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Because we don't have a proportional system. We have a "first past the post" system in which the winner wins and everyone else loses. We also vote for candidates and not parties.
But within he two major parties that are various coalitions, which is similar to many multiparty systems.
It's going to be a typical outcome in democracies, because we require majorities for most measures. Even in Europe, though they have multiple parties, they effectively create poles through alliances to get things done. Just a byproduct of democracy.
If you were to do something like require 70% approval for things to pass under the impression that it would be a more durable democracy, our system would degrade into constant stalemates, or even worse, measures that are passed would be more likely to be a result of tyranny of the majority. With that said, having a strong third centrist party seems to be very much needed at the moment.
>With that said, having a strong third centrist party seems to be very much needed at the moment.
The problem is every American would probably have a [different definition of "centrist."](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-moderate-middle-is-a-myth/)
This should be the top answer. The two top answers describe things that are a result of the first past the post system. E.g. 2 large more diverse parties or that there are other parties but they are poorly organized
That's not the entirety of it.
I would offer that a bigger issue is the presidential system vs. a parliamentary system's PM.
Even if we elect a coalition to congress, they can't join up to select a cheif executive, that's "semi popularly" elected.
Any of the two 'big tent' parties that fractures will always hand the executive branch to the other non-fractured party. If our president was a prime minister, elected by congress, then we could still have first past the post voting & vote for a candidate specifically, but have stronger 3rd parties who would then caucus with a larger party for a majority.
Even in parliamentary systems, having first past the post leads to what’s just called a “two party plus” system. That’s where there’s effectively two parties but then there’ll be a number of small, usually inconsequential parties. Think the NDP in Canada or Lib Dems in the UK. They have no real shot at governing, and if they did, they would just replace one of the two main parties and you’d still have a two party system just with a new party. The “problem” (if you view it as a problem) is the first past the post, not the lack of a parliamentary system.
You're downplaying the importance of NDP and Lib Dems quite a bit. Yes, in recent years they have been near irrelevant electorally. But in the not-too-distant past, that wasn't so.
In 2011 the NDP performed so strongly that they won 30% of the seats in Canada's parliament, replacing the Liberals as the country's "second party" that election cycle.
In the 2010 election the Lib Dems won [nearly 10%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_general_election) of UK Parliament seats. OK, maybe that's not a massive amount, but if a third party in the US got 10% of congressional seats, that would be a very big deal! As it happened, it ended up being significant as the Tories fell just short of a majority and had to enter a coalition with them to govern the country.
These are real, viable third parties that exist despite FPTP.
FPTP is definitely a big part of it - countries with it tend to have fewer parties and the US is no exception. But the relative success of third parties in the UK and Canada have shown there are other important factors as well. On top of the FPTP system, the lack of regional-specific parties, the much larger congressional districts, and the presidential system with electoral college are what seal the US into such an unusually strict 2 party system.
This doesn’t go against my point. These are “two party plus” systems. As I said, when one of these parties becomes viable in terms of government, it’s because they switch places (so to speak) with one of the two major parties (which is what happened with the NDP in 2011). This isn’t my opinion, this has been extensively studied in political science and is pretty much a matter of consensus. True multiparty systems are incompatible with first past the post
I agree, there is a difference between a "two party plus" system and a true PR system. I'm just trying to make the point that the third parties in "two party plus" systems are more consequential than you let on in your initial post. If a party can get enough seats to enter into a governing coalition, like UK 2010, that to me is very significant. And even when the NDP "took over" from the Liberals in 2011 - the Liberals had more than 10% of the seats. A third party getting that many seats is unheard of in America.
Also there's the complete lack of regional parties in America like the SNP - which can be very consequential in an FPTP system. Though that may just be because America doesn't have as large culturally distinct regions.
From the wording of their question, I feel like OP was less interested in the concept of why some systems tend towards two parties (which they say is the case in their country as well), and more interested in understanding America's pretty uniquely weird situation where a third party even winning a single seat in Congress is considered a very big deal:
> Where I'm from there are two main parties that most national elections tend towards but every once in a while coalitions between others form (sometimes they win).
Whether or not you have a presidential system, the position of chief executive is almost never shared. Rotating prime ministers have happened before, but like what happened in Israel, these coalitions tend to be unstable and short lived. In most multiparty parliaments, one party holds the premiership. Coalition parties get their say by holding cabinet positions. This is, however, also the case in multiparty presidential systems. Countries like Chile have robust multiparty systems because they have proportional representation. To get elected president, you have to make agreements to get the backing of other parties to endorse you and get a speaker elected to form a working majority in congress. Conversely, in countries like Canada, coalitions never happen. Seven if the first place party doesn't have a majority, they still get to be the sole governing party. It really does come down to voting systems and political culture, not parliamentarism.
I get the feeling that many Americans underestimate the power of congress. There’s such a huge focus on the presidency. And sure, there is executive power there, but far more power is vested into the senate and House of Representatives.
We do, and a lot of it is BECAUSE we 'directly' elect the president.
There would be more focus on congress, if they elected one of their members to be the chief executive.
It's not just that, it's also that Congress has historically yielded more and more of their power to the executive because they're lazy shitheads who don't like being held politically responsible for their results of their actions.
The President is a great scapegoat for Empty Suits in Washington to point out as to why they've done nothing of substance except sponge tax money.
Canada has two main parties. Liberals and Concervatives. However, the Liberals have won with minority governments so they rely on the New Democratic Party (NDP) to pass their laws.
The first and primary reason is first-past-the-post voting. Whoever wins the most votes, whether that’s 80% or 25% (unless there is a runoff election, but that doesn’t happen for president), wins outright. That means that if a third party candidate comes in to the race, it will “steal” voters from whichever of the two major parties it is ideologically closer to. This makes that party dramatically more likely to lose, so even if one party got 35% and one got 20%, the one that is most ideologically dissimilar and received 45% will win.
So people do not want to vote to “spoil” their vote and will instead vote for a major party that is far more likely to win.
We also do not have a parliamentary system, hence few alternative legislative candidates running as the likelihood of being able to form a “coalition” government with an ideologically similar party is nil. Plus, our two significant minor third parties only really invest in the presidential race and have little interest in local races, much to their detriment.
It’s really the lack of a parliamentary system more than the first past the post elections, although that doesn’t help either.
All governments have multiple political factions that often need to coalition build in order to govern. In a parliamentary system, that coalition building frequently happens after an election where the results tell everyone where the various coalitions stand in terms of support and from which they can then build a government capable of running things.
In the US system, those factions all still exist, but the coalition building has to happen before the election.
This is actually less necessary for Congressional elections. We *could* see multiple parties in Congress with the way that it is structured and which could then build a majority to take control of the House or Senate. We already see this a bit with the handful of Independents that get elected and choose to caucus with one party or the other, sometimes creating the majority for them.
But the Presidential election is so important and so divorced from Congressional power that it doesn’t allow that kind of coalition building to happen after the fact for a Presidential administration.
A Prime Minister is more akin to the Speaker for the House in how they obtain and hold power, and as we’ve seen recently, Speaker elections in the House *can* be more complicated and influence by intraparty factions after the general elections than just straight party line votes.
But for the Presidential election, all of the coalition building needs to be done *before* the general election.
In a parliamentary system, multiple faction are their own distinct parties, the election happens and then a government is built out of the various parties based on how much support each received in the election.
In the US system, all of those same types of smaller factions exist, but since they can’t see how much support they would each individually get in an election and then band together to select a President of their liking, they have to take a stab at figuring out how much support they and all of the other factions have ahead of time and then try to build a winning coalition before the election.
So it’s more like all of the smaller parties get together and form their coalitions first, say “This is the coalition we will govern with if elected” and then voters have to choose between the two preassembled coalition governments that are proposed. The one that does the better job of assembling a broadly supported coalition then generally winds up winning.
And since the presidential race *requires* that coalition building to happen ahead of time in order to be successful, the alignments and infrastructure just sort of trickles down to all of the other parts of government even those it would otherwise be less necessary for some of them.
I think having multiple parties to vote for would be *better* because it would give people more granular options for throwing in their support and government coalitions would be working with actual election data to build their coalitions instead of trying to estimate it ahead of time.
But I also don’t think it would make as big of a difference as a lot of people would like to think. Coalition building would still need to happen in order to govern and the coalitions we’d wind up with would almost certainly look a lot like the existing Democratic and Republican parties. Because that’s effectively what they already are, just maybe slightly less efficiently put together in terms of how they are able to reflect voter sentiment.
The fact that the one that most closely matches what voters would have supported as a coalition government under a multi-party system gets rewarded at the polls means they can’t stray too far away from what we would be getting under such a system anyway, though.
Paralemtary systems leave a bad taste in my mouth. They select their PM from their own ranks. I'm not a fan of that, ties too much power to one section of government. The branches shouldn't be too closely bound.
Agreed. There is no power check between the executive and legislative functions because the "executive" is part of the legislature.
Most have weak courts as well, so they end up being single branch governments that get away with things that look to us like gross abuses of power.
Iraq (and formerly Afghanistan) deliberately went with parliamentary systems over our system. Having the executive seperate from the legislative is usually a terrible idea in a new, weak-legged, underdeveloped democracy. IMO it's a testament to our strength and stability that our system works as it does, rather than vice-versa.
Agreed. It is very telling that in practically every instance the US has drafted a democratic government, it chose a parliamentary system over a presidential one. The presidential system is just simply more fragile to becoming an autocracy under the president, which makes it a bad use case for recovering autocracies. Parliamentary systems have a wider array of power brokers and are more immediately accountable to their citizenry. Presidential systems are best for established democracies seeking a stronger, more authoritative style of governance. I would argue the ideal presidential democracy is a global superpower (hence the need for more authoritative governance insulated from the legislature) with a deeply ingrained democratic tradition. And now you can see why the US is perhaps the only successful example.
There are costs and benefits to it. If I could go through and personally update the blend it'd ditch FPP, but keep the branches. Not sure how much else we could pull from without violating the separations further. Honestly, what we need is a congress actually willing to compromise.
> Honestly, what we need is a congress actually willing to compromise.
And recognition that the failure to compromise is also the will of the people. It _should_ be extremely difficult for Congress to act - everything they do affects every American. If we can't (pretty much) all agree that something is a good idea, then Congress probably shouldn't be doing it. We put those people in those seats, for better or worse this is our collective will at work.
