My understanding is that the US has a two-party system because of single member districts and and winner takes all elections.
The winner takes all system requires candidates to compete for a plurality of votes. This means major parties must accommodate a broad range of ideologies.
Multiparty democracies typically use a system in which representation is proportional to the number of votes received and those political parties can often get somewhere by catering to narrow interests.
In the history of the US, the "third party" either "spoils" in this fashion you've described -- or it subsumes the party it would've spoiled by becoming more popular.
It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
It seems a plausible argument that the same happened to the Democrats beginning Bill Clinton in the 90's. Obama out-fundraised from Wall Street both his Republican opponents. Also, with their lock up on big-tech (Musk aside), and their tepid or purely rhetorical support for unions, the Democrats are the big business party.
Both the Democrats and Republicans are big business parties; they represent different factions of big business. Democrats represent finance, entertainment, and big-tech (which is, honestly, mostly finance); Republicans represent mainly manufacturing and extractive industries.
I was specifically thinking of the "Moral Majority" movement, Reagan doctrine, and "trickle-down economics." It was a sea change in the party and set their direction until 2016. We're still seeing the fallout from it to this day, with consolidation of wealth, pandering to extreme religious conservatives, and endless military engagements to police the globe.
Yep, if I recall my US history correctly, it was the GOP that was the progressive one wanting to get rid of slavery and Democrats were the opposing ones.
Indeed. And there have been many, many re-alignments. The GOP was still the party of civil rights until after the 1960s, and then abortion forced a schism between the southern democrats and the democratic party, which led to the GOP increasingly being "the states right" party.
The democratic party after the Civil War was was the political wing of the KKK, in a similar relationship of Sinn Fein to the IRA.
> It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
I mean, you could argue that that's happened with Trump anyway; the way the system works, doing it internally to a party is probably easier than completely externally.
Maybe, but the old GOP is fighting tooth and nail to oust the Trump base from the party. And while Trump may have had the presidency, it looks like most of the GOP was simply paying lipservice to his base until they got rid of him. Imo- the verdict is still out on whether it's easier done internally or externally. The DNC is not making the same mistake with RFK jr- they've just done a complete media blackout of him and pushed him to run independent instead.
The republican majority during the first two years of his presidency stalled on enacting any of his policy- and now they are much more vocally opposed to Trump- as if they always hadn't been. He's a populist candidate- but he's not at all popular with the actual politicians, who are currently the actual infrastructure of the party. His hold on the party is tenuous at best- mostly because the people that oppose him when it comes to voting will still happily campaign with him and win based on his supporters. The recent soft blacklisting of Trump support from Fox is also going to take out a chunk of his base that will continue to vote for the color red.
That’s literally what everyone does within their party to pretty much anyone. He’s still the defacto face of the GOP, no matter how much they want to change it.
As tenuous as it may be, it’s stronger than anyone else’s!
> It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
Hasn’t that already happened? Since 2016 there has been frequent reportage that the GOP has increasingly been taken over by populists, that the platform that the party proclaimed before (small government and a libertarian touch, some military hawkishness) has little appeal or momentum today when it comes to deciding elections. When the candidate for president who wanted to run under that party had enough charisma to be elected (or at least defeat all other primary challengers), ideology went out the window. And all without creating a third party.
Well, yes, several times. Like I said "in the history of the US..." - because it's happened before.
But what you describe here is shifting platform of the party itself, perhaps due to gerrymandered House districts shifting the rhetoric to include ever more extreme ideals.
In my experience even politically engaged Americans don't tend to think about this question. Not that they'd disagree with probably representation, but they'll never bring it up before the specific policy issue du jour. Our parties have done an excellent job distracting us.
Just due to the nature of the American system, it would be virtually impossible to introduce on a national basis, so there's arguably no sense in spending time talking about it.
Many states also have deeply embedded 2 parties into their various laws and legal systems in different ways. A viable third, or fourth, or whatever party would have a LOT of friction to overcome to actually happen.
I don't think American voters could understand that very well. Where I live in Massachusetts they defeated a ballot initiative for ranked choice voting, which is just clearly better (in that it reflects the will of the people), especially in a state dominated by a single party.
How would proportional representation work? Party A gets 40% of votes so they get 40% of congressional seats in a state? Party B and C each get their respective proportion? Like it re-districts a state/county/town every year?
You would likely need to increase the number of seats (or allow "fractional" representatives for smaller states) so that even the smallest state gets 3-4 representatives
And then yes, in traditional proportional systems you vote for a list of candidates rather than a single candidate, the lists are the ones getting the seats based on vote totals. The seats can be distributed based on a fixed or flexible lists model
If you have a state that now has 10 reps each party would make a list of 10 people, then if party A gets 40%, party B 35%, C 15% and D 10% you'd get 4 people from the list proposed by A, 3 (or 4) from the list for B, 2 (or 1) from C and 1 from D
My understanding is that the US has a two-party system because of single member districts and and winner takes all elections.
Many Westminster descendants are not this way, and never have been. Canada has multiple parties, new ones crop up and old ones die.
The current conservative party is a 20ish year old party, and a merger/takeover of the Reform, then Alliance, the Conservatove party absorbing the tattered remnants of the old party.
We have political alliances, coalition governements where more than one party holds power, minority governments, and typically at least 3 main parties, with a smattering of others around.
We typically have 5 or 6 parties sitting at one time.
And yes, to the youngsters in the room, even our 3rd main party has held power from time to time.
But most importantly, party names and controllers change.
