“Politics ain’t bean bag,” quipped the late 19th century, fictional barfly and political analyst, Mr. Dooley. That is an eternal truth about American politics, wherein combatants have deployed everything from lies to bribes to fists, clubs, and even “violent laxatives” to win office and get their way.

Yet, last year’s invasion of the Capitol along with the various riots and efforts to intimidate election administrators shocked many Americans. Is representative democracy on the ropes? Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, thinks so. His book, “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop” (Oxford, 2020) argues that America is not simply having one of its heated political moments. Rather, structural factors are driving our politics into existential, identity clashes that are tearing apart our governance system. Our discussion is below.

Kosar:
Why have the two parties sorted themselves into separate ideological camps?

Drutman: The broad story is that
starting in the 1970s, American politics became increasingly organized around
race and cultural issues. This slowly displaced the previous divide over the
role of government, and mapped more closely to geography, with cities as the
home of cosmopolitan liberalism and rural and small-town America as the home of
traditionalist values. In an earlier era, we had something more like a
four-party system with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, who were
the key hinge points for bipartisan governing. But as culture-war issues
nationalized politics, both parties shrank their geographic footprints and
wrote off large parts of the country. But this divide is far more about
identity than it is about ideology. Few voters have meaningful ideologies. But
they have strong identities, especially partisan identities. And when they are
surrounded by others like them, these identities become even stronger.

Is
this a new development? Politics in the early and late 19th century featured
intense partisan conflict.

It did, but the partisan conflict
was thin by today’s standards. It was largely about patronage and tariff log
rolls, and most of the important power was still at the state and local level,
where the issues were often different. The federal government was tiny. Few
politicians hoped to make a career in national politics. Today’s intense
partisan conflict is much more totalizing and nationalized, which makes it much
more intractable.

How
do our current election policies incentivize toxic politics?

Right now, we organize our
elections using a single-winner plurality rule — whoever gets the most votes
wins. This kind of voting rule tends to generate just two parties, and is the
main reason we have just two political parties in the United States. Because
our parties are both regionally-based parties (Democrats for the cities,
Republicans for the country and smaller towns), and because voting is highly
polarized, few general elections are competitive. Democrats represent the most
liberal parts of the country, Republicans represent the most conservative parts
of the country. And because we use a direct primary to nominate candidates,
incumbents are always worried about challengers to their right (Republicans) or
left (Democrats), leading them to reject compromise in governing.

Because there are only two
parties, a party that narrowly wins an election can gain 100 percent of the
power, which makes for a particularly nasty zero-sum electoral politics in an
era in which the stakes feel so high.

But because we have only two
parties for our diverse, pluralistic nation, both parties wind up being
big-tent coalitions with lots of intra-party disagreements. To keep these
parties together, party leaders need to keep their supporters focused on a common
enemy — the threat of the other party. This perpetuates a cycle of
demonization. But while we have a phrase “lesser of two evils,” there is no
“lesser of three evils” or “lesser of four evils.”

What
changes to elections do you favor?

I favor proportional
representation with multi-member districts for the US House. As a general rule,
the larger the district size, the more parties can successfully compete. There
are limits to this. I don’t want us to become Israel, with one nationwide
electoral district and a low threshold. I think local representation is still
important. But ideally large districts of five to seven members would give us
somewhere between four and six parties — enough diversity for shifting
coalitions. I would add ranked-choice voting on top of proportional
representation, as Ireland has done for 100 years, to encourage more compromise
and coalition building, and avoid spoiler and wasted-vote problems

Last
question: What are examples of successful multi-party democracies?

Germany had an election last year
that was very boring. Despite similar challenges to the US, the far-right
nativist AfD and far-left Linke party remain fringe parties, and politics is
dominated by four moderate parties. The center-left Social Democrats will now
lead a three-party centrist coalition government. New Zealand, Ireland,
Denmark, and Sweden are also good models.

Thank you, Lee.

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