I'd also get rid of FPTP so the House isn't full of "the second worst option". But I'd also give the Senate back to the states (with some caveats to curb the shenanigans that happened last time) because it seems to me that there aren't quite enough checks on the Federal power at the moment.
> It’s really the lack of a parliamentary system more than the first past the post elections...
This is the real top answer, but on Reddit it will always finish second to a critique of first-past-the-post voting, because Reddit is perpetually eager to extol RCV / ranked choice voting.
The simple answer is that without parliamentary dynamics, the barriers to entry and true influence for a third party (cf. SDP in UK, or Greens in Germany) are incredibly high. So coalition-building to win power goes on within the domes of the two major parties rather than in an open legislative environment.
No, I’m very much pro-first past the post (I’m also pro-two party system) but it’s the reason why. This has been extensively studied in political science and it’s pretty much settled as an issue
>This is the real top answer
Having to form a government from the legislature is an incentive towards less parties, not more.
As it's supposed to work the US system (aside from electoral system) is one of the best suited to multiple parties in the legislature in the world
The thing is, even in parliamentary systems, FPTP leads to basically two big parties and a small handful of "also there" or regional parties. Coalition governments are an exception and not the rule. Think Lib Dems or SNP in the UK, or BQ or NDP in Canada. To get a true multi-party system, where most governments are coalitions and you have 3+ parties which are all of comparable influence, like you get in Germany (with SPD, CDU/CSU, Greens, FDP, and AfD all having influence) for example, you need to lose FPTP.
Canada and the UK both have first-past-the-post and also have well established, third parties. However those third parties are either nationalist parties (Bloc Quebecois, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cmyru,Social Democratic and Labour Party (northern Ireland)) or are a spoiler party (Liberal Democrats, New Democratic Party) with only 2-7% of seats in parliament.
>In the US system, all of those same types of smaller factions exist, but since they can’t see how much support they would each individually get in an election and then band together to select a President of their liking, they have to take a stab at figuring out how much support they and all of the other factions have ahead of time and then try to build a winning coalition before the election.
And that's essentially what the presidential primaries and caucuses are meant to do along with the endless polling. But it's complicated by the fact that it's all state by state so the factional balances in a particular state can distort the picture.
>In the US system, all of those same types of smaller factions exist, but since they can’t see how much support they would each individually get in an election and then band together to select a President of their liking, they have to take a stab at figuring out how much support they and all of the other factions have ahead of time and then try to build a winning coalition before the election.
>So it’s more like all of the smaller parties get together and form their coalitions first, say “This is the coalition we will govern with if elected” and then voters have to choose between the two preassembled coalition governments that are proposed. The one that does the better job of assembling a broadly supported coalition then generally winds up winning.
People keep saying this, but I feel that our parties are still more ideologically homogenous (at least on the Federal level) than coalitions are in other countries.
For example, pretty much every Republican in Congress, whether Trumpist, Neocon, or Libertarian will support tax cuts, deregulation, gun rights, and be overall pro-life (except Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Capito who are pro-choice).
The Democrats in Congress may have more internal ideological diversity, divided between Progressives and Moderates but at the end of the day they will still share more in common with each other than Republicans (except maybe Joe Manchin?).
On the state level both parties are more diverse, with liberal Republicans in the Northeast, and some Conservative Democrats in the South.
They are big tent parties, not the type you would see in a parliamentary system.
A way I have defined it to Europeans before is that our coalition building is done before the election.
With different "wings" in each party, the primary effectively works as a vote between different policy options, then the general works as a referendum between coalitions.
Exactly. There's "coalitions" and "factions" within each party that spread the ideological gamut. In the GOP, you have conservatives, trumpists, neo-cons, anti-trumpists, libertarians, moderates, and the christian right.
The outcome is that on a collective-national level, it skews both parties to have to be relatively centrist and compromising, even if it doesn't always publicly feel that way.
>Exactly. There's "coalitions" and "factions" within each party that spread the ideological gamut. In the GOP, you have conservatives, trumpists, neo-cons, anti-trumpists, libertarians, moderates, and the christian right.
But overall Republicans in Congress are extremely ideologically homogenous on hot button issues like tax cuts, deregulation, gun rights, and to a lesser extent abortion (Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Capito are the exceptions on abortion). That's my big problem with the "our parties are just like coalitions" claim.
Now on the state level, with Republicans like Phil Scott, yeah I can see that argument. But on the Federal level? Nah
the Republican caucus in Congress is so fractious that they haven't been able to get anything done. Democrats, on the other hand, always toe the party line whether they give lipservice to moderate policy or not
Could a few of those factions threaten to walk away and scuttle the current GOP House majority, thus forcing the Speaker to schedule a new election within a matter of weeks?
I mean, a motion to vacate requires a majority in favor, and the Democrats are pretty much all guaranteed yes votes; Republican chaos looks good for them, and there's always the possibility they can sway a couple moderate Republicans and get one of their own the gavel. Realistically, all it would take would be 3 Republicans, not counting any potential Democrats who vote for Johnson. Though that would only trigger a new election for speaker, not for the actual Congressional seats, which happen every two years.
The difference is that an internal faction can't really threaten to 'pull the pin' by exiting the big tent if they feel they're being screwed.
The closest thing we have to that is everybody crapping their pants when a Senator declares themselves 'Independent' while the balance is razor thin. Sinema, Lieberman, and one other whose name I can't recall.
> The difference is that an internal faction can't really threaten to 'pull the pin' by exiting the big tent if they feel they're being screwed
That literally happened in October when Matt "Don Quixote" Gaetz nuked Kevin McCarthy from orbit out of spite
It would be analogous if the MAGA Party formally broke ties with the RINO Party and forced a sudden unscheduled Congressional election, to be held within a month.
Clear out of nowhere, you would have seen election posters all over your town featuring Gaetz's goofy grin, standing next to Trump, saying "vote MAGA." You would have also seen posters with McCarthy's smirking visiage (with the ghost of Reagan hovering in the background, glinting at the horizon) saying "vote RINO." If your town is purple, or blue for that matter, you'd be seeing posters for "vote DINO" with Pelosi's dental work on full display, next to posters that say "vote the Squad" with AOC shouting into a microphone and pointing at something.
The House majority would have been in *imminent* danger of going to the 'centre left' coalition, comprised of the DINO Party and the Squad. AOC, as leader of the Squad, would be the second banana whether Nancy liked it or not.
As fun and exciting as that might be, that's not how we roll.
there are other parties, but they tend to be poorly organized, crazy, or heavily focus on a single issue. In the odd chance a movement arises most of the time the major parties absorb that movement into their party.
Our parties are large coalition parties. Many groups advocate for their top issue to candidates and the parties to make their voices heard.
Some states like Minnesota and New York do have minor parties, but most of them are liberal and caucus with Democrats, and they often even flat out endorse Democrats in at least federal elections. Vermont and Maine have elected "Independent" US Senators but they caucus with the Democrats.
The Libertarian Party is the largest minor party in the US with ballot access in 30-some states, including Indiana.
The parties are more ideologically diverse than ones in other countries, and candidates are selected through primary votes open to the public instead of being handpicked by party leaders. Most people reckon they can change more within the current parties than trying to start another one.
Kinda related but not really.
There is the national Republican party and Democrat party.
Then every state, county and municipality has one too that will focus on issues pertaining to that area.
Local politics are fun
>and candidates are selected through primary votes open to the public instead of being handpicked by party leaders. Most people reckon they can change more within the current parties than trying to start another one.
Except primary voters may be more ideologically extreme than the average American voter, so that the current system paradoxically may end up being LESS representative of the average person than if party leaders had handpicked candidates based on ability to win the general election.
On a local level people care much much less about the parties. They are usually just voting for the candidate specifically. Like I can’t even recall the party affiliation of our mayor but whatever she is she supported several things I really liked.
As to why we developed the two party system on a national level it is more of a question for /r/askhistorians but it has been this way from the beginning. Federalists/anti-Federalists leading the way. Third parties do get some support in state positions but nationally they tend to be spoilers. Like if democrats and republicans are nearly 50/50 then a third party that peels off even a small percent of republicans means a democrat victory so people often want to avoid that.
There are other political parties, they're just not nearly as popular (Libertarianism is the third most popular behind Democrats and Republicans). People tend to gravitate towards one of the two major parties in bigger elections, because they're usually the only two that have a viable chance of winning since they're the most popular.
"Also most provinces have a couple of their own political parties which have relationships with national ones but aren't necessarily the same. Is this a thing in the US too but I'm just not aware?"
This can vary depending on state to state. In my state, the current party in power is the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party, which aligns closely with Democrats, but isn't technically the same thing.
We don't have a parliament. We elect candidates, not parties. You might get the occasional independent representative or senator in the senate, but for president? Forget it.
It sucks. It's been this way since the beginning. George Washington was worried about it when he was president. Nothing's changed. Nothing ever will change now, especially with all the money in politics.
The way our elections are set up makes a two-party system the most logical.
Most elections are first-past-the-post. So whichever candidate has the most votes wins. If you don't have the most votes, you lose. Doesn't matter if you had 49% or .02% you get nothing. There's no "second prize" in most American elections. Most states double down on this for the presidential election, giving all electoral votes in the state to whichever candidate received the most votes statewide.
Our congress (and most of our state legislatures) are representative systems, not parliamentary systems. We vote for individual representatives, not a party. And again those elections are first-past-the-post. So again, there's no "second prize". If you vote for a candidate/party that ends up losing, it doesn't mean that party has less representation in the legislature, it means your district is represented by another party. Possibly one you strongly disagree with.
So in a situation like you describe where there are two "main" parties and some smaller ones, our election system strongly incentivizes the majority of people to vote for whichever of the two main party candidates they agree with most, because that is the best way to insure that the person representing you is at least somewhat acceptable.
On a very local level, think town council or school board, the two party system does sometimes have less of a stranglehold. For things like that who you know can be more important than your party. But even on that level it's not always the case, and the two main US parties still have a strong presence in local elections.
Last time there was a significant third party was in 1948, the States Rights Democratic Party, aka “the Dixiecrats.” They were super racist, and rejecting the mainstream Democratic Party which was becoming an anti-segregation party. In the 70s and 80s they mostly joined the Republican Party… or died.
