Drutman can’t possibly be right that the two-party system is “the whole ballgame.” The hyperpartisanship and dysfunctional politics that concerns him is happening not just in countries with two-party systems like Britain and the United States, but also in countries with multiparty systems like France and Germany and in countries dominated by a single party like South Africa. Other factors are obviously at work.
The most important is the disappearance of inclusive economic growth. This trend started at the end of the 1970s but accelerated after communism collapsed. Capital became much more mobile than labor, leaving workers more insecure as jobs disappeared offshore and, increasingly, to technology. The benefits of economic growth accrued almost exclusively to the very rich, while incomes for the bottom 90 percent either declined or were maintained only by households shifting from one to two earners or borrowing home equity—eroding middle- and working-class wealth as well.
Most people now work harder to stay in the same place. Even in a rich country like the United States, they have scant margin for error. In 2022 some 37 percent of Americans reported that they could not find $400 for an emergency without borrowing—up by 5 percent since the previous year and by 13 percent since 2013. Comparably widespread insecurity prevails in most capitalist democracies. In short, people are afraid and angry, and their futures look bleak. Many expect their children to face even worse prospects. Why wouldn’t they abandon the parties that have been governing them?
Those parties have been failing them for decades. The pattern began with left-of-center parties, whose leaders found themselves back on their heels due to the apparent failure of Keynesian policies to deal with the stagflation of the 1970s and the discrediting of planned economies after 1989. They concluded that the route to power was to embrace the new supply-side orthodoxy of low taxes, low regulation, free trade, and privatization. In the United States, Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama governed as though their job was to be better neoliberals than the Republicans. Britain’s New Labour was a carbon copy. In France, Socialist Party President François Mitterrand performed a U-turn toward austerity. In Germany, a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Greens implemented the pro-business Hartz reforms. Even the African National Congress abandoned its traditional Marxism for the standard neoliberal diet on coming to power in 1994. Meanwhile, center-right parties responded by moving even further right, dragging the center-left with them. In 2007 Alan Greenspan remarked that it didn’t matter which party won because the same pro-market policies would prevail either way.
All the while, the mainstream parties were sawing off the branches they were sitting on. The bipartisan commitment to largesse for the rich and austerity for the rest alienated many voters from the established parties. It animated the antisystem outrage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But it also empowered innovative populists like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen, and it prompted mainstream politicians like Boris Johnson, Viktor Orbán, and Tayyip Erdoğan to morph into populists. This environment made it easy to mobilize voter support by blaming elites and immigrants for people’s woes.
In multiparty systems, the result was fragmentation. Even in Germany, often touted as the model multiparty system, the share of the two largest parties declined from 78 percent of the vote in 1994 to less than 50 percent in 2021, so that for the first time in the country’s history it took three ideologically incompatible parties to form a government. The dysfunctional result is so unpopular that in June this year they were hammered by the populist far right in elections for the European Parliament. Ditto for France, where Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party achieved less than half the vote of Le Pen’s National Rally—forcing him into early national elections in July, when Le Pen’s party gained 54 seats in the National Assembly over the 89 it already had. Macron now has the unenviable task of trying to hold together a right-of-center governing coalition that faces a larger alliance of left parties that agree on little besides their antipathy for the right.
Voter fear and rage plays out differently in two-party systems, mostly in demands for more internal party democracy. In the United States, it shows up in the toxic mix of safe seats and low-turnout primaries dominated by activists on the extremes. This phenomenon pulls the parties apart. Most Senate seats and more than 90 percent of House seats are no longer competitive in general elections. The problem is worse on the GOP side because it has more safe seats. As well as being unable to compromise on legislation with Democrats, Republicans can’t even agree among themselves; those in safe seats veto what those in competitive seats support and vice versa. This reduces them to passing symbolic bills that never become law, pursuing investigations and impeachments, and fighting over their own leaders. Meanwhile, in the UK, the phenomenon has often played out by empowering party members—the British equivalent of primary voters—to choose unrepresentative party leaders. Threats of “entryism,” the British equivalent of a primary challenge, have similar effects on candidate selection.
But isn’t pulling the parties apart a good thing? It would be if the parties were internally strong. The problem today is that they are so weak that leaders can’t line up support for legislative agendas that they know would appeal to most voters.
Most obviously needed are public investments in the real economy and policies that create private-sector incentives to do the same. Instead, we get populists who exploit voter anxiety by promoting xenophobia and bread-and-circuses economics: crumbs for people at the bottom while protecting those at the top. Trump’s recent proposal to abolish federal taxes on tips for service workers, made the same week that he promised additional corporate tax cuts, is a case in point.
Drutman’s proposal—fusion voting—pushes in the wrong direction. As with France’s two-round voting system or instant runoff systems, fusion voting would keep small parties alive in hopes of influencing the larger parties. Larger parties might move to the electoral middle as a result, but that is far from obvious. It could equally pull them toward ideological extremes, as Le Pen’s National Rally has done in France. Or small parties might extract clientelist benefits, as when farmers’ parties demand subsidies and tariffs on food imports in exchange for their support. What would the price be for endorsement on a Tea Party line?
It would be better to attack the problem through redistricting to reduce the number of safe seats in Congress. Doing so would weaken the power of unrepresentative primary voters, because catering to them means losing in the general election. It would also weaken the hold that someone like Trump can have over congressional Republicans by threatening to support primary challenges to those who thwart him.
The good news is that more than a third of the states have already relocated redistricting from state legislatures to independent or bipartisan commissions, reflecting growing appreciation of the problem. The goal should be to create districts that are competitive between the parties, restoring incentives for candidates to head for the electoral middle. This requires large diverse districts that include urban, rural, and suburban voters and look more or less like one another. The United States already has large districts, but they stand in dire need of this kind of diversification.
Given the tendency of primaries to empower extremes, another good reform would be to let congressional party leaders override primaries and pick candidates if turnout falls below some threshold, say 70 percent of the previous general election’s turnout. The same rule could apply at the presidential level, making the U.S. system more like it was before 1824, when a congressional caucus chose a party’s presidential candidate. It is vital that the authority to select candidates devolve to congressional party leaders, not the infamous party bosses in smoke-filled rooms who ruled before the heyday of primaries—and who provided the impetus for decentralizing reforms in the first place.
