These responses highlight the severity of the democratic challenges we face and the necessity of debate in assessing paths forward. Three key themes emerge.
First, most respondents agree that political organizations, particularly political parties, are essential vehicles for democratic engagement and representation. Modern democracy is party democracy. And because fusion is a party-centric reform, it has unique power.
Second, several question whether fusion voting on its own would make enough of a difference given the scale of the problems, and whether other approaches might be more powerful. No doubt, many changes would make for a healthier democracy and improve our political culture. But because parties are the core institutions of modern representative democracy, everything else runs through the party system.
Third, a few highlight obstacles to reviving fusion in states where it has been outlawed. After all, fusion challenges the dominance of the two major parties; their leaders have objected—and will object—to its expansion. Is there really a feasible way around these obstacles? I believe there is.
Start with the role of political organization and political parties.
Factors beyond parties have certainly contributed to our current predicament. Ian Shapiro argues that “the disappearance of inclusive economic growth” has wreaked political havoc. Deepak Bhargava and Arianna Jiménez likewise point to “the rise of grotesque economic inequality,” while Joel Rogers blames neoliberalism and a collapse of the public sector. But Rogers also rightly notes that without vibrant, multiparty competition for public power, alternative visions for a more inclusive economic system are more easily pushed to the margins. Indeed, scholars have found consistent evidence that democracies with institutionalized multiparty systems have lower levels of economic inequality and higher levels of economic redistribution—consistent with Rogers’s argument.
It is true that we see turmoil across different party systems. But among rich democracies, the United States stands out in its high inequality, low public investment, and most significantly, the rise of a major political party that has turned hostile to the basic foundations of liberal democracy. Despite America’s uniquely resilient post-pandemic economy, our politics are anything but. Our major parties limp forward by default. Despite their failures, they persist because they have a monopoly on opposition to each other.
Shapiro’s preferred remedy is to increase electoral competition through independent redistricting commissions—a widely proposed solution. But geographic partisan sorting—the fact that Democrats dominate in cities and dense suburbs, while Republicans dominate in sparse suburbs, exurbs, and small towns—poses an extreme problem for this approach. It’s hard to draw evenly competitive districts without making districts that stretch beyond meaningful coherence. Even in states that have used such commissions, the vast majority of districts—more than 80 percent—are still safe for one party.
Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld also want stronger parties. I agree wholeheartedly with their assessment that today’s “hollow parties” also make for a very hollow version of democracy. But their preferred approach, laid out even more fully in their new book by that name, is a bullhorn cry to party leaders and donors: reinvest in the lost values of grounded and rooted political parties, with real presences in real places.
But parties invest in local organizing only if doing so pays off in wins. In their book, Schlozman and Rosenfeld sing the praises of the Nevada Democratic Party and the impressive organized machine that Harry Reid built around it, in which Las Vegas unions have real on-the-ground power. But what happens in Nevada might well stay there. Most states, like most congressional districts, are so safe for one party that no amount of on-the-ground organizing could make a difference, at least in the foreseeable future.
If we change the electoral rules, however, we change how votes matter, even in the short term. Reforms like fusion and proportional representation can encourage party organizing for a simple reason: the payoff changes when more voters matter. Like Bhargava and Jiménez, I think our democracy would benefit from more civic organizing. But mobilizing and motivating citizens to join and participate in civil society groups is harder when they don’t see themselves represented in the political system. It’s also hard when too many people don’t feel that participation matters, often because existing incumbents in safe districts can safely ignore them.
Like Schlozman and Rosenfeld, I agree we should do more than just revive fusion voting. Yes, “fusion does nothing about presidentialism, never mind the Senate and the Supreme Court”—the sort of built-in structural elements that Bhargava and Jiménez also identify. But absent an unlikely—and at this moment at least, dangerous—constitutional convention, I am not sure what would address these problems. And contrary to Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s outdated assertion that “multipartyism and presidentialism are a bad mix,” two decades of scholarship has shown that it works just fine. The canonical paper on this finding was published three decades ago by Scott Mainwaring. Last year, Mainwaring and I wrote an updated paper, arguing that whatever risks of multiparty presidentialism might exist—and they are fewer than this outdated conventional wisdom claims—pale in comparison to the risks of polarized two-party presidentialism.
