Why Third Parties Don’t Succeed
By Doug Mataconis | Related entries in General PoliticsJoe Tauke at The Melting Pot Project thinks he knows why third party candidates, regardless of their ideological stripe, don’t succeed in American politics:
Did you know that other democracies in the world choose their legislatures and executives in many, many different ways? If you’ve heard of other countries having six, or nine, or eleven parties in their Parliaments, but never bothered to figure out why, the answer lies in how they assign their seats. In America, each seat in the House is linked to a single district. To win any given seat, a party’s candidate must win the most votes in its respective district. Senate seats are the same, at a statewide level. So, if 51% of the country was made up of loyal Republicans, and 49% of the country was made up of loyal Democrats, and the population was spread out perfectly evenly, the result would be that the Republicans would win every single seat in Congress, and the Democrats would win no seats. In each district, the Republican candidate would get 51% of the vote, thereby winning the seat. Same with Senate races.
In many other countries, a system called “proportional representation” is used. As you might guess from the name, this means that the seats in the legislature are assigned, well, proportionally. (Captain Obvious sends his regards.) Let’s go back to that previous scenario. Using proportional representation, a nationwide vote for Congress would be held, rather than dividing the country into districts. If the Republicans received 51% of the vote and the Democrats received 49%, the Republicans would receive 51% of the seats, and the Democrats would receive 49% of the seats. Seems more fair, don’t you think?
Well, it sort of depends on what you’re definition of “fair” is.
If you believe that fairness means that the national legislature should mirror the ideological divide in the country as a whole, then proportional representation is fair, which would mean you’d be more at home in a country with a parliamentary form of government.
If, however, you believe, as the Founding Fathers did, that representatives should represent not a particular ideology or party, but the people who put them in office, then it’s an entirely different story.
Tauke is right that the American political system is biased in favor of two large political parties that represent not just two different political extremes, but also the broad middle of American politics. He’s wrong, however, in his argument that this is a flaw in the system that victimizes supporters of third-party candidates. In fact, I think it’s exactly what the Founding Fathers intended, albeit not in the form they anticipated.
Consider James Madison’s words from Federalist No. 10:
If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.
In other words, the two-party system helps to sustain liberty because it minimizes the ability of people on the ideological extremes to implement their views without tempering them to the will of the majority.
There is, I would submit, nothing wrong with the fact that the United States, unlike most European countries with a parliamentary form of government never had a politically powerful Communist or Socialist Party, or that we’ve never had a situation where a far-right political party attained serious political, as has happened in countries like Austria recently.
That doesn’t mean that third-parties don’t have a role in American politics, because history demonstrates otherwise. Before the Republican Party came into being and achieved power in the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, it was preceded by any number of anti-slavery parties, many of them far more radical in their views than even the Radical Republicans ever were. The Progressive Party was the birthplace of much of the social legislation of the early 19th Century. Even the Socialist Party saw many of it’s proposals enacted as part of FDR’s New Deal. None of these minor parties achieved political power in the sense of winning office, but they they did influence the debate in one or both of the major parties and, in doing so, changed the course of American history.
There’s no reason to completely scrap a system that’s worked just fine for more than 200 years just to get a few Libertarian and Green Party members elected to Congress. The risks, I think, would far outweigh any possible benefits.
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November 14th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
From George Washington’s Farewell Address:
‘Nuff said.
Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com
November 14th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Agnostick,
Washington believed that somehow the American political system could exist without political parties.
As Madison had predicted in Federalist 10, though, that simply wasn’t going to happen.
After the Revolution, it was only natural that disagreements would arise among free people over the proper course that the country should take. It was, perhaps, inevitable that those differences would come to be personified in two people — Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson — who would go on to create the impetus of America’s first political parties, which had started to come into existence even before Washington’s first term was over.
Other than Washington, John Adams seemed to be the only Founding Father who held on to this idea that “party” was a bad thing and that divisions into political parties should be avoided, but even he eventually cast his lost with Hamilton’s Federalists, much to his regret when Hamilton turned on him before the Election of 1800.
When you look at the way it evolved, it seems inevitable that political parties of some kind would come into existence. Washington’s belief that they could somehow be avoided was, quite honestly, just a little naive.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Doug, I liked the article, but there is an amazingly important assumption about your argument. That assumption is that the people we elect represent the people and not the ideology. I would argue that we frequently see the republican approach fail. Case in point is the bailout. Our elected officials didn’t represent the will of the people who elected them in many many cases. So, if our republican system is going to fail at critical points in political history, then a proportional system may ultimately be a better representation of the views of the American people.
