Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop
2020-02-06 · Guest: Lee Drutman (Senior fellow at New America) · 52:05
Breaking the American two-party system doom loop
Bob Zadek and Lee Drutman discuss the inherent flaws and recent breakdown of the American two-party system. Drutman argues that the current “doom loop” of polarization is a modern phenomenon resulting from the nationalization of politics, and he proposes structural reforms such as proportional representation and multi-member districts to create a more representative multi-party democracy.
Topics: Two-party system, political polarization, electoral reform, ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, House of Representatives, parliamentary systems, Lee Drutman
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Lee Drutman, Caller (Jacob)
The Illusion of Choice in American Politics [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thank you so much for listening this winter Sunday morning.
If one were to characterize life in America these days, well, there are lots of ways to describe it, but one of the ways, perhaps one of the more accurate ways, is that our free and open society has given us all lots and lots and lots of choices. We have enormous choices and variety in where to live, how to entertain ourselves, how to spend our money, what kind of clothes to wear, and on and on and on. In all of the important aspects of life, we are provided with lots of choices—except one, the most important one: our governmental system.
Have you ever wondered why in a country that prides itself, that thrives on honoring the freedom of all Americans to do as they wish so long as they don’t harm another along the way—we are given so much freedom except in our politics? We are limited to two—count them, two—political parties. Well, yes, of course, there are other political parties, but as we all know, the structure of political life in America is such that there is very little, close to no hope that any political party other than the Democratic Party or the Republican Party will ever be able to influence life in America.
Have you ever wondered how we got here? Who said we are to be limited to two parties? The irony is, nobody said it. Well, then it must be the law. Nope, it’s not the law. It just is. Can anybody believe that limiting choice in who governs us, limiting choice to just two political parties, is healthy for America? Nobody. Yet that is the system, and it is almost impossible to change. Or is it?
This morning, I’m proud to welcome to the show Lee Drutman. Lee is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America think tank. He has just written an important book, and I only ask what took Lee so long to write the book? It is so needed. Lee has written Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America. Finally, finally, a scholar has chosen to identify that the two-party system, the total absence of choice—identify that as an important issue. It is my hope that Lee’s book will start a discussion in America that will lead to redirecting us from the doom that Lee fears into a multi-party system, a system which most of the rest of the democratic world has. Lee, welcome to the show this morning.
Lee Drutman: Great to be with you, Bob. I’m excited to talk about this book.
How the Two-Party System Evolved [04:05]
Bob Zadek: Now Lee, give us some background, because it’s strange because I don’t think anybody has ever really thought about how we got to the two-party system because, as I said, I think I’m correct, it’s not done by statute. It certainly is not in any of our founding documents. It was an anathema to the founding generation. So here we have a system that nobody can really defend except the very few in power in the two political parties who benefit. So only those small beneficiaries can defend it. So tell us, give us some framework, some background. How did we get here?
Lee Drutman: Yeah. So let’s start at the beginning, a very good place to start. And we’ll start with the Framers, who were doing something that was quite radical at the time, writing a constitution to set up a system of self-government. And they were quite concerned about political parties. They thought that if you had political parties, the country might well split in half and become ungovernable. And so they set up a system of governance that would decentralize power: bicameral legislature, plus an executive branch, plus a judicial branch, plus federalism. And the idea was that it would make it very difficult for political parties to form.
And the other thing that they did, without any debate or discussion, was that they basically carried forth the tradition of plurality voting, which was a 1430 British countryside innovation: whoever gets the most votes wins, also known as first-past-the-post elections. And that turns out to be the voting system that is most likely to generate just two parties because if only one winner can emerge, then third parties become spoilers and all the energy goes to the top two parties.
And I think had they understood what they were doing at the time, they might have thought differently about it, but they thought that they were going to make political parties obsolete through this decentralized political system. Now, in many respects, the system succeeded for about 200 years. We had political parties, we had just two political parties for most of our history, but those two parties were really these broad, overlapping coalitions that didn’t really stand for much. In fact, throughout most of American political history, the critique was not that the two parties were too far apart; it was that they were too similar. Now, to your first point, it is certainly the case that Americans didn’t really have much meaningful choice. In fact, they had even less meaningful choice, and it was harder to know what the parties actually stood for.