Danielle Allen argues that the “Alaska-style” electoral system is our best bet: a two-round, top-four system with ranked choice voting. For states like Alaska—with a strong independent political culture and a long history of bipartisan governing coalitions in the state legislature—this system may be a good fit. (We will see, though: Alaskans may vote to repeal it this year.) But open primaries double down on many of the pathologies of our current situation—above all, the fact that without partisan gatekeepers, money, name recognition, and attention-grabbing skills are the most important things in politics. In 2022 the Alaska system mostly helped incumbents win. That is no surprise: incumbents are usually the ones with the most fundraising power, name recognition, and attention-grabbing capabilities.
Ranked choice voting does give voters more precise opportunities to express their preferences, and I used to think it was a very good idea. But after seeing study after study showing fewer benefits than promised and multiple studies showing significant voter confusion (particularly among lower-income, predominantly Black and brown communities), I have cooled to the idea and see more limited uses for it. Like Rogers, I worry that open primaries and ranked choice voting put too much “focus on individuals, not the parties and rules that define our system. If our broken system is a room, these proposals amount to changing its drapes rather than its furniture.” I agree with Tabatha Abu El-Haj about the central importance of political parties: fusion is “a good idea because it is a party-centric reform with real potential to leverage meaningful democratic returns.”
Allen is also surprisingly dismissive of the Working Families Party’s presence in New York, noting the small share it claims of registered voters. Her numbers are right, but they miss the point: the party focuses on members and supporters, not registrants. (In 2020, almost 400,000 people voted for Joe Biden under the WFP label in New York.) Bob Master, a founder of New York’s WFP, offers a different, insider’s take. His capsule history shows how New York’s fusion laws allowed the party to organize a distinct constituency, develop candidates and staff, and mount issue campaigns. A minor party can play a constructive and productive role in politics, if the rules allow it. Indeed, as Bhargava and Jiménez astutely argue, one of the strongest cases for fusion voting is how it can work synergistically with community and labor organizing. A place on the ballot is real power, and real power attracts organizers.
Maurice Mitchell, the current national director of the WFP, and Doran Schrantz importantly connect the power of more organized parties to increased democratic participation and agency. The logic is simple but profound. Parties are the natural organizing forces in politics; they are our most central “vehicles” for collective action. But when there are only two such vehicles, a lot of people feel left out—and many people disconnect from voting altogether. Fusion creates more lanes, so more vehicles can get on the political road (without the current problems that minor parties now have as potential spoilers). Under an Alaska-style system, candidates may come and go, building a list and then taking it with them. But under fusion, parties make real investments in long-term representation, as only organized political parties can and the WFP unequivocally has done.
The most ambitious critique, from Joshua Lerner, is that an elections-centered view of democracy falls far short of “genuine democracy.” In our era of frustration with traditional parties and political intermediaries, I understand the appeal of other democratic forms like sortition, citizens’ assemblies, and participatory budgeting. But large-scale modern democracy—with its scale, scope, complexities, and demands—requires intermediation and structure, lest it devolve into chaos. Political parties have made modern representative democracy possible by structuring and organizing alternatives in a way that does not require people to have leisure-class status to participate. Some more participatory reforms may work well at a hyperlocal level, but at a national level they ignore the hard realities of power, agenda-setting, and legitimacy.
Of course, any reform that challenges existing power structures faces significant obstacles. As several respondents note, leaders of the established parties are not likely to warm to reforms that threaten their dominance. But among potential reforms, fusion voting has one unique advantage: it offers a state-by-state litigation pathway, because many states have robust constitutions with expansive protections for freedom of association. As Abu El-Haj argues, “the prospects for reviving fusion politics are far more promising than many of the alternatives currently under consideration.”
Finally, there is the question of what our ultimate goal should be. A distinct advantage of fusion voting over other reforms is that it builds toward multiparty proportional representation. As Grant Tudor and Cerin Lindgrensavage note, along with Rogers, proportional representation is the most powerful, transformative way to build a more representative, less zero-sum democracy.
The transformative nature of such reform is the appeal as well as the challenge. Fusion voting is a powerful step because it creates space for actual new parties to organize and influence elections. It thus directs reform energy towards more and better parties, as opposed to more and better candidates. New parties can further build the infrastructure and demand for full multiparty proportional representation.
There are obviously many other challenges to American democracy (and all democracies) right now, including economic inequality, the devastating impacts of climate change, rapid technological change, and more. These are hard times, with hard problems, and it is possible that modern representative party democracy simply cannot meet them. But I strongly believe it can, as long as we set the system up for success. That means enabling a party system that can represent the diversity and pluralism of the country and forge fluid coalitions so we don’t get stuck fighting the same old zero-sum battles. We need to escape the two-party doom loop. And fusion is the first, and most powerful, step in that direction.
