Many American voters are unhappy about the choice they are like to face in the 2024 Presidential election: Joseph Biden (Democrat) vs. Donald Trump (Republican). I think they’re wrong about TFG – he won’t be the nominee – but voters aren’t happy about having only a binary choice no matter who the nominees might be. They want a third party.
However, American political institutions don’t support a third party. If voters want a different party, they will have to wait until one of the current parties implodes and another takes its place. That had happened twice in American history: when the Federalist Party withered after 1815 and was replaced by the Whig Party in the 1820s, and when the Whig Party dissolved in 1854 and was replaced by the Republican Party by 1860.
I’m going to spend some time this morning talking about why the US is “stuck” with a two-party system. First, I want to dispense with the idea that we should have no parties, whatsoever. After all, didn’t George Washington famously warn Americans against political parties in his 1796 Farewell Address? Yes, he did, but that’s because he didn’t know how representative democracies worked. We can forgive him for his ignorance; after all, he was involved in the process of inventing the first one. But if you look across history and around the globe, there are no representative democracies that function without political parties. It is the way you form majorities in these systems.
But why two parties? If you look around the world once again, you can find lots of countries with multi-party systems. Most European countries have multiple parties, as do some of the most stable nations in other parts of the world. So why can’t we have multiple parties?
As much as we would like it to be true, we can’t just wiggle our ears, twitch our noses, or wave a magic wand and create a successful third party. The only way to do this is to change the underlying political institutions that currently maintain our two-party system.
Political parties rest on the underlying political institutions of a country. Let’s look at this.
The first factor is whether the country is a parliamentary or presidential system. In a parliamentary system, the nation’s chief executive – often called the Prime Minister – is chosen by the parliament and always represents either the majority party or a coalition of parties that form a majority. In a presidential system, the chief executive is elected by voters independently of the members of the legislature.
Most pure presidential systems are found in the Western Hemisphere and in a number of countries in Africa. There are none in Europe, where we’ve already noted we find most of the stable multiparty democracies.
A second factor is the electoral process itself. Most multiparty democracies employ proportional representation in their election system. This system gives minority parties a chance to gain bits of power and then build into a more national organization, perhaps eventually becoming the majority. The United States used a plurality or “first-past-the-post” system. This system gives a nascent third party one election cycle to take a shot at winning it all. If they don’t win it all, they don’t win anything at all. This has the impact of killing third parties in their cribs. This map shows the election systems used by each country. You can see that the US is among a small minority of countries that vote in this fashion.
The third factor is whether the political system is federal or unitary. In a federal system, the central government shares sovereignty with the governments of localities – often called provinces or states. The constitutions of these countries define spheres of responsibility for the two levels of government, and neither level can invade the sovereignty of the other level without a constitutional change. In a unitary system, the central maintains total sovereignty. It can delegate responsibilities to localities, but it retains the power to reclaim these responsibilities at any time.
As this map illustrates, federal systems are in the minority among the nations of the world. More specifically, most European democracies are unitary systems.
We can conclude from this brief analysis that the government of the United States is sui generis among the nations of the world. It is the only federal presidential system with a first-past-the-post electoral system. (I think this is true. I’ve scoured these maps and I can’t find any countries that are the same color as the US on all three maps. Feel free to prove me wrong – I’ll update this essay if you do the research for me. I know some of you will take this as a challenge.)
As the timeline at the beginning of this post illustrates, there have been three significant third-party candidates in the last hundred years. In the context of a different political system, any of these three could have taken hold as a distinct political party, competing with the other parties for electoral success and potentially replacing one of the two major parties. In the US, these parties flared briefly before their energy, momentum, and voters were absorbed by one of the major parties.
The Progressive Party, which nominated Theodore Roosevelt for president in 1912, had been kicking around the American political system since the 1890s. When Wilson defeated Roosevelt in that election, the main ideas of the Progressive Party were taken up by Democrats, and by the 1930s the Democratic Party was firmly entrenched as the more progressive of our two political parties.
George Wallace’s American Independent Party achieved some electoral success in 1968 – winning 46 Electoral Votes. However, in 1972, Wallace ran for president again, but this time as a Democrat. However, as you’ll recall, Wallace represented the Southern wing of a seriously divided Democratic Party, and within a few years the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” had converted Wallace voters to Republicans.
Ross Perot’s electoral bid as an Independent in 1992 gained the largest number of popular votes in the history of third parties. He won 19% of the popular vote – compared to the 38% won by the defeated candidate, George H. W. Bush. However, he did not win any Electoral Votes. Within a few years, his anti-tax, small government, “balance the budget” ideas were absorbed by the Republican Party.
It is easy to blame the Electoral College for our dilemma. It doesn’t help, that’s for sure, but it is not solely to blame. For proof, we can look at state governments. No states have a statewide electoral vote system, but states still operate through two major parties. States are unitary, not federal, governments. The state governments delegate power to the counties and cities, but it reserves the right to claw back these powers at any time. However, states still operate through the other two institutional determinants of a two-party. They (mostly) use first-past-the-post election systems, and they all have separate elections for their executives and their legislatures.
The current political landscape is littered with bids to become a viable third party or otherwise viable avenue to the presidency. The “no labels” party has some appeal to voters impatient with our two major parties. Other independents have offered their candidacy as well – Cornell West is the most recent example. These candidacies will clutter the landscape and detract from the real show – the battle between the Republic and Democratic candidates – but their primary effect will be to distract voters from focusing on the candidates who actually have a realistic chance to win. At worst, they could be the Jill Stein of 2024. Remember her? She’s the candidate whose futile and persistent 2016 bid for the presidency pulled just enough votes away from Hillary Clinton to hand the presidency to TFG. I’m just sayin’, we should not do that again.
Is there a way out of this? I see one way that is both achievable and constitutionally possible – change of the electoral system from first-past-the-post to proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, or some system of run-off elections if no one achieves a majority of votes. Several states have implemented these changes in their state election systems, but there has not been a nationwide effort to achieve these reforms across the board. It may not be constitutionally possible for the US Congress to mandate this approach, but a coordinated effort by state leaders could make it happen. But there’s a catch, of course: the leaders we would be asking to lead the charge to implement these changes are the very people who achieved office through the current system. It is unlikely that they would support a change that would threaten their own hold on power. Unless they are, like, willing to put the national interest over their own desire to hold on to power.
Love the last picture. Spot on.
Great piece, as usual.