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To Save Itself, America Needs Not Two Parties, But Many
By Lee Drutman
Is America headed for a second civil war? To judge from recent columns, books, and polls on the topic, we might be. If violence is the alternative to politics, and our democracy is fracturing under the strain of two competing parties, each viewing the other as illegitimate, then maybe civil war is inevitable.
But perhaps there is another solution: letting the Democratic and Republican Parties break into smaller pieces and recombine in new ways. With more political parties, America might avert the fate that many are predicting. Achieving this will require structural changes in how we elect our representatives. This could include transitioning to a system of proportional ranked-choice voting – in which voters rank multiple candidates in order of preference – and allotting multiple representatives, not just one, to each voting district.
Somewhat counterintuitively, then, the solution to our current trouble is to cultivate more political disputation, not less. But even more than the how much, it is the how we cultivate political conflict that provides the skeleton key to managing its resolution. Instead of every political conflict becoming existential because it is all part of one grand zero-sum partisan death match, we need more small conflicts, each with different coalitions. This more dispersed, fluid politics sustained American democracy in the past – and it is our best hope for the future. And we can only restore it by letting the two grand coalitions fracture.
***
The threat of civic conflict culminating in civil war worried the American Founders. They had read their history, especially of Greek and Roman antiquity. They didn’t take political stability for granted. They knew that earlier republics frequently degenerated into binary armed conflicts.
John Adams cautioned that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.” How could such a frightful despotism be avoided?
James Madison’s ingenious and timeless solution was what we might call “multidimensional pluralism.” Factions – groups of people united by some common interests or political goals, what would become our political parties – should be allowed to proliferate. If one faction ever formed a coherent governing majority over the federal government, it might use that power to oppress the minority faction. And that would be fatal to republican self-governance. Thus, the more factions, the harder it will be for any of them to combine into a permanent majority.
Yet despite the Founders’ best intentions, the early republic nearly did dissolve in its infancy, and precisely for the stated fears of having “two great parties.” The Election of 1800 marked a bitter, binary battle between the Federalists of John Adams and the Democratic-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson. The two sides branded one another “monocrats” and “Jacobins,” respectively – as polarized and incendiary as political rhetoric could get at the time. A poisoned politics of constitutional hardball in the late 1790s and an Electoral College deadlock that took the House months to resolve could have easily broken up the fledgling republic.
As the concept of a “legitimate opposition” developed, however, and the republic stabilized and expanded, tensions cooled.
But when slavery became a clear partisan issue in the 1860 election, Southern states, fearing they would be a permanent minority, left the Union before Abraham Lincoln could assume office. The American Civil War followed, proving much longer and bloodier than anybody expected.
After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, states and cities became the hubs of power, and state parties became crucial. Federalism seemed to offer a road to national stability by allowing the proliferation of factions, though largely at the cost of preserving racial apartheid in the South.
Democrats enjoyed overwhelming majorities during the New Deal era, but intraparty tensions between northern liberals and southern conservatives constrained the party, particularly on civil rights issues. Even when Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats won a landslide victory in the 1964 election, historic civil rights legislation passed with large bipartisan majorities. When Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, it was because members of his own party no longer wished to defend him. Though messy and seemingly incoherent at times, American governance during this era was held together by Madison’s concept of factions that sometimes combine but that also often check and limit one another.
Partisan conflict escalated in the 1990s, however, and American politics flattened. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats went extinct. Culture war issues came to dominate, and politics became a war of attrition for a bare 51 percent majority. Party identity hardened: one party for liberal, cosmopolitan America; the other for conservative, small-town America. The middle ground collapsed. And that’s where we are today.
Contemporary political sorting isolates our two parties, with each side surrounded by echo chambers that banish dissent and doubt and breed distrust of the “other.” If the other side can’t be trusted, extraordinary measures are justified. Under this logic, self-governance collapses eventually into self-righteous authoritarianism – and democracy dies.
***
It would be comforting to think that some incremental change could put us back on course. But the problem is that we are now so far off course; tinkering on the margins won’t be enough. The system is in trouble.
Fortunately, we don’t have to reinvent the principles of sustainable self-governance. We just have to rediscover them.