But it sort of worked with our system of governing, which requires this broad coalition building, broad compromise, and so it kept the American political system broadly stable. Well, now what we have—and this is really a new and distinct period in American political history—is a genuine two-party system with two parties that have no overlap and really stand for very different visions of America. And they are both roughly equally represented in Washington, so that every election is basically a toss-up election in which power is up for grabs.
And this has created a very, very dangerous situation for our democracy because it’s raised the stakes of every election to this impossibly high point in which everything becomes emotional to the extreme. And it’s also created a set of bizarre incentives in which both parties are in a position where they want to have this narrow but elusive majority, so it means that they are demonizing the other side to the extreme. And whichever party is not the majority party is refusing to compromise, which makes it very impossible to get anything done in Washington.
So we have this extended gridlock in which nothing can happen, no public policy can be made, and with these occasional moments of unified government in which policy moves in a very extreme direction one way or the other. We have an electorate that’s going crazy, and we have no resolution in sight. And this whole process is what I call a doom loop because it is continuing to escalate and escalate to the point where we’re losing a sense of shared fairness, a sense of legitimacy. And that’s what democracy depends upon. We have to acknowledge that we have disagreements, but that we have a fair way to resolve those disagreements. And that is rapidly disappearing. I’m very worried about a legitimacy crisis in the 2020 election if it’s close. I think we are seeing the breakdown of the foundation of our democracy, and the two-party system is responsible for that. And again, I really want to emphasize that this is a new development in having two distinct parties, but there’s no going back. We are in an upward ratchet of a feedback loop, a doom loop, and the only way to break out of that doom loop is to change that electoral system that the Framers imported unthinkingly and to reform the way we vote and join most of the rest of the advanced democracy world and have a form of proportional representation in which multiple parties can get representation and voters can have more choices and everything no longer has to be this zero-sum, all-or-nothing, winner-take-all, high-stakes emotional battle that is, again, driving us all crazy.
The Psychology of the Two-Party System [10:29]
Bob Zadek: What I’d like to—I’ll get to, we’ll get to an important part of your book, which is the solutions. But I’d like to offer to you, Lee, and to our listeners, two observations about the two-party system.
First observation: when I was growing up, I went to summer camp, and the highlight, at least for me, of summer camp was Color War. In Color War, which was towards the end of the eight-week summer camp season, the entire camp from the kindergartners through the counselors was divided totally at random into, in our case, the Green Team and the White Team. And you ate together, you sat together, and there was competition—athletic competition, singing competition, and the like—to see who won the most events. And you kept score, and that was it. That was the highlight.
The point I’m making is, when we were divided up, instantly, everybody on the Green Team kind of didn’t like those on the White Team. They became instant enemies for a short period of time. And not that there was anything mean-spirited; it’s just they were on the other team. It was totally random, but it caused this polarization in a wonderful experience—I mean, it was positive in the competition—but it was totally random. And that’s what politics feels like today.
Now, as to the randomness, the second observation is, on prior shows, I have analogized or labeled the political parties as nothing other than marketing cooperatives. They are a group of disparate people with different beliefs who get together, join together in a cooperative because if they work together, even though their beliefs are not aligned, they will get the Holy Grail, that is elected office. Now, as an example of that is, if we look at, at random, the Democratic Party, in the Democratic Party, minorities in general, blacks in particular, are an important component. They vote overwhelmingly Democratic, even though many aspects of traditional Democratic politics, such as the importance of public education and eliminating school choice, is harmful to many members of the inner city, especially the black community. And we can go on and on and on.
So here we have the Democratic Party, and the same can be said of the Republicans, which take positions that are harmful to some of the members, but they suck it up for the goal of getting elected. So the two-party system forces people to align with others who they wouldn’t otherwise align with. In a multi-party system, nobody has to hang out with people, be aligned with people they don’t agree with. Every type of political belief has a home in a multi-party system. So Americans are forced to make an absurd choice of supporting a party they might not agree with for 40% of the time because they disagree with the other party 45% of the time. That’s not the way political life should be in America.
