U.S. Versus: The Two Party System

Americans often take issue with our two-party system. So what other options are out there? Today, with the help of political scientists Guillermo Rosas and Robin Best, we explore the reason why we have (and may always have) such a system, and compare it to other democracies around the world. This episode contains an overabundance of Street Fighter 2 references. INCOGNI DEAL: They can't harm you, if they can't find you! To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to ⁠incogni.com/CIVICS⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nick Capodice?

  Do you remember the 21st night of September? Love that song. Love that song. But anyways, it is still September. Everybody's going back to school. So we at Civics 101 are hitting up the episodes that teachers in the US use in classrooms more than any others. And today's a big one. One of the questions we get asked most often. Why do we have a two-party system in the United States? Why are we fated to always have exactly two parties fighting like Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbosa until the end of time? Or Will Turner drops a bloody coin on a pile? Don't other democracies out there have more than two parties?

• 0:45Nick Capodice?

  How do they get away with it? And finally, and this is truly up to you to decide. Are places that have more than two parties also more small d democratic than we are? It's up to you. It's an us versus today. How does the US fare against other democracies around the world? And it's specifically us versus the two-party system. Stick around.

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• 2:37Nick Capodice?

  You watch enough political speeches, Hannah, and it gets to the point you don't even hear it anymore.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  But don't let anyone tell you that America isn't great.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  I think we have to get back to what this election has to be about. Okay, this is the greatest country in the history of mankind.

• 2:57Speaker 06

  Instead, I tell this story just to remind you of the magical intoxicating power of America.

• 3:08Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

• 3:10Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 3:11Nick Capodice?

  And today we are asking how we measure up against the rest of the world. It seems Hannah, every few weeks we come up with another series on our show. But this is one I desperately want to revisit. It's called us versus, or US versus, where we compare other successful, or sometimes unsuccessful governmental systems to our own. And today, something we get asked about constantly, the two-party system. Why do we have it? Can it change? And most importantly, how does our system compare to other democracies? And yeah, I'm doing like a whole Street Fighter II thing. This is the opening music to that, by the way.

• 3:50Hannah McCarthy?

  What does Street Fighter do?

• 3:52Nick Capodice?

  It's a violent lesson in democracy, Hannah. Players pick a fighter who lives in a country somewhere in the world, and they fly around the world visiting other countries and do battle with other fighters there.

• 4:02Hannah McCarthy?

  So it's an arcade game?

• 4:03Nick Capodice?

  It's an arcade game.

• 4:05Nick Capodice?

  And right off the bat, I have to say, that is ridiculous. There is no M. Bison to defeat at the end of this episode. But I do want to say one thing, Hannah. It's a fast, personal anecdote. Did I ever tell you about the play that I was in in New York that was really bad?

• 4:23Hannah McCarthy?

  From what I understand, you're in a lot of really bad plays.

• 4:25Nick Capodice?

  That's fair. This one was one of the worst. And I'm not going to name the director. But I was having a tough time in rehearsal one night because I didn't like any of the choices they were making. And I was upset. And a friend of mine said, Nick, no matter how bad you think a director is, they've got a better seat than you. And I'm never going to forget that.

• 4:46Hannah McCarthy?

  Meaning you can't accurately critique your own performance because you're you.

• 4:50Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Hannah McCarthy?

  So to take that lesson to heart for civics, it's hard to study American governmental systems when you're in them. You're basically on stage.

• 4:59Nick Capodice?

  Right. So first, I'm going to explain why we have a two-party system. But then we'll talk about the pros, cons, and how other democracies do it.

• 5:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Hold on a second, Nick. I can hear the gathering of pitchforks. There are other parties in the United States.

• 5:15Nick Capodice?

  There are. There are many other parties. Keep the pitchforks in the barn. But I will say, as of this recording, December 2021, every member of the House of Representatives is a Republican or a Democrat. And in the Senate, there are two independents, but they always caucus with the Democratic Party. Of the 7,383 seats in state legislatures, only 25 of them are held by members of other parties.

• 5:40Hannah McCarthy?

  So while there are other parties, we are known internationally as a country that has a two-party system.

• 5:48Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and to continue on that thread, to put us in the us versus frame of mind, I talked to a specialist in that, in comparative politics. Guillermo Rosas, he teaches at Washington University at St. Louis.

• 6:01Speaker 07

  Comparative politics basically uses the comparative method to say meaningful things about politics in general. And here, the emphasis is in using the domestic politics of different countries as data points, as observations that we can leverage to make general claims about political phenomena in general.