Political parties organize political life. When they function properly, they develop and advance policies, offer coherent narratives, vet and support candidates, and mobilize and engage citizens in collective action. They make elections sensible by providing consistency from campaign to campaign.
Some believe that nonpartisan elections and independent candidates could elevate reason above passion, but the political science on this subject is clear: nonpartisan, independent politics imposes demanding cognitive burdens on citizens who depend on partisan cues. It strengthens demagogues and special interests and undermines the compromise and teamwork necessary for governance. Democracies with weak political parties are the ones most prone to dissolution. Granted, our two parties today are falling into many of these same pathologies (demagoguery, special-interest capture, inflexibility). But this is not an inherent flaw in the nature of political parties. It is, rather, a flaw in the expectation that just two political parties could govern a nation as large and diverse as the United States.
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Most advanced democracies have multiple parties, elected through systems of proportional representation. Consider the 2021 German elections. The center-left SPD (social democratic party) was the winner, with just 25.7% of the popular vote – more than any other party received. But the SPD still had to build a coalition government, joining with the center-left Green Party (which won 14.8%) and the center-right FPD (Free Democratic Party). Meantime, Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU party won 24.1% of the vote, but it will go into the opposition, at least for now.
In German politics, then, all governing is coalition governing. German voters and politicians expect compromise, and policy hews to the acceptable middle, without wild swings. Yes, Germany has extreme parties on the left (a vestige of Communism) and the right (the AfD). But practically speaking, the nation has four viable, center-oriented parties, all of which can form coalitions with one another. The same dynamic holds for most of the European multiparty system – a large and functional range of centrist parties, capable of forming moderate governing coalitions.
Certainly, the frightful example of extremist parties in Weimar Germany stands as the classic caution against proportional representation. But the politics of 1930s Germany is more complicated. It involved fateful decisions by leading center-right actors to ally with Hitler, seeing him as a useful idiot in their efforts to maintain power. In other European multiparty systems, notably Belgium, the center held because center-right parties made a different calculus, instead marginalizing the far-right.
For politicians in such systems today, governing means working with other parties in coalition. Working together builds relationships. Campaigning in a multiparty system is different because parties can’t portray themselves as the lesser of two evils. Demonization doesn’t work as a campaign strategy.
For citizens and voters, politics is more complex because there are real choices across a broader range of ideologies. Some right-wing parties compete in the cities, and some left-wing parties compete in the country. Coalitions shift over time; politics is responsive to changing pressures. In short, politics looks more like what Madison envisioned.
Though federal legislation for a voting system of proportional representation is unlikely in the near term, cities and states could lead the way, as they have done throughout American history. Already a growing number of states and cities are using ranked-choice voting, though single-winner ranked-choice voting is unlikely to create opportunities for multiple parties. As reform expands, states and cities should combine proportional, multimember districts with ranked-choice voting. There are many ways to do it.
In the immediate term, Congress could establish a congressional commission on structural solutions to the crisis of hyper-partisan polarization to pull together leading experts and focus the national reform conversation. Congress could also repeal the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act, which mandated that states use single-winner districts, and instead allow states to experiment with proportional multi-member districts.
More important than any specific electoral reform is a guiding principle: as long as just two competing sides are committed to the elusive goal of total dominance, American democracy is endangered. Self-governance cannot survive when all conflict is organized along an us-against-them dimension.
The Founders were right to fear a republic divided into “two great parties.” And Madison was right that the only way to solve the problem of faction was to “control its effects” – paradoxically, by making sure that enough factions flourish to prevent single-party control and ensure responsiveness to the voters. There is a path forward, but it will mean embracing major structural reforms to make multiparty democracy possible in America.
Lee Drutman is the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.” He is a senior fellow at New America, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, the co-host of the podcast Politics in Question, and the co-founder of Fix Our House, a campaign for proportional representation in America. He can be contacted at drutman@newamerica.org.
In Defense Of The American Party System
By Daniel DiSalvo
Criticism of political parties in the United States began even before their creation. For much of our history, party reform has been seen as the royal road to improving the quality of American politics, public policy, or both.
As part of that venerable tradition, Lee Drutman argues that America’s two major parties are too strong and are engaged in a war of attrition, which poisons political life and paralyzes the government. His solution: break up the Democratic and Republican Parties and institute a multiparty system such as exists in many European countries.