So Lee, how much do you think did the polarization, the two-party system—how much is that a result because you identify it as sort of really occurring somewhat recently? I think you identify 2010 as when it really got baked in. I’ll ask you to explain that. But how much of that, after you explain the significance of the 2010 election, how much of that is a function of external events such as social media, the breakdown of mass media into a lot of components, into non-political factors, so that the baking in of the two-party system was external and not political?
Lee Drutman: Well, there’s a lot there to chew on. So let’s start with the Color War point, which I think is a very important point, the Green versus the White and the extent to which this arbitrary division into two teams can turn people against each other. And what your summer camp did is it replicated a well-known psychological experiment called the minimal group paradigm, which has been done many times in which researchers put people into two arbitrary groups, and it turns out that they start to really dislike each other when they’re set into two groups.
But interestingly, when you put people into three or more groups, people don’t hate each other as much. It’s just something about this binary condition that seems to really drive people against each other: good versus evil, black versus white. Something in our brain appears to have this kind of us-versus-them switch that gets turned on and really turns us against each other. But it only gets turned on when there’s just two groups.
Now, to your point about the parties being these sort of motley coalitions in which people make compromises in order to support one party or the other, I think there are a couple of important points there. One is that the parties actually are more diverse than they sometimes appear to us because we only see them at their very top level and the political figures who represent them in Washington. And this is important, and I think one of the reasons why we would be better off with a multi-party system because I think there is much more diversity in this country than gets represented in a simple fight between Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump.
However, this diversity within both parties, which are I think still somewhat big-tent parties, creates a real challenge for the party leaders because how do you keep all these folks happy and aligned with your side? And the way you do that is by reminding your voters that the other side is even worse. And you see this on both sides. You see Democrats obsessing about Trump and turning Trump into the devil, but you saw that with Republicans and Obama. That the way to unify a party is to find a common enemy. And this is why you see so much negative partisanship in American politics and so much lesser-of-two-evils rhetoric, that both sides say, “Well, you might not love our side, but the other side, they would destroy the country.” And this again turbocharges that us-versus-them, Green versus White, Red versus Blue thinking and it really drives us all crazy and it makes compromise impossible.
Now, I do want to argue a little bit with you on that point that people shouldn’t have to compromise because I think politics is all about compromising, and nobody gets everything that they want. And politics is about building coalitions and about making tradeoffs. But I think the question and the real difference between a multi-party system and a two-party system is when those coalitions and compromises form. Do they form before the election, which is the case in the two-party system, or do they form after the election, which is often the case in the multi-party system in which you have some form of coalition government?
And I think it’s much better for them to form after the election because if they form before the election, voters can’t send clear signals to what it is that they want most. They have to make an awful lot of tradeoffs before the election, whereas after the election, parties can say, “Look, here’s how much support we have for this set of positions,” and then bargaining can occur based on that. So I think it’s important to recognize that compromise and coalition building are inherent in politics, but the two-party system actually makes them much harder to be a part of governing. They make them a part of pre-election campaigns, and both sides get locked in and they get turned against the other side, and that’s when the real danger to self-governance happens.
The Nationalization of Politics [19:51]
Lee Drutman: Now, the other question that you raised is the question of how we got here, which is a big part of my book, which is again called Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop for those listeners who are just tuning in. And I don’t—you talked about social media and media fragmentation and other external causes. I actually don’t put that much stock in those explanations. I think that a lot of the change is a function of the nationalization of politics and the long realignment of the parties post-civil rights, in which the Democratic Party became the party of cultural liberalism and the Republican Party became the party of cultural conservatism.
And that was a long process that really, I think, hit its culmination in the 2010s. It started in the ’90s with the culture war politics to really reach a level of saliency. And that’s when you saw the Gingrich revolution change Congress. Gingrich was the first person to really nationalize congressional elections, and that was when Republicans took control of Congress for the first time after 40 years. Now, for decades prior to that, you had a long period of divided government, which actually had its problems, but there was a sense that the Democrats were going to always be the party that was represented in the House of Representatives and the Republicans were going to win the presidency most of the time.
