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America’s Weak Party System

Political scientists distinguish between majoritarian and consensus electoral systems. Majoritarian systems tend to have just two or three major parties, and elections generally produce a clear winning party at the polls. The winning party (or perhaps a two-party coalition) governs while the losing party is out of government. Consensus systems have electoral rules that produce a large number of parties, and several parties generally govern as part of a broad coalition.1

The main reason for America’s majoritarian character is the electoral system for Congress. Members of Congress are elected in single-member districts according to the “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) principle, meaning that the candidate with the plurality of votes is the winner of the congressional seat. The losing party or parties win no representation at all. The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger’s Law.2 Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.

There are two major implications of America’s FPTP system. First, in a two-party system, the swing votes are near the center of the income distribution and political ideology. Both parties attempt to woo the middle class and independent (nonparty) voters. The poor are typically not wooed and are often not even mentioned in the campaigns, since they are rarely the swing votes. During the three presidential debates in 2008, the words “poor” and “poverty” were not uttered a single time (neither by the candidates nor by the questioners). The opinions and needs of the poor are represented only in districts that have a high rate of poverty.

In European proportional systems, on the other hand, winning more national votes among the poor means winning more parliamentary seats overall. The poor may be represented by their own party or may have a strong hold on a center-left labor party. Even if the poor are disbursed throughout the country, they still form a powerful voting group.3

These basic differences show up in systematic differences in social spending according to the voting system. Proportional systems are likely to support higher social spending and more redistribution toward the poor. Consider, for example, the share of public-sector social outlays in GDP in 2007 across three electoral systems (first-past-the-post, proportional, and a mix of the two) in a sample of fourteen high-income countries. The FPTP countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada) have an average social outlay of 19.9 percent of GDP. The proportional countries rank at the top of the list, with an average outlay of 28.1 percent. The mixed voting systems are in the middle, with an average social outlay of 24.6 percent. This correlation is not proof that the FPTP voting system causes the lower level of social outlays, and even within the group of FPTP countries, U.S. social spending is very low, but the pattern certainly suggests that FPTP systems tend to neglect the needs of the poor.

The second implication of America’s FPTP system is the lack of strong party discipline within the two national parties. In proportional systems, the national parties almost always stick together in parliamentary votes. In parliamentary FPTP systems such as those in the United Kingdom and Canada, the governing party or parties also stick together on major votes, since a failure on a major policy vote usually triggers a new national election or at least the fall of the government.

In America’s FPTP system, by contrast, in which Congress and government are separate branches and the government does not fall when it loses a legislative vote, national party discipline is limited and fragile. Members of Congress prioritize local interests over national interests, since Congress is elected locally. A strong national party leader may occasionally achieve party discipline in Congress, but party ranks are easily broken when