How More Parties Can Save U.S. Democracy

Lee DrutmanOld

Apr 1

With Lee Drutman (he/him) • April 1, 2021 • Vol. 01 No. 02

Editor’s Note: The recent passage of a Georgia state law that severely restricts voting rights and the current struggle in Congress over the For the People Act—which would expand ballot access, limit partisan gerrymandering, and increase transparency in campaign finance—are dark reminders that in the United States, democracy itself is contested. In this interview, political scientist Lee Drutman explains how the structure of U.S. politics promotes dysfunction and argues that changing the electoral map could transform the United States into a healthy, multi-party democracy.

Alchemist: What are the core issues facing U.S. democracy?

Lee Drutman: Oh, that's a big question. There are two major problems that our democracy is struggling with right now. One is the hyper-partisanship of our two leading parties, and specifically how it’s creating dysfunctional governance and a declining sense of legitimacy in our political institutions. The second problem is a broader inequality of wealth and opportunity in our society, which creates resentment and, frankly, uncertainty, which then exacerbates the polarization.

The U.S. has a "winner-takes-all" system that has created spiraling inequality and hyper-partisanship.

I think at the core of both of those problems is the failure of our electoral institutions to channel and manage conflicts in society. We have a “winner-takes-all” system of elections that really undermines the ability of our politics to be responsive—and it has created spiraling inequality and hyper-partisanship that are twin existential threats to American democracy.

Alchemist: What are some of the causes driving the first problem you mentioned—polarization?

Lee Drutman: The biggest cause is the sorting of our parties by geography—the cultural liberal versus cultural conservative axis of conflict. Sixty years ago, you had conservatives and liberals of the Democratic Party, and conservatives and liberals of the Republican Party. What you now have is the sorting of conservative rural traditionalist values into one party and cosmopolitan, urban values into the other party.

The second cause is the nationalization of politics. In the past, you had local political cultures and local political institutions that were more variegated. Now, you have intense focus on this single “winner-takes-all” power struggle within Washington, which has amped up polarization.

The third factor is that we've had this period of very closely divided partisan balance at the national level—of pendulum swings from unified government back to divided government. At every election, it's possible for at least one party to take back the Presidency, House, or Senate. And that creates this really tight competition, which means that you're always trying to gain back power if you're out of power by making the other side seem extreme. And all of this, of course, occurs within the two-party system. That’s the master background in which all of these trends take place.

Alchemist: In your most recent book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, you identify the two-party system as a major, if not the major, source of our woes. Why is that the case?

Lee Drutman: We have bifurcated politics in this country, as the two parties have sorted into two nationalized coalitions organized around very separate geographies and separate cultural identities. Add in a very closely contested election system, and you get a politics dominated by the mentality that “you're either with us or you're against us.” And even though the parties themselves are still somewhat heterogeneous, what binds them together is a shared enemy. That shared enemy is very important to creating that sense of party unity and has become very central to winning elections. It has created this very intense othering.

The way I've described things, one could accuse me of “both sides”-ism [implying that both parties are equally at fault for our current problems]. But I think there's a crucial asymmetry here: Because of the way that districts are drawn—Democratic voters are just naturally overly concentrated in urban districts—Republicans, as the rural party, have a structural advantage. They can win more seats with fewer votes. Also, by virtue of being the rural party, they represent a declining share of the electorate. In order to stay competitive, they have to squeeze more juice out of the advantages that they have, which makes them more aggressive. The Democratic Party represents demographic change, which is threatening, and Republicans have a sense of losing everything and time being against them.

The Republicans have gone from being a majority to a shrinking minority. That sense of loss is a powerful motivating force. It’s driving the current Republican Party, or at least the most active and intensely mobilized parts of the Republican Party.

Alchemist: Why is it the case that we have only had two major parties?

Lee Drutman: The United States has basically been a two-party system since the start. In the past, third parties were more influential largely because you could have regional third parties. For example, the populists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were effectively a regional party, from the farming parts of the country that had been hit hard by the economic transformations of the 1880s and 1890s. But as politics nationalized, and also as politics polarized, it has become harder for third parties to secure a foothold.

For third parties to succeed, a lot of voters have to be indifferent to the two major parties. Third parties typically don't last very long in the United States, because usually one of the two major parties wins over that voting population. That’s more or less what happened with the Democratic Party in the 1930s. The New Deal coalition incorporated a lot of the third party—the progressives.

Historically the U.S. has had a multi-party system within a two-party system.