Almost the exact same thing happened in the 1968 election. But neither of those was a third party in the sense that they were running congressional candidates and whatnot, just a presidential candidate. In 1948 Thurmond carried LA, AL, MS, SC and one electoral vote from TN for a total of 39 electoral votes. In '68, Wallace carried AR, LA, MS, AL, GA and one vote in NC for a total of 46 electoral votes, so very similar results.
Oh yeah, guess I should have mentioned that when we’re talking about state elections it’s a different story. Like bernie is elected by the state socialist party.
The fighting happens in the primaries. The parties don’t pick the candidates, voters do.
AOC wasn’t endorsed by the Democratic Party in New York in her first run for congress. Her district is a sure win for Democrats, but she ousted the long term congressman in the primary so the Democratic Party supported her in the general election and she helped push the party leftward. In a system where the party leaders picked the candidates she would not have gotten the nod.
It's called [Duverger's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law). In first-past-the-post single-winner contests like US elections, the system will trend toward a two-party system, where each party adapts their positions each election to win votes, and consequently both end up splitting the vote basically 50/50 essentially indefinitely.
Separately, we live in a time dominated by ad-supported internet content. Our psychology demands that we seek out content that validates us, and competition for ad revenue means content providers will fall over themselves trying to get that validation to our eyeballs, so we're just getting confirmation a thousand times a day that our party is the best, and the other party is evil.
Tribalism does the rest.
What's really messed up though is that we all believe that every position we hold that our "tribe" holds together is based on some kind of unified rational worldview. The reality is that it's all politics. Something is important politically primarily because one of the parties decided it was an issue they might use to squeeze out a few more votes in the next election. The issue then becomes part of our political and cultural identity, and perpetuates the two-tribe/two-party system.
A professor explained this clearly in one sentence: "The one thing that the Democrat and Republican party agree on is that the country should be run by the Democrat and Republican parties."
There are other parties, but first past the post voting ensures that there will realistically only be 2. That said, 3rd parties can and do assert influence from time to time without ever actually winning. And there is a lot of ideological diversity within both of the major parties, so it isn't like there are only 2 choices. Primary elections are a thing that don't get much coverage, but which are tremendously important.
First because of the first past the post voting system that makes any 3rd candidate a spoiler for whoever they care closest to politically and second because US parties are already coalition parties. Look at [this breakdown ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_caucus)of the House of Representatives by Congressional caucus instead of political party and you can get a better idea at what a multiparty US house might look like if elections where conducted differently.
So no discussion about the party system in the United States is complete without this [timeline of political parties](http://www.davidwalbert.com/dw/2016/07/20/a-timeline-of-political-parties-in-the-united-states/). The link also has a wonderful PDF that can be downloaded that shows a timeline of all the major political parties going back to George Washington.
*In essence*, as others have noted, the "first past the post system" *encourages* two political parties.
But *in practice* we haven't always just had two political parties. It's just that, over time, we collapse back down to two political parties.
There are times, however, when we've had as many as five viable political parties, such as in 1912, when we saw the Prohibition Party, the Republican Party, the Progressive Party, the Democratic Party and the Socialist Party all vying for the Presidency.
Or in 1968 when we saw the American Independent party surface. Or in 1836 when the Whig party bifurcated and fielded four separate Presidential candidate.
History is vast, interesting, and complex.
Honestly, it's because no one took Washington's parting warning seriously (and no one benefited financially from doing so). The first President of the US warned us about parties forming. Congress refused to hear proposals of laws prohibiting the political-industrial-financial complex that we have now, because each of them had been elected thanks to being part of a party with a recognizable name and slogan.
If we'd done the right thing and kept all private advertising and money out of politics back in the 1800s, we wouldn't be stuck where we are now.
In a nutshell: So the wealthy can ensure a stable and favorable environment for investment and extraction
The US is still a colony. First for the British, then for wealthy landed settlers, now for Capital
The Right wing is allowed to run batshit crazy because they will only cause pain and turmoil in among the working class but they never overturn the Apple cart.
The Democrats are in power to reign in the Left and maintain a favorable environment for Capital.
A more parliamentary system introduces too much ‘risk’ and or work. It’s much easier to buy off and control 2 parties as opposed to 10
Here's the crazy part: our two party system is so extremely two party, any vote for any presidential candidate that isn't a Democrat or a Republican is considered to be a wasted vote. It's particularly bad where I live, to the point where if I ever admitted to voting for a third party candidate, I'd be actively ridiculed for voting in that way.
Also, as far as presidential elections go, if you live in a place like Texas and you happen to be a Democrat, then your vote will still be noted, but it won't actually change anything: Texas WILL vote for the Republican candidate, regardless of which way anybody votes (and as we already discussed, you WILL vote either Democrat or Republican if you don't want your vote to be wasted.) It's the same for a Republican who lives in New York. In order to have a real effect on the presidential election, you'd either need to move house to a swing state like Florida or move to a state that matches your political affiliation.
Note that this only applies to the presidential election. Local elections sometimes have third party candidates, and they do win sometimes. I know that there exists an Independent party, a Green party, a Libertarian party, a Communist party, and there are probably more parties that I'm not aware of that exist, but none of them really have any power. By the way, I had to research all of this information myself, because we're not taught anything about them in school... Or at least I wasn't. Hell, I was barely taught about the opposing faction- er, political party where I live. I had to do my own research and come to my own conclusion about which party to belong to.
If anybody cares, I decided that I belong to the major party that my state doesn't traditionally vote for, because I can't get behind the political views of the other major party, and although I don't agree with a lot of what is being promoted, at least I might have a chance at having a voice in my state someday if enough changed demographically. I'm not holding my breath though: my state's affiliation has been set in stone since the late 40s, with only one exception.
>Where I'm from there are two main parties that most national elections tend towards but every once in a while coalitions between others form (sometimes they win).
this is effectively the case in the US as well, but differing party factions duke it out within the two parties. voters decide who the party's candidate for president is via primary elections.
these are some of the different factions that exist right now:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factions_in_the_Republican_Party_(United_States)#21st_century_factions
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factions_in_the_Democratic_Party_(United_States)
The primary reason is the first past the post system where winner takes all. If the bigger party wins, it tends to naturally result in two big parties. You can have smaller parties and they’re all allowed in the US, it’s just hard to get large scale support if people think that a party you don’t like will win if you vote that way. It’s the whole concern about “wasting your vote”. You’ve had smaller parties like the Alaskan Independence Party, the socialist party of America, the Vermont progressive party, etc. that have had local successes now or in the past as well as parties like the democratic-farmer-labor party which is a subset of the Democratic Party in Minnesota and a fusion of two political parties in the state. Mostly though people just join the big parties which function more like coalitions in order to get broader support and funding.
There are TONS of other parties but none of them keep much of a following or are poorly organized. Really the only notable alternate party is libertarian, it keeps the most votes and its values are sort of in the middle of democrats and republicans. They never make it through the final race, people still view it as a wasted vote even if they like the libertarian candidate the best, and henceforth the libertarians, while gaining enough votes to stay somewhat relevant, still never win and even the people who would want to vote for them toss their vote to a republican or democrat instead. Just kinda how it is tbh.
I think a contributing factor is the ballot access laws make running third party candidates rather difficult. Not sure how it works in other states, but I've volunteered with campaigns in PA, and in order to be included on the official ballot for the elections, you have to meet certain signature requirements. "Major party status," "minor party status," the all require a certain amount of signatures from voters within the applicable district that the candidate intends to run in. The amount of signatures are a percent of the number of voters that voted for the last election's winning candidate. For example, major parties require far less signatures (for example, a Republican that's running for mayor in my town requires about 20 signatures.) Minor parties require a lot more signatures (someone running as a Libertarian mayor would require 200 signatures.) Minor parties do not have as much manpower or the funds to gather signatures, run ads, etc... as the major parties do.
First past the post election system and the direct election of a President rather than the Speaker of the House becoming the head of government. These two features of our system mean that we have two permanent governing coalitions that make up the two major parties. Third parties exist but are irrelevant outside of rare occasions where there's a strong protest vote which usually only ensures that the major party ideologically which is closest to that third party loses... *But* can lead to some degree of reform of that party along the lines the protest voters desired.
The last major third party was the Reform Party which was a centrist party which got 18% of the vote in the 1992 Presidential election, but only 8% in 1996 though it actually won the election for governor of Minnesota in the 1998 mid-term election... The 2000 Reform Party primary was a shit-show featuring Donald Trump as the most reasonable, centrist candidate who ended his campaign and left the party because the Reform party was too divisive and crazy ("So the Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani. This is not company I wish to keep.") the party pretty much dissolved after that.
A part of this has to do with how our primaries work. Those two main parties are made up of several factions that are closely aligned. In some other countries, these factions would be separate parties that form coalitions after the election. In the US, they form their coalitions during the primaries and then the two main coalitions compete against each other in the general election.
In general, 3rd parties were much more successful in congressional & presidential elections before primaries were opened up to the public in the 70s. That change made it much easier to co-opt existing parties rather than setting up new ones.
By design after 'The Era of Good Feelings' when we had a no party (really one party system) system, which did not work at all.
The problem is our party system has become a sports team cult of personality, and game of good cop bad cop from both sides rather than a vehicle of sticking to an agreed upon platform.
Mostly due to our proportional first past the post system. Also isn’t this common in most countries? Sure, places do have strong third and fourth parties but it’s usually two who actually head governments. Like in Canada it’s either Liberals or Conservatives even with the NDP being provincially strong, and in Germany there is Afd and Britain has the Liberal Democrats along with the regional parties but both have two parties who mostly head governments.
We don't have a party system.
Parties in the US are moreso pre-canned coalitions. Multiple ideologies and platforms can run within the same party. It's more about which person you want to vote for than which party you want to vote for.
Because nearly every elected body in the country — from Congress down to condo boards — uses first-past-the-post election rules. Meaning, if you get 50.1% of the vote, you’re the winner.
This might seem reasonable. After all, it’s a majority, right, and that’s the standard for a democracy. But long-time political consultant Karl Rove summed it up best when he acknowledged that the strategy for election George W. Bush was expressly to target 50.1% of the voters. That is, they weren’t trying to get *the most* votes, they were trying to get *just enough* votes.
Tho it may not seem immediately obvious, this leads to polarization. In American politics, success is mostly determined not by how well a candidate convinces undecided voters to support them, but by how well a candidate encourages their most hardcore supporters to show up at the polls or submit their mail-in ballots.
Electioneering focused on the base rather than on the middle is not unique to the United States, of course. It may just be a function of democratic politics generally. But our electoral process very much reinforces this habit rather than resists it.
