Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America

by Lee Drutman

Multiparty democracies have consistently generated stable, moderate, compromise-oriented policymaking; higher voter turnout; more satisfied citizens; and better representation of political and ethnic minorities. In multiparty democracies, parties do not claim to represent true majorities. They promise to represent and bargain on behalf of the different voters and issues they represent. In multiparty democracies, coalitions are more fluid and flexible, built around compromise—just as the Framers of the American Constitution intended.

A call for de-escalation might ring hollow, given the stakes. It might seem like backing down in the face of evil. But we need to understand that politicians operate inside institutions and environments that constrain their choices, shape their values, and reward and punish certain behaviors. When we see destructive behavior, we have to ask: Would anybody else act differently, given the choices and pressures? Or: Could somebody with a different political temperament even get elected? If the answer is no, we have an institutional problem. I believe the answer to both questions is no. We have an institutional problem.

The American experience suggests that in a two-party system it’s impossible to engineer that “just right” balance. Somewhere in between those extremes there was an era of reasonable balance, when parties were neither too indistinct nor too distinct. In retrospect, that era lasted from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, when American democracy was at its most productive and responsive (though it didn’t always feel that way at the time). But, as we will see, that era was a byproduct of a unique set of underlying conditions that allowed American politics to operate more like a multiparty democracy than a two-party democracy. Ultimately, it was a party system in transition from one state to another, like a slow-turning ship temporarily on course, if only by happenstance.

As the party of inclusion and opportunity, the postwar Democratic Party embraced an ethos of universalism. In a study of American party ideology, political scientist John Gerring describes Democrats’ consistent post-1952 message as emerging out of the “intertwined concepts of consensus, tolerance, compromise, pragmatism, and mutual understanding”—a “Universalist weltanschauung, in which all peoples, all faiths, and all lifestyles were embraced (at least in principle).”91 Democrats focused less on structural economic issues (like the conflict between labor and management) and more on the actualization of human potential and the ability of every individual to pursue their dreams, free of discrimination.

Today, Republicans have become the party primarily for white, evangelical Christians, predominantly men, who see national salvation in rediscovering the virtues of a simpler past. In their telling, that past was a time when clear moral guidelines and predictable social hierarchies gave order and stability to life, when America gained strength from cultural unity and up-from-your bootstraps hard work and there was no interventionist federal government working on behalf of the freeloaders. True national greatness lies in recovering the virtues of this past—in Making America Great Again. Democrats, meanwhile, have become the party for everyone else. In the alternate telling, the past was not so simple. It was a time when old social hierarchies limited the humanity and liberty of too many Americans, a time when the government failed to right the wrongs of widespread discrimination and prejudice, a time when the government callously ignored the material needs of too many. The past belongs in the past. But the work is not yet complete. The true spirit of the Declaration of Independence—that all people are created equal and therefore deserve equal justice—remains unfulfilled. True national greatness lies in realizing this vision of tolerance and equality. Perhaps America was never so great.

The current political system has no mechanism for self-correction. Single-winner plurality elections have turned the two major parties into separate regional parties, both dominated by representatives from the places where strong partisans are most likely to be surrounded by other strong partisans. The close balance of national power and the repeated pendulum cycle of shifting partisan control send a strong signal to party leaders: Under periods of divided government, hold out for unified government. Under periods of unified government, get as much done as possible, by whatever means possible. Your time is limited. In this era, Congress has become dysfunctional and weak. Gridlock and centralized partisan leadership have replaced flexible and fluid bipartisan compromise-oriented legislating, and Congress hasn’t had a serious burst of bipartisan lawmaking since 1990. A weak Congress makes for a more powerful presidency, and a more powerful presidency raises the stakes of elections, which makes polarization worse. It’s a self-reinforcing doom loop, with no obvious way out in the existing two-party system.

Conflict in all democratic societies basically boils down to two great questions: “Who gets what?” and “Who are we?” Or, put another way, all conflicts are at their core either about economics and the distribution of material resources or about national identity, culture, and social group hierarchy. Sometimes these conflicts are separate. Other times, they are yoked together, and “Who gets what?” becomes a question of “Who deserves what?” Depending on which great question predominates, we get different politics.

When a fight over national identity defines partisan conflict, social and cultural values come first. Voters adjust the rest of their political opinions accordingly. This conflict makes politics toxic, because it raises the stakes and collapses partisanship into a battle of us against them. It also reduces the pressure on parties and politicians to respond to economic demands, because voters do not cast ballots on economic issues. And when inequality continues to increase, more resentment follows. Parties have to respond to that resentment somehow. A party system organized around zero-sum questions of identity provides an obvious target for that resentment: the other party is to blame. The people the other party represents are stealing the resources you deserve. This is yet another doom loop. Inequality makes partisanship more zero-sum. Zero-sum partisanship makes inequality more intractable.

More parties mean more diversity of representation. Voters in multiparty democracy are more likely to find a party they affirmatively like, rather than simply support as the lesser of two evils. Voters are more likely to feel represented and engaged politically. Minority voters need not cluster together into majority-minority districts to elect their candidates of choice. And when countries use proportional representation to generate multiparty democracy, voters don’t have to live in “swing” districts for their votes to matter. Under a proportional system, almost all votes matter equally, regardless of where they are cast; elections do not come down to a limited number of “swing” districts.

In a two-party system, a party can win a national election with mostly unpopular policies if the election becomes a referendum on the one or two issues where the winning party has the more popular position. A winning party doesn’t have to represent a broad majority agenda to win an election. It just has to represent the more popular position on the most salient issue of the election. This is why elections are crude instruments for translating public will into public policy, especially in a two-party system. Voters are constrained by the choices on offer. It gets worse. In a two-party system, a winning party doesn’t actually have to win a majority to get unified control.

In contrast to two-party democracy, multiparty democracy doesn’t promise strict accountability. It promises good-faith representation. Voters expect their politicians and parties to represent them and to bargain on their behalf. Voters understand their parties are not majorities but that they have to bargain and compromise to govern. Voters have more issue bundles to choose among, so elections can be more representative. And higher turnout means that the governing coalition is more likely to reflect a broad majority. In governing, multiparty democracy can be flexible and responsive, assembling different majorities for different issues. Though two-party democracy promises majority rule, it more often delivers minority rule. And though multiparty democracy promises only better representation, it actually delivers something much closer to majority responsiveness.

in Downs’s modeling, the median convergence prediction only holds with a long list of unrealistic assumptions about how parties operate, what motivates politicians, how voters process political information, and specific electoral rules and conditions.59 Among other easily disproven assumptions, the prediction relies on voters who (1) care about policy more than they care about partisan loyalty, (2) care more about policy than they do about the charisma and charm of candidates, (3) have clear and stable policy preferences, and (4) have one-dimensional preferences that cluster in the middle of a bell curve. It also assumes parties can adopt policies willy-nilly to win elections, without regard for the coalitions they represent, allowing them to converge on the political center. Downs’s model also assumes a single national electorate voting in a single election for one of two unified party teams.

Poll after poll confirms a deeply discontented electorate. But there is less agreement about a solution. Americans seem to agree they want more parties. In one recent poll, two-thirds of Americans say they want a third party. But few Americans understand the institutional reasons why more parties don’t emerge: the antiquated single-winner plurality electoral system. Absent this understanding, Americans are unlikely to demand electoral reform. Instead, they will keep blaming politicians for responding to the incentives the political system generates, and they will continue to be disappointed. So it’s urgent we make the connection between electoral reform and more parties.