Introduction (Mark Schmitt)

Democracy as we practice it in the United States looks quite different from the roughly 100 other democracies in the world. The most notable trait unique to the U.S. is that, while political parties emerge in all democracies, ours has had just two meaningful parties—the same two—for more than 170 years. There is no other democracy in which not one sustainable, influential new party has emerged at the national or even regional level in the last 100 years.

Because democratic self-government is a collaborative venture, political parties are essential institutions, as Didi Kuo demonstrates in her essay in this collection. Parties enable people to work together toward shared or overlapping policy goals. Parties help voters clarify policy choices and broader ideological agendas, appreciate what’s possible, and identify candidates and ideas compatible with their views. Political parties, at their best, also help people develop those views by offering them a coherent agenda and bringing them into solidarity with others, either within their geographic communities or across their state or the country. Without parties that offer a consistent agenda, voters—or those who choose not to vote—are left entirely on their own to figure out the issues, their own preferences, and the candidates. That’s a difficult task for anyone in a complex world.

At times in the twentieth century, parties have even served as core institutions of civil society, forging social and community bonds and acting as direct intermediaries between people and government. At other moments, parties have challenged the political consensus of the time, or introduced new ideas or moral claims to the agenda. And contrary to the conventional wisdom in America that partisanship is the opposite of compromise, parties actually facilitate compromise because they create formal structures in which leaders can effectively negotiate on behalf of their constituents—whether legislators (as in the case of bargaining among congressional leaders) or voters—and form new coalitions.

But parties cannot perform these functions effectively in a stagnant framework in which there are only two, representing broad but starkly opposed ideological visions and aligned with distinct racial and regional constituencies.¹ That’s particularly true in an electoral and legislative structure governed by winner-take-all elections. Today’s Democratic and Republican blocs are “hollow parties,” as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue in a book of that name; they are at once “overbearing and ineffectual.”² They are too ideologically variegated to present a clear national program and too professionalized to reach voters directly where they live, instead becoming largely vehicles to raise and allocate money.

Partisan alliances are tight and unyielding: The vast majority of voters now support one party or the other exclusively, in national as well as local elections that increasingly turn on national issues. All but a few congressional districts cast their votes for presidential, senatorial, congressional, and state-level candidates of the same party. But for all the apparent loyalty they engender from voters, these conglomerate parties no longer serve as meaningful civic institutions or embodiments of a coherent ideological platform. Both major parties are clearer about what they’re against—the culture and ideas of the other party and its adherents—than about what they’re for. Thus political scientists find that “negative partisanship,” even more than affirmative party allegiances, drives political behavior and makes conflicts difficult to reconcile.

“These conglomerate parties no longer serve as meaningful civic institutions or embodiments of a coherent ideological platform.”

One of the major parties, the Republican bloc, is now composed of so many factions that in the House of Representatives they refer to “five families” of legislators that in 2023 descended into a month-long struggle to elect a Speaker of the House. While the party once took pride in being guided by an “elevator pitch” policy agenda of smaller government, economic libertarianism, and social conservatism, its shared consensus seems, at the time of writing, to consist of loyalty to the impulses and grudges of a single political figure. Another elite faction that nominally remains within the party, often referred to as “Never-Trump Republicans,” is similarly defined by their feelings about that same individual. Neither of these views forms a sound basis for a political party.

The Democratic coalition in Congress and the electorate is also deeply factionalized, although even in opposition during the first two years of the Trump administration, and more recently while holding full or partial control of government since 2021, they have worked far more successfully than Republicans to find shared consensus on legislative priorities. Still, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comment, “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are,” succinctly describes the dilemma faced by those who would like their viewpoint to be represented by something more concrete than a vaguely defined caucus.³

While Ocasio-Cortez’s “squad” and comparable factions, such as the House GOP Freedom Caucus, have some voice in Congress, they have no tangible presence among voters, who know them on the ballot only as Democrats or Republicans—or in some cases as individuals, in the case of candidates who have some celebrity, such as from appearances on Fox News or a career before politics. If these factions were parties, allying and forming coalitions with other parties on some issues but not all, they would be represented not only in the legislative body but matched by a coherent constituency in the electorate. As parties, they would present visible policy agendas and could be held accountable by voters with the same agendas. Other parties might emerge that seek to put new issues or perspectives on the agenda, such as a more ambitious approach to climate change or drug legalization. These would be parties that stand for something.

The political coalitions that would emerge in such a multiparty democracy would likely be shifting and overlapping. A socially conservative party that also favored strong government supports for families, such as an expanded child tax credit, might find common ground with Democrats on that point and conservative Republicans on others. Single-issue parties might emerge to find allies in both the major parties, and in turn, as smaller parties emerged, they would form coalitions with one another as well as the two incumbent parties. As Will Horne shows in his paper here, drawing on international comparisons, such fluid and overlapping coalitional models of governance tend to have a positive effect on confidence in government and trust in the parties.