• 6:24Nick Capodice?

  Guillermo told me that his students get very animated when he teaches the two-party system because they are frustrated.

• 6:32Speaker 07

  It's not that they are pathetic, but they certainly feel alienated oftentimes, right? They see two options nowadays. It used to be, because I'm old enough to have had students that are now in their 30s or 40s, there was a time when, you know, people complained that the parties were too similar. So there was no real option.

• 6:53Hannah McCarthy?

  When in modern history were the parties considered too similar?

• 6:59Nick Capodice?

  After World War II, there was this era of political post-war consensus where policy had very little to do with whether you had a D or an R next to your name. Most of the bills that passed in the 1950s and 60s were with bipartisan support. And voters expressed frustration with the fuzziness of the two parties. They didn't know who to hold accountable or what it was their representatives even stood for.

• 7:27Speaker 07

  Now, that's not a complaint, right? The complaint now is that there's certainly a lot of difference in the platforms of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. But that they feel too far away from these parties. That they would like some other option that's closer to them. And that's a common complaint when you have a two-party system. It makes sense, right? Two parties, two options. And of course, these are parties that are going to have to pack a lot of content in their platforms.

• 7:55Hannah McCarthy?

  This is something that I have heard not just from listeners to our show, but guests. I did an episode on independents, and one guest said she considered being an independent to be an act of non-compliance, a political statement of great importance.

• 8:10Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and I get that. We are at a moment right now of severe polarization. And if you told someone where you stood on a hot-button social issue, they could predict the probability of where you stand on 20 other issues that aren't even related to it.

• 8:26Hannah McCarthy?

  So you're saying there's frustration when the two parties are too similar and also when they are too different? Then why do we have it? Is the two-party system in the Constitution?

• 8:36Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, that's a really good question. It is not enshrined anywhere in our founding documents. This is Robin Best, professor of political science at Binghamton University, who also teaches comparative politics. And in fact, there's nothing in the Constitution that says that we have to have either a particular type of electoral system or a particular type of party system. The primary reason why we have a two-party system in the

• 8:58Speaker 04

  The United States is the electoral system that we use for many of our elections and almost all of our national level elections, which is the single-member district plurality method of election. So I think many of our listeners know how we do elections in America, but they might not be familiar with that term. Can we define it?

• 9:18Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. Single-member district plurality method of election, SMP for short, also called first past the post voting. It's a winner-take-all system. It's just how we do it. You live in a geographic district, and in that district, you vote for one elected official, like a senator, congressperson, and the winner is the person with a plurality of votes. We can't say majority, because there are usually more than two people on the ticket. It's usually a plurality. So I'd say the first place gets 40% of the votes, second place gets 30%, and the rest of the votes go to other candidates.

• 9:54Speaker 04

  So whoever wins that district, whichever candidate wins that district, wins the seat and the loser gets absolutely nothing. And what this does is it really focuses political competition between two candidates, but also two political parties. So one political party could conceivably win the district seat, and then there's a political party that kind of comes in second and might be able to overtake the winner the next time around.

• 10:22Nick Capodice?

  But this leaves those parties that came in third or fourth with little to no chance of winning over time.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  And is this why you see candidates leave third parties and join one of these big two?

• 10:34Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. I mean, if you're losing over and over as a Green Party or a Libertarian candidate, chances are you might change your affiliation to a D or an R, so you got a chance. And the same goes for voters, Hannah. If a voter keeps voting for that third party, and they never win anything in this winner-take-all system, they too will start to align with the red or the blue. And it's this combination of systems that creates a law.

• 11:02Speaker 07

  What is the law?

• 11:05Nick Capodice?

  Duverger's Law.

• 11:06Speaker 07

  Duverger is very celebrated and with good reason, as having come up with a statement that, you know, for political scientists, basically has the force of law.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  This is one of the closest things we have to a law in political science, is Duverger's Law. So this was Maurice Duverger, who expressed this relationship between a single-member district plurality method of election and a two-party system. So Duverger's Law is very simply that the single-member district plurality method of election tends to favor a two-party system.

• 11:41Speaker 07

  That is the law. I will not men.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  And it's for precisely the reasons that we've been discussing. So Duverger himself separated the process here into a mechanical effect and then a set of psychological effects.

• 11:58Nick Capodice?