That's on the federal level. On the provincial level, new party spring with abandon, and form governments too.
What I would suggest, is not pushing for something incredibly insane sounding to most US ears, like changing the entire voting system, but instead just push for that third party, something that sounds more tenable.
If people were serious about starting a third party, they would start with a hyper local strategy.
There are _lots_ of places in the US where one of the two major parties is a complete shambles and there are people running unopposed for races where a third party could actually come in and win elections.
Demonstrate success at the county level, work up to getting elected to the state house, demonstrate that you can govern effectively and so on.
It's a 20 or 30 year project, and it's not glamorous like running for president is, though.
Historically, this isn't true. The Republicans were founded in 1854 and won the presidency in 1864. The second-party system started in 1830 and won the presidency in 1840.
It's actually much easier to do this a national level, and then drive it downwards into the states.
Yeah, I can see most people can agree on feeling that the two big parties don't meet their needs, but I highly doubt they agree on what that third party should be. And if that's the case there's a real "you go first" problem under FPTP for voting for new parties, because otherwise you've just given the established party on the opposite side to your own views an effective boost by switching from your traditional party to one that meets your views better.
You really need at least ranked voting and ideally multi-seat PR to get out of that, which is hard as it's against the interests of the two big parties.
That said, looking at the UK there does seem to be a renewed interest in moving away from FPTP in their Labour Party despite it being nominally against the parties interests, so maybe there's a way to get movement on that?
I want to vote for local representatives and a real person. I don't want to vote for Republican LLC and Democratic INC.
Parties have no standing at all within the United States Constitution. The fact that we are talking this way is reflective of the simple fact that the representative democracy (aka Republic) that the United States is has been corrupted by parties that work to their own interest, not the interest of the people.
IF you need any evidence of that, you can see it this week when Democrats voted party line with a few Republicans to remove a speaker for no other reason than it humiliated the republican party and the speaker.
I think your last paragraph is leaving out a lot of context on the way the Speaker had treated Democrats up to that point. It wasn’t really about humiliation — McCarthy refused to work with the Dems and said as much.
What democratic nation in the world does not have political parties? It turns out from both a voter and politician perspective, the fact that banding together into parties for predictable ability to deliver results is an advantage seems to be a global phenomenon.
FPTP systems are bad for delivering only two parties, but all systems cause parties of some scale.
That single member can “cross the aisle” without being instantly dismissed from their party and loosing all speaking rights, which is why we have two party. This gives the representative more ability to represent the interests of their district, by threatening to break ranks.
.. and what upsets me the most about this and similar systems is that such status quo is not reformable without a huge crisis or a catastrophe. This may be naive, but I feel like humanity could experiment more with some artificial way of breaking and reforming "working" systems with minimum harm.
Right. It used to be the Right would swing further right during election season and the Left would swing further left. Once the election was over they both drifted back closer to center. Now, well, we can easily see that's just not the case anymore.
The UK has it as well, and it has at least 6 viable political parties that regularly win votes in districts. But yes, it makes it harder to "grow" as 5, 10% doesn't get you a foot in the door of power the way proportional representation does.
The winner takes all biases towards a two party system, but has actually been baked into law by the big two parties to discourage competition. Ballot access is extremely difficult unless you're one of the Big Two
Yeah and the UK is seeing the same issues as the US like extreme polarisation between parties and no incentive to reconcile.
In Holland parties have to form a coalition after the elections. This is a very complex and time-consuming process but I'm very glad we have it. It's not perfect but way better than winner takes all IMO.
> extreme polarisation between parties and no incentive to reconcile.
It's more like polarisation between party supporters. The parties themselves become virtually indistinguishable. Choosing between Tories and Labour is like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. They have very much the same agendas and are only different on minor issues (in the grand scheme of things) that are blown out of proportions.
I think what we see in the UK and the US is a really weird combo of centering politics (both parties don't want to be too much off-center to attract as many voters as possible) but also a really extreme polarisation with the 'enemy' (because they need people to vote for them and not the other party)
In addition to that, politics becomes a 'zero-sum game'. Meaning a loss for one is automatically a win for the other. In other countries in Europe we don't really have this mechanism and it takes a lot of the sharp edge off politics. Because getting the other parties to fail is not automatically a win.
I think especially in the US this latter point is very clear right now, one party is always trying to undermine the other, even at the cost of the country's interests (which was the one thing they were supposed to care about!). Using the shutdown as leverage is a typical example.
I think any system that reduces politics to a zero-sum-game should be avoided as much as possible to reduce this very phenomenon. Because while the two parties in the US are fighting in the streets over internal issues, Russia and China don't have any internal political issues and can take full advantage of this on a geopolitical scale. That's the handy thing of being a "one party system", as awful as it is.
Not saying the EU countries are perfect. Coalition forming is an awfully complex process and sometimes it takes years (I think Belgium was without a government for more than a year recently). It also leads to inaction or slow response times to external events by having too many parties at the table. But it doesn't lead to this kind of extreme infighting and stalemates.
Open primaries are also a really part. In other countries the party itself decides who runs in each district but in America there is an open primary where basically anyone can run and if they win the primary then they are the parties nominee.
In other countries groups like the democratic socialists or the tea party would have to run as third parties because they could never get selected to run, but in America if you are in a fridge group it makes more sense to run in one of the two parties.
The winner takes all system requires candidates to compete for a plurality of votes. This means major parties must accommodate a broad range of ideologies.
Multiparty democracies typically use a system in which representation is proportional to the number of votes received and those political parties can often get somewhere by catering to narrow interests.