So both parties were able to work together because they weren’t trying to win this narrow majority. The other thing in that period from the mid-’60s really up to about ‘92 was that you had within the two-party system, again, a multi-party system. You had liberal Republicans who were a little bit more libertarian, particularly on the social issues, and you had conservative Democrats who were a little bit more populist. And that meant on any given issue, you could build a different coalition, so things didn’t break down into this binary condition. But liberal Republicans began to go extinct, conservative Democrats began to go extinct, and that process played out in the ’90s and the 2000s, and by 2010, it was completed so that we were left with really just two parties: conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, and everybody else was forced to either get on board with one of those two parties or throw up their hands and say, “Nobody represents me, our political system is broken, and I don’t have a vote.”
Bob Zadek: You make two, as we go to break, two really interesting and in my opinion important points. One, I learned just now from your correction of my comment that when I said, when I made reference to compromise, and you pointed out the difference was whether compromise is pre-election or post-election. That’s an important correction to make, and I was, without realizing it, referring to the absence of compromise post-election, and I thank you for that. That’s an important correction, helps me understand my thinking.
And the other point is that when you pointed out that there were parties within parties, I can remember there were the Blue Dog Democrats who were Democrats from the South who often voted with Republicans on certain issues. And the point being, I think that’s a reflection of in those days, in the last half of the 20th century, there was less control by party leadership of how members of the House voted, and they were given more latitude. There wasn’t that top-down control. So Southern Democrats who had longevity and therefore they were committee chairs, they could vote the way they wanted, very different from Northern Democrats, and still survive within the party. And I think that’s an important difference, that right now there is this lockstep voting because as you said, with Gingrich, politics became very nationalized, which means, I think, that leadership in the House had very rigid control over the membership through a lot of institutional tools which they had. Therefore, disagreement within the party post-election really didn’t happen that much. Just an observation on my part.
This is Bob Zadek. We are speaking with Lee Drutman this morning. Lee has written an important book, a very important book, and thank heaven he has written it and not a day too soon. His book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America. Lee argues persuasively and with a sense of urgency that America is in a—his word—doom loop if we continue to be governed under a two-party system. Now, it is one thing to identify the problem, quite another to offer solutions. Lee, happily for us all, offers solutions. The solutions to our problem when we come back. We’ll be back in 30 really short seconds. Please stay tuned.
Proportional Representation and Multi-Member Districts [26:49]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. This morning, we are speaking with Lee Drutman. Lee has written Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America, where Lee argues persuasively and with, as I said, a sense of urgency that the two-party system, which now is the bedrock of our political system, is harmful to us. It is leading us down a road from which there may not be any return.
I offer just one observation on the two-party system, and that is this: America, since its founding, our political DNA has been a fear of, a distaste for, an abhorrence of any accumulation of power in any institution, public or private. The Founders built a governmental system designed to neutralize and minimize an accumulation of power. That is the system of checks and balances we all know about. The reason we have checks and balances is to have power neutralize power, with the result that no power survives. And that has been the way we have lived in America for 240 years.
Also in our economic system, we have generally a free market system, more or less, but yet we are sensitive to distortions in the free market system, and we have a body of law called antitrust law, which prevents the establishment of monopoly power. We don’t like it when one institution, with governmental help often, establishes a monopolistic system and imposes its will upon the public. So we abhor accumulation of power, we abhor monopoly, and yet in the most important area, which is the exercise of our political rights, we tolerate both monopolistic power in the two-party system and the accumulation of enormous power in the two-party system, such as who establishes the rules for the national “debate,” who gets on ballot access. All of those important political rules are decided by those in power, the two-party system. So we have a system that we should, one would think, naturally abhor, and yet we tolerate it.
Now Lee, thank you for your book, and in your book, you offer some suggestions, many suggestions about how to undo the two-party system. Because given that it has now, through the tools that I have mentioned, baked itself into the system, it is very hard to change. And you can’t change it from the top down; it’s just too hard. So give us some idea of what a different system might look like, and give us some idea how listeners who right now presumably are pretty gosh darn worked up over the two-party system, how might they participate in the change?