This recommendation presents two problems. One is that Drutman does not provide a set of measures that could plausibly be adopted to get us all the way to a multiparty system. The other is that even if such a system were somehow achieved, it is not at all clear that it would actually improve political or policy outcomes.
Recall that political parties are organizations that emerge from and adapt to constitutional structures. Therefore, to establish a multiparty system in the U.S., we would have to substantially change the small “c” constitution of the country – and, very likely, the large “C” Constitution as well. That’s a tall order. As a result, the call for a multiparty system often boils down to a vague wish for the United States to be a country other than what it is.
Are America’s two parties really too big and strong? Would a multiparty system be a major improvement?
One might argue that the current problem with America’s parties is not that they are too strong but that they are too weak. The basics of the political system – an independently elected president, staggered electoral cycles, federalism, and bicameralism – prevent the concentration of power in political parties. These elements have been compounded by a wave of decentralizing party reforms that began in the 1960s, which sought to devolve power to the grassroots.
As a result, our current party system is a far cry from the “Westminster model,” characterized by two big, disciplined, hierarchical, and competitive parties. Originating in England, this model is based on single-member districts, first-past-the-post elections, and the delegation of power from members of Parliament to the party leadership. Parties campaign on a real policy program, and if they win a majority, enact that program in office. For most of the 20th century, this strong-party model was political scientists’ favorite.
By contrast, if the measure of party strength is the ability to pass legislation, then Republicans and Democrats are feeble. Although members of each party regularly vote together in Congress, creating the illusion of unity and discipline, in recent years neither Republicans nor Democrats have been able to unite on a policy platform or consistently enact their policies into law. Instead, as political scientist Frances Lee has shown, party unity on roll-call votes in Congress has more to do with political competition with the other party and fending off primary challenges than with crafting public policy.
It remains the case that most laws passed in Washington receive substantial votes from both parties. Such bipartisanship reflects the lack of a party program. Voter vexation is predictable when neither team ever really “wins” and nobody is clearly answerable for government policy. Energies mobilized in elections are frustrated once representatives take their seats in office.
But scant evidence exists for the claim that multiparty systems vastly outperform America’s system of two big but weak parties. Consider that multiparty, proportional-representation systems, which enhance representation at the ballot box, can easily fragment and bolster the extremes on the left and right. In this century, such systems in Belgium, Spain, Italy, Israel, and elsewhere have had great difficulty forming governments and getting those governments to act. Nor have European nations been immune to strident populist and anti-immigrant parties.
Furthermore, while multiparty advocates tout the prospect of supporting smaller parties that more closely approximate voters’ preferences, they often neglect to mention that voters have no idea what coalition of parties will wind up forming a government, or what policies it will enact. Representation is enhanced at the election stage but diminished at the governing stage.
The German model – on which Drutman’s case rests – is distinctive. It is based on a combination of proportional lists and single-member districts. The impressive result is that the German system draws on the strength of two-party systems created by single-member districts and gets the participatory benefits that come with multiparty proportional lists.
Other nations have not been able to combine those features successfully, however. Attempts to imitate Germany, especially in Latin America, have produced systems with many weak parties and excessive political fragmentation. Only corruption and backroom dealmaking allow governing coalitions to form and act. It seems probable that such efforts in the United States would likely make its party system more like its neighbors to the south than those on the continent.
Long ago, political scientist Edward Banfield pointed out the paradoxical truth that strong, hierarchical parties are better for democracy. Efforts to decentralize the parties, he held, would only end up destroying the parties’ ability to mediate between citizens and the government. That insight has proved prescient. Indeed, one could argue that decentralizing reforms are at least partly responsible for today’s problems.
Reformers should therefore be mindful of potential unintended consequences in their efforts to improve the American party system.
Daniel DiSalvo is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York-CUNY.
Want A Multiparty System? Embrace Factionalism Within Our Two Parties
By Steven M. Teles
Too often, our discussions of political reform proceed without a clear notion of what problem we are trying to solve. Lee Drutman’s essay is an admirable exception. Against the spirit of the times, he claims that “Somewhat counterintuitively, then, the solution to our current trouble is to cultivate more political disputation, not less.” On this point, we are in firm agreement. But will his proposed solution – that we foster a multiparty system by enacting ranked-choice voting – actually get us that productive disputation? I doubt it. Fortunately, though, our two-party system has in its DNA an alternative that can serve many of the same ends that Drutman hopes will be achieved by a multiparty system, without waiting for institutional reforms that may never arrive.