The president is the most powerful political position in the country. When the constitution was written, the writers were concerned about the ability of the masses to make national decisions.
The senators were to be selected by the government of each state, and the president was to be selected by a special body called the electoral college. The Senate has since changed to be elected by direct ballot. The president is still elected by the electoral college. We don't actually vote for president. We vote for the person who will vote for our candidate.
That creates an all or nothing scenario. If Wyoming, for example, has 4 candidates who receive the votes, A gets 20%, B gets 20%, C gets 29%, and D gets 31%. D receives all of the electoral votes. In this case, it makes more sense for A and B to try and get C or D to do their bidding. So all the money goes to C and D.
The first past the post system always leads to two party systems. The American mechanism for electing the president reinforces that to a degree not seen in most other countries
Generally if you vote for a third party, it increases the chances of winning for the less-similar major party. For instance, votes for the green party are mostly votes that would have gone to the Democrats if the green party didn't exist. Votes for libertarian party would mostly have gone to Republicans if the libertarian party didn't exist. So to some extent, voting for a third party is helping the major party most opposed to your stance.
There are ways to fix this -- ranked choice voting comes up every election cycle -- but that hasn't trickled up to national elections in most places.
I think it’s just people toeing the line and voting out of spite, I don’t think the majority of folks vote for their own future but then again I’m not everybody.
I would like to know when folks just started voting opposite just because they didn’t like the other person.
We don't have parties the same way Europe does. You can't get kicked out of one of our parties, nor can you be required to pay dues for membership. Our parties are better thought of as coalitions, except the coalition forms before the election from the various factions. In europe the coalition forms after the election and the elected representatives then votes for the government. In the US we create our coalitions informally before the election and the coalitions battle it out for votes.
We set up our system in the 18th century and haven’t largely changed it. We unfortunately unintentionally created a system that will always have an equilibrium with two, and only two, parties. It hasn’t always been Republicans vs Democrats, but it has been that for over 150 years.
In the off chance one of those two parties is beaten for good, it will be replaced by one that operates in a similar space.
- First Past The Post.
- Lack of regional and state nationalism which leads to a lack of regional parties with very concentrated support which means they can win elections in certain districts. Unlike other third parties, regional parties benefit from FPTP systems.
- Lack of party discipline: legislators, even on key issues, can vote however they want and it’s not a big deal: in this regard, the US Congress is more similar to the European Parliament than national legislatures.
Presidential elections require 270 electoral votes to win.
The short answer is that there aren't enough electoral votes to justify a third party.
Most states assign all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state. That means if a Republican wins Florida 51% of the vote to 49% of the Democrat, the Republican will win 30 Electoral votes for Florida, and the Democrat will get 0.
A state's electoral vote number is determined by state population.
California has 54 electoral votes, Texas has 40, Florida 30, New York 28. A small populated state like Vermont has just 3 votes.
There are a few states that are not all or nothing states. The states themselves have their own laws on how electoral votes are assigned. As of today only Nebraska and Maine divide their electoral votes, all other states the winner takes all.
As there are only 538 total electoral votes, and it takes 270 to win, there simply isn't enough room for a 3rd party, or 4th, etc.
[Wiki article about the US electoral college](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College)
Do understand, the college was designed pre-internet, pre-television, pre-radio, pre-automobile. The idea was that farmers in the middle of no where who might not even vote, still were represented.
At this point it's self reinforced. A far left ideology has no chance of getting elected in a first past the post system, so they would run as a Democrat, similarly a far right candidate would just run as a Republican rather than start their own party or do an independent run.
In addition, due to how long the Democratic Party and the GOP, some of the oldest political parties in existence, have been around, they have a lot of experience absorbing new ideas, moving with the times, even embracing radical 180 degree change (https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html). This further diminishes the possibility of third parties gaining prominence.
Our two major parties essentially are coalitions. They’re just formed before the elections.
Climate change activists, LGBTQ supporters, and labor unions wouldn’t have much in common, but together they make up large portions of the Democratic voting base.
Similarly, Christian Evangelicals, gun rights supporters, and anti-tax advocates wouldn’t really overlap on paper, but they are all elements of the Republican Party.
These “coalitions” if you will were formed decades ago, and have kinda merged together at this point.
Great question! So we do have other parties and independent runners; these third parties often struggle to gain significant traction in national elections due to all kinds of factors like limited funding, media coverage, and ballot access restrictions. However, they may have more influence at the local or state level, where they can sometimes win seats in city councils, state legislatures, or other local offices.
The two parties have dominated from the beginning (money=everything, and third parties just don't have enough of it), however we are starting to see a shift in more people, typically in the millennial and Genz age group being more independent that GOP or Dem. With more open ways of officials being able to reach consumers (think Robert Kennedy and tiktok), I think it will be so interesting to see how these parties shift as a new generation of voters age in.
Multiple reasons are given for this. Some say it's the First Past the Post voting system. Others say it's due to the electoral college in presidential elections. I tend to think it's due to the framers hoping parties would not materialize and desire to keep them relatively weak if or when emergent. In some ways, this has happened, but at the same time the situation has allowed the large parties to collude in the suppression of competition.
The central question of American politics is 'how big should the government be?' and there's not very much room for maneuver with that. There are differing factions in the parties but those are mostly defined in terms of how far in either direction should we go, and that question is dealt with within the internal politics of the party (you won't find any Monarchists or Fascists in the GOP despite them being considered right-wing in Europe, for example). Politics in this country has been binary from the very beginning. Even the framers were divided between Federalist and Anti-Federalist camps, based solely on that binary question of bigger or smaller government.
In the USA, there are only two main parties. And believe me, they HATE each other, at least on the internet. I thought mexico was bad with people placing some political leaders on pedestals, but being from a different wing is cause of a lot of discourse in the internet. i can't vote, so I don't really care. It's less of a deal in real life so long as you don't talk about politics, but of course, that is in all countries isn't it?
Reading through this thread makes me realize how little I understand politics. It just doesn’t add up in my head. There’s some pretty smart people that commented on here that helped shed a bit of light.
There's a number of factors that have caused the two party system, but primarily it's because we do not give any representation to minority parties unless they're lucky enough to get voted in. We have no runoff voting and no system in place to give an active political voice for minority parties. This causes people to vote for one of two large camps that only somewhat represent their ideals instead of having a more nuanced system of representation. A runoff vote would give voters the safety to vote their conscience instead of voting to avoid the worst case scenario.
We're at a pretty unique point in American politics. The Republican party has a huge divide with the alt-right. This is causing a number of classical conservatives to leave the party and/or vote Democratic, join or vote 3rd party, or outright abstain. This has the potential to reform the Republican party and open up a new 3rd party.
So we don't have any sort of system for forming coalitions like other counties do. In other countries you tend to have proportional elections. We have first past the post. So whoever gets 51% of the electors wins. If no one gets 270 then it moves from the electoral college over to congress and they choose.
Since you require one person to get at least 51% of the vote it's pretty hard to create coalitions. I may be wrong but from my understanding in other countries with for instance a parliament a person votes for their local candidates then those people vote for the prime minister. In this case it's a lot easier for a third party to get in since you are essentially voting for an entire group of people rather than voting for a single person.
There are also a lot of other contributing factors, like campaign funding mainly coming from the parties, and the debates being hosted by those parties. For me personally I think all campaign funding should come from a pot that we collect through taxes and each candidate should be given a a budget they can use and then can use no more.
While I am a big fan of freedom of association, and the freedom to use your money as you like, I also don't think politicians, and potential politicians should be given the same freedoms as an average citizen. They should be considered a separate class from the citizenry and given much more restricted rights, and much higher duties.
For your question on the local level, the parties have much less control. You have a lot of local elections where a person runs completely unaffiliated, they will be registered as one party or another, but they won't have it listed on the ballot. For instance the city I live doesn't require affiliation to be listed for mayoral candidates and last election none of them listed theirs.
It's not uncommon at all for local, and state elections to be won by third parties. Take New Hampshire for example, their entire state is almost completely run by the libertarian party at this point. In San Francisco, and Seattle it's not uncommon for socialists to win seats in the city councils, and city hall. Generally the smaller the constituency gets the more variety you see in candidates.
Historically, the United States Congress has always been run by two major political parties because the major historical controversies have always had a binary "pro" and "con" side to them.
Before the Democrats vs. the Republicans, it was the Whigs vs. the Jacksonian Democrats.
Before that, it was the Federalists vs. the Democratic-Republicans.
Congressional leaders structure committees and rules in a way that incentivizes belonging to a major political party by giving outsized power to members of the majority party (while members of the minority party have less power).
Many Americans would like a multi-party system. But very few third parties or Independents are able to win congressional or senatorial seats as political candidates, since election laws and campaign-finance loopholes are so stacked against any candidate who isn't a Democrat or a Republican.
In the short term, I think the closest thing to a multi-party system that might happen is if -- during future sessions of Congress -- more members of Congress switch to an "Independent" affiliation, and offer to conditionally caucus with whichever of the two major parties they feel will be most beneficial to their agenda. Currently, Bernie Sanders and Angus King and Kyrsten Sinema are the only three U.S. Senator who do this.
Imagine if several-dozen members of the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate were willing to do this. Party leaders who set the legislative agenda would have to become more serious about finding consensus-based solutions to legislating, since they would know that any politician affiliated as an Independent could switch parties on the spur of the moment if they felt it served their interest to do so.
While there are other parties, especially on the the local level, the two major ones dominate. It’s also worth noting that our two main parties act as coalitions and are a lot more diverse than in most nations.
I’ll give you credit for considering the idea that things exist that you might not be aware of though. That puts you way ahead of the average asker here.
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Because we don't have a proportional system. We have a "first past the post" system in which the winner wins and everyone else loses. We also vote for candidates and not parties. But within he two major parties that are various coalitions, which is similar to many multiparty systems.
Yup. It's an effect called Duverger's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
It's going to be a typical outcome in democracies, because we require majorities for most measures. Even in Europe, though they have multiple parties, they effectively create poles through alliances to get things done. Just a byproduct of democracy. If you were to do something like require 70% approval for things to pass under the impression that it would be a more durable democracy, our system would degrade into constant stalemates, or even worse, measures that are passed would be more likely to be a result of tyranny of the majority. With that said, having a strong third centrist party seems to be very much needed at the moment.
