Executive Summary

The crisis of American democracy has been long in the making, and its causes are many. As it has steadily worsened, the crisis has tipped into a spiral, or doom loop, that cannot correct itself. Structural reform has become necessary.

Starting from this premise, this paper argues that we need a system-level solution to what has become a system-wide problem. And at the center of our political system, we find the two most crucial institutions that organize and structure our democracy—the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

Political parties are the central institutions of modern representative democracy. They must also be the center of reform efforts. To redirect and realign the downward trajectory of American politics, we must focus on political parties. We need them to do better. And in order for them to do better, we need more than two of them.

It may seem obvious that system-level problems cannot be solved by incremental changes. Yet, for years, existential threats to American democracy have been met with small, candidate-related tweaks that have largely failed to alter the trajectory. Rather than continue to focus on bad actors or extremist individuals, then, we must understand the way in which the entire system empowers and elevates the worst instincts in political leaders, who in turn stoke the most irrational fears among citizens. We must understand how this extremism follows from the toxic combination of an anxious uncertainty and a confrontational us-against-them binary fight for total power.

The good news is that the roiling crisis has driven more attention and support toward political reform. But that attention has also brought expanding ideas and proposals of varying quality. Different reforms tackle the problem at different levels, but none are entirely new. Therefore, history offers important lessons about which types of reforms are most likely to be successful and sustainable, and which approaches are typically feeble and fast-fading.

Many proposals focus primarily on candidates and, in particular, elevating independent and moderate candidates in the immediate term. These “candidate-centric” reforms include open primaries, top-two primaries, ranked-choice voting, and blanket primaries that send the top four or five finishers regardless of party to a ranked-choice general election. This category of “candidate-centric” reforms views political parties as obstacles to good governance and see the task of reform as finding a clever way around the perceived destructiveness of parties and especially partisanship. Though these candidate-centric reforms can sometimes work in targeted circumstances, this paper argues that such productive circumstances are limited. More broadly, this paper argues that in addition to having mixed and uncertain immediate-term effects, these candidate-centric reforms are unlikely to have sustainable long-term positive effects, because they do not address the core questions of the political party system.

Instead, this paper makes the case for pro-parties reforms both generally, and specifically for two powerful pro-parties reforms: fusion voting and proportional representation. Fusion voting allows for multiple parties to endorse the same candidate, encouraging new party formation. Proportional representation ends the single-member district, and makes it possible for multiple parties to win a proportional share of representation in larger, multi-member districts. The goal of these reforms—fusion in the short and medium terms, and proportional representation in the longer term—is to move us toward a thriving multiparty democracy in which healthy political parties perform the crucial functions essential to modern representative democracy, with less of the us-against-them, all-or-nothing, high-stakes uncertainty that sabotages self-governance.

Healthy parties aggregate long-term policy commitments among diverse groups. Healthy parties communicate the consequences of these policies to voters at scale. Healthy parties make elections meaningful and consequential by structuring choices. Healthy parties engage and mobilize voters. Healthy parties vet and support qualified candidates for public office. Healthy parties assemble governing majorities and broker compromises capable of solving public problems. These are all essential functions of modern democracy. No other organization can do all these things simultaneously or at scale.

Healthy parties perform all these roles with honesty and integrity. Healthy parties do not lie to voters. Healthy parties do not engage in corruption. Most importantly, healthy parties adhere to the basic foundations of democracy—mutual toleration (accepting the legitimacy of political opponents) and forbearance (holding back from abusing legal powers). Healthy parties police extremism and authoritarianism in their ranks. Healthy parties do not dehumanize their political opponents or tolerate violence, let alone endorse it. Healthy parties accept electoral defeat with grace, and electoral victory with humility.

Understandably, both U.S. parties are not living up to these standards. This is because a polarized two-party system creates many perverse incentives both between and within the two major parties. A two-party system also shuts out new entrants and thus limits innovative new models of party organization. Instead, reformers are left with the difficult and unsustainable tasks of retrofitting old, aging parties, or finding ways around parties altogether.

