How would US politics be different if there was no two party system?

[Revy]

The potential of that Hoffman guy from the Conservative Party of New York being elected to Congress tomorrow got me thinking.

It would just be an interesting event since Congress is often just two-party. There's always a few independents but rarely ever people from a third party.

Does the two party system serve a unique purpose for the American ruling class, and will it ever change? Does it really matter for the left whether there is a one or two or multi party system under capitalism?

[RadioRaheem84]

The two party system is as ingrained in the American psyche as capitalism. The two party system represents significant consolidated power from the business elite. The two parties represent those interests in the way they shape policy to benefit private enterprise. Third party candidates usually represent the people that feel left out of the political process. That is why third parties upset the establishment so much.

They manipulate the public by enhancing the phony premise that there is a left-right split amongst the two parties when there really isn't. The parties have more or less competing special interests rather than competing ideologies.

They appeal to their "base" when it serves them, i.e. candidates pretending to be right wing and Christian or pretending to be left wing and progressive to win votes. But when they all reach DC they're really representing the interests that funded their campaigns. The public is merely called out every four years to elect a President that's already been bought and paid for by corporate or special interests.

The nation relies on this system and it doesn't look there will be much momentum to stop it. The public has no other way of thinking. They themselves base their beliefs on the party they support. They know no other way.

[Tatarin]

Maybe it would make some difference if the third party would be something like a social democratic party/"Labour Party US", as those have more working class origins. But that in turn would need a significant background, and most working class movements were much more beaten down in the US than in the EU, I'd say.

In any case, as the social democratic parties in the EU more and more drop their pro-worker arguments and turns to "other solutions", I doubt the US would have been that much different. The discussions of class and work would have been much freer, and things like Fox News probably would not have much airtime (after all, much of the shit they spew from there is considered extreme by European standards).

However, that the US have only two parties that can wield power is in itself not relevant, but what stance they have towards their own and other peoples. If both the Democrats and Republicans competed in making the US the most worker-controlled place on earth, I wouldn't complain.

[Demogorgon]

It would look more like European politics.

[chegitz guevara]

The two party system is not ingrained in the American psyche. It is the result of the first-past-the-post electoral system we have. If we were to move to a proportional election system, the two major parties would begin fracturing overnight. Both major parties, are loose coalitions, which could not sustain themselves if there was a real opportunity for the constituent parts to gain representation on their own.

The Democrats would probably hold together longest. The various wings of the GOP seriously hate each other, almost as much as they hate Democrats. The Libertarian and Constitution Parties would grow at the expense of the GOP.

[h9socialist]

I agree. If the US had a system aimed at proportional representation, the stranglehold of the two main parties would be severely weakened. But the key point is that the non-representational side of the US electoral system is meant to weight the system toward private property. That's how Wyoming has two senators -- and why the "electoral college" survives. It is a farce to refer to that as "democracy."

[BobKKKindle$]

It is the result of the first-past-the-post electoral system we have. If we were to move to a proportional election system, the two major parties would begin fracturing overnightThere's not really any necessary connection between having a PR system and multipartism - Malta, for example, operates under a PR electoral system, but has only two main parties, both of which receive either slightly above or below 50% of the popular vote in each election, and have spent roughly the same amount of time in government during the time that this electoral system has been used. Whilst electoral systems do impact parties, the electoral system that a country uses is only one amongst a range of factors - others include the condition of social cleavages, other institutional factors such as the existence or absence of federalism and a presidency, and the strength of the parties themselves. In the case of the US, there are a number of factors that we need to think about. One important factor is historical in nature - in comparison to other democracies, universal male suffrage was introduced relatively early in the 1830s and it was this that generated what has since been described as the “golden age of party” whereby party organizations reached the height of their significance, particularly at a local level, where party officials were able to distribute patronage in the form of key roles in state bureaucracies, and large numbers of activists were involved with parties on a regular basis, leading to a certain degree of interpenetration between parties and society. A further impact of this early change was that it was harder from that point on for new parties to capture a significant proportion of the electorate, as the parties that had already existed before the introduction of male suffrage were able to establish themselves throughout the country, and prevent the emergence of new parties. In European countries, by contrast, new parties have often arisen as a result of new social groups being integrated into the electorate, this being particularly true of the vote being granted to the working class.

We also need to think about the parties themselves, as, in terms of their internal organization, the discipline that can be imposed on congressmen, and the extent to which voters regard candidates are representatives of national organizations, US parties are nothing like parties in Europe - they are much weaker, with a different understanding of what it means to be a member of a party, and as such each party contains a very broad range of different viewpoints. The level of internal variation is such that two individuals who identify with different parties but inhabit the same geographic region may find that they have more in common politically than two individuals who support the same party but live a large distance from each other, especially in the case of the Democrats, who have historically been split between a social-liberal wing in the northeastern states, and a white-supremacist wing in the South, which exercised hegemonic control over that region in the form of the “Dixiecrats” until desegregation was enforced towards the end of the 1960s. This feature manifests itself in the behavior of legislators, as Congress exhibits surprisingly non-partisan behavior, as during the Ford and Nixon presidencies a majority of Democrats voted in opposition to the majority of Republicans on less than 35% of recorded roll calls, compared to 46% under Kennedy and Johnson, thereby indicating that partisanship has in fact become less common with time, having always been relatively low.

So yeah, you can argue that it is precisely because parties in the US are so weak as organizations that there are not more of them, because congressmen can vote as they like without being disciplined by national leaders (whereas in the UK we have whips whose main job it is to make sure that MPs vote in the right way) and there is less of an incentive for candidates to form their own organizations, given that using the labels of "Democrat" and "Republican" allow them to receive support whilst not binding them to a national manifesto.

That raises the question of why parties are weak however....

To answer the OP, personally, I don't think a shift to PR would make any difference whatsoever, for the reasons I've outlined above.

[BobKKKindle$]

BTW, something political scientists like Duverger have focused on when discussing the relationship between party systems and electoral systems is the degree of proportionality - the extent to which the distribution of seats reflects the distribution of votes. As you would expect, PR is more proportional than mixed systems and single-member district systems. Whilst the average for all systems is 6.2, according to Gallagher's data (Gallagher, OUP 2005), which makes use of a least squares index, the average for the six examples of SMD he uses in his study is 10.9, compared to 4.4 for PR systems. Interestingly, the US and India are both SMD systems, but they both show a match between vote shares and seat shares, despite India having many parties, and US being the clearest case of a two-party system.

Food for thought for any budding political scientists out there. ;)

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I don't think anything would look much different. The established order wouldn't be shaken much in my opinion. Look at Britain, the Tories and Labour have a stranglehold even though there is a multi-party system.