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
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