The Difficulties with Two-Party Politics

The United States is the world’s third-largest country. Sprawling across a landmass of nearly 4 million square miles, our nearly 350 million inhabitants represent dozens of distinct races, ethnicities, religions, languages, and national origins. Outside of the African continent, where countries typically rank highly across diversity indexes, the United States is one of the most culturally heterogeneous nations on Earth.¹ Accordingly, our political system must accommodate a lot of diversity. Although the founders did not exactly foresee what the American republic would become, they did welcome a large and diverse country to diffuse power so that no single group would become too powerful and abuse the rights of others.

But despite our remarkable diversity and the founder’s intentions, just two parties capture the wide variety of ideologies, regional concerns, policy impulses, and other groupings in American politics. This two-party system has been, more or less, the norm throughout American history. Democrats and Republicans have been the two major parties since the Civil War, although exactly which groups fall into each party has changed a good bit since the nineteenth century.² Democrats have gone from being the party of the agrarian, white supremacist South to an almost entirely urban party with strong support across racial groups. Similarly, Republicans have shifted from their roots in the abolition movement to become a largely white and Southern party that balances the interests of business and religious conservatives.

“Just two parties capture the wide variety of ideologies, regional concerns, policy impulses, and other groupings in American politics.”

The key to the stability of the two-party system prior to the 1990s was its fluidity and adaptability. Politics was rooted at the state and local level, so it was possible to have heterogeneous national parties that governed on a bipartisan basis. Conservative Democrats from the party’s southern wing regularly worked with conservative Republicans on certain issues at the expense of progressive Democrats and liberal Republicans.

However, since the mid-1990s, politics has become increasingly nationalized. The differences between Democrats and Republicans have widened, and the parties have become more internally homogenous. There are very few conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans remaining. Moreover, national politics have become oriented around identity, specifically the question of who we are as a country. In line with their respective political bases, Democrats see America as a fundamentally multicultural and cosmopolitan society, while Republicans see it as rooted in traditional values with a singular national character. Both of these views have truth in them, but complexity has been flattened into a more simplistic “us vs. them” identity politics among politically engaged citizens. Meanwhile, anti-system attitudes are rising among the politically disaffected and disengaged, who do not believe anyone represents them in the two-party system.³

“Anti-system attitudes are rising among the politically disaffected and disengaged, who do not believe anyone represents them in the two-party system.”

Plenty has been written about how the country has polarized in a two-party system.⁴ Our focus here is on how this polarization has affected Congress—the national political institution where the founders imagined various factions and groups would come together to decide important questions through compromise. We argue that polarization in the two-party system has led to increasing centralization in the U.S. House, imperiling representation without delivering the promised partisan victories. Moreover, the breakdowns seen in the 118th Congress are a consequence of the underlying pluralism in American politics bucking up against the rigidity of the two-party system.

Alongside the politically engaged public, members of Congress have also become divided into two cohesive partisan teams.⁵ Polarization and partisan unity have risen to historic levels.⁶ There are few remaining moderate members who regularly reach across the aisle or vote with the other party. Instead, Capitol Hill is increasingly populated by partisan warriors for whom political combat is business as usual.⁷ Although there are myriad explanations for the now unprecedented levels of polarization and partisanship, electoral competition largely explains why the parties act as viciously as they do.⁸ Control of the government is on a knife’s edge, regularly alternating between Democrat and Republican leadership. This leads the parties to seek an electoral advantage over the other through high-stakes confrontation.⁹ Both sides tend to portray the next election in existential terms, with their opponent’s victory likely to lead the country into doom and destruction. This is not the stuff that healthy democracies are made from.

To coordinate their partisan teams and achieve their goals in this polarized environment, members of Congress have increasingly turned to centralized leadership. Political scientists argue that greater levels of unity within the parties and greater levels of disagreement between them, alongside stiffer electoral competition, make legislators more likely to utilize centralized leadership structures.¹⁰ When co-partisans are more aligned with each other and distinct from the other party, they are more likely to empower leaders to pursue the party’s collective goals—namely, more ideological policies and electoral victories. In turn, party leaders can use their institutional advantages to create even more unity and cohesion among their members than would have otherwise existed.¹¹

