Is our two-party system to blame for the political dysfunction in the U.S.?
The January 6 Capitol insurrection shows that the United States is facing exceptional challenges to our democracy. Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation, thinks that our two-party system is a root cause of that dysfunction. Although we have had a two-party system in name for many decades, there were divisions and overlaps between parties that created room for bargaining, compromise, crossing over, and even unity. In our current state of hyper-polarization, however, the two parties are fully sorted, and this give-and-take has eroded into a death-match. According to Drutman, our democracy will not succeed unless we can escape this two-party doom loop.
On Wednesday, February 10th, during an Ash Center event titled Can We Break Out of the Two-Party Doom Loop?, Drutman and Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, will discussed our two-party system and potential strategies for a critical, non-incremental move away from our dysfunctional "politics as usual."
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Presenter: You're listening to AshCast, the podcast of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School.
Lee Drutman: I think there's a deep desire among the American people to see us kind of come together as a nation but in practice, it's very difficult. Our system is set up with two parties that are trying to achieve narrow majority control in Congress, and the way that the Republican Party sees its path back to power is by casting the Biden administration as dangerous and extremist. casting the democrats and dangerous and extreme...
Archon Fung: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this afternoon's Democracy Seminar. Before we begin today's discussion please join me in acknowledging that the land on which Harvard sits is the traditional territory of the Massachusetts people at a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among nations. My name's Archon Fung and I'm on the faculty at the Kennedy School. I help organize the democracy programming here and I'd like to thank you for joining this important discussion about some of the deep structural features of American democracy that may be generating the problems, the deep problems that we're experiencing. There is no one... I made a list of books to try to understand the current moment just kind of for myself last week. And at the very top of the list was Lee Drutman's book, "The Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America" And we're really fortunate here this afternoon to be joined by Lee, who is a Senior Fellow in the Program for Political Reform at New America. He's written many books and not just "The Two-Party Doom Loop" but "The Business of America is Lobbying" and these books have won many prizes including the Robert Dahl Award for a scholarship of the highest quality on a subject of democracy. You may have heard Lee on other programs. He's the cohost of the podcast "Politics In Question" writes for the "New York times" "Vox" and "FiveThirtyEight". Today's discussion comes at a good time. I don't know how many people have read Tom Edsall's piece in "The New York Times" today about the problems democracy faces and he draws on Lee's work a whole lot for what we might look to do to make things better. And I've posted a link to Tom Edsall's piece in the chat for those of you who are interested in checking it out. So welcome, Lee. I'm really excited to talk with you, today.
Lee Drutman: Yeah, well, I'm thrilled to be having this conversation and thank you for the incredibly kind introduction. Really excited for this conversation.
Archon Fung: Great. So I will open it up with a few general questions and then we'll reserve some time, maybe 15, 20 minutes after my structured questions for audit questions from the audience, which is a very robust today. A lot of people are interested in this subject. So first question, what do you think about the Biden administration emphasis and priority on unity and reaching across the aisle? I wanna get started by asking you a little bit about partisanship and how bad do you think it is? Does President Biden have better or worse chances than President Obama did at reaching across the aisle which President Obama had very much hoped to do?
Lee Drutman: Yeah, well, I think there is a deep desire among the American people to see us kind of come together as a nation. And so Biden's message of unity I think resonates with a lot of people but in practice it's very difficult to do for the same reasons that Obama found it extremely difficult to achieve a bipartisan compromise because our system is set up with two parties who are competing to achieve narrow majority control for Congress. And the way that the Republican party sees its path back to power is by casting the Biden administration as dangerous and extreme, is casting the Democrats as dangerous and extreme. And by cooperating with the Biden administration with Democrats in Congress, they're effectively legitimating democratic policies, democratic priorities. And what the Republican party is gonna try to do, the same thing that it did when Obama was in power is to obstruct, to kind of create a sense that whatever Democrats are doing is too extreme. And so I don't think the chances for bipartisanship are very high now. I mean, probably worse than when Obama was in office, because at least then there were more Republican moderates in Congress and more members of Congress who were in districts that had split their ticket. Now, I mean, I think we're down to like 16 districts in all of Congress that have split their tickets. And I think we're down to only six States now that have even split congressional delegations. So all of the incentives are for Republicans to oppose the Biden administration and the Democrats. So I think that the problem is quite bad. And also, I mean, as we're seeing in play out in real time, the Republican party is more concerned about alienating the Marjorie Taylor Greene supporters than they are about alienating Liz Cheney's supporters. So the Marjorie Taylor Greene contingent is not a contingent that is gonna tolerate any compromise with the Democrats.