November 14th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Doug, I agree with your point. And I would also add that just because it is difficult for third parties to win, that does not make them irrelevant. As the political positions of the major parties drift such that they don’t cover a significant portion of the population, a third party can gain credibility by representing that portion. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity to the major parties. The challenge is that the third party may take away votes from one or both of the major parties. On the other hand, it provides an opportunity to adopt some of the positions of the third party and gain those voters. This prevents the positions of the parties from getting too extreme (or too moderate, for that matter).
While I didn’t vote for a third party this time around, I do not subscribe to the notion that its throwing your vote away for this reason.
I’ve written more about this here if you’re interested.
November 15th, 2008 at 4:35 am
ExiledIndependent,
I don’t know that the bailout is a good example for your argument. The polling in Sept. and Oct. was pretty ambiguous on where the public stood on the issue. Some polls showed massive opposition, others showed moderate support.
Also, representative democracy doesn’t necessarily mean that the will of the people always must prevail. If it did, then we should just go ahead a fire Congress and have national plebecites on every issue.
And for the record, I opposed the bailout.
November 15th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Great post and great comments. It is a conundrum. Parties were not anticipated by the founders of the Constitution, and indeed that may be a defect in the Constitution. We have seen instances where one party rule effectively subverts the checks, balances and separation of power designed into the Constitution by the founders (Bush43, LBJ, FDR). But, political parties exist because political parties work. They are effective at securing a share of power for their candidates and constituents. The era in American politics when parties were strongest, was the era when there was the greatest popular participation in politics. OTOH, our system of government stacks the deck against any but two major parites.
Although third parties can have the positive effect (as Doug and Mike point out) of getting major party attention for specific issues, they have no success at securing political power for their candidates or constituents. They can have a real impact on an election, have political “success”, but that “success” is realized in a negative way. A “successful” 3rd party is always a spoiler, serving only to elect the greater of two evils by drawing away support from the major party that is closest to the third party platform (Perot elects Clinton, Nader elects Bush43). Even Teddy Roosevelt, a wildly popular ex-president, who had the most successful 3rd party run in our history, only got 12 electoral votes, spoiled the Republicans chances and succeeded only in securing the election for Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
However, history does offer a glimmer of hope for anyone who despairs at what our two dominant parties offer today. While there is no historical precedent in modern American history for a 3rd party succeeding in anything but being a spoiler, there is a precedent for one of the two major parties self-destructing and being replaced by something new (The Republicans replaced the Whigs). The Republicans replaced the Whigs because the Whig Party ripped itself apart over fundamental issues. Perhaps we are seeing history repeat itself. Perhaps a new major party can emerge from the ashes of the GOP.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:45 am
These comments assume that all parliamentary systems have proportional legislatures and all presidential systems have winner-take-all legislatures. But this is not the case. What about the U.K. and Canada (parliamentary, winner-take all)?
Using data from Wikipedia and the ACE Project, I have a list of 69 nations with directly-elected chief executives (presidential systems). 28 have majoritarian (winner-take-all) legislatures, 26 have proportional legislatures, 10 have mixed systems, and there are 5 I don’t have data for. In my list of 73 nations with parliamentary governments, 30 have majoritarian legislatures, 33 have proportional legislatures, 8 have mixed systems, and there are 2 I don’t have data for.
Conclusion: type of executive (presidential versus parliamentary) is unrelated to type of legislature (winner-take-all versus proportional).
November 17th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Doug, I’m with you until the last graf. I’d hazard that the current system allows for alternative party wins in Congress, and I’m generally of the opinion that a viable third party movement would begin with a legislative presence if at all. There’s no need for change in that regard. It’s the Presidency that seems immune to any but Big Two candidates, not the House and Senate.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Never say never…
The Constitution Party–just 16 years old–is already the 3rd largest political party in the United States. It is also the fastest growing of the country’s so-called “third” parties. Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party’s 2008 presidential nominee, set a party record this year in the number of votes he received.
If you’re interested in supporting individuals who genuinely believe in small, non-nanny, non-interventionist government, and who are 100% pro-life, you’ll want to check out the Constitution Party.
“Constitution Conscious”
http://www.constitution-conscious.blogspot.com
“Constitution Party”
http://www.constitutionparty.com