Democrats and Republicans have consistently qualified. A new party that cannot access public financing must raise private money to compete with parties that have multi-hundred-million-dollar fundraising operations built over decades. The structural disadvantages compound: no ballot access in some states, no public financing, no name recognition, no incumbents, no party infrastructure, no committee assignments for any legislators who do win, and – in the event of actual electoral success – no governing coalition. Third parties in America are not losing because they have bad ideas. They are losing because the system was designed by people who benefit from their losing, and it works exactly as designed.
The Spoiler Problem: Losing While Winning Attention
The most politically influential thing a third party can do in the American system is lose in a way that changes which major party wins. This is the spoiler dynamic: a candidate who cannot win the presidency can determine who does by drawing votes from one major party more than the other. Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. George Wallace in 1968. Ross Perot in 1992. Ralph Nader in 2000. Jill Stein in 2016. Each received far more attention in post-election analysis than their vote totals would otherwise suggest, because each potentially changed the outcome. Third parties in America have the power of the decisive vote without the power to win. This is an unusual form of political leverage – enormous consequence, zero reward – and it is not obviously making the system better.
The solution most frequently proposed is ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to rank candidates in preference order and eliminates the spoiler dynamic by ensuring that a vote for a third-party candidate doesn’t inadvertently help the least-preferred candidate. Several cities and states have adopted it. Maine uses it for federal elections. Alaska uses it. Most of the country does not, because the electoral rules are set by legislatures controlled by the major parties, who have a rational self-interest in maintaining a system that ensures their dominance. The major parties occasionally express openness to electoral reform. They express it most openly when they are in the minority and losing, and least openly when they are in the majority and winning, which tells you something about the sincerity of the sentiment.
Why Two Parties and Not One: The Competition That Remains
If the two-party system is so thoroughly entrenched, one might ask why there are two parties rather than one. The answer is that competition between parties – as opposed to competition among parties – is genuinely enshrined in the system. Both parties have access to enough voters, enough money, enough geographic and demographic diversity that neither can permanently eliminate the other. They oscillate in power. Each party, when it loses, regroups, adjusts messaging, recruits candidates, and competes again. The system produces vigorous two-party competition that looks like democracy and functions like democracy in many respects, while systematically excluding the possibility that either party could be replaced by something new, or supplemented by something third. It is competitive within a duopoly. Whether a competitive duopoly is what the founders intended by “”democracy”” is a question they were not asked and cannot now answer, being unavailable and also having actively opposed the party system they inadvertently created.
SOURCE: The London Prat