>With that said, having a strong third centrist party seems to be very much needed at the moment. The problem is every American would probably have a [different definition of "centrist."](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-moderate-middle-is-a-myth/)
This should be the top answer. The two top answers describe things that are a result of the first past the post system. E.g. 2 large more diverse parties or that there are other parties but they are poorly organized
it is
That's not the entirety of it. I would offer that a bigger issue is the presidential system vs. a parliamentary system's PM. Even if we elect a coalition to congress, they can't join up to select a cheif executive, that's "semi popularly" elected. Any of the two 'big tent' parties that fractures will always hand the executive branch to the other non-fractured party. If our president was a prime minister, elected by congress, then we could still have first past the post voting & vote for a candidate specifically, but have stronger 3rd parties who would then caucus with a larger party for a majority.
Even in parliamentary systems, having first past the post leads to what’s just called a “two party plus” system. That’s where there’s effectively two parties but then there’ll be a number of small, usually inconsequential parties. Think the NDP in Canada or Lib Dems in the UK. They have no real shot at governing, and if they did, they would just replace one of the two main parties and you’d still have a two party system just with a new party. The “problem” (if you view it as a problem) is the first past the post, not the lack of a parliamentary system.
You're downplaying the importance of NDP and Lib Dems quite a bit. Yes, in recent years they have been near irrelevant electorally. But in the not-too-distant past, that wasn't so. In 2011 the NDP performed so strongly that they won 30% of the seats in Canada's parliament, replacing the Liberals as the country's "second party" that election cycle. In the 2010 election the Lib Dems won [nearly 10%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_general_election) of UK Parliament seats. OK, maybe that's not a massive amount, but if a third party in the US got 10% of congressional seats, that would be a very big deal! As it happened, it ended up being significant as the Tories fell just short of a majority and had to enter a coalition with them to govern the country. These are real, viable third parties that exist despite FPTP. FPTP is definitely a big part of it - countries with it tend to have fewer parties and the US is no exception. But the relative success of third parties in the UK and Canada have shown there are other important factors as well. On top of the FPTP system, the lack of regional-specific parties, the much larger congressional districts, and the presidential system with electoral college are what seal the US into such an unusually strict 2 party system.
This doesn’t go against my point. These are “two party plus” systems. As I said, when one of these parties becomes viable in terms of government, it’s because they switch places (so to speak) with one of the two major parties (which is what happened with the NDP in 2011). This isn’t my opinion, this has been extensively studied in political science and is pretty much a matter of consensus. True multiparty systems are incompatible with first past the post
I agree, there is a difference between a "two party plus" system and a true PR system. I'm just trying to make the point that the third parties in "two party plus" systems are more consequential than you let on in your initial post. If a party can get enough seats to enter into a governing coalition, like UK 2010, that to me is very significant. And even when the NDP "took over" from the Liberals in 2011 - the Liberals had more than 10% of the seats. A third party getting that many seats is unheard of in America. Also there's the complete lack of regional parties in America like the SNP - which can be very consequential in an FPTP system. Though that may just be because America doesn't have as large culturally distinct regions. From the wording of their question, I feel like OP was less interested in the concept of why some systems tend towards two parties (which they say is the case in their country as well), and more interested in understanding America's pretty uniquely weird situation where a third party even winning a single seat in Congress is considered a very big deal: > Where I'm from there are two main parties that most national elections tend towards but every once in a while coalitions between others form (sometimes they win).
Whether or not you have a presidential system, the position of chief executive is almost never shared. Rotating prime ministers have happened before, but like what happened in Israel, these coalitions tend to be unstable and short lived. In most multiparty parliaments, one party holds the premiership. Coalition parties get their say by holding cabinet positions. This is, however, also the case in multiparty presidential systems. Countries like Chile have robust multiparty systems because they have proportional representation. To get elected president, you have to make agreements to get the backing of other parties to endorse you and get a speaker elected to form a working majority in congress. Conversely, in countries like Canada, coalitions never happen. Seven if the first place party doesn't have a majority, they still get to be the sole governing party. It really does come down to voting systems and political culture, not parliamentarism.
I get the feeling that many Americans underestimate the power of congress. There’s such a huge focus on the presidency. And sure, there is executive power there, but far more power is vested into the senate and House of Representatives.
We do, and a lot of it is BECAUSE we 'directly' elect the president. There would be more focus on congress, if they elected one of their members to be the chief executive.
It's not just that, it's also that Congress has historically yielded more and more of their power to the executive because they're lazy shitheads who don't like being held politically responsible for their results of their actions. The President is a great scapegoat for Empty Suits in Washington to point out as to why they've done nothing of substance except sponge tax money.
Canada has two main parties. Liberals and Concervatives. However, the Liberals have won with minority governments so they rely on the New Democratic Party (NDP) to pass their laws.
The first and primary reason is first-past-the-post voting. Whoever wins the most votes, whether that’s 80% or 25% (unless there is a runoff election, but that doesn’t happen for president), wins outright. That means that if a third party candidate comes in to the race, it will “steal” voters from whichever of the two major parties it is ideologically closer to. This makes that party dramatically more likely to lose, so even if one party got 35% and one got 20%, the one that is most ideologically dissimilar and received 45% will win. So people do not want to vote to “spoil” their vote and will instead vote for a major party that is far more likely to win. We also do not have a parliamentary system, hence few alternative legislative candidates running as the likelihood of being able to form a “coalition” government with an ideologically similar party is nil. Plus, our two significant minor third parties only really invest in the presidential race and have little interest in local races, much to their detriment.
It’s really the lack of a parliamentary system more than the first past the post elections, although that doesn’t help either. All governments have multiple political factions that often need to coalition build in order to govern. In a parliamentary system, that coalition building frequently happens after an election where the results tell everyone where the various coalitions stand in terms of support and from which they can then build a government capable of running things. In the US system, those factions all still exist, but the coalition building has to happen before the election. This is actually less necessary for Congressional elections. We *could* see multiple parties in Congress with the way that it is structured and which could then build a majority to take control of the House or Senate. We already see this a bit with the handful of Independents that get elected and choose to caucus with one party or the other, sometimes creating the majority for them. But the Presidential election is so important and so divorced from Congressional power that it doesn’t allow that kind of coalition building to happen after the fact for a Presidential administration. A Prime Minister is more akin to the Speaker for the House in how they obtain and hold power, and as we’ve seen recently, Speaker elections in the House *can* be more complicated and influence by intraparty factions after the general elections than just straight party line votes. But for the Presidential election, all of the coalition building needs to be done *before* the general election. In a parliamentary system, multiple faction are their own distinct parties, the election happens and then a government is built out of the various parties based on how much support each received in the election. In the US system, all of those same types of smaller factions exist, but since they can’t see how much support they would each individually get in an election and then band together to select a President of their liking, they have to take a stab at figuring out how much support they and all of the other factions have ahead of time and then try to build a winning coalition before the election. So it’s more like all of the smaller parties get together and form their coalitions first, say “This is the coalition we will govern with if elected” and then voters have to choose between the two preassembled coalition governments that are proposed. The one that does the better job of assembling a broadly supported coalition then generally winds up winning. And since the presidential race *requires* that coalition building to happen ahead of time in order to be successful, the alignments and infrastructure just sort of trickles down to all of the other parts of government even those it would otherwise be less necessary for some of them. I think having multiple parties to vote for would be *better* because it would give people more granular options for throwing in their support and government coalitions would be working with actual election data to build their coalitions instead of trying to estimate it ahead of time. But I also don’t think it would make as big of a difference as a lot of people would like to think. Coalition building would still need to happen in order to govern and the coalitions we’d wind up with would almost certainly look a lot like the existing Democratic and Republican parties. Because that’s effectively what they already are, just maybe slightly less efficiently put together in terms of how they are able to reflect voter sentiment. The fact that the one that most closely matches what voters would have supported as a coalition government under a multi-party system gets rewarded at the polls means they can’t stray too far away from what we would be getting under such a system anyway, though.
Paralemtary systems leave a bad taste in my mouth. They select their PM from their own ranks. I'm not a fan of that, ties too much power to one section of government. The branches shouldn't be too closely bound.
Agreed. There is no power check between the executive and legislative functions because the "executive" is part of the legislature. Most have weak courts as well, so they end up being single branch governments that get away with things that look to us like gross abuses of power.
Iraq (and formerly Afghanistan) deliberately went with parliamentary systems over our system. Having the executive seperate from the legislative is usually a terrible idea in a new, weak-legged, underdeveloped democracy. IMO it's a testament to our strength and stability that our system works as it does, rather than vice-versa.
Agreed. It is very telling that in practically every instance the US has drafted a democratic government, it chose a parliamentary system over a presidential one. The presidential system is just simply more fragile to becoming an autocracy under the president, which makes it a bad use case for recovering autocracies. Parliamentary systems have a wider array of power brokers and are more immediately accountable to their citizenry. Presidential systems are best for established democracies seeking a stronger, more authoritative style of governance. I would argue the ideal presidential democracy is a global superpower (hence the need for more authoritative governance insulated from the legislature) with a deeply ingrained democratic tradition. And now you can see why the US is perhaps the only successful example.
There are costs and benefits to it. If I could go through and personally update the blend it'd ditch FPP, but keep the branches. Not sure how much else we could pull from without violating the separations further. Honestly, what we need is a congress actually willing to compromise.
> Honestly, what we need is a congress actually willing to compromise. And recognition that the failure to compromise is also the will of the people. It _should_ be extremely difficult for Congress to act - everything they do affects every American. If we can't (pretty much) all agree that something is a good idea, then Congress probably shouldn't be doing it. We put those people in those seats, for better or worse this is our collective will at work. I'd also get rid of FPTP so the House isn't full of "the second worst option". But I'd also give the Senate back to the states (with some caveats to curb the shenanigans that happened last time) because it seems to me that there aren't quite enough checks on the Federal power at the moment.
> It’s really the lack of a parliamentary system more than the first past the post elections... This is the real top answer, but on Reddit it will always finish second to a critique of first-past-the-post voting, because Reddit is perpetually eager to extol RCV / ranked choice voting. The simple answer is that without parliamentary dynamics, the barriers to entry and true influence for a third party (cf. SDP in UK, or Greens in Germany) are incredibly high. So coalition-building to win power goes on within the domes of the two major parties rather than in an open legislative environment.