The case for pro-parties reform may seem counterintuitive, since it cuts against the American reform tradition, which is decidedly anti-party. It may indeed feel paradoxical to call for more parties as the solution to hyper-partisan division. But as this paper will make clear, the anti-party reform tradition has repeatedly failed in its goals of achieving a more representative and responsive government. Political parties have survived efforts to marginalize them, but only by becoming less transparent and less accountable.

This paper will describe the history of these anti-party reform efforts and why they have failed. It will cover the crucial democracy reform episodes of the 1830s, 1900s, and 1960s. Each of these reform periods involved devolving authority ever closer to “the people.” But each of these reform periods failed to understand that collective organization is the key to citizen power. Each of these reform periods assumed an idealized “democratic wish” of independent citizen participation, spontaneous candidate emergence, and large-scale deliberative governance at odds with the scale and scope of modern democracy.

The repeated lesson, however, is that only powerful interests have the organizational resources to navigate the proliferating participatory entry points. Yet, once again, many democracy reformers see political parties as failing. And once again, many reformers are attempting to find ways around political parties by focusing on candidate-centric reforms. History shows that these reforms are unlikely to succeed beyond temporary gains, and even these gains may not exist.

In calling for pro-parties reform, this paper argues that we must see our crisis at a system level. A system-level crisis cannot be fixed by incremental changes. We must address the root causes. Rather than taking buckets to a flood, we must fix the entire stormwater management system.

Pro-parties reform will not solve everything. More parties and better parties are not an end in themselves. They are the mechanism through which we can have a healthy, representative democracy with a fighting chance of solving more difficult and pressing problems, such as climate, the dominance of big money in our politics, AI’s impact on the economy, and whatever else the world throws at us in the decades to come.

Given that we are in an emergency, with too many seemingly willing to abandon the rule of law for short-term power, it is reasonable to try many things at once. But we cannot try everything. We must act prudently. For reforms to achieve long-term success, they need to be thoughtfully planned. Experience and a wealth of political science research show that reforms solely targeting candidates while sidestepping parties are neither sustainable nor effective. These types of reforms draw backlash and may not even work in the short term.

Pro-parties reform is both practical and tactical. Fusion is an immediate solution to extremism. It creates an opportunity for moderates to form a constructive party that won’t spoil elections or waste votes. Such a party, which cross-endorses major party candidates, can act as an off-ramp for those who are disgusted with the extremism in their own party but are not fully ready to vote for the other major party. Voting for a moderate party offers a way to signal this view and to form a new identity. The major parties would need to moderate to compete for those votes.

Longer term, more parties can mean a more fluid and responsive political system, capable of realigning, with space for new innovative parties. The proposal here is for modest multipartyism through proportional representation, aiming toward five or six parties—enough to provide diverse representation, but not so much as to make governing fractious and voting confusing. A sweet spot does exist.

Though the status quo feels locked in, historically, it is precisely the moments when the status quo feels locked in that major change is most likely. This is because rigidity and brittleness are the same.

Change always happens two ways: slowly, then all at once. This is especially true in the U.S. party system, because a two-party system offers few release valves. Instead, pressure builds and builds.

The signs are powerful that U.S. democracy is now entering a fourth significant period of reform. Though still early, increasing interest in structural change is real. During the initial phases of a reform period, it’s critical to be rigorous about the institutional legacy we wish to pass on. Yet, given the clear democracy emergency alongside this opportunity, it is sometimes hard to think straight. It is easy to rely on the near past. It is harder to learn from the more distant past. Perhaps the greatest challenge in moments of deep pessimism is imagining a different, better future.

Yet we must retain some optimism. We must see that the urgency of combating extremism is equally a chance to build a more representative, effective, and full democracy for the twenty-first century. There are no shortcuts. If we succeed, it will be only because we did the hard work to make more and better parties possible.