Over time, the rise of the primary election brought in would-be third-party challengers. Notably, Donald Trump was a third-party candidate in the Reform Party before he moved on to the Republican Party. So all of those factors have made third parties less relevant. Although we've always had a two-party system, within those major parties, there have been lots of factions. So, in reality, we had something much closer to a multi-party system within the two-party system, because the two parties were open and weak and capacious at a national level. It's really only in the last decade or so that the two parties have become so fully sorted and non-overlapping that we've actually had what would classify as a genuine two-party system.

Alchemist: How would we restructure our electoral system to enable a multi-party system?

Lee Drutman: If we increased the size of House districts—while maintaining or increasing the number of House members—we would open up the potential for more parties. All of a sudden, the average district would have, say, five members instead of just a single member. In such a system, successful candidates wouldn’t need to get 51% of the vote within their district. Third and fourth parties would no longer be spoilers. Encouraging multi-party races would be harder to do in the Senate, but you could possibly do it through a two-round electoral system, which is what France uses. If you have more than two candidates, you could do a ranked choice model with a top four primary, like what Alaska will use in 2022 for the first time.

Most of the world's democracies are proportional democracies. There are many formulas for proportional representation, but basically, the larger the district size, the more parties you get. There are different rules about thresholds for winning, different rules about the role of parties versus candidates, but the system that I've been enthusiastic about is ranked choice voting with multi-member districts, which is what Ireland has used for 100 years. I think it's a particularly good system for a diverse society.

We can debate the merits of a few different models of proportional representation. But I think the big thing that we have to agree on is that a more proportional system that generates more parties is just a fairer and better system, and that there's something really dangerous about having a binary conflict in politics. Particularly when that binary conflict is over national identity.

When there are fluid and overlapping coalitions with few permanent enemies, democracy becomes much more stable.

There's something important that scholars of democracy have found again and again, which is that when society polarizes into a binary conflict, democracy becomes very unstable. And the flip side is that when you have lots of fluid and overlapping coalitions in which few enemies are permanent and different people have different overlapping identities, democracy becomes much more stable. Nobody feels like a permanent loser. Nobody is trying to dominate.

This is Madison's fundamental insight in Federalist 10, which really draws from his thinking on religious liberty: namely, that the way to get a bunch of different groups to live peacefully together is to create an environment in which no one group ever feels like it's about to be dominated by any other one group. And no one group thinks that it's on the verge of having total domination.

Some people argue that ethnic diversity is bad for democracy. But I look at Los Angeles, I look at New York City. Not to say that those are perfectly governed places, but there's certainly a lot of different groups that managed to get along and thrive. The fact that there are so many different identities and different groups and different religions in these major cities means that nobody is worried that some other group is going to use their power to impose one set of rules on everyone because nobody can accumulate that much power.

Alchemist: You mentioned that a major issue facing U.S. democracy is economic and social inequality. How might these electoral reforms, which would hopefully reduce polarization, also relate to the pursuit of more egalitarian politics?

Lee Drutman: When you look at survey data on economic policy issues, a broader social welfare state is widely popular. Consider the 65% plus in favor of the stimulus bill. That's broadly popular. Very few wanted tax cuts for the rich. People like having health care. People like funding for schools. People would like to see corporations and those with incomes over $200,000 pay higher taxes. So what is standing in the way of that? It's the fact that the two-party system is splitting that supermajority. Because there's a number of voters who, for various cultural or identity reasons, will continue to support the Republican Party, no matter how plutocratic their policies

Moreover, the party of the upper class doesn't want politics to be about economic issues. The more it shifts politics to being about cultural and identity issues, the more it can get away with policies that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.

Because of the single-winner system, the Democratic Party faces a related challenge. Some Democrats feel like they can take poor voters for granted, and particularly poor voters of color, because—where else are they going to go? The pivotal swing voter in the median district and the median state is going to be more conservative than the median voter in the country at large. That’s going to lead the Democratic Party to be a little bit more concerned about the interests of professional suburbanites instead of working-class voters in urban districts whom they can just take for granted. There's a broader pattern here: If you look at the trend lines for the last 40 years, you see an increase in inequality and an increase in polarization, growing almost side by side.

It’s hard to know what causes what. But there are some ways in which you can think about the connection. One is that as polarization increases, it becomes harder for the government to enact new policies. Second, as inequality increases—and resentment increases in turn—there’s a sense that government is not working. Both parties have to channel that anger somewhere. And in a binary, two-party system, it becomes very easy to channel that energy into a simple message: "The other party is dangerous. They represent a dangerous threat."

You can get away with that in the two-party system because you can win as the lesser of two evils. There is no phrase in politics, “the lesser of three evils.” In multi-party systems, candidates can't just say, “Well, the other party is terrible, so vote for me.”