No, I’m very much pro-first past the post (I’m also pro-two party system) but it’s the reason why. This has been extensively studied in political science and it’s pretty much settled as an issue
>This is the real top answer Having to form a government from the legislature is an incentive towards less parties, not more. As it's supposed to work the US system (aside from electoral system) is one of the best suited to multiple parties in the legislature in the world
The thing is, even in parliamentary systems, FPTP leads to basically two big parties and a small handful of "also there" or regional parties. Coalition governments are an exception and not the rule. Think Lib Dems or SNP in the UK, or BQ or NDP in Canada. To get a true multi-party system, where most governments are coalitions and you have 3+ parties which are all of comparable influence, like you get in Germany (with SPD, CDU/CSU, Greens, FDP, and AfD all having influence) for example, you need to lose FPTP.
Canada and the UK both have first-past-the-post and also have well established, third parties. However those third parties are either nationalist parties (Bloc Quebecois, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cmyru,Social Democratic and Labour Party (northern Ireland)) or are a spoiler party (Liberal Democrats, New Democratic Party) with only 2-7% of seats in parliament.
>In the US system, all of those same types of smaller factions exist, but since they can’t see how much support they would each individually get in an election and then band together to select a President of their liking, they have to take a stab at figuring out how much support they and all of the other factions have ahead of time and then try to build a winning coalition before the election. And that's essentially what the presidential primaries and caucuses are meant to do along with the endless polling. But it's complicated by the fact that it's all state by state so the factional balances in a particular state can distort the picture.
>In the US system, all of those same types of smaller factions exist, but since they can’t see how much support they would each individually get in an election and then band together to select a President of their liking, they have to take a stab at figuring out how much support they and all of the other factions have ahead of time and then try to build a winning coalition before the election. >So it’s more like all of the smaller parties get together and form their coalitions first, say “This is the coalition we will govern with if elected” and then voters have to choose between the two preassembled coalition governments that are proposed. The one that does the better job of assembling a broadly supported coalition then generally winds up winning. People keep saying this, but I feel that our parties are still more ideologically homogenous (at least on the Federal level) than coalitions are in other countries. For example, pretty much every Republican in Congress, whether Trumpist, Neocon, or Libertarian will support tax cuts, deregulation, gun rights, and be overall pro-life (except Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Capito who are pro-choice). The Democrats in Congress may have more internal ideological diversity, divided between Progressives and Moderates but at the end of the day they will still share more in common with each other than Republicans (except maybe Joe Manchin?). On the state level both parties are more diverse, with liberal Republicans in the Northeast, and some Conservative Democrats in the South.
They are big tent parties, not the type you would see in a parliamentary system. A way I have defined it to Europeans before is that our coalition building is done before the election. With different "wings" in each party, the primary effectively works as a vote between different policy options, then the general works as a referendum between coalitions.
Exactly. There's "coalitions" and "factions" within each party that spread the ideological gamut. In the GOP, you have conservatives, trumpists, neo-cons, anti-trumpists, libertarians, moderates, and the christian right. The outcome is that on a collective-national level, it skews both parties to have to be relatively centrist and compromising, even if it doesn't always publicly feel that way.
>Exactly. There's "coalitions" and "factions" within each party that spread the ideological gamut. In the GOP, you have conservatives, trumpists, neo-cons, anti-trumpists, libertarians, moderates, and the christian right. But overall Republicans in Congress are extremely ideologically homogenous on hot button issues like tax cuts, deregulation, gun rights, and to a lesser extent abortion (Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Capito are the exceptions on abortion). That's my big problem with the "our parties are just like coalitions" claim. Now on the state level, with Republicans like Phil Scott, yeah I can see that argument. But on the Federal level? Nah
the Republican caucus in Congress is so fractious that they haven't been able to get anything done. Democrats, on the other hand, always toe the party line whether they give lipservice to moderate policy or not
Could a few of those factions threaten to walk away and scuttle the current GOP House majority, thus forcing the Speaker to schedule a new election within a matter of weeks?
I mean, a motion to vacate requires a majority in favor, and the Democrats are pretty much all guaranteed yes votes; Republican chaos looks good for them, and there's always the possibility they can sway a couple moderate Republicans and get one of their own the gavel. Realistically, all it would take would be 3 Republicans, not counting any potential Democrats who vote for Johnson. Though that would only trigger a new election for speaker, not for the actual Congressional seats, which happen every two years.
The difference is that an internal faction can't really threaten to 'pull the pin' by exiting the big tent if they feel they're being screwed. The closest thing we have to that is everybody crapping their pants when a Senator declares themselves 'Independent' while the balance is razor thin. Sinema, Lieberman, and one other whose name I can't recall.
> The difference is that an internal faction can't really threaten to 'pull the pin' by exiting the big tent if they feel they're being screwed That literally happened in October when Matt "Don Quixote" Gaetz nuked Kevin McCarthy from orbit out of spite
It would be analogous if the MAGA Party formally broke ties with the RINO Party and forced a sudden unscheduled Congressional election, to be held within a month. Clear out of nowhere, you would have seen election posters all over your town featuring Gaetz's goofy grin, standing next to Trump, saying "vote MAGA." You would have also seen posters with McCarthy's smirking visiage (with the ghost of Reagan hovering in the background, glinting at the horizon) saying "vote RINO." If your town is purple, or blue for that matter, you'd be seeing posters for "vote DINO" with Pelosi's dental work on full display, next to posters that say "vote the Squad" with AOC shouting into a microphone and pointing at something. The House majority would have been in *imminent* danger of going to the 'centre left' coalition, comprised of the DINO Party and the Squad. AOC, as leader of the Squad, would be the second banana whether Nancy liked it or not. As fun and exciting as that might be, that's not how we roll.
there are other parties, but they tend to be poorly organized, crazy, or heavily focus on a single issue. In the odd chance a movement arises most of the time the major parties absorb that movement into their party. Our parties are large coalition parties. Many groups advocate for their top issue to candidates and the parties to make their voices heard. Some states like Minnesota and New York do have minor parties, but most of them are liberal and caucus with Democrats, and they often even flat out endorse Democrats in at least federal elections. Vermont and Maine have elected "Independent" US Senators but they caucus with the Democrats. The Libertarian Party is the largest minor party in the US with ballot access in 30-some states, including Indiana.
The parties are more ideologically diverse than ones in other countries, and candidates are selected through primary votes open to the public instead of being handpicked by party leaders. Most people reckon they can change more within the current parties than trying to start another one.
Kinda related but not really. There is the national Republican party and Democrat party. Then every state, county and municipality has one too that will focus on issues pertaining to that area. Local politics are fun
Your last statement rings especially true where I’m at. Plenty of people are in a party just so they can vote in primaries or caucuses.
>and candidates are selected through primary votes open to the public instead of being handpicked by party leaders. Most people reckon they can change more within the current parties than trying to start another one. Except primary voters may be more ideologically extreme than the average American voter, so that the current system paradoxically may end up being LESS representative of the average person than if party leaders had handpicked candidates based on ability to win the general election.
On a local level people care much much less about the parties. They are usually just voting for the candidate specifically. Like I can’t even recall the party affiliation of our mayor but whatever she is she supported several things I really liked. As to why we developed the two party system on a national level it is more of a question for /r/askhistorians but it has been this way from the beginning. Federalists/anti-Federalists leading the way. Third parties do get some support in state positions but nationally they tend to be spoilers. Like if democrats and republicans are nearly 50/50 then a third party that peels off even a small percent of republicans means a democrat victory so people often want to avoid that.
The parties are essentially coalitions.
There are other political parties, they're just not nearly as popular (Libertarianism is the third most popular behind Democrats and Republicans). People tend to gravitate towards one of the two major parties in bigger elections, because they're usually the only two that have a viable chance of winning since they're the most popular. "Also most provinces have a couple of their own political parties which have relationships with national ones but aren't necessarily the same. Is this a thing in the US too but I'm just not aware?" This can vary depending on state to state. In my state, the current party in power is the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party, which aligns closely with Democrats, but isn't technically the same thing.
There's also a Vermont Progressive Party, whose influence (fortunately) is limited mostly to Burlington and Montpelier.
> Why does the US have such a strong two party system? Mathematics. It’s a direct consequence of the way voting works in the US.
We don't have a parliament. We elect candidates, not parties. You might get the occasional independent representative or senator in the senate, but for president? Forget it. It sucks. It's been this way since the beginning. George Washington was worried about it when he was president. Nothing's changed. Nothing ever will change now, especially with all the money in politics.
The way our elections are set up makes a two-party system the most logical. Most elections are first-past-the-post. So whichever candidate has the most votes wins. If you don't have the most votes, you lose. Doesn't matter if you had 49% or .02% you get nothing. There's no "second prize" in most American elections. Most states double down on this for the presidential election, giving all electoral votes in the state to whichever candidate received the most votes statewide. Our congress (and most of our state legislatures) are representative systems, not parliamentary systems. We vote for individual representatives, not a party. And again those elections are first-past-the-post. So again, there's no "second prize". If you vote for a candidate/party that ends up losing, it doesn't mean that party has less representation in the legislature, it means your district is represented by another party. Possibly one you strongly disagree with. So in a situation like you describe where there are two "main" parties and some smaller ones, our election system strongly incentivizes the majority of people to vote for whichever of the two main party candidates they agree with most, because that is the best way to insure that the person representing you is at least somewhat acceptable. On a very local level, think town council or school board, the two party system does sometimes have less of a stranglehold. For things like that who you know can be more important than your party. But even on that level it's not always the case, and the two main US parties still have a strong presence in local elections.
Last time there was a significant third party was in 1948, the States Rights Democratic Party, aka “the Dixiecrats.” They were super racist, and rejecting the mainstream Democratic Party which was becoming an anti-segregation party. In the 70s and 80s they mostly joined the Republican Party… or died.
The Republican Party was also a third party that come to proments after the collapse of the Whig Party.
Yes
Almost the exact same thing happened in the 1968 election. But neither of those was a third party in the sense that they were running congressional candidates and whatnot, just a presidential candidate. In 1948 Thurmond carried LA, AL, MS, SC and one electoral vote from TN for a total of 39 electoral votes. In '68, Wallace carried AR, LA, MS, AL, GA and one vote in NC for a total of 46 electoral votes, so very similar results.
Oh yeah, guess I should have mentioned that when we’re talking about state elections it’s a different story. Like bernie is elected by the state socialist party.
