When the Federalists died out, the Democratic-Republican Party split into the Whigs and Democrats, who disagreed about the balance of power between branches of government. By , a collapsing Whig Party was replaced by the anti-slavery Republican Party, whose feuds with the pro-slavery Democrats led to the Civil War. From that point forward, those two dominant national parties have remained stable. Third-party challenges have been limited and generally unimportant, usually driven by specific issues rather than broad-based concerns.
The modern Republicans and Democrats are unlikely to go the way of the Whigs, Federalists and Anti-Federalists, regardless of recent political earthquakes. National politics are a different game now than they were during the early republic. Advances in communication and technology have enhanced party organization. Parties can maintain a truly national presence and ward off potential challengers.
Both major parties have shown a willingness to stretch to accommodate populists like Trump and Sanders rather than splintering. Recent changes in the Democratic nomination process , for example, demonstrate this flexibility.
Barriers to third parties appearing on ballots are ingrained in our electoral laws , which have been engineered by those managing the current system so that it will endure. And donors and lobbyists, who want predictable outcomes, have little incentive to rock the boat by supporting a new player in the game. Certainly, the parties have evolved and will continue to do so. Yet evolution should not be confused with destruction, and the persistence of the present system is relatively secure.
Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. End gerrymandering? Of course. But how? Independent commissions are an improvement over politicians drawing maps for partisan advantage.
But with parties divided between cities and rural areas, drawing competitive districts is hard. And, again, because Democrats are overconcentrated in cities, ensuring partisan fairness will come at the cost of other districting goals.
Single-member districts limit the possibilities. Make it easier to vote? But for six decades, reform after reform has made it easier to vote in the United States, and turnout has barely budged. Few elections are competitive.
Few candidates are inspiring. And few campaigns invest in serious voter mobilization. In the current political environment, higher turnout would likely help Democrats win more elections on the margins. Encourage more civility and tolerance in politics? But notice what has happened to the few remaining politicians who have charted a path of civility and moderation in recent years?
Better ethics regulations? Again, sure. But ethics rules are only as good as their enforcement and congressional oversight. But in highly partisan politics, even facts become selective, partisan things. Campaign finance reform? The U. This might actually reduce polarization a little. As the political scientist Andrew B. Hall has shown in his new book, Who Wants to Run? But polarization needs to be sharply reduced, not just trimmed. Under the two-party system, U.
Both sides see themselves as the true majority. Republicans hold up maps of the country showing a sea of red and declare America a conservative country. Democrats win the popular vote because most Americans live in and around a handful of densely populated cities and declare America a progressive country. The only way to break this destructive stalemate is to break the electoral and party system that sustains and reinforces it.
The United States is divided into red and blue not because Americans want only two choices. In poll after poll, majorities want more than two political parties. Few Americans enjoy the high-stakes partisan combat.
And even if Americans agree on wanting a third party, few are willing to gamble on an alternative for fear of wasting their vote. Nor can Americans agree on which third party they would want, either. The United States would need five or six parties to represent the true ideological diversity of the country. All else equal, modest multiparty democracies with three to seven parties perform better than two-party democracies. Such a party system regularizes cross-partisan compromise and coalition building.
Since parties need to work together to govern, more viewpoints are likely to be considered. The resulting policies are more likely to be broadly inclusive, and broadly legitimate, making voters happier with the outcomes. Some might cite Brazil, Italy, or Israel as paradigmatic and thus cautionary cases of chaotic multiparty democracy. But these are very different countries. Political culture and political history both matter tremendously.
Brazil and Italy have long histories of corruption that challenge any party system, and Israel is perpetually surrounded by hostile enemies. Brazil and Israel have too many parties, the result of electoral rules that make legislative representation too easy for parties to obtain, rather than too hard.
A sweet spot is between four and six parties—enough to give voters meaningful choices, and offer coalitional variety, but not so much to fragment a polity and make coalition management difficult. Comparing countries is always difficult, but the more appropriate comparisons for the United States would be the modest multiparty democracies of Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia—hardly dysfunctional polities. To facilitate more parties, first-past-the-post elections have to go.
But if they alone are driving illiberalism and hyper-partisanship in the U. Shapiro, the increase in affective polarization in the U. Second, the change in how Americans feel about their party and other parties has been driven by a dramatic decrease in positive feelings toward the opposing party. In most though not all of the nine democracies, voters have become a little less enthusiastic about their own parties.
But only in the U. Boxell, Gentzkow and Shapiro caution that the cross-country comparisons are not perfect, since they rely on different survey question wordings over time. Third, more so than in other countries, Americans report feeling isolated from their own party. When asked to identify both themselves and their favored party on an point scale in a survey, Americans identified themselves as, on average, 1. This gap is the highest difference Rodden found among respondents in comparable democracies.
Read more. Fourth, and perhaps most significant, in the U. Scholars at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have been monitoring and evaluating political parties around the world. And as the chart below shows, of conservative, right-leaning parties across the globe, the Republican Party has more in common with the dangerously authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey than it does with conservative parties in the U.
The U. People in countries with majoritarian ish democracies, or two very dominant parties dominating its politics like in the U.
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