Those Pesky Third Parties

David C. King
for DemocracyToday.com
August 1, 2000

As I watch this year’s third party candidates – Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party – I find myself feeling less than sanguine about the role third parties play in the modern electoral process. Despite the expectations these candidates raise, votes for third party candidates in the United States are almost always wasted gestures with little impact on who actually gets elected. Third parties do play a role in bringing neglected issues to the national stage (witness the Populist Party's James Weaver's strong showing in 1892 and Ross Perot's 1992 focus on the budget deficit). However, the almost inevitable result of our electoral laws is that the Democrats or Republicans swallow up third parties within two election cycles.

The nation's Founders conjured a constitution that they thought would make political parties obsolete. They created more-or-less representative assemblies to reflect local issues around which large national factions would be unlikely to emerge. Parties are not mentioned in the Constitution, and in its original form, the vice presidency was held by the person who came in second in electoral college balloting. Yet it is the electoral college, and its local legacy of "single-member districts with plurality rule" that set the U.S. on a path for a strong two party system.

With the electoral college, only one person wins all the electoral votes from a state (the single member requirement), and whoever gets the most votes in that state wins (plurality rule). Likewise, most city council seats, all state legislative seats, and all congressional seats are allocated one-per-district to whoever gets the most votes. It would seem un-American (indeed, almost un-democratic) to run elections any other way. Yet most democracies have drastically different electoral systems, and those other systems encourage multiple parties. Is Chile any less democratic for sending to its National Assembly the top two vote getters from each district? Is Israel any less democratic for allowing parties winning less than 2 percent of the vote to have a place in the Knesset?

As in Israel, and Denmark and (thanks to recent electoral reforms) New Zealand, proportional representation gives rise to successful third, fourth and fifth parties. There is even a cottage industry among Political Scientists that can predict with remarkable accuracy whether an electoral system will - in equilibrium - support eight or ten or thirteen political parties. Some analysts soberly, and correctly, predicted the split in Poland's Beer Lover's party into "big beer" (focusing on exports) and "little beer" (with more attention to local environmental issues and alliances with the Greens). More worrisome for democratic stability, however, has been the rise of nationalist and ethnic splinter parties throughout the proportional representation world.

Since it takes a plurality to win an election in the U.S., the natural pressure among candidates and parties is to form coalitions before elections. A general election in which someone is sent to office with twenty percent of the vote is a failure of our system to knit together interests and communities. In proportional representation systems, governing coalitions are formed after elections, making those coalitions more transitory and less deeply rooted in the political culture.

Third party candidates in the United States too often, naively, vaingloriously, imagine that they will succeed in landing legislative seats (and maybe the presidency) just as their ideological compatriots have around the globe. The U.S. Green Party has no more chance of winning the presidency than Lyndon LaRouche and assorted ruckus rousers of the far right and far left. And the noise you will hear in 2000 from Perot's Reform Party is nothing but a death rattle. The Reform Party will not be on a majority of state presidential ballots four years from now.

What is to become of the Reform Party voters? If history proves a good guide, the Democrats and Republicans will adopt the core issues. Without Ross Perot's strong showing in 1992, it is unlikely that Congress would have seriously addressed the budget deficit in 1993 and 1994. Mr. Perot served the nation well. Likewise, ever-present pressure from Libertarian candidates, especially in U.S. Senate races, has helped keep Lockean liberalism alive, well, and refreshing the parties.

Once in U.S. history, a third party rose up, united around a single issue, and toppled the second party. That was in 1852 when Republican John Fremont came in second place to Democrat James Buchanan. This was made possible by a regional split in the Whig Party, long led by rivals Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency, and the Whig Party disappeared forever.

Like slavery in the 1850s, is there a similar nationally riveting issue being overlooked by the Democrats and Republicans today? No. Are either of the parties especially undermined by frictions among national leaders? No; in fact the party faithful seem more united than at any time since the early 1930s. The two parties, yes, are increasingly alienating average Americans, which is part of the explanation for lower turnout in elections and for general mistrust of government. Yet there is no good evidence that disgust with parties and polarization makes third parties more successful at the ballot box.

So go ahead and vote for a third party presidential candidate in 2000. You may be sending a message, hoping that some Democrat or Republican will hear your plaint. You will not, however, be sending anyone to the White House.

David C. King is an associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. This op-ed appears in the Fall 2000 Kennedy School Bulletin.