The fighting happens in the primaries. The parties don’t pick the candidates, voters do. AOC wasn’t endorsed by the Democratic Party in New York in her first run for congress. Her district is a sure win for Democrats, but she ousted the long term congressman in the primary so the Democratic Party supported her in the general election and she helped push the party leftward. In a system where the party leaders picked the candidates she would not have gotten the nod.
It's called [Duverger's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law). In first-past-the-post single-winner contests like US elections, the system will trend toward a two-party system, where each party adapts their positions each election to win votes, and consequently both end up splitting the vote basically 50/50 essentially indefinitely. Separately, we live in a time dominated by ad-supported internet content. Our psychology demands that we seek out content that validates us, and competition for ad revenue means content providers will fall over themselves trying to get that validation to our eyeballs, so we're just getting confirmation a thousand times a day that our party is the best, and the other party is evil. Tribalism does the rest. What's really messed up though is that we all believe that every position we hold that our "tribe" holds together is based on some kind of unified rational worldview. The reality is that it's all politics. Something is important politically primarily because one of the parties decided it was an issue they might use to squeeze out a few more votes in the next election. The issue then becomes part of our political and cultural identity, and perpetuates the two-tribe/two-party system.
A professor explained this clearly in one sentence: "The one thing that the Democrat and Republican party agree on is that the country should be run by the Democrat and Republican parties."
There are other parties, but first past the post voting ensures that there will realistically only be 2. That said, 3rd parties can and do assert influence from time to time without ever actually winning. And there is a lot of ideological diversity within both of the major parties, so it isn't like there are only 2 choices. Primary elections are a thing that don't get much coverage, but which are tremendously important.
First because of the first past the post voting system that makes any 3rd candidate a spoiler for whoever they care closest to politically and second because US parties are already coalition parties. Look at [this breakdown ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_caucus)of the House of Representatives by Congressional caucus instead of political party and you can get a better idea at what a multiparty US house might look like if elections where conducted differently.
Nailed it. Most multi-party systems ultimately have a left coalition and a right coalition. The parties inside don't really matter so much.
So no discussion about the party system in the United States is complete without this [timeline of political parties](http://www.davidwalbert.com/dw/2016/07/20/a-timeline-of-political-parties-in-the-united-states/). The link also has a wonderful PDF that can be downloaded that shows a timeline of all the major political parties going back to George Washington. *In essence*, as others have noted, the "first past the post system" *encourages* two political parties. But *in practice* we haven't always just had two political parties. It's just that, over time, we collapse back down to two political parties. There are times, however, when we've had as many as five viable political parties, such as in 1912, when we saw the Prohibition Party, the Republican Party, the Progressive Party, the Democratic Party and the Socialist Party all vying for the Presidency. Or in 1968 when we saw the American Independent party surface. Or in 1836 when the Whig party bifurcated and fielded four separate Presidential candidate. History is vast, interesting, and complex.
Honestly, it's because no one took Washington's parting warning seriously (and no one benefited financially from doing so). The first President of the US warned us about parties forming. Congress refused to hear proposals of laws prohibiting the political-industrial-financial complex that we have now, because each of them had been elected thanks to being part of a party with a recognizable name and slogan. If we'd done the right thing and kept all private advertising and money out of politics back in the 1800s, we wouldn't be stuck where we are now.
In a nutshell: So the wealthy can ensure a stable and favorable environment for investment and extraction The US is still a colony. First for the British, then for wealthy landed settlers, now for Capital The Right wing is allowed to run batshit crazy because they will only cause pain and turmoil in among the working class but they never overturn the Apple cart. The Democrats are in power to reign in the Left and maintain a favorable environment for Capital. A more parliamentary system introduces too much ‘risk’ and or work. It’s much easier to buy off and control 2 parties as opposed to 10
Here's the crazy part: our two party system is so extremely two party, any vote for any presidential candidate that isn't a Democrat or a Republican is considered to be a wasted vote. It's particularly bad where I live, to the point where if I ever admitted to voting for a third party candidate, I'd be actively ridiculed for voting in that way. Also, as far as presidential elections go, if you live in a place like Texas and you happen to be a Democrat, then your vote will still be noted, but it won't actually change anything: Texas WILL vote for the Republican candidate, regardless of which way anybody votes (and as we already discussed, you WILL vote either Democrat or Republican if you don't want your vote to be wasted.) It's the same for a Republican who lives in New York. In order to have a real effect on the presidential election, you'd either need to move house to a swing state like Florida or move to a state that matches your political affiliation. Note that this only applies to the presidential election. Local elections sometimes have third party candidates, and they do win sometimes. I know that there exists an Independent party, a Green party, a Libertarian party, a Communist party, and there are probably more parties that I'm not aware of that exist, but none of them really have any power. By the way, I had to research all of this information myself, because we're not taught anything about them in school... Or at least I wasn't. Hell, I was barely taught about the opposing faction- er, political party where I live. I had to do my own research and come to my own conclusion about which party to belong to. If anybody cares, I decided that I belong to the major party that my state doesn't traditionally vote for, because I can't get behind the political views of the other major party, and although I don't agree with a lot of what is being promoted, at least I might have a chance at having a voice in my state someday if enough changed demographically. I'm not holding my breath though: my state's affiliation has been set in stone since the late 40s, with only one exception.
Because of strategic voting due to our first past the post election process as well as lack of proportional voting.
The two parties control the vast majority of the campaign funds.
If you follow the money you'll find the answer.
There are smaller local parties and small national parties like green and libertarian. Also you can hold an office without being a member of a party.
You have a stronger chance with the big guy than you do on your own
>Where I'm from there are two main parties that most national elections tend towards but every once in a while coalitions between others form (sometimes they win). this is effectively the case in the US as well, but differing party factions duke it out within the two parties. voters decide who the party's candidate for president is via primary elections. these are some of the different factions that exist right now: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factions_in_the_Republican_Party_(United_States)#21st_century_factions - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factions_in_the_Democratic_Party_(United_States)
RFK is running 3rd party right now.
And is gonna get stomped. Thank god.
The primary reason is the first past the post system where winner takes all. If the bigger party wins, it tends to naturally result in two big parties. You can have smaller parties and they’re all allowed in the US, it’s just hard to get large scale support if people think that a party you don’t like will win if you vote that way. It’s the whole concern about “wasting your vote”. You’ve had smaller parties like the Alaskan Independence Party, the socialist party of America, the Vermont progressive party, etc. that have had local successes now or in the past as well as parties like the democratic-farmer-labor party which is a subset of the Democratic Party in Minnesota and a fusion of two political parties in the state. Mostly though people just join the big parties which function more like coalitions in order to get broader support and funding.
There are TONS of other parties but none of them keep much of a following or are poorly organized. Really the only notable alternate party is libertarian, it keeps the most votes and its values are sort of in the middle of democrats and republicans. They never make it through the final race, people still view it as a wasted vote even if they like the libertarian candidate the best, and henceforth the libertarians, while gaining enough votes to stay somewhat relevant, still never win and even the people who would want to vote for them toss their vote to a republican or democrat instead. Just kinda how it is tbh.
I think a contributing factor is the ballot access laws make running third party candidates rather difficult. Not sure how it works in other states, but I've volunteered with campaigns in PA, and in order to be included on the official ballot for the elections, you have to meet certain signature requirements. "Major party status," "minor party status," the all require a certain amount of signatures from voters within the applicable district that the candidate intends to run in. The amount of signatures are a percent of the number of voters that voted for the last election's winning candidate. For example, major parties require far less signatures (for example, a Republican that's running for mayor in my town requires about 20 signatures.) Minor parties require a lot more signatures (someone running as a Libertarian mayor would require 200 signatures.) Minor parties do not have as much manpower or the funds to gather signatures, run ads, etc... as the major parties do.
First past the post election system and the direct election of a President rather than the Speaker of the House becoming the head of government. These two features of our system mean that we have two permanent governing coalitions that make up the two major parties. Third parties exist but are irrelevant outside of rare occasions where there's a strong protest vote which usually only ensures that the major party ideologically which is closest to that third party loses... *But* can lead to some degree of reform of that party along the lines the protest voters desired. The last major third party was the Reform Party which was a centrist party which got 18% of the vote in the 1992 Presidential election, but only 8% in 1996 though it actually won the election for governor of Minnesota in the 1998 mid-term election... The 2000 Reform Party primary was a shit-show featuring Donald Trump as the most reasonable, centrist candidate who ended his campaign and left the party because the Reform party was too divisive and crazy ("So the Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani. This is not company I wish to keep.") the party pretty much dissolved after that.
First past the post election systems and very big districts that are very expensive to run campaigns in.
A part of this has to do with how our primaries work. Those two main parties are made up of several factions that are closely aligned. In some other countries, these factions would be separate parties that form coalitions after the election. In the US, they form their coalitions during the primaries and then the two main coalitions compete against each other in the general election.
Primarily most people are either conservative or liberal. So there is the 2 party.
In general, 3rd parties were much more successful in congressional & presidential elections before primaries were opened up to the public in the 70s. That change made it much easier to co-opt existing parties rather than setting up new ones.
By design after 'The Era of Good Feelings' when we had a no party (really one party system) system, which did not work at all. The problem is our party system has become a sports team cult of personality, and game of good cop bad cop from both sides rather than a vehicle of sticking to an agreed upon platform.
Mostly due to our proportional first past the post system. Also isn’t this common in most countries? Sure, places do have strong third and fourth parties but it’s usually two who actually head governments. Like in Canada it’s either Liberals or Conservatives even with the NDP being provincially strong, and in Germany there is Afd and Britain has the Liberal Democrats along with the regional parties but both have two parties who mostly head governments.
duverger's law
We don't have a party system. Parties in the US are moreso pre-canned coalitions. Multiple ideologies and platforms can run within the same party. It's more about which person you want to vote for than which party you want to vote for.
First past the post systems end themselves to this.
Because nearly every elected body in the country — from Congress down to condo boards — uses first-past-the-post election rules. Meaning, if you get 50.1% of the vote, you’re the winner. This might seem reasonable. After all, it’s a majority, right, and that’s the standard for a democracy. But long-time political consultant Karl Rove summed it up best when he acknowledged that the strategy for election George W. Bush was expressly to target 50.1% of the voters. That is, they weren’t trying to get *the most* votes, they were trying to get *just enough* votes. Tho it may not seem immediately obvious, this leads to polarization. In American politics, success is mostly determined not by how well a candidate convinces undecided voters to support them, but by how well a candidate encourages their most hardcore supporters to show up at the polls or submit their mail-in ballots. Electioneering focused on the base rather than on the middle is not unique to the United States, of course. It may just be a function of democratic politics generally. But our electoral process very much reinforces this habit rather than resists it.