Lee Drutman: All right. Well, let’s start with some alternatives. And to understand what things could look like, this weekend, Ireland is holding elections. Ireland is a democracy that has had a system of multi-winner ranked-choice voting for almost 200 years. And there’s two concepts in there: multi-winner and ranked-choice voting. Now, folks may be familiar with ranked-choice voting because it is a system that is actually used in several cities in the Bay Area: San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley. And it’s a system in which rather than having picking just one candidate, you can rank your candidates in order of preference. And what that means is that if you want to support a Libertarian candidate, you can support a Libertarian candidate first, and then if that candidate gets eliminated because he or she doesn’t have enough support among first preferences, your vote gets transferred to a backup choice. So you get to vote your heart, and then you get your vote to actually matter. And this would certainly help third parties get a foothold.
Now, in most places in the US, including the Bay Area, ranked-choice voting is used for single-winner elections, which means that the votes are retabulated until a majority winner emerges. And that’s better than the plurality system that we have. It’s also a system that ranked-choice voting is also used in Australia, a few other countries around the world. Ireland has a multi-winner version of ranked-choice voting in which rather than representing a single district, legislators who go to their parliament come from multi-winner districts, typically about three to five members. And that creates a form of proportional representation and a multi-party democracy in which you don’t have to get 50% or a plurality of the votes to win; you can win with 17% in a given district if you have a five-member district.
And the fundamental principle of proportional representation is that parties should be represented in a legislature in proportion to their popularity in the electorate. So if the Libertarian Party were 15% of the electorate, the Libertarian Party could get 15% of the seats in the state legislature. Now, that’s not the system that we have. We have this very antiquated system that most of the world has left behind long ago: plurality single-winner elections. And I think we could decide that we want to leave it behind too. And we’ve innovated in a lot of other areas, and yet when it comes to voting, we are stuck with a very antiquated technology.
Now, what could folks do about it? California has an initiative process, and if folks wanted to get involved in a campaign to change California to a proportional system for its state legislature, I think that would be a wonderful idea, as well as bringing it to local municipalities as a proof of concept. So I think there are plenty of rooms for activism. I mean, you’re certainly right, change is probably not going to come out of Washington, although I’d note that there is a bill called the Fair Representation Act that has a few co-sponsors, including I believe Ro Khanna, who’s a congressman from out in the Bay Area, that would create this system for the entire country. But I think more likely it would start in states like California, which have long been innovators in political reform. So I think there’s a tremendous opportunity there.
Expanding the House of Representatives [36:37]
Bob Zadek: Now, in the Bay Area where it has been in effect for a while, are voters (a) aware of it, and (b) are those voters feeling more enfranchised, do you think, than voters in other parts of the country? And if yes to the second question, why isn’t this sweeping the country like wildfire, at least initially in local elections?
Lee Drutman: Well, it’s certainly starting to gain tremendous momentum. Maine has become the first state in the country to use it statewide for its federal elections. There are more and more cities that are adopting ranked-choice voting. New York City just became the largest city in the—well, it is the largest city—it has last November, it passed a citywide initiative to bring ranked-choice voting to New York City and passed with about 75% support. So it certainly is catching on. I think there are a lot of folks who are now understanding that the problem with our politics is that we have an electoral system that makes it very hard for third parties to compete.
Now, at the city level, most cities are pretty much one-party dominant or non-partisan, so it doesn’t have the same quite same effect as it would have at the state or national level, although it has led to campaigning that is a little more civil and cooperative and voters tend to like it once they get used to it because it allows them to express the full range of preferences rather than having to just pick one candidate. So I think it is catching on, and I think as we understand how much of an existential danger the two-party system provides to our continued experiment in self-governance, I think we will see even more attention and organizing effort behind electoral reform.
Bob Zadek: So I guess in the House of Representatives, which really is I think where the change would be felt the most under your system, an electoral district for the House of Representatives would—each district would send not one member to Congress, but three members or something like that.
Lee Drutman: Yeah, or even five.
Bob Zadek: Or even five. So that would mean the population, the membership in the House of Representatives, would increase dramatically from 435 to some other number. And I should point out, Lee, before you comment, that the Founders, if I’m not mistaken, originally envisioned a representative representing, I think, 40,000, I seem to remember, Americans. And if we had that system today, we’d have a couple of thousand members in the House of Representatives. So in reality, by increasing the number of voters that are represented by one member of the House, we are really diluting the importance of one vote. So I think I’m right about the 40,000, but wouldn’t the system you discuss in your book result in a much larger membership in the House?
