(Part 1 of 4-part series on voting reform. Part 1 deals with the problem; part 2 tries to inspire about what solving it could mean; part 3 offers a specific solution, but explains there are many others; and part 4 is about how to get there from here.)
Imagine that there were a law that only two competing models of car were allowed. Probably one of the two would be smaller and cheaper to start out with. But as the two companies fought for market share, their models would grow to look more and more like each other. After all, each company could take their "base" customers for granted, and the only important fight would be over the "swing" customers who want a medium-sized car. Meanwhile, neither company would bother to spend money to develop new features like antilock brakes and GPS - or even air conditioning and windshield wipers. Why bother, when even without innovation, they were basically guaranteed half of the market?
The end result is obvious. Consumers would end up forced to pay too much money for a choice between two all-too-similar cars of stagnant, outdated design.
Does that result remind you of the political situation? That's no coincidence; it's because there is, in fact, a law that only two parties are allowed. No, not a statute; an empirical law, like the scientific law of gravity. "Duverger's law" states that, as long as we use the plurality voting system in which each voter can only support one candidate, two-party domination is guaranteed. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: as long as the two parties always win, a vote for a third party is always wasted; and as long as voters don't want to waste their vote, the two parties will always win. But remember: unlike the law of gravity, "Duverger's law" has a way out: it only applies as long as we use plurality voting.
But until we find that way out, we're stuck with two parties that often strive to minimize their differences, and entirely neglect the opinion of majorities on multiple issues, just as in the imaginary car example. Want to end the war in Afghanistan[1], reduce free trade[2], depose executives at bailed-out banks[3], or end subsidies for big farms [4]? You're out of luck; neither party will speak for you (at least, not the mainstream of either party). The two parties can use apocalyptic rhetoric to battle over whether health care is provided by slightly-more-regulated market mechanisms or slightly-more-market-driven regulations, or over whether immigration enforcement should be slightly tighter or slightly looser; but anyone who proposes a root solution to these problems --- from either side --- is not even worth taking seriously.
And in fact, the political duopoly is in many ways even worse than the hypothetical automotive duopoly. Sure, on the bright side, individual politicians aren't mass-produced; the two political models can vary a bit for regional tastes. But consider the downsides:
- While you can do without a car, you can't opt out of having a representative or a government.
- Up to half, or with "vote splitting" even more, of voters can end up not even getting their preferred model; it's as if entire neighborhoods were forced to get whichever car was more popular locally.
- Gerrymandering can make that problem worse; in the car metaphor, a gerrymandered system would have a shortage of one of the models and cars would choose who drove them, making it hard to get the oldest clunkers off the road.
- Rich political donors, whose early infusions of money can influence the makeup of the two options voters are left with, can distort the very agenda to their advantage.
- And finally, any voters who are seduced by the siren's song of third parties tend to effectively help elect exactly the candidate they like the least.
It doesn't have to be that way. Only plurality --- essentially the worst known voting system --- binds you to vote for a single candidate, forcing you to make the lose/lose choice between a meaningless vote for your favorite or a compromised one for the lesser evil. Almost any other voting system solves this basic problem (as with Approval Voting, SODA voting, Majority Judgment, Range Voting, and Condorcet systems) or at least mitigates it (as with Instant Runoff Voting).
[1] 58% opposed Afghan war in an AP-GfK Poll in August 2010 (before Bin Laden was killed); 59% opposed it in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll in May 2011 (after his death).
[2] 47% felt that free trade agreements hurt the US, and 69% felt that they cost jobs, as opposed to only 23% and 18% who took the opposite position, in a NBC polls in Nov 2008 and Sep 2008 respectively.
[3] 56% of those polled by Bloomberg (Mar 2010) said they would support government action to limit compensation of those who helped cause the financial crisis, or to ban those people from working in the banking industry. http://www.bloomberg.com/...
[4] 61% oppose large farm subsidies; this proportion is basically the same across parties. http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/...