Archon Fung: Yeah, and maybe we can take up that discussion later on. I think maybe right after the election, a lot of people are wondering what the Republican party coalition would look like. And maybe we're beginning to see that now maybe it's the Liz Chaney weighing in and the Marjorie Taylor dream piece of it. But before getting into questions like that I wanted to back up and ask about your book. The title is very dramatic. "The the Two-Party Doom Loop." I think for many Americans it's counterintuitive 'cause we've had the two-party system for a very long time. For Americans paying attention to politics, the two-party system is kind of like a fish swimming in the water. It's kind of hard to imagine other alternatives 'cause this is the one we've been in so far. And yet you argue as the title suggests that this two-party system is generating itself. The fact that it's two parties is generating a huge amount of toxicity in American politics and that we're falling further and further apart. What are a couple of the most important main Springs of that dynamic? Why these two parties? Why you think the two parties are generating the toxicity and driving each other and Americans apart?
Lee Drutman: Yeah. I mean, certainly you're right, that we've always had two major parties in the US, a function of our first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral institutions combined with a presidential Electoral College system. But for most of our political history, those two parties have really been these loose overlapping coalitions. For most of American history that the real action was at the state party level. And the national parties they would come together every four years to nominate a candidate for president but they didn't really stand for all that much. In fact, there was a very famous report by the American Political Science Association in 1950 that complained that the problem with American politics is that we don't have responsible parties. The parties are incoherent, they don't stand for anything. And voters don't have clear choices. They don't know what the parties actually stand for. And actually the problem is that we need parties that have clear programs. Now, this falls into the category of be careful what you wish for. But I think it's important to understand how unusual it is to have what we have now, which is actually a fully sorted two-party system. One of the things I argue in the book is that, for a good portion of the second half of the 20th century we had something more like a four-party system with Liberal Republicans. I mean, you can think Charlie Baker in Massachusetts a lot of even Mitt Romney as governor, right? This was an important part of the Republican party. And you also had a lot of conservative Democrats who came from the South and some rural areas. And within this four party system we had the potential for lots of different coalitions coming together. And both parties have liberal and conservative wings. So whether Republican party was in the White House or a Democratic party was in the White House, you'd still have this sort of overarching cooperation. Lots and lots of districts were split ticket districts. Lots of States were split States. And that allowed a certain compromise fluidity to coalitions. Now that began to collapse in the 1990s for various reasons. And, since the 1990s we've had what political scientists call there's a kind of sorting of the parties where the Republican party has become much more a party of conservative rural America and democratic party has become much more a party of liberal cosmopolitan urban America. And what we've seen is this incredible geographic separation of the two parties that the greatest divider is a density divide in American politics, a rural urban divide. And what that does is it creates two parties that are entirely separate from each other. So there's none of the cross-cutting cleavages that kind of kept politics moderate and stable in that sort of scholars of democracy say, that one of the most important things to have a stable democracy is to have cross-cutting cleavages where people are kind of caught between different alliances. And now all of the important political identities, of race, religion, culture are all stacking on top of each other in a fully sorted two-party system which is roughly balanced at the national level. And you add in winner-take-all elections in this two-party system. And every election is an election for the fate of the nation. I mean, the Republican National Convention I think the most important speech of the Republican National Convention was a speech by Mike Pence in which he said, "This is an election about whether America remains America." And when you create a two-party system divided on that fundamental cleavage of national identity you create a very dangerous political environment in which winning determines who counts in America.
Archon Fung: Yeah. It is worth remembering that it wasn't so long ago in the '90's and before in which people who didn't really pay that much attention to politics kind of had a hard time telling the difference between the two parties, right. There was a lot of, as you say, a huge amount of overlap in Liberal Republicans, Conservative Democrats. But one reason people who study non-voting give for the non-voting is it's hard to tell for a lot of non-voters what the difference was. And now, that claim, right, everybody knows what the difference is because the difference has gotten so much more vast.
Archon Fung: Think that was the core argument of "The Vanishing Voter" right?
Archon Fung: Yeah. And so it's worth remembering that how much the political reality has changed in America on just that dimension. I guess, my glib way of putting it is, if it's between a Bush and a Gore, right? Like how much difference is there, really? Of course there are substantial differences but those differences are minuscule compared to how people perceive the difference between a Donald Trump and a Joe Biden, as you say, right? So political scientists like you and I often talk in this way of polarization and overlapping cleavages, cross-cutting cleavages and the sorting, geographic sorting, ideological sorting but a lot of Americans. And I suspect a lot of people in the audience are saying what are you guys talking about? There's no symmetry here. Suggesting that the two parties are somehow equally responsible, there's one party that's causing the problems and the toxicity. And that is the party that is trying to diminish the size of the franchise whose supporters are resorting to violence, that that's where the toxicity is coming from. And if they would just stop it things would be a lot better. What do you think?
