Two Political Parties Why Not 50?
by Tamim Ansary
Encarta MSN
We're schizophrenic about our two-party political system.
Sometimes, we Americans declaim the term in tones of reverence: The Two Party System (all rise) is practically synonymous with democracy itself.
Other times (some of us) utter the term like a curse word. Why must we always choose between two near-indistinguishable options? Why can't the Third-Party-of-the-Moment get a bug's chance at a square dance?
The American party animal
Well, the truth is, we don't have to have two parties. The constitution sets no limit. The constitution, in fact, says nothing at all about political parties, even though some of the founding fathers were notorious party animals.
We can have as many parties as we want--and we do. Shall we name names? Greens. Libertarians. Reform Party. Peace and Freedom. (big breath) American Party. Socialist Workers Party--well, the list goes on. They're all out there, they just don't win elections.
No one mandates it, yet virtually every significant political office in this country is held by either a Democrat or a Republican.
Is it because these two parties are just so incredibly wonderful that no one else could compare?
Or is this a plot by the rich and powerful to limit us to Tweedledum and Tweedlee, both of whom They control?
French sociologist Maurice Duverger says: "Neither."
Why settle for just two major parties?
Two parties--It's a law.
Way back in the 1950s, sociologist Maurice Duverger studied a variety of political systems and came up with a proposition now known as Duverger's Law. He claimed that an electoral system like ours inevitably drifts toward a two-party system, no matter how many parties come out the gate.
By "system like ours," he meant a system with these two properties:
1. Whoever gets the most votes wins.
2. Winner takes all.
Candidates in our system don't need to receive, say, 50 percent of the vote to win an election. They just need to beat the nearest runner-up. And when the voting's over, in our system, one candidate has the seat and all the others can go back to washing dishes.
Measured against real life, Duverger's Law holds up. Anomalies and deviations occur, of course. Former professional wrestler-turned Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura comes to mind. Neither a Democrat nor a Republican, Ventura was a member of the Reform Party and then the Independence Party. But "third-party" successes like Ventura's tend to be temporary. The two-party system keeps reemerging as if ordained by some law of nature.
Why?
Political scientists explain it by drawing a distinction between sincere voting and strategic voting.
Sincere voters cast their ballot for the party, person, or position they like best. That's the naïve base model of democracy. Strategic voters calculate what everybody else will do and apply their vote accordingly, where they think it will make the most difference. In every election, many voters--if not most--vote strategically.
Strategic voting
Let's say a race begins with four parties vying for power--Jocks, Preppies, Hipsters, and Geeks. Early polls show them getting, respectively, 35, 30, 20, and 15 percent of the vote.
The Geeks have little chance of winning, but at first they're planning to vote for their candidate anyway, hoping to spark a movement. They're not neutral on the other parties, however. Some Geeks actively dislike Jocks. If their candidate can't win, they'd at least like to keep the Jocks out of power. If their party had some chance, they'd vote their party line. But as their hopes wither, they feel increasing reluctance to waste their vote on The Loser (as they're now calling their favorite Geek). They decide to use their vote to keep the Jocks out. And who will they vote for? Well, voting for the Hipster would be almost as pointless as voting for the Geek. If they want to block the Jock, it only makes sense to vote for the Preppie.
The poll numbers now change. Geeks drop to 10 percent. Jocks and Preppies start running neck and neck. This, however, triggers movement among the Hipsters. Some of them think Jocks are sort of okay but they detest Preppies. When the Jocks were clear front-runners, they felt safe voting for their Hipster standard-bearer, because at worst they'd get a Jock. But with the Jocks in trouble, they're reconsidering. Maybe they'll vote for the Jock, just to block those awful Preppies.
The polls now show Jocks and Preppies getting a combined 80 percent of the vote. It's clear that one of these two candidates will win. Many who were planning to cast protest votes for Hipsters or Geeks wonder if their protest will even make a noise. If it won't, maybe they'd better use their vote to help determine who will actually win, Jocks or Preppies.
The power motive
Now, add another factor to this dynamic. A political party is not just a union of people devoted to the same principals. It's also a group of people organized to gain power. Between elections, each party has a strong incentive to absorb any absorbable minor parties on its fringes. It does this by opening its umbrella, becoming more inclusive--and more vague.
Neither party has a big incentive to stake out very definite positions, because any position that attracts some voters will alienate others. The safest course for each big party, then, is to become the least unattractive alternative to the other.
You see where this is going. By election time, there are only two major parties, pressed right up against each other on either side of a line. They will inevitably compete for voters who could go either way. And who are these wishy-washies? They're anyone situated somewhere between the major parties.
Whether you call them mugwumps, know-nothings, or independents, they inherently define the center. Since they will determine the outcome of the election, they become the line of scrimmage. And a line of scrimmage has only two sides.
The line of scrimmage itself can move, of course. The whole country can shift right or left; and it does. But the major political parties don't produce this shift. They reflect it. Wherever the line of scrimmage ends up, you'll find the two major parties nose to nose on either side of it.
Can a third party ever win?
Once two major parties are firmly established, can a third party ever crash the gate?
Well, no third party has succeeded since the Civil War, when our current two-party configuration really took shape. Ross Perot's Reform Party made big noise in 1992, but got only 19 percent of the vote, and that was considered good. Teddy Roosevelt came closer in 1912, when his Bull Moose Party actually pulled ahead of the Republicans. (Experts deny that the party's ridiculous name had anything to do with its ultimate loss.) But lose it did, to the Democrats, who then co-opted enough of its ideas to make it irrelevant. By 1916 the Bull Mooses had faded into the woods.
A minor party that tries to jump to the majors faces one enormous Catch-22. In the long run, in order to get votes, a party must deliver. A party not in power cannot deliver. A party that has never held power can't point to any record of delivery. To win an election, therefore, a party must have won some elections already. A third party might go for a few cycles fueled purely by passion and principle--but eventually the troops get hungry. That's when the Catch-22 of party politics sets in.
Even if a third party movement did succeed, Duverger's Law predicts it would reconfigure, not eliminate, the two-party system. That's because a third party could succeed in only one of two ways. It could drain enough votes from one of the two parties to kill that one. We'd then be back to two parties. Or it could drain votes from both parties by offering a real alternative to their blandness. In that case, the two diminished older parties, driven together by their similarity, would consolidate against the upstart. They'd become one party. The former third party would become the second party--and there we are again.
To break out of our current two-party system, we would have to change the mechanisms of our electoral system. Alternative mechanisms do exist, of course. Opponents of the two-party system have been heard to mutter about the parliamentary system so common in Europe; about proportional voting; about fusion voting; and other schemes. But no scheme, system, or mechanism will stop people from voting strategically. So any changes we make may well move us out of a two-party system--but into what?
The voters will decide. And they're hard to predict, except in retrospect.
posted by Richard at 5:05 PM