Congress worked differently when there was less ideological overlap between the parties. Prior to the 1990s, there were conservative southerners in the Democratic Party and liberal northeasterners in the Republican Party. Moreover, there was very little electoral competition for control of Congress, as Democrats held the House for all but two years between 1933 and 1995. With Democrats a permanent majority, members saw little need to rally behind common partisan electoral goals.¹² They usually just focused on winning their own seats, which, for conservative Democrats in particular, involved differentiating themselves from the national party rather than boosting it. Party leaders functioned more as “brokers” who facilitated bargaining between various intraparty factions but did not wield much power themselves.¹³

As the House became more polarized and partisan, members empowered party leaders to further their collective goals of securing more policy and electoral wins. With the blessing of their caucuses, leaders like Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi stacked important committee posts with party loyalists, directed the legislative process to ensure their preferred legislation made it to the floor, dominated information flows through their larger and more experienced staffs, centralized messaging and electioneering efforts, and participated in summits with Senate leaders and the president to work out compromises on major bills.¹⁴

With leaders dominating everything from procedure to the information flows on Capitol Hill, rank-and-file members are often cut out of the legislative process.¹⁵ While leaders are often working in the interest of their caucuses, they do not often seek their input. In many ways, this undercuts the very idea of a Congress, where representatives of a diverse nation should come together to bring their unique perspectives to bear on the common problems the country faces. Instead, we have a Congress where members relinquish much of their authority to leaders who are more focused on party goals than the representation of diverse perspectives.

“We have a Congress where members relinquish much of their authority to leaders who are more focused on party goals than the representation of diverse perspectives.”

While centralized leadership promises more effective legislating, the results have been largely underwhelming. The parties are no more likely to implement their stated agendas than they were prior to the 1990s.¹⁶ Partisan lawmaking has barely budged over the last four decades, as most enactments involve widespread bipartisan support. Laws that pass without any minority party support (e.g., the Affordable Care Act, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act) are exceptions to the rule.¹⁷

In short, greater polarization and centralization have not brought us any closer to the idealized model of two-party politics that political scientists long pined for. In the responsible party government model of legislative politics, a cohesive majority makes law while an equally cohesive minority offers a contrast through opposition.¹⁸ The responsible party government model never clearly fit with American policymaking, though. Unlike the U.K. system on which it was modeled (essentially a unicameral parliament with two cohesive parties), the United States’ bicameral separation-of-powers system and supermajority veto points, alongside the intraparty disagreements and factions that are inevitable in a large and diverse nation, have largely prevented majority parties from implementing their policy agendas without significant compromise and accommodation.¹⁹

But despite it being patently unrealistic, leaders have still promised to lead their parties to glorious victories over the opposition. The results have been predictable. Bipartisanship is still, by far, the most common way to enact policy, even in an era of historic polarization, and leaders are most often using their advantages in the lawmaking process to secure bipartisan legislation. But the dissonance between the dream of partisan domination and the reality of bipartisan compromise has led to considerable disappointment among rank-and-file members. As a result, party leaders, particularly Republicans, must often drag their members to the finish line, kicking and screaming, to enact bipartisan bills.

“Despite it being patently unrealistic, leaders have still promised to lead their parties to glorious victories over the opposition.”

Rank-and-file members are particularly upset because so much of their party’s messaging is focused on demonizing the other party—their only enemy in a binary system. Collaborating with the people you claim are unfit to run the country is a surefire way to demobilize your base and undercut arguments for why voters should choose you in the next general election or primary.²⁰ These contradictions create problems for leaders who win their positions promising to achieve partisan goals. When members are disappointed by the way party leaders use their power, the incentive to centralize and defer to those leaders is weakened, with sometimes explosive results. For an example of this explosiveness, we turn to the 118th Congress, where Republican disappointment with their leaders led to a breakdown in longstanding norms.