  That law says, as long as we have winner-take-all, single-district plurality voting, it's a pretty sure bet that we'll be in a two-party system.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  But that's not to say that we're going to forever be Democrats and Republicans. We have had a lot of parties over the years.

• 12:13Nick Capodice?

  Oh, we sure have. Should we go through the list, just for old time's sake?

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Maybe we should get you a button that you press that just does classical music and a carriage running down a cobbled street, because it would save you a lot of time.

• 12:23Nick Capodice?

  It's true. George Washington was our only president who wasn't aligned with a party. He hated parties. That man saw a balloon on a mailbox, he would drive right by. He would see them start to form during his administration. But in his farewell address, he excoriated parties. He said, "The spirit of parties, quote, 'serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.'" But they happened right away. We started with the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, and the Anti-Federalists, led by

• 13:07Nick Capodice?

  James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. The Anti-Federalists start to go by the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalists die out around the War of 1812, and the Whigs rise to take their place. The Andrew Jackson-led Democrats come to contend against the Whigs. The Republican Party branches off the Whigs and grows into power to battle the Democrats. And from 1854 to now, it has been two parties, Republicans and Democrats.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  And I have to add, what those parties stood for changed an awful lot over 150 years. We've done episodes on the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, if anyone out there wants the full story on realignment. But I can't help but wonder, is there a possibility of fulfilling George Washington's fantasy? Can we exist without parties at all?

• 13:52Nick Capodice?

  It seems improbable. Guillermo told me about a famed political scientist named Eric Elmer Schatzschneider, who said that contemporary representative democracy is really not even imaginable in the absence of parties.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Why?

• 14:07Speaker 07

  Let me see if I can put this, encapsulate this in a one-minute elevator pitch. I may fail. But the best explanation is that, once you have representatives in Congress, you are selecting people that come from geographically circumscribed territories. So there is, in principle, no reason why people that show up in Congress or in Parliament the first time have some sort of pre-built allegiance to a particular party, right? However, once they, once they show up, they realize that they are going to be there for a while, right? Their terms, their terms vary from two years to three, four, or whenever the next election is, and that they are going to have to be passing laws and building coalitions.

• 14:49Nick Capodice?

  And if you want to succeed, if you want to get laws passed that your constituents love, and don't forget, if you want someone to bankroll your campaign, you align with one of these coalitions. You may not agree with them all the time, but you do most of the time.

• 15:05Speaker 07

  The dirty secret is that politicians themselves know that they are tying their hands when they enter into a party, right? They are tying their hands, and they are oftentimes called to do things that they do not necessarily believe are in their best personal interest. But they trade this off for the opportunity or for the predictability of belonging to a coalition that they understand.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Parties in politics, two parties in America. They are here, and they're here to stay. But is that a good thing or a bad thing?

• 15:40Nick Capodice?

  Well, we'll talk about that, as well as how we measure up to other countries, right after the break. Maybe you're aware of data brokers, maybe you're not. You should be. And as much as I wish that data brokers was just Brett Spiner managing real estate, it is not. Data brokers are out there, thousands of them, and what they're doing is they are collecting every single thing about you that exists on the internet. And they're taking that huge pile of data, and they are selling it to the highest bidder. And unlike Commander data on the USS Enterprise, these guys are up to no good.

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• 19:51Nick Capodice?

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• 20:07Nick Capodice?

  All right, so we got our hands up. They're playing our song. It's Two Parties in the USA.

• 20:12Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, now to the US versus. Do any other countries have a system like ours?

• 20:16Nick Capodice?

  Here's Robin Best again.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  It's really fun to teach American students about comparative politics, because you learn how weird the US is. The US is actually really strange and unique on a number of dimensions. And the two-party system is actually, in this day and age, quite rare as well.

• 20:35Nick Capodice?

  There are a few countries that have a system where the same two parties are vying for seats like us, notably Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Zimbabwe. And there are other countries that vote like we do, but don't have a two-party system.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  Some of the other countries that have, that use single-member district plurality elections, like Canada or the United Kingdom, they have very significant third parties that manage to enter their national legislatures, and we just don't. And one of the reasons why you might think that's the case is you might say that instead of two parties, we actually have 100.

• 21:08Nick Capodice?

  And here is where we are truly one of a kind. Political parties in the US are organized on a state-by-state basis.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  So you could think of the US as having, like, a New York State Democratic Party, and then a Texas Democratic Party, or a New Hampshire Republican Party, and a, you know, Colorado Republican Party, and that you actually get some ideological and strategic differences between the party organizations by state. So the US is actually quite unique in the structure of its party system, not only because it's a two-party system, but again, because these parties are kind of, they're very large, they're umbrella parties. And because of that, they can mask a lot of underlying variations, a lot of which take place at the state level.

