A path beyond our broken two-party system.
The way forward, I argue in the second part, is to introduce more parties and break the two-party doom loop, specifically by reviving fusion voting: an electoral system that allows multiple parties to endorse the same candidate for a public office. I say “revive” because fusion voting was once common in U.S. politics, before it was banned in the early twentieth century by the dominant parties. Though the state-by-state specifics varied, the broad motivation was simple: they didn’t like all the added competition fusion enabled.
Part 1: It’s the Party System, Stupid
The right prescription to our ailing democracy depends on the right diagnosis, so it is important to get the story right about how we got to this moment.
The most common view is a classic decline-and-fall narrative. On this account, there was once a time when American democracy worked, before partisan polarization messed it all up. Moderates dominated; partisans disagreed, but they worked out differences in a spirit of constructive bipartisanship and remained close to the political center. This golden age allegedly peaked in the 1950s or early 1960s, and maybe even continued through the 1980s—but then things all went downhill starting in the 1990s with new confrontational politics pioneered by Newt Gingrich, the archetypical villain of this story. The tone in politics turned nasty and dysfunctional; cable news and talk radio, and then social media, destroyed everything. Most of the good, reasonable, compromise-minded politicians either left politics or got primaried by extremists.
The right prescription to our ailing democracy depends on the right diagnosis, so it is important to get the story right about how we got to this moment.
The most common view is a classic decline-and-fall narrative. On this account, there was once a time when American democracy worked, before partisan polarization messed it all up. Moderates dominated; partisans disagreed, but they worked out differences in a spirit of constructive bipartisanship and remained close to the political center. This golden age allegedly peaked in the 1950s or early 1960s, and maybe even continued through the 1980s—but then things all went downhill starting in the 1990s with new confrontational politics pioneered by Newt Gingrich, the archetypical villain of this story. The tone in politics turned nasty and dysfunctional; cable news and talk radio, and then social media, destroyed everything. Most of the good, reasonable, compromise-minded politicians either left politics or got primaried by extremists.
This explanation is a good first approximation of what has gone wrong, and I have told versions of it in the past. But it oversimplifies in significant ways—and because it oversimplifies, it invites the wrong solution. If we want to fix things, this story suggests, we have to re-empower the “exhausted majority” in the middle—the mass of voters who just want stuff to get done, unlike the ideologues and extremists of left and right. In other words, we need to force parties to be more responsive to the “median voter.”
Behind this metaphor of the “middle” lie several assumptions. One is that voters have consistent ideological preferences—formed independently of political parties—that can be specified on a single axis running from the extreme left to the extreme right. Another is that voters decide who to vote for by accurately selecting the party “closest” to them on this ideological spectrum—and that parties, too, can be classified in this one-dimensional way. Still another is that there really is a sizable group of voters in the political center.
When we talk in these terms, we are applying what political scientists call the “median voter theory” to American elections. And it’s little surprise that we do so. As Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson put it, this model has been the “master theory” of U.S. politics for half a century, at least among political scientists. Partly (but not only) for that reason, it is the analytical water in which much political analysis now swims. (...)
What median voter theorists had interpreted as two-party convergence along a single axis was actually the result of a deeper, multidimensional process. Both parties had always contained multitudes—a mix of liberals, moderates, and conservatives of many types—and they competed with each other almost everywhere throughout the postwar era. We really had something like a hidden four-party system, with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. This factional diversity produced system-wide moderation: holding together the interests of multiple, overlapping groups prevented either of the two parties from swinging into extreme partisanship.
But this arrangement came under serious strain in the 1990s. As liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats began disappearing from Congress, U.S. politics became much more of a nonoverlapping two-party system. The result, as we all know now, has been disastrously divisive. The Democratic and Republican parties began to diverge, staking out increasingly distinct visions of American identity drawn from increasingly separated cultural and geographical bases.
Influential political analysts and reformers should have taken this divergence to mean that the median voter theory is wrong. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. On the contrary, they have offered endless rationalizations for the gap between prediction and reality, and as a result median voter theory still gets prominent intellectual billing among columnists and mugwumps, who blame parties and partisanship for “distorting” politics. In doubling down on the one-dimensional “pulling apart” story, these commentators miss the real reason for the apparent disappearance of the political middle: the collapse of a de facto four-party system into a two-party system.
What caused this collapse? It started in the late 1960s with the rising salience of “social” issues around race, gender, and religion and the gradual disappearance of an older world of local party organizing. During the 1970s parties had only thin national networks—in which candidates could act relatively independently—but by the 1980s, the national apparatuses had grown financially stable and increasingly relied on consultants, ad makers, and ad buyers to shape their messages and candidates. Parties were thus transformed from local operations rooted in communities across the country into distant, national fundraising juggernauts helmed by a professional political class. Today they bring in hundreds of millions of dollars each year—most of which goes straight to advertising and direct marketing.
Meanwhile, single-issue advocacy groups with strong policy views and financial backing began to proliferate and press their demands in Washington, and party leaders learned to arbitrage among them, shaping new coalitions by accumulating new stakes into politics. Business organizations became especially dominant. Starting in the 1990s, as politics became thoroughly nationalized around social and cultural issues, the country saw significant internal migration: Democrats abandoned rural and exurban areas, and Republicans abandoned urban areas. This geographic sorting in turn led to shrinking partisan competition in many areas—and the disappearance of party organizations along with it. After all, in a system of winner-take-all elections, why invest in places where support is below 40 percent? This geographic sorting atop single-winner districts was the central mechanism that drove the collapse of the de facto four-party system into only two parties.
