Two Parties Too Few?

In a Townhall article today Michael Medved argues against the idea of third parties in our two-party political system (article here).

The reader comments posted reveal how little people understand the two-party system and what trade-offs are involved compared to other possible party systems. First, there is the context. The USA is not Switzerland, France or Germany. National scale matters. The USA is also much more ethnically and culturally diverse than nations like Germany, France, Japan, India or China. The plurality of interests that make up American society means possible political differences are significantly greater and this has implications for how the political system arrives at single national policy outcomes. (Think about the red-blue divide we currently experience? Would a multi-colored rainbow divide be better?)

A second major assumption is what we wish a party system to do - what is the main objective. Public comments suggest that the primary objective is to validate individual voters preferences and reward their participation. But is this really the primary objective? Is not the primary objective to govern a free democratic society in a way that strengthens the nation to insure those constitutional principles under which we choose to live together? Our elections are not about making voters happy - it's about finding candidates that can represent and lead the entire nation, from sea to shining sea.

The third caveat is how the party system is a function of the electoral rules. We have a two-party system by design with an electoral system based on single-district, simple plurality, winner-take-all rules. This means the election strategy is to capture the middle where one can win a simple plurality of the votes. This election strategy forces candidates and parties towards the center where only two parties can be left or right of each other. A third party would have to frog leap over one of the two parties to capture the necessary votes to prevail. To make third parties viable over the long term would require changing the electoral rules.

Under these three conditions, a two-party system provides the best of all worlds or, if one chooses the glass half-empty attitude, the least of all evils among alternative electoral systems. A two-party system forces a highly diverse polity to converge on an acceptable policy. It forces the extremes to move toward compromise at the center. In contrast, a multi-party system allows interests to diverge into many small camps where compromise becomes impossible. Then the government must be stitched together from many small coalitions that have failed to compromise over policy. It's a recipe for chronic instability, as one can witness in countries with proportional representation and multi-party coalition governments.

So, what does this mean for third parties? The system is not static, and one of the two major parties can fail and be replaced by a third party. If Obama loses in November one might expect the Democratic party to split and dissolve, where the centrist Democrats would repudiate the left wing radicals and vice versa. If the Republicans lose one could expect the same split unless the party recalibrates its ideological identity. But absent an abject failure and collapse of one of the two parties, there is no real need or benefit from a third-party movement in American politics. There are many other ways to fiddle with electoral processes to introduce more choice, like instant run-offs or weighted preferences, but the point is still to converge on one candidate with a national mandate. The party system doesn't exist for the happiness and satisfaction of we voters. Time we got over it.