In the United States, each presidential election cycle inevitably includes a set of independent/third-party candidates ready to “shake up the race.”
Some years there is just one newcomer seeking to overturn the status quo, like Ross Perot in 1992. In other years, we see a plethora of people running outside of the two major parties. The 2024 race appears to fall into the latter category. Indeed, this year we have a very wide range from true independents like Professor Cornel West to established small party candidates like Green Party stalwart Jill Stein to people on the periphery of major parties like the former Democrat Robert Kennedy Jr.
In the United States, no third party or independent candidate has ever won a presidential election. Throughout U.S. history, even the most popular third-party presidential candidacies have done little more than grab headlines and siphon votes from one major party to the other – as the did Nader in 2000 or Stein in 2016.
And yet, every four years, people across the political spectrum run as third-party/independent candidates, and a considerable number of Americans vote for them. And many others say they, too, would vote for third-party/independent candidates, if those candidates had a real chance of winning.
Clearly, there is untapped demand in the United States for leadership options beyond those offered by Democrats and Republicans.
The two-party system in the United States is almost as old as the country itself. For more than 200 years, every American president has belonged to one of the country’s two major political groups at the time of his election – either the Federalists, the Democratic-Republicans, the Democrats or the Whigs, and since the days of Abraham Lincoln. , Democrats or Republicans.
In this strictly two-party system, independent/third-party candidates are often seen as novelty acts: they add color to election coverage, entertain audiences with their radical plans and proposals, create the ground for late-night monologues and Saturday Night Live sketches. , and nothing else.
The two-party binary system is such a fundamental part of the American political system that in the 1996 election, The Simpsons suggested that Americans would vote for an alien from outer space rather than a third-party candidate, thus spawning the “don’t I” don’t want it; I voted for the Kodos meme.
The main factor that ensures the continued existence of the two-party binary system in the United States, even in times when voters seem disillusioned with both parties, is the “first past the post” voting system used in the country.
“First-past-the-post” means that the candidate/party that wins the most votes (whether a majority or not) wins the election. As French social scientist Maurice Duverger has established, this electoral arrangement favors two-party binaries like the one we see in America today for two main reasons.
First, this system in which a single candidate wins by simply obtaining one more vote than the second largest vote-getter discourages minor parties from running in elections. When three or more parties are competing in such a system, they have a clear incentive to team up, combine their electoral bases and thus defeat their common opponent. This logic, which usually plays out before voters can cast their ballots, quickly reduces a long list of potential parties into two blocs that compete against each other election after election. Second, in first-past-the-post systems, people are often reluctant to vote for a minor party that chooses to run alone in elections. Even if they prefer the political proposals of a minor party, for fear of “wasting” their vote on a party that has no chance of winning the elections, they instead vote for the candidate of the major party that seems to them the most acceptable.
This logic holds with such consistency that it is often referred to in political science as “Duverger’s law”. There are, however, very few universal “laws” in political science, because human beings are disordered and their behavior is much less predictable than that of atoms or genes. Indeed, recent research has called into question the validity of Duverger’s law in certain contexts such as India and the United Kingdom.
And even in the United States, of course, there are exceptions: a maverick who finances a race or two himself, a disillusioned party member who breaks off and strikes out on his own, or a candidate or party that cares more about bringing attention to their pet issues than winning the vote. There have even been a few cases in history where new groupings have managed to take advantage of extraordinary political unrest to gain widespread support. But even in these cases, the newcomers never remained a third party and always ended up replacing one of the two major political parties of the time.
Overall, Duverger’s Law has been implemented in the United States throughout history and shows no signs of failing in the near future. So, unless a cataclysmic event upends America’s current political alignment, the only hope politicians and voters have of breaking the two-party system is to change the way America runs elections. A variety of options exist. Most notably, dozens of countries, from Brazil to Germany to Turkey, maintain multi-party systems through proportional representation.
Although the exact details vary, proportional representation or proportional representation is a system in which parties are allocated seats – seats in the Legislative Assembly, for example – based on the share of votes they receive in elections. ‘an election.
In the current American system, if a hypothetical constitutional party organized and received 20% of the vote in every race for the House of Representatives across the country, it is likely that constitutionalists would lose every election, have no representation in the Congress and would be forced to question their position. their viability as a party. But in a proportional representation system, that same vote share would give these constitutionalists 20 percent of the seats in the House, a good showing for a third party.
There are other systems that would also allow more than two parties to exert influence. Even a majoritarian system, which requires a winning candidate to obtain more than 50 percent of the vote in order to avoid a runoff, allows for the creation of more parties, because getting second place in the initial vote n is not automatically a loss.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who identifies as a democratic socialist but holds her congressional seat as a Democrat, said once that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party.”
In a United States with a different electoral system, she could present herself as a social democrat, as its equivalent is known in many countries. Similarly, fiscally conservative but secular libertarians and socially conservative evangelicals would be able to maintain separate parties instead of serving under the GOP umbrella. Environmentalists, pro-labor voters and other interest and advocacy groups could create their own parties.
Of course, such a system is not without its drawbacks. When no party achieves a majority in a multi-party system, the need to form governing coalitions leads to gridlock or frequent political unrest. But with 10 government shutdowns in the United States since 1981 and several others narrowly averted, the threat of a government shutdown already exists, and even when our government is functioning, many people feel like they are not represented by the production.
Reforming electoral systems is not an easy task. First and foremost, the people currently in power are the ones who have benefited from the current system. Reforms are still possible, either on public demand or if their implementation is delayed – politicians are less worried about changing the rules for their successors than for themselves. Second, few people pay attention to voting systems, and when they do, they usually focus on cases where their preferred candidate or party did not win, not on guesses about candidates or parties who would have presented themselves under a different set of rules. And voters generally appreciate that the procedure is simple, and “the candidate who gets the most votes wins” is a simple rule, regardless of the consequences.
However, many other countries have done very well with their more “complicated” systems, and several districts in the United States have managed to pass major changes in election rules. Alaska and Maine currently use “preferential voting» or RCV for federal and state elections, in which voters assign ordered rankings to candidates rather than simply voting for their first choice; New York is the largest of dozens of urban areas that also use this system for some of their local elections. Furthermore, the Pew Research Center notes that a number of precincts across the United States have resorted to alternative voting methods at some point in history. For example, in the first half of the 20th century, a number of cities used single transferable vote (STV), a version of ranked-choice voting with multi-member districts that specifically aims to ensure proportional representation. This method was abandoned largely due to hostility toward racial and ethnic minorities who benefit from the system, a concern that has hopefully since abated in the United States. Over the past several decades, Pew notes, dozens of states and local districts have adopted alternative voting systems, often due to public demand.
In short, for those who may not be excited about a rematch between Biden and Trump and are more generally disillusioned with the binary choice between Democrats and Republicans, there is hope that additional parties may become viable at the UNITED STATES. But this is not achieved by providing support to third-party candidates in the existing system, but by convincing or forcing politicians already in power – usually representing both established parties – to change the rules governing how we elect the candidates.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
