I’ve heard it said 1000 times that the US is 2 party political system, but I just don’t understand what mechanisms push it to be that way? Why are 3rd parties so weak or unlikely?
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Because of the first-past-the-post election mechanism. All votes that don’t win a district are lost. In each district the Party with the most votes gets 1 person in the electoral college or parliament, no matter how close it was, and no matter who made second place.
If you vote a third party then you harm yourself and the party you like the least is benefiting from it.
Imagine you prefer Democrats over Relublicans. Even more you’d like the Green party to win, so you decide to elect green. But it doesn’t matter who gets hiow many votes, only the most votes ot your district matter, so your decision made the Democrats lose one vote and the Relublicans win. Even if Green plus Democrats together are 66% of the votes, split evenly, the Repuplicans can win with 34%
In a proportional system your vote would still get counted. Other Green party voters in other districts get pooled together. If neither Democrats nor Republicans get 50% of votes, then they are forced to form a coalition government, and your green party is much more likely to ally with the Democrats, so you gain something by voting them in any case.
Another option is ranked choice, where you can say “I vote green, but if green isn’t in the top 2 I vote Democrats” wich is basically a preemptive tiebreaker election if noone gets the absolute majority.
This is by the way known as [Duverger’s Law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law)
The winner takes all system basically means you’re often stuck voting against the option you don’t want.
Imagine a vote on what to have for dinner. The margherita pizza party gets 60% of the vote form everyone who wants pizza. The cheeseburger party gets 40% from those who want burgers. Margherita pizza wins Around half of the margherita pizza party actually prefer pepperoni pizza and only Vote that way because they prefer it over hamburgers. they decide to form their own party.
Next election: The margherita pizza party gets 30% The pepperoni pizza party gets 30% The cheeseburger party gets 40% Now the cheeseburger party wins despite the majority of people wanting some kind of pizza.
A combination of the electoral setup and of incumbent protectionism. I’ll address both.
* The US uses “first past the post” elections, so that in each district, a legislator has to defeat the others to be elected. Chances of election are mathematically highest when you coalesce into two parties, each trying to get over 50%. If you have three or more parties, the setup is unstable, as joining another faction that is kinda similar to you puts you closer to power than trying to win a race against 2, 3, 4, 5 other parties. (If you had 3 parties, each pulling one-third of the vote, a person could could move over to another party and ensure victory; since political views are a spectrum, it wouldn’t be giving up that much ideologically.) As a result, people have coalesced into coalitions, each of which captures around half the people. (Swing voters are pretty rare, percentagewise.)
* The two existing parties have, over the decades, made it so that it’s much easier to win if you’re one of the two incumbents. Elected officials get money to “communicate with constituents” but that means free campaigning; same for presidential travel. Parties that get more than 5% of the vote are automatically eligible to be on the next ballot in most states, while third parties have to spend massive money gathering signatures in every election cycle. Etc etc. Removing these obstacles would probably result in more third parties at the local level; hard to imagine it on the national level, given point #1.
In almost all US elections, the person who gets the most votes (not a majority, just the most) wins the election. And, in almost all elections, a voter gets only one vote that is cast for a single candidate.
In a system like that, third parties act as spoilers–if 60% of people hate party X, split their votes between parties A and B, then Party X will win (30% v. 30% v. 40%).
As a result, elections become less about the person you most want to win, and more about voting in a way that causes the person you dislike the most to lose. That means consolidating votes behind one big group that you find less objectionable, and thus a two party system.
[This video](https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo?si=uffdu_PCZCKDuHCL) is a great recap of the failings of how first past the post (citizens can vote for one candidate only and the most votes wins) is bad for representation and diversity.
Leading up to the election, we see the 2 major candidates as Amy or Charlie. Most people really want Bobby. But the more votes Bobby gets, the fewer votes Charlie gets. Everyone is afraid that Amy will get elected if they don’t vote for Charlie, so Charlie ends up winning.
How do we fix this? Ranked choice vote. If everyone is allowed to say who their first, second, third choice, etc are, then they don’t have to worry about taking a vote away from their second choice. In this system, if the person you voted for doesn’t win, then your vote gets transferred to your second choice.
There are many benefits to this system: if a candidate buys a primary election, and you wanted the other major candidate for that party, you can still vote them first choice. If a third party candidate still loses, you can still see how many first choice votes they got. If it was close to nothing, they know they didn’t stand a chance. If it was high, they could get more funding and try again next time. If there are 5 equal positions open, you can vote for your 5 (or more) favorites, and not each position individually.
Good propaganda. Most Americans are convinced that if they don’t vote for a winning candidate, somehow their vote is lost. Which is ridiculous and wrong. All votes influence policy, often the ones going to some small single issue party most of all. Politicians don’t make decisions based on votes they already have in the bag, votes they could get or could lose are what drive the decisions.
“First past the post” systems where only the candidate/party with the majority of votes gets anything from a particular election outcome rewards parties for conglomerating and pooling their resources. If you’ve got two progressive parties and one right-wing party, it doesn’t matter if 60% of the country votes progressive as they’ll split those votes between the two and the 40% voting right wing will be greater than the 30% either progressive party gets, while a 60% vote wins hands-down. And once you HAVE two very large coalition parties, it becomes very hard to operate outside of those parties, as almost all of the money in the political system goes through those parties.
America, as a Representative Republic, exacerbates this effect even further. Take a look at the presidential election, which uses an electoral college system. This means that each state sends electors only for the candidate with the most votes in their state, and then the electors do another round of voting, and only a candidate who receives a plurality (greater than half) of all electoral votes can become president. If no candidate gets that plurality, then it is decided in the House of Representatives through a similar system; each state votes among its congressmen, and then casts one vote per state for the chosen candidate, with the majority winning.
So think of it like this: There are five classrooms, and you’re tasked to vote on a school sport that everyone will have to participate in for the next year. You know Mr. A’s class and Ms. B’s class are going to vote for Dodgeball, because they always do. The rest of you hate Dodgeball and would rather play anything else. Mr. C’s class wants to play Basketball, Ms. D’s class wants to play Hockey, and Ms. E’s class wants to play Lacrosse, but they all would prefer playing Soccer. So all of the non-Dodgeball-preferring students in all three classes come together and form the Soccer coalition, where they all agree to vote for Soccer, so that Soccer wins each of those three classrooms, and then those three classrooms carry the classroom-level vote for the sport 3:2. If the Lacrosse students strike out on their own, they may win E’s class, but are unlikely to win C’s or D’s, and Lacrosse-preferring students in those classes may split the vote away from Soccer and result in Dodgeball winning one of those classrooms and thus the entire thing.
Its always telling to me that when you look around the world, nowhere else fully emulates the American system. Even among places where we have ‘exported Democracy’ – its never the first past the post system. Its usually a proportional parliamentary system.
The US is the the alpha software of Democracy. It works, but has lots of bugs and weird workarounds – the two party hegemony being among them. Problem is its installed on a system that runs some really important hardware systems so major upgrades are very difficult and there isn’t any downtimes. American democracy is the old mainframe system behind the banking system or the airlines, etc, so its just easier and safer to run this system vs the unknowns of a major upgrade – or it has been safer. Is possible newer flaws or newer ways to exploit the known flaws are getting to a point where more drastic changes are needed.
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