A political environment composed of two stagnant parties, professionalized and overbroad, or “ineffectual and overbearing,” is one in which we should expect new parties to emerge and find their footing, just as we would in a market dominated by two older corporations with outdated business models. Yet this has not happened. Two parties with ballot access in many or most states, the Libertarian and Green parties, seem content to play marginal roles and participate primarily as potential spoilers at the presidential level. Other efforts, such as the possible presidential candidacy sponsored by the organization No Labels, specifically disclaim any intent to form a lasting political party or to operate at any level other than the presidential.

Because our parties are too broad, professionalized, and focused on fundraising, they lead voters not only to dislike the party they’re less aligned with—the negative partisanship that has driven recent elections—but also to dislike political parties in general, inducing voters to insist, “I vote for the person, not the party.” (In practice, those voters usually vote for candidates of one party.⁴) Americans’ hostility to parties also often leads to reform ideas that minimize the role of parties, such as the nonpartisan top-two primaries in California and Washington. This hostility, and preference for an idealized politics of pure individualism, is in itself a barrier to the formation of meaningful parties, as Julia Azari and Jennifer Wendling show in their essay.

“Our parties … lead voters not only to dislike the party they’re less aligned with … but also to dislike political parties in general.”

There is a basic feature of our electoral system that pushes it toward a two-party equilibrium: winner-take-all elections and the single-member districts that characterize Congress and our state legislatures. Both inherently lead to a stable two-party system, as the sociologist Maurice Duverger established in the 1950s with such strong evidence that it is known as Duverger’s Law. But while it is a good guide, it is not literally a law; it has not always held true, and there are other features of our system that reinforce the duopoly. Restrictive ballot access laws in many states make it difficult for a new party to qualify. States with public financing for campaigns often advantage established parties. Media-sponsored debates often exclude third-party candidates.

If having a larger number of parties capable of forming fluid coalitions and better representing voters is a worthy goal, there are two paths that might get us there. If we start by looking at other countries, we would find the solution in proportional representation and multi-member legislative districts. If seats were allocated by the share of the vote across a state or a large multi-member district, then the dominant party would win a majority or plurality of seats, and a second would win seats roughly in proportion to their share of the vote. And a third party that won just 10 percent of the vote might win some seats in Congress or a state legislature, putting them in a position to negotiate on behalf of their meaningful constituency. Coalitions would be built from the grassroots up, rather than just in Congress. Racial minorities would also be more likely to gain representation equivalent to their share of the population in a proportional system.

Proportional representation and multi-member districts would represent a dramatic change from current practice and would involve significant new legislation—which would have to be enacted by those elected under and vested in the existing system—as well as potential litigation. Proportional representation is a useful north star for building a robust multiparty, multiracial democracy, but it is not the only way to make it easier for new parties to get started and have some influence.

If instead of looking at other countries we look at our own past, we’ll see periods when new parties emerged, split, grew, and sometimes merged, despite the inherent limitations of winner-take-all elections. One such period was before the Civil War, when a number of parties, including the Whigs, the Free Soil Party, and the Liberty Party, competed before their effective consolidation into what became the anti-slavery Republican Party. Later in the nineteenth century, the People’s Party embodied the agrarian populist challenge to the oligarchy of the Gilded Age, and a decade later, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party created the most competitive four-way presidential election since 1860. (It is no coincidence that these periods coincided with moments of political crisis and democratic reinvention, not unlike our own time.)

What allowed those parties to form and evolve, despite the obstacles? One answer is fusion voting, a system that allows parties to endorse candidates who also appeared on the ballot lines of other parties. (In practice, until the 1890s, each party printed its own ballots, so a candidate might appear on more than one party’s ballot.) Fusion means that new parties do not have to be spoilers in every election; they might endorse a viable major party candidate for some offices and run their own candidates for others. In the 1890s in particular, the People’s Party fused with Democrats in some states and with progressive Republicans in others. Worry about the anti-establishment majorities that might be forged by these fusion tickets led to the major parties banning fusion in all but a few states. Lisa Disch’s article below shows how the history of fusion is relevant to the challenges of our moment.

While the Supreme Court in 1997 declined to overturn bans on fusion in all states, any state is free to reverse its ban and allow parties to cross-endorse on the ballot. In some cases, state courts might find that the fusion ban violates provisions of the state’s own constitution. In others, change might be achieved by voter initiative or referendum. In two states that still allow fusion, New York and Connecticut, the practice has allowed a variety of parties to emerge over decades, including the Liberal and Conservative parties in New York and the Working Families Party in both states. Oscar Pocasangre’s essay digs deep into the history of those two states to show the actual effects of fusion in elections since 1976, which has been considerable.

Together, these essays show the importance of strong political parties to a functioning democracy, the benefits of having more than two of them forming fluid coalitions, and a clear and viable path to opening the system up in a way that is likely to lead to a multiparty democracy in which all are represented.