Assignment Task: After reading and watching these videos:
- Summarizes why the U.S. is stuck with two parties
- Explains what is meant by "weak party/strong partisanship?"
- Points out an anecdote that stuck out to you most
Video: "How the Republican Party went from Lincoln to Trump" from Vox via YouTube
Video: "From white supremacy to Barack Obama: The history of the Democratic Party" from Vox via YouTube
Video "Grassroots Populism: Minnesota Politics" from Prairie Public via YouTube
Read | Azari, Julia. "Weak parties and strong partisanship are a bad combination." Vox. November 3 2016.
Read: Americans are not happy with the dominant political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. 40% of people who identify as Democrat or Republican are not even happy with their own party. Nearly half of younger adults say they 'wish there were more parties to choose from' (Pew 2022). Given that Americans are pretty widely dissatisfied with the state of the two party system....why do you think this is the system that persists? Take a few seconds to think and jot down your answer.
So the tl;dr is ... math, psychology, and the way we designed our system of representation.
The way we elect people to represent us in the House of Representatives is through a logic called "single-member districts." Through apportionment, each state is assigned a certain number of representatives based on population, and then it's up to states to figure out how to divvy up their population into equally sized districts. Each one of those districts is electing a single representative.
And the way that candidates win in single member districts is they get the most votes. Not a majority, just the most. So if you get 30% of the vote, but no other candidate gets more than you...congrats! You won. We call this type of rule "plurality" voting. Other names for this type of voting system include "winner take all" (which will be relevant when you learn about the electoral college) and "first-past the post."
Plurality voting is used in districts where there's one seat up for election. Washington state, for example, has 10 members of Congress, and the state is divided into 10 districts. The people who live in each district elect 1 person.
Let's imagine that we're in one of those 10 districts in Washington and there's a lot of political competition. In this district, there are 5 political parties that are trying to win that district's one Congressional seat. The numbers below each party's logo represents the percentage of voters who plan to vote for that party. Higher number = more support for that party. Remembering that in single-member districts, the party that gets the most votes wins. Pause the video and decide who you think is going to win this election based on which party has the most support.
Party with the most votes wins the election. So right off the bat, that looks like Party D, which as 28% support. Easy peasy right? Well.... The other parties know about the electoral rules. And Party A and Party B realize that they share pretty similar values, and they compromised on a single candidate to represent both of their parties as a new Party AB, which when we add Party A's support and Party B's support we get 38% of the overall vote share. 38% > 28%, so Party AB would win.
Well....not done yet. Party D and Party E realize that they share pretty similar values, and they compromised on a single candidate to represent both of their parties as a new Party DE. When we add Party D's support with Party E's support, we get 43%, higher than AB's 38%. So now it looks like DE will win.
But we've still got these 19% of voters who like Party C, the centrist party. Do they just decide not to vote altogether? Party AB decide to adopt some of Party C's policy ideas to attract some voters to their side, Party DE's main candidate gives a speech trying to attract C voters to their side. In the end, it's hard to say exactly who would win, it depends on whether AB is more persuasive than DE and what types of issues C cares about most.
What this illustrates is that in single-member districts, there's a mathematical incentive away from a large number of parties. These parties would have more nuanced ideological positions and might be more responsive to voters, but they're disincentivized to compete in elections because of how difficult it is to actually win. Voters are disincentivized to vote for these smaller parties, even if they're better suited to fight for the policies that voter wants, because smaller parties are unlikely to win a plurality of votes. There's a psychological incentive for voters to cast a vote for a party they think is actually going to win, so they vote for one of the two big parties. This phenomenon, where electoral systems that have single-member districts tend to end up with two major political parties is called Duverger's law.
Plurality electoral systems aren't actually that common across the world though. The countries in red on this map use this voting system for national legislative elections. Compare that map of plurality voting systems with a map of former colonies of the British empire...
Duverger's law and the concept of single-member districts are things you'll need to know and understand for the final exam.
If you're interested in all the countries in gray in the first map and what type of electoral systems exist beyond the single-member district model, I'll explain in the rest of the video.
The other major model of electoral systems are called "proportional systems." Let's reset our parties, we have 5 parties again and they have different levels of support. Imagine that these parties are not competing for just one seat, but 10 seats in the district. Seats are distributed proportionally based on how many votes each party gets. Pause the video and take a moment to calculate how many seats each of these parties would receive.
Whether you round up or round down, that's something that would be specified in the electoral rules. But I think it'd be fair to give A 1 seat, B 3 seats, C 2 seats, D 3 seats, and E 1 seat. Maybe B gets 2 and E also gets 2. That would be something determined before the election ever happens.
Political scientists and politicians have argued that democracy in the U.S. would be stronger if we moved away from a plurality system to a proportional one. Representative Don Beyer from Virginia has proposed a bill in the House called the Fair Representation Act. If this ever became law, it would create multimember districts in states that have more than one rep. So apportionment would still distribute House seats to states based on population. But there would be fewer total districts. So Minnesota has 8 representatives, and instead of 8 districts, maybe we'd have two 4-member districts.
This example from a Washington Post article by Christopher Ingraham shows a hypothetical district that goes from 1 seat to 5.
In the single-member district set-up, the 40% of the district who lean Republican may feel like it's pointless to vote and may feel like their representative can't meet their expectations ideologically. But in a multi-member district, there's some room for those who vote with the minority to have representation in the legislature. People who vote with the minority don't feel like they're throwing away their vote.
This voting system also creates room for multiple parties. Again, an infographic from Ingraham's Washington Post article.
The current two-party system doesn't reflect the diversity of political values across the population. In a multi-member district where seats are awarded proportionally, rather than just to whoever wins the most votes, more niche parties can stay in the race without the fear that they'll "spoil" the election for the bigger, more established parties. 20% of voters can vote for the Green Party in a multi-member district in a way they wouldn't in a single-member district. If 20% of voters withheld their votes from one of the dominant parties in a single-member district, another party with views even further away ideologically would win - it's a numbers game.
We'll also learn about another system of voting called Rank Choice Voting (which many cities in Minnesota use), which is different from the proportional system - it keeps the single-member districts, but just switches up the way that voters select who they want to represent them.
The big takeaway from this lecture is that the way electoral rules are designed can change the outcome of the game. The incentives of plurality voting lead to two parties, meaning big umbrella organizations that don't necessarily represent voters' specific ideologies or policy preferences.