Lee Drutman: Well, there are two ways you could do that. You could combine five existing districts into one. So for example, I think California has about 50 members of Congress. You could split—instead of having 50 districts, you could have ten five-member districts, which means that you might actually be able to elect a Libertarian from the Bay Area. Now, you could also make the House larger, and I recommend increasing the House to about 700 members in the book, although I’d certainly be open to something even bigger, although just as a matter of practicality, I think even—I’m already talking about some pretty radical changes here.
Now, on the original vision for the House, the 1789 vintage of the House had 65 members, each representing 30,000 constituents. And Madison actually—he had 12 of what we know as the Bill of Rights. There were actually 12 amendments, of which the first two didn’t make it into the Bill of Rights. And the first amendment that Madison proposed was an apportionment amendment, which he said the House of Representatives is the people’s house, so representatives should be close to their people. So for the first 100 members, we’re going to have it 30,000 constituents. For the up to 200 members, we’re going to have it 40,000 constituents. And then when we get over 200, we’re going to have it 50,000 constituents, and that’s as high as it could possibly go.
Today, it’s 765,000 constituents per representative, so it went a lot higher. For a good portion of American history, the House actually did continue to increase its size with each census as the country grew bigger. So it went from 65 members to the 435 we know today. That was in 1911, and the country has more than almost quadrupled in size population since 1911, and the size of the House has stayed the same. So I think if we want to have a House which is better set up to represent the diversity of the American people, which contains members who are closer to the people, then I think a bigger House is a great idea, and I think it pairs quite nicely with a vision of multi-party democracy.
Bob Zadek: Now, your point about after 1911 we stopped increasing the House, was that by decision or people just plain stopped and nobody knows why? Because continually increasing the membership in the House seems healthy because it gives the vote more value. It values each voter more so than not increasing the House. So was there a conscious decision not to stop increasing the size of the House, or was it practical, there was no more room for chairs?
Lee Drutman: Well, there were some people who thought that the House at 435 was that was enough. But a lot of that impasse came from the fact that there were a lot of fights over how to apportion the new seats. Nobody could agree on that, and eventually the forces of “let’s just keep it at 435”—because a lot of the growth of seats was in parts of the country, cities that were growing, immigrant populations, and so there was a concern by some of the more conservative rural members of the House that their power would be weakened if we continued to increase the size of the House.
Bob Zadek: So it wasn’t random. There was a calculation about, “Let’s not give these voting citizens any more power than they have. They have too much already,” kind of mentality. Oh my goodness. Well, that’s painful to hear.
Caller Segment: Israel and Parliamentary Systems [42:31]
Bob Zadek: Lee, we have a caller on hold. He’s been on hold for some time. Jacob, good morning, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind?
Caller (Jacob): Yes. Your guest, Lee—I wondered if he could comment on the current or the recent state of the so-called diverse parliamentary system in Israel and what a paralytic nightmare that has been. That kind of defeats his argument about the binary paradigm terror that he’s describing. So could he comment also on how the binary system argument that he’s advancing on your program, Bob, this morning, how that affected the impeachment where you have foreign financial entanglements on both the Democratic side and the Republican side with the Bank of China involvement, even I think in Ukraine with Pelosi’s family? Why didn’t Mitch McConnell recuse himself because of the Bank of China foreign entanglements with his family?
Bob Zadek: You’re asking Lee to write a book on the air. So Lee, if you could just comment on Jacob’s first point about the system in Israel, which is a parliamentary system much in the mold of the British system because of its political history. Is that an example of a system which works? Can we learn from that and other parliamentary systems, or are there advantages to our system over a parliamentary system?
Lee Drutman: Yeah. And I want to make something clear that we often conflate parliamentary systems with multi-party systems, but there are two dimensions here that are separate from each other. One is two-party versus multi-party, and then the other is parliamentary versus presidential. So the UK is basically a two-party system, but it’s a parliamentary system in which there is no separately elected president. Most European countries are parliamentary systems without a separately elected president, France being the one exception there, or the major exception.