Lee Drutman: So, yeah, I mean, this is definitely something that I've wrestled with a lot. Because it's clear to me and I think clear to anybody that the Republican party has become a liberal party. I think the Republican party became a liberal party on January 6th when members of Congress, or really in the aftermath of January 6th when Republican members of Congress basically said, well, it's not a big deal that the sitting president of the United States incited a mob to storm the Capitol because he refused to acknowledge and electoral defeat. And, I mean it's been trending this way for a while. And, democracy is a difficult thing to maintain, if you have one of the two major parties that does not believe in free and fair elections. But it's also a difficult thing to maintain more broadly when there's not a shared sense of what are fair processes. Now, I mean, so... Polarization is sort of relate even think of it as a relational concept in that, you have two parties that are further and further apart, and but you can also think it as a function of hyper-partisanship that you have two parties that view the other side as fundamentally enemies and not as fellow citizens of the country, but as threats to the nation. Now there, there is some symmetry and I've seen some polling around that, but the problem is what do you do with one where one party is fundamentally illiberal and the other party is fundamentally liberal. And that creates a tremendous challenge 'cause on the one hand, as a and I make no secret of the fact that I'm a Democrat and I align with the Democratic party. Now, so wearing my democratic jersey I would say, well, of course the problem is the Republicans. And the key is just we have to crush, the Republicans and we have to pass all kinds of voting reforms that make it easier for people to vote. And then the Republican party will-
Archon Fung: You're on the record, by the way favoring all of those such reforms.
Lee Drutman: Yeah, exactly. So, of course I favor those... I mean, exactly. So I favor all those reforms but at the same time, I don't think there are enough. Because the challenge is that if you have two major parties and one of those two major parties is fundamentally illiberal and does not believe in free and fair elections in which everybody votes equally you can't sustain a democracy. And we have lots of examples around the world of how democracies breakdown and they all involve intense polarization in a binary way with one party that becomes authoritarian illiberal and that's the most dangerous condition. So the argument of for electoral reform, which is, what I advocate in the book moving to a more proportional system is that the only way forward is that we have to find a space for a pro democracy, right party to emerge and within our current political system that space has disappeared. And the only way to create that space is a proportional system in which liberal Republicans can run independently of conservative or Trump MAGA, whatever you wanna call these, I either call them MAGA, America Firsters, Patriot Party Republicans who don't represent anywhere close to a majority. I mean, depending on how you wanna count the support I would say it's probably about 15 to 20% of the country. Now that's similar to far-right populous parties in Germany say, the AFD. But difference between Germany and the US is that in Germany, you have a proportional system in which the center-right party Merkel's party, the CDU can form a coalition with the center-left party the SPD, and they can form essentially a quote on "senaterror." And marginalize the far-right, keep them out of power. And in Germany, the AFD is actually losing support. It's down to less than 10%. But in the US because there's no space for that center-right faction to operate independently in a system of winner-take-all, two-party elections. It's just fighting a losing battle within a Republican coalition that is rooted in parts of the country that are overly culturally conservative and represent the declining white evangelical electorate that feels under a tremendous sense of threat and that because they are declining and because they already rely on minority institutions they're gonna push harder to restrict the franchise to engage in aggressive gerrymandering to preserve their shrinking power.
Archon Fung: Good. And I want to get to the multi-party proportional ideas in just a moment. A couple of things. The one thing that multi-party systems allow for is all kinds of alliances that you would not expect. And just in the German case I don't know how many the Germans are in the audience but what we might see as a center-right, the CDU, as you say coalition with the greens. And you think, well why would they be in coalition with the greens. And Wolfgang Streek, a German political scientists offered the observation a few years ago. Well, the greens are basically the vegan wing of the Christian democratic party, meaning, well, they're kind of upper class professional but have these whole foods shopping tendencies which I thought was an interesting observation. For people keeping score in the audience, Lee has proposed two different paths forward that we wanna put in conversation for one another and with one another. And I think a lot of people on the capital D democratic side of the ledger have in their mind, a majoritarian way forward that the capitally Democrats get 51% of the votes, shove through things like HR 1 and S 1 anti-racist policies and run the table and that's the way to make democracy better. So that's a path one, the majoritarian path. And Lee is putting on the table not the majoritarian path, but a proportional and multi-party path that is innovative and provocative. And so we'll put those two ideas into conversation more in a moment. But first, right before we do that I wanted to ask you about the racial justice and multi racial inclusive democracy priority. This summer in the midst of COVID-19 we saw what was perhaps the most widespread protest ever in this country around racial justice. It was a reminder to me, to everyone who watched I think of just how far America has to go before we achieve an inclusive multiracial democracy. Now, Lee, you might think that the democratic party seems to have deeply embraced racial justice more deeply. And so within the context of this two-party system we're pushing inclusion forward to the extent that capitally Democrats have political power. So, some of these other doom loop questions aside do you think that the American two-party system is helping out the cause of multiracial democracy? Because it seems to be such a core part of the Joe Biden-Harris agenda at this point.