Traditionally, the party that wins the House majority has banded together as a cartel to control important aspects of the institution. Since the Civil War era, the majority party alone has elected the Speaker of the House and settled other organizational matters, such as committee leadership and the rules package. There was an expectation that all party members should vote for the speaker candidate on the House floor even if the leadership race was contentious within the caucus.²¹ The majority party also controlled the House agenda by voting for special rules that govern debate and amendment and by defeating the minority’s attempt to gain control of the floor via the motion to recommit and discharge petitions.²² The majority party typically hangs together on procedural matters even when it is internally divided on the underlying policy or substance.²³

During the 118th Congress, a number of House Republican rebels rejected this norm by regularly revolting against their leaders on organizational and procedural votes, severely undercutting Republican control of the chamber. The rebels, who came from various corners of the caucus but mostly included members and close allies of the House Freedom Caucus, were furious at Republican leaders (current and past) for cutting bipartisan deals to enact budgetary, fiscal, and other must-pass policies. This history of disappointment seemed likely to repeat in the 118th Congress because Democrats held the presidency and the Senate while the House Republican majority was extremely narrow. However, this narrow control simultaneously gave the rebels enormous leverage over party leaders in terms of organizational and procedural votes. They resolved to vote against most Republicans and, thus, with Democrats on these typically party-line matters unless leaders gave the rebels disproportionate power in the conference and aggressively pushed for more conservative policies.

The rebellion began with an extended speakership battle at the beginning of the Congress. To secure 218 votes, Speaker-designee Kevin McCarthy made various concessions to the rebels, including representation on the Rules Committee (which has been stacked with leadership allies in recent decades) and increased sway in intraparty negotiations. After McCarthy cut bipartisan deals to raise the debt ceiling and to pass a continuing resolution funding the government, some of the rebels joined with Democrats—their sworn enemies on policy matters—to oust him through a motion to vacate. They also voted down several House rules and forced the speaker to rely on Democratic votes at other points. Democrats bailed Republican leaders out in some cases, but their own incentives to damage Republicans ahead of the 2024 elections led them to join with the rebels in others.

In short, intraparty factionalism effectively undermined House Republicans’ procedural and organizational majority.²⁴ While intraparty bargaining and defections on leadership votes have become more common in recent decades, the House majority party has generally been willing to bury internal policy disagreements to wield power. The 118th Congress broke that trend. If open rebellion becomes more regularized, then the House is sure to become a more chaotic and ineffective legislative body.

The current system is particularly vulnerable to factionalism because party leaders usually do not have a credible outside option if members of their own party defect. The minority party rarely crosses over to help the majority party on organizational or procedural matters.²⁵ Their electoral incentives to embarrass and undermine the majority are simply too strong. There was one example of a bipartisan bailout in the 118th Congress, when Democrats came to the rescue of McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson, when rebels also tried to oust him. However, they only helped out after Johnson advanced foreign aid legislation prioritized by President Biden.

“The 118th Congress demonstrates how the considerable diversity and heterogeneity in American politics are in tension with centralized leadership in a two-party system.”

Will the two-party system lead to regular institutional breakdowns like these? Maybe. The conditions were particularly ripe for rebellion in the 118th Congress. For a variety of reasons, Republicans are more likely to rebel against their leaders than Democrats, and, moreover, their majority in the House was historically narrow.²⁶ Furthermore, divided government essentially requires bipartisan compromises that tend to disappoint rank-and-file members. Without these conditions, intraparty factions might not be able (or want) to put their leaders under extreme pressure in future Congresses.

But, in any case, the 118th Congress demonstrates how the considerable diversity and heterogeneity in American politics are in tension with centralized leadership in a two-party system. The two parties have always been “long coalitions” of diverse policy interests, congealed by a constructed ideology that binds a coalition around agreements and sublimates divisive disagreements.²⁷ Moreover, there have always been elements of those coalitions that have been dissatisfied with their place in it. The changing variable here is the centralization of legislative leadership after decades of rising polarization, partisanship, and electoral competition. Empowered party leaders have sidestepped disagreement in pursuit of the one goal everyone agrees on—defeating the other party. However, if a highly centralized House cannot accommodate a resurgence in intraparty factionalism, this arrangement is in trouble.

“Our electoral system has pushed us into two camps, but American politics is much more complicated than this superficial binary.”

This problem is unlikely to be solved by reforms that further empower the two parties to discipline their members. The larger issue is that the centralization created by polarization and electoral competition does not fit with a broader governing system that requires power-sharing and compromise. Our electoral system has pushed us into two camps, but American politics is much more complicated than this superficial binary. If members decide that it no longer suits their interests to bury their disagreements in service of the two-party system and defer to strong leaders, they could alter institutions to achieve their goals through other means. In the next section, we explore one way to do this.