Ours is a constitutional order designed to use conflict to generate deliberation. Elections are, for the most part, not supposed to settle governing questions as they do in “responsible party government” systems like that of the U.K. Instead, the American Founders sought to create a system that would create the space for what they called the “mild voice of reason.” Without the ability to force legislation through on the basis of a mandate from the people, legislators would have to haggle and persuade, which the Founders hoped would yield at least a modicum of reasoned deliberation.
Our parties have tended to facilitate this sort of deliberation, because over most of American history they were not unitary, programmatic, philosophically coherent entities, but rather coalitions of disparate factions. As Daniel DiSalvo has argued, the heterogeneity of the United States was present not so much between parties, as within them.
As a consequence, parties composed of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats – as well as a number of other geographic, economic, racial, and religious divisions – were relatively weak in Congress, because members wanted it that way. The members of Congress wanted the ability to make strange-bedfellow coalitions, and they got it. So, rather than the kinds of multiparty coalitions that Drutman seeks to create through ranked-choice voting, the United States had temporary legislative coalitions that shifted issue to issue.
This kind of legislative-politics-by-temporary-factional-coalition sometimes produced coalitions through outright vote-buying. But it also – as in, for example, the cases of airline and trucking deregulation in the 1970s, tax reform in 1986, and legislation to address acid rain in 1990 – produced something like genuine deliberation. Issues got on the agenda through a decentralized process involving interest groups, the media, local economic interests, and learned professions (like economists). In an environment in which neither party could ram its preferred policies through with fully disciplined members, there was space for ideas to find their way into the process through entrepreneurial staffers (like Stephen Breyer, who played a critical role advising Senator Ted Kennedy on deregulation).
A factional Congress also had the benefit of allowing a wide range of citizens to see themselves reflected in the nation’s politics. (It should be no surprise that a Congress like today’s, increasingly composed of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, would lead to a high level of voter alienation, when so many voters have political identities that do not line up with these narrow ideological categories.) And more factional parties would also help avoid the trench warfare and negative partisanship that Drutman identifies as a key pathology of our current system, because in a Congress with shifting coalitions, members of the other party are not simply an enemy to be defeated but a potential legislative resource to be cultivated.
Factionalized parties would offer many of the benefits that Drutman associated with a multiparty system. Most important, they would erode the winner-take-all features of our current system that create the dangers of demagoguery and institutional hardball that Drutman rightly condemns in our current politics.
But the most important advantage of seeking a more factionalized politics is that we can pursue it without waiting for major institutional reforms like ranked-choice voting. As Matthew Yglesias and I have argued, it would take only relatively small organized factions of the two parties to force congressional leadership to create more open, flexible rules that would allow for more cross-party legislating.
The left wing of the Democratic Party has already shown the way toward this kind of factional future. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad” in the House are just one example of a party-within-a-party, with its own magazines, fundraising, candidate recruitment, and local chapters. They participate in party primaries – often to the annoyance of senior party leaders – and help shape their party’s legislative agenda. Moderates in both parties could do the same.
If they did, internal fractures would set off a process both inside and outside Congress that would produce many of the same ends that Drutman seeks from a multiparty system, but with one advantage: we can get there from here through party factionalization, whereas, by contrast, we don’t actually know how to get ranked-choice voting to be sufficiently widespread that it would generate multiple parties. Further, we can get to factionalization incrementally; it does not need to be done in one swoop. In fact, a handful of members of Congress could take consequential steps in this direction today, if they chose to do so.
Factionalized parties are our constitutional order’s substitute for multipartyism. We should embrace and enable them – rather than dream of more radical reforms with theoretical advantages but no anchor in our constitutional practice.
Steven M. Teles is Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. Among other works, he is the coauthor (with Robert Saldin) of “Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites” (Oxford, 2020).