Lee Drutman: Yeah. So it's a great question. And it's something I've been thinking a lot about. So I think it's certainly the case that it's racial justice has become a key part of the democratic party agenda. As the democratic party itself has become really a strongly multiracial coalition. Now, at the same time the Republican party has become much more extreme in its white nationalists, basically anti pluralist view. So, on the one hand we see progress on the other hand we see tremendous opposition from that progress, which is, certainly the course of things you get progress, you get backlash. However, one of the things that makes this incredibly volatile is the fact that we've created a two-party system that is forcing people to make a binary choice on national identity. And so one of the reasons why you see the Republican party becoming more explicitly white nationalists is because in a binary system, and that elevates this question of national identity in a winner-take-all context the Republican party sees a potential to gain votes by creating an exaggerated threat of what a multiracial democracy would look like as a way to win elections. Because the logic of zero-sum, lesser-of-two evils politics is to make the other side seem evil. So what's happened rather than saying, all right, well, this is okay, because, we're a nation of immigrants. The Republican party has sort of done a caricature of Black Lives Matter and of social justice movements as dangerously violent when they're not, as dangerously radical when they're not. And that has an effect because most people follow elite cues in party politics. And if you're a Republican and you're watching about this cancel culture every night on Fox News, and OAN you suddenly feel like it's a real threat which makes you more radicalized. Yeah, it emerges from the binary conflict. Now, there's a lot to say on this topic and we could talk about this for quite a while. I'll just say two other things. One is that, in the last month or so I've been spending a lot of time looking at what election systems experts recommend for divided pluralistic multiethnic societies in terms of electoral institutions. And there's some debate on various types of proportional systems but here's what they don't recommend is creating winner-take-all systems in which you divide people into two competing camps and set them for in a fight for narrow majority control. But overwhelmingly recommend is, a system that's more proportional that allows for more fluid coalitions. Again, we'll get back to this fundamental point of cross cutting dynamics in political systems. And also, create space for different realignments and different coalitions. And that's just become so crucial. Now, the other, the flip side of that is what has the two-party system meant for minority representation in American politics? And Paul Frymer who's a political scientist at Princeton, has written a really I think incredibly insightful book called "Uneasy Alliances" which talks about the argument of electoral capture that because there's only two parties that once a minority group gets essentially captured in the democratic coalition it doesn't have a ton of leverage. And this is, he argues that this has been sort of the story of black voters in American politics is that as they became part of the democratic coalition they lost the leverage that they might've had to demand more racial justice policies that were more in line with racial justice because the swing constituency was always the white more culturally conservative voters. And that is still the swing constituency in American politics. And I think that will still limit the ability of Democrats to pursue a racial justice agenda. And, anyway we could talk more broadly. But I mean, I think the bottom line here is that overwhelmingly if you look at comparative electoral systems experts will tell you that the more proportional a system the better it is for minority representation the better it is for an inclusive multiethnic democracy. And the absolute worst thing you could do is to create this binary winner-take-all dynamic in which elections are about the identity of, who we are as a nation and kind of reify a very black or white view of national identity.
