A supermajority of Americans are frustrated with both the Republican and Democratic parties. According to Gallup, 62% of Americans are dissatisfied with both political parties and believe that a third party is needed.
However, only 15% of those said they would be very likely to vote for a third-party candidate. Changing the rules of American politics to allow for a proliferation of new parties would create more harm than good.
To allow for more than two viable parties would require changing the electoral system of the U.S. The most common alternative election system is proportional representation, where the share of seats a party wins is proportional to the share of the vote it wins. In the model’s simplest form, a party that wins 30% of votes across the country gets 30% of seats. Voters can vote for whichever party they like best without fear of spoiling the vote, and so more than two parties will achieve viability.
In fairness, proportional representation is more representative of the public’s beliefs in the sense that it allows for a greater diversity of parties and grants them representation relative to voter support; voters will have more options. If you simply value more options above all else, you may prefer PR. But the greater representation granted by proportional representation on the level of election results may not translate to greater representation and proportionality in actual governance.
The core of the problem with proportional representation, and with having more than two parties, is that it leads to split governments and often requires several parties to work together to govern.
For a majority coalition to form, which is usually needed to elect a prime minister and/or pass legislation, multiple parties must agree to work together. Because the votes of all the parties would be necessary, any party could threaten to withdraw its support if it did not receive sufficient concessions in legislation. In this way, having more than two parties can be less representative of the public on the level of governance because smaller parties in government can extract concessions disproportionate to their size in exchange for keeping the governing coalition together.
Another problem with having more than two parties is that it is unclear to voters what government will form if the current government is elected out of office. For example, Angela Merkel, the leader of Germany’s center-right CDU party, entered negotiations with the environmentalist Greens and the pro-market FDP after the 2017 German election to form a governing coalition. The three parties could not reach an agreement, so instead Merkel formed a majority coalition with the center-left SPD.
In contrast, it is almost always clear in the U.S. that if the Republicans are voted out of power, then the Democrats will take power, and vice-versa. Whatever promises either party makes in an election will not be foiled or diluted if they take power because another party in the majority coalition threatens to leave the coalition. In this way, a two-party system can be more representative of the public on the level of governance. The government that is elected in a two-party system is more likely to successfully carry out its campaign promises than in a multi-party system.
Granted, either party in the U.S. may fail to fulfill its policy promises for other reasons, but that would not be a failure of the two-party system. Both American parties are unpopular at the current moment, but the reasons for that are not the two-party system. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.