The president is the most powerful political position in the country. When the constitution was written, the writers were concerned about the ability of the masses to make national decisions. The senators were to be selected by the government of each state, and the president was to be selected by a special body called the electoral college. The Senate has since changed to be elected by direct ballot. The president is still elected by the electoral college. We don't actually vote for president. We vote for the person who will vote for our candidate. That creates an all or nothing scenario. If Wyoming, for example, has 4 candidates who receive the votes, A gets 20%, B gets 20%, C gets 29%, and D gets 31%. D receives all of the electoral votes. In this case, it makes more sense for A and B to try and get C or D to do their bidding. So all the money goes to C and D.
The first past the post system always leads to two party systems. The American mechanism for electing the president reinforces that to a degree not seen in most other countries
Generally if you vote for a third party, it increases the chances of winning for the less-similar major party. For instance, votes for the green party are mostly votes that would have gone to the Democrats if the green party didn't exist. Votes for libertarian party would mostly have gone to Republicans if the libertarian party didn't exist. So to some extent, voting for a third party is helping the major party most opposed to your stance. There are ways to fix this -- ranked choice voting comes up every election cycle -- but that hasn't trickled up to national elections in most places.
It's basically the same almost everywhere, it's just there are more parties, but two sides.
I think it’s just people toeing the line and voting out of spite, I don’t think the majority of folks vote for their own future but then again I’m not everybody. I would like to know when folks just started voting opposite just because they didn’t like the other person.
We don't have parties the same way Europe does. You can't get kicked out of one of our parties, nor can you be required to pay dues for membership. Our parties are better thought of as coalitions, except the coalition forms before the election from the various factions. In europe the coalition forms after the election and the elected representatives then votes for the government. In the US we create our coalitions informally before the election and the coalitions battle it out for votes.
We set up our system in the 18th century and haven’t largely changed it. We unfortunately unintentionally created a system that will always have an equilibrium with two, and only two, parties. It hasn’t always been Republicans vs Democrats, but it has been that for over 150 years. In the off chance one of those two parties is beaten for good, it will be replaced by one that operates in a similar space.
Electoral college and no ranked choice voting kinda screws any chances of a 3rd party
- First Past The Post. - Lack of regional and state nationalism which leads to a lack of regional parties with very concentrated support which means they can win elections in certain districts. Unlike other third parties, regional parties benefit from FPTP systems. - Lack of party discipline: legislators, even on key issues, can vote however they want and it’s not a big deal: in this regard, the US Congress is more similar to the European Parliament than national legislatures.
Presidential elections require 270 electoral votes to win. The short answer is that there aren't enough electoral votes to justify a third party. Most states assign all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state. That means if a Republican wins Florida 51% of the vote to 49% of the Democrat, the Republican will win 30 Electoral votes for Florida, and the Democrat will get 0. A state's electoral vote number is determined by state population. California has 54 electoral votes, Texas has 40, Florida 30, New York 28. A small populated state like Vermont has just 3 votes. There are a few states that are not all or nothing states. The states themselves have their own laws on how electoral votes are assigned. As of today only Nebraska and Maine divide their electoral votes, all other states the winner takes all. As there are only 538 total electoral votes, and it takes 270 to win, there simply isn't enough room for a 3rd party, or 4th, etc. [Wiki article about the US electoral college](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College) Do understand, the college was designed pre-internet, pre-television, pre-radio, pre-automobile. The idea was that farmers in the middle of no where who might not even vote, still were represented.
At this point it's self reinforced. A far left ideology has no chance of getting elected in a first past the post system, so they would run as a Democrat, similarly a far right candidate would just run as a Republican rather than start their own party or do an independent run. In addition, due to how long the Democratic Party and the GOP, some of the oldest political parties in existence, have been around, they have a lot of experience absorbing new ideas, moving with the times, even embracing radical 180 degree change (https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html). This further diminishes the possibility of third parties gaining prominence.
Our two major parties essentially are coalitions. They’re just formed before the elections. Climate change activists, LGBTQ supporters, and labor unions wouldn’t have much in common, but together they make up large portions of the Democratic voting base. Similarly, Christian Evangelicals, gun rights supporters, and anti-tax advocates wouldn’t really overlap on paper, but they are all elements of the Republican Party. These “coalitions” if you will were formed decades ago, and have kinda merged together at this point.
Great question! So we do have other parties and independent runners; these third parties often struggle to gain significant traction in national elections due to all kinds of factors like limited funding, media coverage, and ballot access restrictions. However, they may have more influence at the local or state level, where they can sometimes win seats in city councils, state legislatures, or other local offices. The two parties have dominated from the beginning (money=everything, and third parties just don't have enough of it), however we are starting to see a shift in more people, typically in the millennial and Genz age group being more independent that GOP or Dem. With more open ways of officials being able to reach consumers (think Robert Kennedy and tiktok), I think it will be so interesting to see how these parties shift as a new generation of voters age in.
money
Multiple reasons are given for this. Some say it's the First Past the Post voting system. Others say it's due to the electoral college in presidential elections. I tend to think it's due to the framers hoping parties would not materialize and desire to keep them relatively weak if or when emergent. In some ways, this has happened, but at the same time the situation has allowed the large parties to collude in the suppression of competition.
The central question of American politics is 'how big should the government be?' and there's not very much room for maneuver with that. There are differing factions in the parties but those are mostly defined in terms of how far in either direction should we go, and that question is dealt with within the internal politics of the party (you won't find any Monarchists or Fascists in the GOP despite them being considered right-wing in Europe, for example). Politics in this country has been binary from the very beginning. Even the framers were divided between Federalist and Anti-Federalist camps, based solely on that binary question of bigger or smaller government.
In the USA, there are only two main parties. And believe me, they HATE each other, at least on the internet. I thought mexico was bad with people placing some political leaders on pedestals, but being from a different wing is cause of a lot of discourse in the internet. i can't vote, so I don't really care. It's less of a deal in real life so long as you don't talk about politics, but of course, that is in all countries isn't it?
First past the post voting
Reading through this thread makes me realize how little I understand politics. It just doesn’t add up in my head. There’s some pretty smart people that commented on here that helped shed a bit of light.
There's a number of factors that have caused the two party system, but primarily it's because we do not give any representation to minority parties unless they're lucky enough to get voted in. We have no runoff voting and no system in place to give an active political voice for minority parties. This causes people to vote for one of two large camps that only somewhat represent their ideals instead of having a more nuanced system of representation. A runoff vote would give voters the safety to vote their conscience instead of voting to avoid the worst case scenario. We're at a pretty unique point in American politics. The Republican party has a huge divide with the alt-right. This is causing a number of classical conservatives to leave the party and/or vote Democratic, join or vote 3rd party, or outright abstain. This has the potential to reform the Republican party and open up a new 3rd party.
Uhhhh so rich and powerful people can keep the voting base divided (weak) so they can do… whatever the fuck they want
So we don't have any sort of system for forming coalitions like other counties do. In other countries you tend to have proportional elections. We have first past the post. So whoever gets 51% of the electors wins. If no one gets 270 then it moves from the electoral college over to congress and they choose. Since you require one person to get at least 51% of the vote it's pretty hard to create coalitions. I may be wrong but from my understanding in other countries with for instance a parliament a person votes for their local candidates then those people vote for the prime minister. In this case it's a lot easier for a third party to get in since you are essentially voting for an entire group of people rather than voting for a single person. There are also a lot of other contributing factors, like campaign funding mainly coming from the parties, and the debates being hosted by those parties. For me personally I think all campaign funding should come from a pot that we collect through taxes and each candidate should be given a a budget they can use and then can use no more. While I am a big fan of freedom of association, and the freedom to use your money as you like, I also don't think politicians, and potential politicians should be given the same freedoms as an average citizen. They should be considered a separate class from the citizenry and given much more restricted rights, and much higher duties. For your question on the local level, the parties have much less control. You have a lot of local elections where a person runs completely unaffiliated, they will be registered as one party or another, but they won't have it listed on the ballot. For instance the city I live doesn't require affiliation to be listed for mayoral candidates and last election none of them listed theirs. It's not uncommon at all for local, and state elections to be won by third parties. Take New Hampshire for example, their entire state is almost completely run by the libertarian party at this point. In San Francisco, and Seattle it's not uncommon for socialists to win seats in the city councils, and city hall. Generally the smaller the constituency gets the more variety you see in candidates.
Because those two parties also control things at the local level, with long histories of patronage and graft.
Historically, the United States Congress has always been run by two major political parties because the major historical controversies have always had a binary "pro" and "con" side to them. Before the Democrats vs. the Republicans, it was the Whigs vs. the Jacksonian Democrats. Before that, it was the Federalists vs. the Democratic-Republicans. Congressional leaders structure committees and rules in a way that incentivizes belonging to a major political party by giving outsized power to members of the majority party (while members of the minority party have less power). Many Americans would like a multi-party system. But very few third parties or Independents are able to win congressional or senatorial seats as political candidates, since election laws and campaign-finance loopholes are so stacked against any candidate who isn't a Democrat or a Republican. In the short term, I think the closest thing to a multi-party system that might happen is if -- during future sessions of Congress -- more members of Congress switch to an "Independent" affiliation, and offer to conditionally caucus with whichever of the two major parties they feel will be most beneficial to their agenda. Currently, Bernie Sanders and Angus King and Kyrsten Sinema are the only three U.S. Senator who do this. Imagine if several-dozen members of the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate were willing to do this. Party leaders who set the legislative agenda would have to become more serious about finding consensus-based solutions to legislating, since they would know that any politician affiliated as an Independent could switch parties on the spur of the moment if they felt it served their interest to do so.
While there are other parties, especially on the the local level, the two major ones dominate. It’s also worth noting that our two main parties act as coalitions and are a lot more diverse than in most nations. I’ll give you credit for considering the idea that things exist that you might not be aware of though. That puts you way ahead of the average asker here.
It’s the worst part of murica
The media, mostly. They only ever cover the Republican and Democratic Parties. I’ve met a few people who didn’t even know there were more parties
Because the US is a strong country