• 21:55Hannah McCarthy?

  If the two parties are umbrellas, each encapsulating 50 state parties, I can see true federalism at work. A country where people are frustrated that their Democrat or Republican Party isn't necessarily repped at the federal level.

• 22:10Nick Capodice?

  That's a good point.

• 22:11Hannah McCarthy?

  So let's get into it. Give me a country that does it differently.

• 22:14Nick Capodice?

  You got it. Here is Guillermo Rosas again with Germany.

• 22:18Speaker 07

  In Germany, there probably are five to six parties represented in the Bundestag.

• 22:23Nick Capodice?

  Germany has a multi-party system. They are a federal parliamentary representative democratic republic. The Bundestag, which he mentioned, is their federal parliament, and members of it are elected by the German people. There are 736 seats in the Bundestag, indeed divided by six parties.

• 22:41Speaker 07

  So there is, in principle, there's, there's something for everyone, right? You can, you can feel very close to a particular party. But it is not entirely, it is not entirely obvious to voters what kind of governing arrangement they are gonna get after all of the bargaining is done, once the election has taken place.

• 23:06Nick Capodice?

  And that's not the case in the US. Sure, we have moderates and far-left and far-right politicians, but they're all aligned under a majority umbrella. In contrast, when you have a lot of parties, something for everyone, and there's no clear majority, how is anyone gonna get legislation passed? Only through working with other parties. Sure, I'll sign your clean energy bill, but only if you add X, Y, and Z, and then you sign my bill, which maybe your constituents are gonna hate.

• 23:37Hannah McCarthy?

  So the trade-off here is that you can elect someone who lines up exactly with what you want, a member of your very specific party. But you have no idea if they're going to succeed at getting anything done.

• 23:52Speaker 07

  And the corollary of that is that it's also gonna be more difficult for you as a voter to know exactly who you, whom you need to hold accountable for things that you dislike.

• 24:03Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, that's an example of a multi-party system. Is there such a thing as a one-party system?

• 24:09Speaker 07

  Most one, real one-party systems are, occur in countries that are not democratic, right? So China is a one-party system. Cuba is a one-party system. Vietnam is a one-party system. There are other systems, more and more so, we, in political science, we're moving away from a strict dichotomous division between authoritarian countries and democratic countries. Think about the United, United Russia in Putin's Russia, right? That would also be a competitive authoritarian regime, where other parties can obtain representation in the Duma, but, you know, it's, it's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty hegemonic presence of the, of the, of the main party.

• 24:50Nick Capodice?

  The state Duma is Russia's elected legislative body, and of its 450 members, 326 are the United Russia Party.

• 24:58Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, we're not going to get into the pros and cons of non-democratic or authoritarian systems in this episode, but I will say, ah, it's pretty effective.

• 25:08Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, it's easy to get stuff done if you just do away with elections and democracy and representatives. A lot less gridlock.

• 25:19Hannah McCarthy?

  I think I understand the pros and cons of two-party versus multi-party. Two-party systems like ours are relatively easier to govern. One party is in power for a while, and they can get laws passed until the other party wins control. And the downside is a lack of choices. You've got two ways to address every issue in America. And multi-party systems offer more diversity of thought, but have more trouble passing laws, and there's less accountability.

• 25:48Nick Capodice?

  That's a pretty good summation, and I think Guillermo and Robin would both be proud of it.

• 25:54Hannah McCarthy?

  I bet Guillermo wouldn't say, being a political scientist and all, but did he give any hint of what he thinks is the best of these democratic systems? Is there one that surpasses all others as champion?

• 26:06Speaker 07

  Many students, especially the young ones, believe that somewhere out there, there is a perfect political system that has the right amount of parties, that has the right configuration to allow laws to be passed effectively and implemented with some good sense. And it is true that I think some systems are better than others, but that, that's a holy grail, right? I mean, it's, well, it's not a search that will have a clear, final goal, where you're gonna find the perfect system.

• 26:41Nick Capodice?

  And I dared ask him, Guillermo, I know there isn't a perfect system, but if you had to pick, which country do political scientists think is closest to that holy grail?

• 26:53Hannah McCarthy?

  Did he choose one?

• 26:54Nick Capodice?

  He did.

• 26:55Hannah McCarthy?