Archon Fung: Yeah, that's great. And for the reading list out there people who might be interested who are interested in African-American power in the context of the two-party system, my former colleague Leah Wright Rigueur has a fabulous book "The Loneliness of the Black Republican" which looks historically at Republican leaders within the... Or African-American leaders within the Republican party trying to carve out space, whether their ideas economic independence or self-sufficiency but it's just really hard to get traction for some of the reasons that Lee points out. All right. I think a lot of people judging from the Q and A and some of the questions before are eager to get to the all-important question about what to do about the two-party doom loop, how to make it better. And Lee you've already indicated that broadly speaking you would like to move toward a more proportional system, but this is not Europe. We have a two-party system. We have first-past-the-post. And so let's talk about some of the measures either things we can do in the short term and things we can do, might be done in the longer term to move towards some proportionality. Before we do that, I'm going to paste in the chat, if I can, an excerpt from this article by Tom Edsall. I can't do it. Nevermind. I'll try to figure it out while this goes on. In which a polling firm has asked people, well, if there were five parties in the United States, who would you support? And there's a nationalist right-wing party and they would get 19% support. A traditional conservative party about free enterprise and traditional family, and they'd get 21%. So that's like 40% of the population. There's a culturally liberal and globalist party with a platform about social progress, women, LGBTQ, minority rights and inclusion, but about capitalism. So these are your friends on the upper East side not to draw too much of a stereotype. They get, upper East side of Manhattan, they get about 12% of the vote. And then the center-left party about the middle-class universal healthcare labor unions, they get 28% and then the green new deal party gets 10%. So nobody gets anything like close to 50% and it's spread out according to the survey, which is pretty interesting. So I'll see if I can post that in the chat. Lee so what are some of the steps that you could imagine are there at the state level or at the national level, bringing us toward some proportionality and multiparty competition?
Lee Drutman: Yeah. Well, the key is multi-member districts, right? That are proportionately allocated. So I'm not talking like the old, like at, block voting, which was used to limit civil rights. I'm talking about proportional multi-member districts. Now there's a few ways to do proportional representation and every country has a different version. I think generally the consensus is that you wanna have multi-member districts but not super large. You don't wanna be Israel where you have the entire Knesset is elected in one district but rather something, what I have in mind is something like Ireland where you have five member districts selected by rank choice. Well, actually it's the Cambridge uses, Cambridge Massachusetts uses the system but they use it with non-partisan elections which makes it confusing for voters. So, I mean, I think you wanna recognize that parties are essential. Now, there is legislation in the house, the Fair Representation Act, which actually would do this. It would create multi-member districts for house seats with rank choice voting that would also put in place rank choice voting for Senate elections. And I think that would go a long way towards creating space for more parts. I think increasing the house, size of the house would also help and that bill actually does that. And I think that would go a long way. Now, we can debate there's the... So that's the Irish model proportional representation. There's also a German, New Zealand model which is a mixed member system which is half a single winner district constituency base and then half party less based. There's openness PR which is used in Belgium and Finland. But I mean, the broader point here and I'm happy to get into the weeds here. 'Cause this stuff is so fascinating. But I mean, the broader point is that the number of parties is a function of district size and allocation rules. So if you have larger districts where seats are allocated proportionally to share of the district, you get more parties. And if you have single winner districts like we have with plurality voting you're most likely to have just two parties.
Archon Fung: Mm, good, good. And one question, there's a lot of questions from the audience. One that is striking asked about the path. So can you think of, and I've been racking my brain, myself, think of examples either from other countries or from States in the United States that have exhibited a little bit of a doom loop dynamic but have managed to pull back from it perhaps through going to some PR system or some other way?
Lee Drutman: Yeah. So the best example comes from New Zealand. Now, in the 1980s New Zealand politics was incredibly dysfunctional. At the time, New Zealand had a very pure Westminster style system very much like the British system single winner plurality district. And they had a bunch of plurality reversals in which the party that won the most seat, the most votes which was the liberal party or the... The liberal party actually wound up with a minority and the party that won fewer seats which was the kind of the right-wing party won more seats in the legislature. And they had this kind of buffoonish populist prime minister. And there was just like this incredible distrust in political institutions. In New Zealand, they had enacted these very unpopular austerity policies. And there was a sense that something needed to change. And there was a national commission that recommended moving to proportional system. And they put it up for a vote and New Zealanders overwhelmingly voted to become a more proportional system. They copied the German model of mixed member proportional. And now New Zealand has been a thriving democracy. Confidence in institutions has increased by all measures. The quality of New Zealand democracy has increased tremendously from the '90's when they... '93, they voted to change, '96 was the first election. So I think that's, probably the shining example of a transition from a system that was unfair to a system that was more proportional. The first wave of movement to proportional voting systems was it swept Western Europe from 1899 to 1919. And there are a bunch of reasons why various European countries did that. But, I mean, basically the trend among democracy is going back to 1899. Belgium was the first country that did it. And they had basically solved a civil war problem there. And if they've managed, despite being a very divided country between the Flemish and the Walloons, so French speakers and the Dutch speakers Belgium has managed to hang together as a nation. I mean, they've had some challenges forming coalition governments but the proportional, a lot of people think that the proportional system saved them. So, yeah, but no country has ever gone from being a proportional system to a majoritarian system.