In short, the two parties grew “hollow,” in the apt phrasing of Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld: they have come to be floating presences disconnected from most citizens, run by pollsters and messaging gurus. As a result, more and more citizens have become frustrated bystanders in national politics, and a growing share of citizens have rejected partisan conflict entirely. In some cases the major parties have responded by trying to fit more issues and groups in their coalitions, but mostly they have taken to demonizing the other side. You might not feel inspired by us, party leaders effectively tell voters, but they are terrible for the issues you care most about—abortion, as the Democrats emphasized, or religious “freedom,” according to the GOP.
The cumulative effect of these changes has been disastrous. Partisan conflict is a blasted terrain, but voters who don’t like it have nowhere to go. An overwhelming messaging machinery tells voters that even if they don’t like their party, the other side winning would be far worse—and that losing, therefore, is unacceptable. It is under these conditions—high partisan division, low system legitimacy, high citizen disaffection—that democracies typically crumble.
If this is so, why aren’t the critics of partisanship right? Their mistake is to see partisan polarization as the root cause of these ills. In fact, it is just a symptom of a significantly diminished partisan landscape. In modern representative democracies, partisan identity is not a distortion of some pre-partisan reality, and citizens are not the idealized, independent actors of rational choice models. On the contrary, study after study has shown that the vast majority of voters are partisans first: they derive their policy positions from the party they identify with, not the other way around. The more informed and engaged voters are, the more they know exactly what they should think as loyal partisans. The cleverer they are, the more they can reinterpret any fact pattern to explain why their party is right and the other party is wrong. More and better information—often proposed as a remedy to polarization—actually reinforces it.
To be a Democrat or a Republican (or a member of any party) means being part of a team, and when you see yourself as part of a team, you tend to be loyal to it. All of our collective identities—whether religious, ethnic, regional, or cultural—operate this way. We defend our teams when they are attacked, cheerlead when they succeed, and subscribe to the collective values that they promote. We look to our fellow group members to see what we should think about events in the world and update our views accordingly. We tend to self-segregate into the teams we want to be a part of—and when we don’t see a team we want to be a part of, we sit things out. (...)
In response to this state of affairs, many have proposed that we combat hyperpartisanship, perhaps by doing away with political parties entirely. Mickey Edwards, for example—a former Republican member of Congress—has argued that we should just view ourselves as Americans, not as members of a political team. Antipartisanship is the guiding principle behind No Labels, the organization Edwards cofounded that (as its name suggests) advocates for eschewing partisan labels.
But even “no label” is still a label; there is simply no escaping labels in politics. Moreover, there is little evidence that voters disillusioned with the two major parties are united in holding more or less the same centrist views. Most self-described “independents” are closet partisans, voting reliably for one party. (Many hold views even more extreme than partisans; they dislike parties because they see them as too compromise-oriented.) Similarly, “moderate” is the default category for people who don’t identify as liberal or conservative—which doesn’t mean that their views land in the metaphorical “middle” of the two camps. These two groups—self-identified independents and moderates—overlap somewhat, but the overlap is much smaller than critics of partisanship suggest. More than anything else, what holds them together is a sense that the system is broken.
Third Parties That Don’t Spoil
It’s not hard to understand why third parties fail in our current party system: they are plagued by the “wasted” or “spoiler” vote problem. Voting for a minor-party candidate means voting for a candidate who simply cannot win, and in a close election, voting for a minor-party candidate could mean helping the candidate you least prefer. These facts make our third parties weak. Ambitious political actors channel all their energy into the major parties, while existing third parties attract only fringe candidates and donors.
So far, this is just like a typical ballot (at least in a place where third parties are active). But imagine there’s a fifth, minor party in the mix, the Common Sense Party, with a base of moderates attracted to bipartisanship, civility, and the rule of law, and they decide to “fuse” with the Democrats for this race by cross-nominating the same candidate, Smith. For example, they might message to their base this way:
We have evaluated the two major-party congressional candidates on their commitment to our values, and we’re nominating Smith. She’s a Democrat, and we disagree with the Democrats about many things, but on the values we care about, she’s far and away best candidate in this race. If you agree these values are important, we urge you to vote for her under the Common Sense Party label. It counts the same as a vote on a major party line, but it lets her know that these values matter to you.Election Day rolls around, and even though Smith gets fewer votes from Democrats than Jones does from Republicans, her support on the Common Sense line propels her to a narrow victory. The Common Sense Party can proudly claim to have produced the margin of victory. Smith will be most attentive to her own party, but she won’t ignore Common Sense voters—and Republicans will be forced to run a more competitive candidate. In this scenario, supporters of the minor “fusion” party do not waste their votes (as supporters of the Green and Libertarian parties do). Instead, citizens vote for the candidate they prefer under the party label closest to their values.
by Lee Drutman, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. A number of responses (each well worth a read). Here are a few:
- Sign Me Up! (Our two-party system has destroyed our civic health.)
- Beyond Elections (The single-minded focus on voting is part of the problem.
- Forget Fusion, Look to Alaska! (Open primaries and ranked choice are better paths forward.
