Our two-party political system isn’t working. The fix? More parties.

Lee Drutman argued for more and better parties in the Washington Post.

The way to build the health of our political parties and thus of our democracy is by ensuring meaningful competition. We might have a two-party system, but in most parts of the country, we really have only a one-party system. Even where the two parties compete, they each have an effective monopoly on opposition. Only vibrant multiparty democracy can create enough competition. We need reforms that expand the possibilities for more and better parties to form.

As reform proposals begin to proliferate in response to the widespread sense of democratic decline, they tend to fall into two types: candidate-centric and party-centric.

Candidate-centric reforms, focused on elevating moderates and finding better candidates, include open primaries, ranked-choice voting and a combination of the two. This approach is aimed at making politics less partisan and implicitly treats political parties as obstacles to good governance.

Though candidate-centric reforms can sometimes work in targeted circumstances, they are unlikely to have sustainable long-term effects because they fail to address the core questions of the political party system. They rely on candidates self-nominating and often self-funding. It’s a system well-suited to allow more Kennedys — i.e., individuals with name recognition and money — to run for office.

Party-centric reforms, by contrast, focus on creating space for new parties to organize. New parties can empower voters to make new choices and elevate new types of candidates. The most promising and doable pro-party reforms are fusion voting and proportional representation. Fusion voting allows 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.