Archon Fung: Yeah. And I just wanna show... I wanna ask a little bit... Whoever's hosts, Melissa if your host, could you give me screen-sharing? I just want to follow up on the New Zealand issue. So what are the lessons for the United States and what are the conditions? It feels like one of the conditions is that both parties feel like they get the short end of the stick from the existing electoral system. So they are both supportive of some kind of reform. And I mean, it sure feels like the US satisfies that condition now as long as we have the Electoral College. So are there other conditions that you think are important? And is the US close to a New Zealand moment or far from it?
Lee Drutman: I mean, I hope we're close to a New Zealand moment. I mean, I think generally, I mean, when you look more broadly at electoral system change there seems to be a few conditions that need to be met. One is a overwhelming sense that we have a problem. And I think that condition largely seems to be met. Second condition is, that we have a sense of what the alternative ought to be. And I feel like here we have a lot of work to do. And then the third condition is that politicians who would vote to enact such a change have to think that they'll do at least as well if not better under a new set of voting rules. And that's also a challenge. Now, I mean, I think here, you might say, well, of course the Democratic party and the Republican party why would they ever vote a system that basically would undermine the Democratic party and the Republican party? And there's a couple of ways to think about it. One is that, within those parties there are factions that feel like they're getting the short end of the stick. so that the parties themselves are these broad coalitions and, interestingly, or perhaps not surprisingly in my conversations, the most enthusiasm for these reforms comes from the center-right, and the never Trumpers and the justice Democrats, the progressive left, who both feel they're on the margins here and they'd like to see more representation. But at the same time, I think you could also see support and I've seen some support for this not as much from the sort of more moderate wing of the democratic party who feels like, they would like a system, one that generates more compromise and two, that frees them from having to be associated with the defund the police wing of the democratic party. The point about, uncertainty that you were raising in our economy is... Actually, I think the pivotal point in the adoption of PR systems in Western Europe in the first part of the 20th century is that you had a lot of wild swings back and forth because of the way that the majoritarian single winner districts were working. Although a lot of those countries did have something like a multi-party system, but there was a sense that the socialists were gaining power, there was a expansion of the franchise. And a lot of support for the reform in Western Europe at that time came from conservative parties who felt that they were gonna be wiped out entirely. And the proportional system gave them more of a share that was in line with their population, as well as the socialists who while they were gaining power often felt that their power, their representation was not equal to their voting share 'cause they were over concentrated in urban districts. So, I think we are at a moment in which there is a lot of uncertainty about who's gonna take power. And I think there's a sense that a lot of wild swings are not good for the stability of American democracy. And finally, I do think that there are a lot of members in Congress who are really frustrated With how the hyperpolarization is affecting their work. And I don't think you can find a member of Congress who would stand up and say, Oh, gee things are working really well. But it's a challenge to get them to see, all right, well here's a different system. Now, and there is legislation in the house, Fair Representation Act. One of the co-sponsors is the new all-star of the democratic party, Jamie Raskin. So, you know, there's...
Archon Fung: Good. Good. So I wanna show this picture from your book. One of the diagrams that is, I found, I mean, I kind of knew this at some level but to see you sketch it out. And it's very surprising, I think, for an American audience. And can you guys see that? Hold on
Archon Fung: You expand it to make to do full screen.
of goes on from there. And the outliers are Iceland, Israel, Belgium and the Netherlands, which have between seven and eight effective parties. So the US is a real outlier in the world stage in having our two-party system. And that's not, I think, unrelated to the fact that where our constitution is the oldest on this list. Good. All right. So question for you, Lee, how do you think about the relationship between reform at the state level toward proportionality through ranked choice voting as we have in a couple of States now, I guess and other forms of proportionality? How does the state level reform effort fit into the national effort? Do we have to have a lot of States doing this first to make it plausible for people to generate some national models? What do you think?