Israel is a parliamentary system with a form of hyper-proportional representation in which the entire country is one electoral district, so there’s 120 seats apportioned with a very low threshold, which creates a system with, yes, way too many parties—I believe 17 parties in government. And historically, Israel has managed to have different coalition governments. The recent impasse is certainly challenging, and I think a lot of it stems from Netanyahu’s stubborn politics rather than the system itself. And I’m not sure what political system would handle somebody with Netanyahu’s stubborn, aggressive stance.
The other problem with Israel’s political system is that basically there are Arab parties, but they are treated as pariah parties. So you have about 20% of the seats in the Knesset of a party that nobody will ever form a coalition with. So that really limits the ability of coalition formation. And certainly you have a lot of these smaller splinter extreme parties that make it hard to form a coalition. I think 17 parties is too many, and frankly, I’d rather have two parties than 17 parties. But I think the ideal is like four to six parties. And if you look at the countries in Western Europe, Ireland, New Zealand, the examples of really top-thriving, healthy democracies, you see that they tend to have about four to six parties.
And the thing that we know, thanks to lots of political science and lots of experience with multi-party democracy, is that you can more or less manage to get four to six parties based on the electoral system that you set up. So if you wanted to have 14 parties in the US, you would have one national election in which everything would be proportional, and that would create a lot of parties. That’s not the system that I’m proposing. I’m proposing a system that is used in Ireland, Australia, and would probably create about four to six parties given the electoral rules. So I’m not recommending that we become Israel. It’s important to understand that there are many versions of multi-party democracy around the world and many versions of proportional representation, and what I recommend for the US is a much more modest version.
The Impact on the Average Voter [47:28]
Bob Zadek: Now Lee, as to—I often identify I’m a Libertarian, I don’t necessarily identify with the Libertarian Party as such, but libertarian describes how I look at issues. But as to the average voter who, let’s say typically will agree if you’re a registered Democrat or Republican, you agree with some of your party’s positions and disagree with others. Under the system you propose, how would that voter that I have just described, how would they experience a difference in how they vote, how they feel about voting, and their relationship to the government they voted for?
Lee Drutman: Well, in multi-party democracies, voters tend to feel better about the system of democracy because they’re more likely to find a party that represents them a little better. I think there might be a Libertarian Party in the US if we had a multi-party system. It might be a 10-12% party. There are in most multi-party systems, there are parties that are classically liberal, sort of more restrained on government spending but supportive of immigration and give people freedom to express themselves in their private lives. So I think you would more likely see a party like that.
And you would have in the House, for example, with an enlarged membership in the House as we discussed earlier, there would probably be—just as Bernie Sanders is a self-identified Democratic Socialist—there would be members of the House, one would assume, who would be identified as and ran on the platform of Democratic Socialist, and Green, and Independent, and Constitutional Party, and Libertarian Party, and Labor Party. So if you were in a minority in what you believed, you would at least have a seat at the table. You wouldn’t have dominance, but you would feel represented.
And I think as we wind down, Lee, we’re running out of time, but if you could comment very briefly on: wouldn’t that be healthier in that even if your beliefs didn’t carry the day, you would have a seat at the table? Isn’t that a laudable goal in itself? Very briefly, Lee.
Lee Drutman: Yeah, oh, I absolutely agree. And if you look at polling, about two-thirds of Americans say that there should be more than two parties. So certainly people want that. I think another important benefit of a proportional system like the one I’m describing is that your vote matters no matter where you live. You don’t have to live in a swing state or a swing district in order for your vote to count. So if you live in San Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley or many parts of the Bay Area, you’re in a blue district in a blue state, and your vote is totally irrelevant. Parties don’t care about it, nobody’s campaigning for your vote, nobody values your vote. In a proportional system, your vote matters no matter where you live. And people complain about the low turnout rate in the US. Well, people are not dumb, and they know that in most places your vote doesn’t matter, so why vote? And if you don’t have choices that you’re excited about. In a proportional system, if we move to a proportional system, voter turnout would shoot up in this country. People would be much more engaged, and I think that would be much healthier for the country. People would feel represented, people would feel motivated, and people wouldn’t be so angry.
Bob Zadek: Lee’s book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America, is a must-read. Have your vote count, perhaps for the first time in your electoral life. Thank you so much for Lee for giving us an hour of your time, and most importantly, thank you for writing your book. This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Sure look forward to it.