Transformative Reform Is Needed
By Lee Drutman
Since both Steve Teles and Daniel DiSalvo raise questions about how a multiparty system might fit within the American constitutional order, let me start there. There is, of course, nothing in the Constitution that says that American democracy must have two parties. Indeed, the Framers did not envision that we would have any parties. Above all, they feared a two-party system. As I note in my opening essay, John Adams cautioned that “a division of the republic into two great parties . . . is to be dreaded as the great political evil.”
For much of the nineteenth century and even into the early twentieth century, third parties, and sometimes fourth and even fifth parties, played an important role in the hurly-burly of American politics as disruptors and innovators and sometimes as realigning forces.
But the Progressive Era put in place reforms that drained third parties of their sources of power. By replacing “ticket voting” (in which voters simply turned in a party ticket) with the “Australian ballot” (in which the state controls access), the two major parties raised the threshold for ballot access and banned “fusion,” which had allowed third parties to cross-endorse major-party candidates, giving them some proportional influence.
Direct primaries, another Progressive Era reform in which parties handed over power to the state, gave would-be third-party actors a way to infiltrate the major parties by running in their previously closed primaries, thus depriving third parties of their best potential candidates.
These were significant and consequential changes to the constitutional order, and analysts would soon describe American politics as having a “two-party system.”
As for DiSalvo’s assertion that multipartyism would require a change to the Constitution, here’s a quick refresher course. Article I, Section IV (the so-called Elections Clause) gives Congress authority to alter how members of Congress are elected – a power that it has used throughout our history, right up to the present. Current legislation, the Fair Representation Act, would mandate that congressional elections be conducted under a proportional ranked-choice voting system, with multimember districts.
DiSalvo notes that most laws passed in Congress still pass with bipartisan support. This is true. But this focus on the numerator ignores the denominator. As Sarah Binder has shown, the share of important issues Congress is able to legislate on continues to decline, and with these failures, public frustration and anti-system anger are generating populist demagogues.
DiSalvo is also correct (citing Frances Lee), that much voting in Congress is party-line posturing, designed to draw distinctions between the two parties. But this is precisely why Congress is so dysfunctional. The minority party views its sole and only goal as becoming the majority party by not cooperating with the opposition. And the majority party, recognizing this, attempts to move policy sharply in its direction on pure party-line votes. That these votes often fail highlights how hard it has become to solve problems in our current Congress. In this closely fought but deeply polarized two-party system, distrust, demonization, and eventually demagoguery carry the day.
Finally, DiSalvo warns of “potential unintended consequences” and cites the example of a few sometimes-dysfunctional countries as representative of all proportional systems. It’s true, of course, that all reforms have potential unintended consequences. One could have equally admonished the Framers that abandoning the Articles of Confederation for a new Constitution would have unintended consequences – which it absolutely did. But when American politics appears on the brink of a constitutional crisis, an equal burden of proof should fall on those who argue that maintaining the status quo is preferable – as it did in 1787, when it was clear that the Articles of Confederation were a disaster.
As for the empirical effects of proportional representation, ask any comparative political scientist, and she will tell you that on balance, proportional multiparty systems are more stable and more responsive, and produce more sustainable, equitable policy. There is variation, sure, and voting systems are not the only determinant of democratic outcomes and health. But there is not much dispute that proportional democracies perform better on the key metrics that democratic scholars tend to care about.
Teles and I are indeed in “heated agreement” on the need to expand the space of political conflict, and to get Congress back to something closer to the shifting coalitions of an earlier era. The question is whether we can recreate that magic within the two-party system again, despite our geographical partisan polarization and the use of single-winner districts. We should certainly pursue it. But given the overwhelming nationalization of American politics, it’s hard to see how individual factions can meaningfully distinguish themselves among voters without some new party labels.
Similarly, a small, organized “centrist” faction could attain disproportionate power if it is organized together. However, without a change to our electoral system that allows such a faction to form a meaningful party and win election independent of the two major parties, its members will face significant difficulties.
Nonetheless, this would be the logical place to start toward the transformative reforms that I favor. Start building the factions. Start building the new centrist coalition. And over time, perhaps these can help steer American democracy toward electoral changes (proportional representation) that will help restore and expand the political center necessary for long-term stability.
Lee Drutman is the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.” He is a senior fellow at New America, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, the co-host of the podcast Politics in Question, and the co-founder of Fix Our House, a campaign for proportional representation in America. He can be contacted at drutman@newamerica.org.