Lee Drutman: I'm not sure. I mean, I've gone back and forth on this question as have a lot of folks in this advocacy space. I think one thing that's important to understand is that there's the single winner ranked choice voting which maintains the single member district which was on the ballot in in Massachusetts last year, what passed in Maine what passed in Alaska and then there's the proportional multi winner form of ranked choice voting, which has not been on the ballot anywhere, although maybe it will be in 2022. There's some potential that some States, will be interested in that. I think both it's important to pursue it at both the federal level and at the state level. I think, it's in some ways the threshold for effecting change at the state level is lower. And, there is a powerful demonstration effect. I mean, I think certainly the success of campaigns in Maine and Alaska has kind of created a new plausibility for electoral reform that wouldn't have existed otherwise and raise the profile of the issue in a way that gets people talking about it. I mean, there is... But at the same time, given the sort of overwhelming nationalization of American politics and the extent to which so much is focused on what happens in Washington and the sort of centrality of the Congress that clearly doing it at the federal level would be the most powerful and most important thing to do. And that would kind of filter down to the state level. So I think we ought to be doing all of the above and I mean that, state, city, national. And there's different opportunities for different folks to get involved at different levels. And I think the more people who get involved in thinking about how they want their democracy to operate the better. Because, ultimately this is a conversation that we all need to be having with each other. And I think one of the things that we've kind of not really thought about collectively is what kind of democracy do we really wanna have? We sort of take it for granted that, well, this is just how US democracy works because it's worked that way in the past. But one of the things, when you look at the broader scope of the history of American democracy is that we've had these various moments in which social movements have emerged to say, we can do better. We don't have to do democracy in the way that we did it in the past, because, we see the flaws in that. And we can become them at every revolutionary war. It was as a social movement that said, we can have self-governance we don't need to be ruled by a King. Progressive era was an era of social movements and which says, we want politics to be more participatory. The civil rights era was an era in which great social movements mattered. It shouldn't matter what the color of your skin is. Everybody should have the right to vote equally and be counted equally. And, I think we could see the sort of emergence of a new democracy social movement that will say, we want a more inclusive and representative democracy in which it doesn't matter where you vote or where you live, your vote counts equally. And in which we get more choices that represent the diversity that is this country and not put everybody into the Procrustean beds of just one or the other parties.
Archon Fung: I think there's an interesting moral dimension. We've been talking a lot about the toxicity and the very practical and urgent problems of the illnesses that face democracy, our two-party system democracy and our two-party form. There's an interesting moral dimension to it, which is that in the two-party doom loop dynamic, right, actually voters don't get to vote for what they really stand for. And even leaders don't get to stand for really what they believe in because the two-party dynamic is driving excessive opposition, whether you hate the other side or not, that's kind of, you're on the puppet strings of this two-party doom loop. But in a proportional system, right, leaders would get to stand for what they believe in, whether you're a green new deal person or a build the wall higher person you'd get to stand for that. And voters would get to vote for what they really want as opposed, like right now, the hardcore Bernie person really didn't in the general election get to vote for who he wanted to vote for. And the moderate Republican, the Mitt Romney type person didn't get to vote for what he really wanted. He or she really wanted, right? So yeah, I was just kind of trying to lift up what's to be said on the moral dimension of a multi-party system.
Lee Drutman: And I mean, you see a lot of evidence for this. In proportional systems, people one, are more satisfied with democracy 'cause they feel like they got to express their view better. And, two, you just see much higher levels of citizen engagement and participation. The US is consistently one of the lowest turnout democracy, but also UK and Canada are also low turnout democracies 'cause they're two or two-ish party systems with first-past-the-post elections in which a lot of districts are just not competitive. And the advantage of, one value of a proportional system is just that you have competition everywhere because there are no safe seats. Your vote matters whether you live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or suburban Philadelphia. And, also with more candidates and more parties there's more people reaching out to voters and engaging voters. Voters are more likely to also feel like they have a candidate who they're excited about. And I mean, we know from tremendous amounts of research, that there's all kinds of downstream benefits from more competitive elections. People are more likely to be engaged in politics and there's more likely to be spill over affection into other forms of civic participation and volunteerism from people being engaged. So I think there are tremendous downstream effects to having a more the higher turnout that would result from more proportional and more party elections. And also in terms of how politicians campaign in a two party election, you can just run your campaign. Oh, well, that person is extreme and dangerous. And don't talk at all about what you stand for. In fact, that's largely what the 2020 election was. Just trying to cast the other side as more extreme, but if there is more than two candidates, you don't have that dynamic. There's no phrase, lesser of three evils. Though actually in my crack research for the book I did find that it was a martial arts, original title of a martial arts film, which was very poorly reviewed and later renamed fist of the warrior. But that was the only use that I could find, right. But even if you think about the democratic primary as an example, in which there are multiple candidates, instead of saying, well, this, other candidate is terrible. They had a stand for different policy programs and what you see in multiparty elections. I mean, sure, there's some negative campaigning, but there's a lot more here's what my policy vision is, and here's how it's different. Not the other side is extreme and dangerous. And that creates a different dynamic in politics.
Archon Fung: Good. And so Alex Keyssar, my colleague, great historian of democracy, asked a question and I'll pose it both at his level but also at the personal level for you, which is have you found much purchase among professional politicians for this proposal? That's the to Lee question. And then Alex's form of it as a historian is look in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there was room for third, fourth parties in a lot of places. And the two parties, the two major parties implemented many, many rules to solidify their duopoly and lock those third, fourth, and fifth parties out. So I think Alex expects a great amount of resistance from the capitally the Democrats and the capital are Republicans for any move, any microscopic move in the directions that you suggest.
