According to a 2015 Gallup poll, only 38% of us believe that “the Republican and Democratic parties do an adequate job of representing the American people.” A full 60% think that “a third major party is needed.”
The poll suggests a gaping disconnect between what voters say and what they do. If so many dislike the two major parties, and want to see them challenged, then why do third parties virtually never win elections?
This question maddens dedicated members of the Libertarian, Green and Constitution parties. They regularly rail against the most obvious barriers to their success, like exclusion from debates and the costly process of securing a spot on ballots.
These barriers are, however, incidental to third parties’ chronic electoral frustration. Their true nemesis is the type of elections we have in the United States.
Many countries employ some form of proportional representation, whereby political parties gain legislative seats in proportion to the number of votes they receive. In contrast, most elections in America produce just a single, personal winner for each representative district. Winners generally need only garner a plurality of the vote. In other words, our system is “single-member plurality,” where the party whose candidate receives the most votes gets 100% of the representation in a given district.
Political scientist Maurice Duverger is credited with the observation that single-member plurality electoral systems tend to produce and maintain a political structure dominated by just two parties. His observation has proved so empirically sound that, within political science circles, it is referred to as “Duverger’s Law.”
“The compelling logic of Duverger’s Law is as strong as ever,” says professor David Canon, chair of the political science department at UW-Madison, in an email. “The necessity of winning the most votes to get any representation in Congress (or any state legislature) serves as a strong deterrent to third-party success. Many voters would rather vote for their second choice, who could win, instead of their first choice (perhaps a third-party candidate) who has almost no hope of winning.”
Outside of political science circles, this phenomenon is referred to simply as the “wasted vote syndrome.” It is the recognition that a critical mass of voters who are unenthusiastic about both perceived frontrunners will strategically pick the lesser of two evils.
Why would people vote for “evil” at all? Psychologists have established that humans are loss-averse, meaning that we fear losses more intensely than we crave gains. So we are highly motivated by who we do not want to see in office. This sets up a binary choice in the minds of most voters. Few will resist the pull of human nature and consider a third option.
To be clear, Duverger’s Law applies only to bona fide political parties. Highly appealing independent candidates can become contenders in a weak field. Such viable independents might even build an ad hoc party around themselves, like Teddy Roosevelt and Ross Perot did. Such parties, though, either disappear as soon as the candidate does or swiftly join other minor parties in the political wilderness.
To emerge from this wilderness, by supplanting one of the major parties, is a perpetual minor party fantasy. But this hasn’t happened since before the Civil War, when America was disintegrating along regional lines. Today’s Democratic and Republican parties operate in a relatively stable environment. And though they may seem like dinosaurs, the major parties are actually nimble, adaptive creatures. They relentlessly reposition themselves ideologically so as to keep the bulk of the electorate within their compass. Rumors of their imminent extinction have been around as long as they have.
So should those who feel neither “red” nor “blue” just give up and choose a side? Not necessarily. Minor party electioneering will have, at best, a negligible effect on America’s power structure as long as the single-member plurality system is in place. But minor party supporters could shift their energies toward eliminating that system. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution precludes our conversion to an alternative, like Instant Runoff Voting, Range Voting or Approval Voting. Such systems allow voters to select multiple candidates within a contest, thereby expressing their true top preference while still indulging their loss-averse nature.
League of Women Voters organizations in several states have already taken positions in favor of alternative voting systems. Other mainstream groups could surely be persuaded to join in a concerted reform effort, given the widespread dissatisfaction with the Democratic and Republican parties.
Ultimately, though, it will take extraordinary squawking to force reform on the government, controlled as it is by members of the major parties. Through their maintenance of the current system, they are sponsoring their own political duopoly. Until we get their thumbs off the electoral scale, new voices and new ideas from third parties will never get the fair hearing they deserve.
Michael Cummins is a Madison-based business analyst.