  What was it?

• 26:56Nick Capodice?

  Spain.

• 26:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Spain?

• 26:59Nick Capodice?

  Spain.

• 27:05Speaker 07

  Spain would be kind of the place that people have in mind. And you know, if you have been following politics in Spain, it's anything but placid, right? There's also a lot of problems. It's complicated. But the argument there would be that the way that Spanish voters send representatives to the Cortes, to their parliament, is that they are also divided geographically.

• 27:27Nick Capodice?

  I'm going to try to break down how Spain does it, and I hope we don't make a hash of things. But Spain is divided into 50 provinces, and each province elects members to Spain's Congress called the General Courts. The more people that live in a province, the more seats it sends to the courts.

• 27:42Hannah McCarthy?

  It sounds a lot like our own congressional district.

• 27:44Nick Capodice?

  Yes, but with two massive differences. They do not use the SMP winner-take-all method. They use a proportional method. And the people don't vote for individuals. They vote for a party that has a pre-selected list of candidates. As an example, let's take Cadiz, that old town on the southwestern coast. Cadiz sends nine people to the courts. In their 2019 election, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party got 30% of the vote and thus won three seats. The conservative Vox Party got 20%, and they sent two people to the courts, and so on.

• 28:20Speaker 07

  So what does that buy you? It buys you, in terms of the alienation that we've been talking about, it buys you the fact that you have more parties with more diverse platforms all over the spectrum from far left to far right that you can choose from. So that's nice. At the same time, you are not fragmenting the assembly or the parliament all that much. After all, there's only so many ways in which you can divide eight votes, right? Even if you have 14, 40 parties competing, most of them are not going to get a lot of representation.

• 28:58Nick Capodice?

  Some political scientists say that Spain's system hits that sweet spot.

• 29:02Speaker 07

  In which you're obtaining some of the advantages of a system like the United States, where you know who your Congress representative is, where you know the Congress representative spends a lot of time in close to the constituents, develops a home style, wants to kiss babies and shake hands and talk to people and all of that. And the advantages of the more proportional systems that we tend to find in continental Europe, where there is more possibility for different interests to be represented.

• 29:34Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. My last question is, how do we measure up? Who wins in this us-versus?

• 29:41Nick Capodice?

  Now, I am not saying, if we want to go back to the Street Fighter II reference at the beginning, that we should all choose Vega instead of Guile.

• 29:48Hannah McCarthy?

  I think maybe 1% of our audience is going to get that reference.

• 29:51Nick Capodice?

  Fair. That's fair. Guile is from the US, everyone. Vega is from Spain. But Spain is by no means a consensual nation politically. They've got divides and problems, like we've all have divides and problems. But to know how the US would do in a comparative matchup against Spain? Guillermo said, we can't. We have to wait and see.

• 30:13Speaker 07

  You know, the American two-party system has its problems. I'm not going to stand here and say otherwise. But it also, what I like about it is that it provides ample opportunity to build relatively lasting majority coalitions. I think we're going through a period in American history in which this is not quite working out, because we seem to be in the middle of a process of realignment, where the two big parties are trying to figure out how they are going to capture constituencies that they didn't use to represent. And I think it's going to take a while for the parties to sort this out.

• 30:57Speaker 07

  But I like the two-party system because of that, right? Especially in a country as heterogeneous as the United States.

• 31:04Nick Capodice?

  And in this liminal space of a realignment, the two big parties are looking to their constituents and deciding what their new platforms are, what the party stands for. And once we get through this phase of what Guillermo referred to me as growing pains, only then can we better assess how we measure up on a global scale.

• 31:24Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. Until then, I'm sticking to Tekken.

• 31:27Nick Capodice?

  This episode is made by me, Nick Capodice, with Hannah McCarthy. Civics 101 staff includes Rebecca Lavoy, Taylor Quimby, Marina Henke, and Dana Cataldo. Music in this one from Epidemic Sound, Blue Dot Sessions, Azura, and Chris Sabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 31:45Speaker 05

  What does it really take to start a startup? I'm David Rosenko, entrepreneur, investor, and the host of Leap Forward. In each episode, I go behind the scenes with successful founders and someone who knew them before they were famous: their college roommate, their first employee, or their mom. To hear the sometimes uncomfortable, but very real inside stories of how companies actually get built. Companies like Reddit, Airbnb, or Twitch. Listen to the new season of Leap Forward for never-before-heard stories behind the world's most iconic companies.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full-price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.