A Russian view of American democracy, from a visiting delegation

I've been meaning to write this, but, well...

Last week, I had a meeting with some Russians.  NO COLLUSION!!!  WITCH HUNT!!!

Anyway, they were a bunch of politically-involved types who wanted to talk to an American political science professor while in Cleveland.  They talked to me.  They had a translator, some creepy dude lurking around, and asked me some fun questions as I tried to explain the bizarreness of our political system.  I also asked them how they perceived our system.  Why?  American narcissism.

The most common thread in their comments was the existence, and in their minds, the problematic nature of having a system built around two political parties.  Why was that?  Did it reduce turnout?  (They really cared a lot about voter turnout)  Isn't it horrible?

I found myself in a room filled with Russian goo-goos.*  It was... strange.  Of the many complaints I have about politics today, the two-party system is not one of them, and I think you will probably find that many political scientists who study American politics are also fine with it.

So, a very brief overview.

First, why do we have it?  It is the electoral rule we use.  We use a simple plurality rule system, rather than proportional representation.  In a plurality rule system, whoever gets the most votes wins.  Yeah, we mess around with that with the electoral college, but at the state level, whoever gets the most votes within the state gets the electors for that state, except for Maine and Nebraska, but even there... I'm getting off track here.  Win a state, you get that state's electors.  Win a state as a senate candidate, you become a Senator, and so on.  We use a simple plurality rule.  In contrast, most other countries use proportional representation.  In that system, you vote for a party.  The proportion of seats that a party gets in the legislature is the proportion of the vote that it gets.  Yeah, there are mixes and complications, but this is the executive summary, and it has already gone on longer than Trump's attention could manage, so I'll leave it at that.  I have more to write, and I'm making a dent in my morning coffee.

Countries that use the plurality rule have a strong tendency towards two parties.  Use PR and you get more parties.  Maurice Duverger noticed this pattern, and in his honor, we call this "Duverger's law."  What does it take for a third party to get anywhere?  Either a major party has to collapse, like the Whigs did, or the third party has to be very geographically concentrated.  The southern Democrats were kind of like a third party for a while, through the mid-20th Century.  Geographic concentration.  Other than that, you get two parties.

I've written about Duverger before, and I teach about it, but it is worth repeating because so many people don't understand it, and it comes up all the time.  Including last week in my TOTALLY NON-COLLUDE-Y meeting with the Russians.

Does having two parties reduce turnout?  First, I don't care.  Turnout is a goo-goo thing.  The Russians were really interested in turnout, but I do not care in the slightest what the turnout rate is.  I care about having an election result that is representative of the population's preference, but the notion that low turnout intrinsically leads to bias is a statistical fallacy.  In fact, in many elections, if we ask the non-voters whom they preferred, add them in as hypothetical voters, and construct a hypothetical 100% turnout election, the winner would have won by a bigger margin.  However, the turnout rate for its own sake?  I don't give a rat's ass about that.  A rat's ass is organic material, biodegradable, and it would at least serve as some kind of compost.  That has a use.  A value.  A high turnout rate?  It is literally less use than the rectum of a rodent.  Would I rather have a high turnout rate or keep the rodent's rectum?  I'd keep the rodent's rectum rather than give it away.  Stop whining about turnout rates.

That aside, does the two-party system cause low turnout rates?  No.  There are other two party systems around the world, and they all have much higher turnout rates.  Consider Britain.  The Liberal Democrats have managed some power over the last few years, but mostly, the country has been a two-party system over the last century, with power going back and forth between the Conservatives and Labour.  And much higher turnout.  About which I don't care.  Remember:  rat's ass.  More valuable to me.

Why is our turnout low?  A question for another time.  Short answer:  Switzerland!

Anyway, what really bugged my Russian goo-goo friends (but not COLLUSION friends!!!) about the two-party structure was the notion that it limited representation.  If you don't really like either the Democrats or Republicans, then you are stuck up that thing that is more valuable to me than high turnout.

Well, observation 1 is that party is really about group identity, and in any given election year, between 80% and 90% of the population identify as affiliating with one of the two major parties.  So, we really aren't talking about that many people.  Between 10% and 20% of the population have to accept a compromise.

Yeah.  Compromise.  Deal with it.

At the end of the day, in any political system, there is one executive, and for any single policy debate, there is one outcome.  Even in PR, there is one governing coalition.  Suppose you really like the Hipster Douchebag Party, representing approximately 1% of the population.  Or maybe I'm just projecting here.  The HDP wants to make everybody listen to 1950s and 1960s jazz, force men to grow oddly-shaped facial hair, and speak in obscure cultural references that nobody gets in order to cause a total breakdown in social communication.  I am not a number, I am a free man!

OK, so obviously, I vote HDP, right?  What does that mean?  Absolutely nothing!  Which is what you are about to become!  (See what I did there?)

Small parties ain't leadin' but two things around PR systems.  Jack and shit, and jack left town!  (I'm really on a roll here!)

In order to have any influence on policy, a party in PR has to join a governing coalition because no party in PR ever gets an outright majority.  So, a bunch of parties get together, form an agreement on a platform, select a PM, cabinet, etc., and there's your government.  What do the small parties get?  In the governing coalition, not much.  Outside the governing coalition, nothing at all.  More importantly, that process-- the process of forming a coalition, is the process that happens before the election in a two-party system.

In a PR system, evangelical christian whatevers may have their own party.  Maybe they get into a governing coalition and set policy, maybe they don't.  Here, they are a part of the Republican Party.  What do they get?  Supreme Court seats when the GOP is in power, and a bunch of laws at the state level.  Are they getting laws passed at the federal level?  Not as much.  But, that's something.  Why?  They have a lot of votes within the coalition.  In PR, there may be a labor party.  Here?  They are part of the Democratic Party.  What do they get?  Less.  Mostly, it's about what the Republicans can't do when the Democrats are in power.  Why?  Labor isn't as organized.  Unions have been on the decline for decades.

This is all just coalition politics.  Parties are coalitions.  That's it.  In PR, coalitions are formed after the election.  In plurality rule systems, everything has to reduce to two parties before the election, so all of that coalition stuff has to happen before the elections.  That's really it.

So, do I care that there are only two parties?

No.  No, I don't.

I care that one of them is batshit crazy right now.  This from a guy who spent a long series of posts in July of 2017 arguing that the political system needs classical conservatism to balance out the worst impulses of liberalism, and that we are poorly served by its absence as the GOP descends into lunacy.



*Snarky term for "good government" advocate.

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