Lee Drutman: Yeah, and I think I see his book on your shelf, right? Is that, the-
Archon Fung: Yeah it is.
Lee Drutman: Which is an excellent book. And I would just say, I really enjoyed it and learned a ton from his history of the electoral college, which is also about how hard it is to enact major reforms. And, certainly, a major reform like changing the voting system would go up against the capital D capital R Republican parties. I would however, note that in that earlier era that the parties themselves were much stronger institutions and much better organized at the state and local level so that there were like real party organizations that were really trying to shut out competition. The parties today are not really institutionalized and strong organizations as they were in that earlier era. I mean, they're sort of these loose networks of campaign consultants and lawyers and activists but they're not strong in the way that they were in that earlier era. And in fact, I think they're incredibly internally divided. And so in some ways like who is the democratic party, who is the Republican party. And so there are certainly the way you build support for reform is not from Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer down but it's from members up who eventually Schumer and Pelosi will get where their members are. And there is certainly support for a Fair Representation Act. It's got a bunch of co-sponsors in the house including Jamie Raskin and I think representative McGovern, who are kind of adjacent to party leadership. I mean, I think it would have more support if... But, I mean Democrats are obviously focused on HR 1 as their urgent priority. And, it's just these reforms haven't been socialized, but informally talking to number of staffers who work for members, I think there's enthusiasm for this idea. And I think they understand the importance of it. Anyway, ultimately, I mean, yes, members of Congress are partisans. Yes, they're reelection seeking, but I think a lot of them also are engaged in politics because they want to work on public policy and making the country better. Less and less of them, unfortunately, more and more just wanna get on TV and raise money for their celebrity. But still, I do look at the history of American democracy reform and while it's true that ballot access laws became more restrictive, States and Congress passed direct election of senators the initiative and referendum in more than half of the States direct the direct primary. And almost got rid of the electoral college four times, not quite, but, you know, now... But I mean, there were at least four times when one of the chambers passed it with a super majority. So, when the stars align, things could happen.
Archon Fung: So Lee last question to go out on. This one is pithy. And I hope it doesn't offend people as a little bit too glib. But imagine the 2024 election and it's 2023, if you had the opportunity to wave your wand and get a multi-party set of reforms and you knew that the result of that would be a very robust MAGA/Patriot Party as well as a pretty robust AOC-Bernie squad party would you take that deal? So there would be four in that scenario, right?
Lee Drutman: Yeah, absolutely, I would. I think, I mean, one of the things that you have to think about is like what that dynamic, right... I mean, basically the problem is that our system is stuck right now and we're in this this narrow trench warfare in which not much happens and everything is really ugly. And we keep digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole. And yeah, it might be that you get a robust MAG party and a robust AOC party but then suddenly we know where the balance is and it creates opportunities for new coalitions. And you might find that there's more space for different coalitions when you don't have two armies fighting for this narrow majority control. I mean, democracy is not a system in which we all agree. It's a system in which we resolve our disagreements through elections and through governance. And so it would, I think create some action and some fluidity and some potential realignments. And I'd rather, I mean, right now what we have is just this sense that everything is stuck and we have to... And if you unstick things you might get a little chaos, but if you think of it in terms of democracy as a complex system you need... For a complex system to work, there needs to be a little bit of sort of small-scale instability in order for the larger system to be stable. And the most dangerous thing in a complex system is if things can't adjust and if there's no opportunity if there's too much small-scale stability that the whole system becomes unstable at a large scale. And so what we have is too much small scale stability and the entire system is unstable at the large scale. What we need essentially is more small-scale instability and change and fluidity to allow the system to be responsive at a large scale.
Archon Fung: Thank you very much, Lee. There's like a ton of great questions in the chat, and I apologize that we didn't get to those but it's evidence of how rich this discussion has been and how much people care about what just a few years ago we would regard as a very abstract kind of non-urgent question, but the reality has really come home that we need to think ambitiously and deeply about how to fix our democracy. Lee, thank you very much for helping us all to do that.
Lee Drutman: Yeah, well, thank you for hosting this conversation and I'm excited to keep this dialogue going. I mean, I think this is a question of how we keep our democracy moving forward and have a democracy that works in a diverse multi-ethnic society is I think the crucial question of our times.
Archon Fung: I totally agree. Thank you very much and have a good day everyone and stay safe.
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Presenter: You've been listening to AshCast, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation's podcast. If you'd like to learn more, please visit ash.harvard.edu or follow the Ash Center on social media @harvardash.