Why only the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in the USA? Are they stipulated as official parties by law?
Why are there no Green, Liberal, Christian, Labour etc parties?
Actually, we do have Green and Libertarian parties, but they’re so tiny that they have little practical impact at the national level.
I think it’s largely due to winner-take-all approach to elections.
It’s also worth noting that although (I think) we’ve always tended to have two major parties, they haven’t always been these two.
I’m sure someone with a more accurate knowledge of US history will be by with details.
-D/a
Without some sort of fancy voting system (proportional or perhaps preferential for example) democracies always tend towards two major parties.
In a country with a simple voting system like the US, a minor party that can attract only a small percentage of the vote in any given electorate will never win anything at all. So people are reluctant to vote for them at all since doing so (a) won’t result in any representation and (b) will detract from number of votes for the major party that the voter would otherwise support, making it more likely that the opposing major party will win.
It’s not impossible for more minor parties to gain votes in first-past-the-post countries (see for example the Lib Dems at the moment in the UK) but the system works against it.
The United States does not have only two parties. It has only two major parties. And this situation evolved on its own; parties are not mentioned in the constitution, and it would be unconstitutional for any law to limit the number of parties.
There are in fact many parties in the United States. As has been stated, we have a Green party and a Libertarian party, and, indeed, a Labor party (occasionally).
See here for a list.
The Green party did, however, have a massive impact on the national level during the 2000 presidential election. Remember the 530 votes in Florida that would have shifted the election to Al Gore instead of George Bush?
And even in the US, politicians do occasionally get elected from parties other than the Big Two. Two senators are from other parties (Barry Sanders describes himself as a socialist, and Joseph Lieberman is officially from the Connecticut for Lieberman party, a party he created himself when he lost the Democratic primary), and there are a host of examples at the state government level.
The case in Minnesota might be instructive: They had a Farm Labor party that was modestly successful, but precisely because they were successful, the Minnesota Democratic Party found it worthwhile to adjust their platform to encompass the Farm Labor issues, and merged with them. So Al Franken is officially a member of the Democrat Farm Labor party, not the Democratic Party (though of course on the national level he’s treated as a Democrat).
The United States is about as close to a pure two-party system as you can get, even though parties are not mentioned in the constitution. (How could they be? – many of the founding fathers were strongly against political parties, including General Washington. And the current Democrat/Republican system only emerged in 1860, with Abraham Lincoln’s first election.)
No law “limits the number of parties” directly, but the system of one-member electorates strongly encourages a two-party system – as it does in the U.K., Canada and Australia. However those three countries do not have such a strong two-party system:
(1) The U.K. because of strong regional differences in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
(2) Canada because of Quebec.
(3) Australia because of the alternative vote in the lower house and proportional representation in the Senate.
Two other things that encourage a two-party system in the U.S. are state-conducted primaries, and gerrymandered electorates which favour the return of incumbents.
Which is exactly the point, I believe, that addresses the OP’s question. It’s not merely a technicality.
I counted four questions in the OP, and only one asks if there’s a law limiting the number of parties.
Duverger’s Principle states that in a political system with a plurality voting system, there is a strong tendency to have only two major parties: Duverger's law - Wikipedia. This doesn’t mean there’s an explicit law that states there must be only two parties in the United States, just that for the voting system we have, two parties are the likely result (similarly, the rules of chess do not explicitly state that opening with the king’s knight’s pawn is an automatic loss, but that is the very likely result if you’re playing against a competent opponent)
Your own cite lists this as a dispute, not fact.
And that very mentality is why, IMO, we need election reform to give a fighting chance to more than two parties.
That is not exactly true about Canada. We do have one federal party that is only relevant in Quebec (Bloc Quebecois), but they are only the fourth most popular party in the country. The top three parties are the Conservative, New Democrat, and Liberal parties, which are nationwide. I don’t know why we have three and the US only has two.
That’s exactly it. A plurality voting system leads to two parties since it makes it very difficult for a third party to gain traction. The two major parties also tend to adopt policies from third parties, thus siphoning off voters. Ultimately, the better ideas of third parties are taken up by the major parties; supporters of the third party then abandon it because one of the major parties have a better chance of getting the policies adopted into law.
Thanks. I don’t really understand Canadian politics: apart from Quebec, it should be about as homogeneous politically as the United States, so it’s quite odd that it has three major parties in Anglophone Canada.
“Taken up”? More like “co-opted and diluted”, methinks.
Partisan politics is important all the way down to the local level in the U.S. Parties build up support, get volunteers, and conduct voting drives from the precinct level on up. Parties vie for all offices, from mayors and legislatures of small towns, to cities, counties, and states. If you start in office as a Republican or Democrat, you have a pathway to rise inside the party up to the national level. And the national party distributes money, support, advertising, and other help all the way down.
This makes it hard for a third party to find any niche at all. They probably run candidates for the offices - here in New York State, you can see 8 or 10 parties on a ballot - but they are never more than rounding error. And if they were to have an occasional success, there’s no good way to exploit it. New York is unusual in allowing the same name to run on more than one party line, so the Conservative Party has gained some strength from the coattails of the Republicans and every once in a while if the Republicans get ornery, run a candidate of their own who wins with one-third of the vote (see Senator James Buckley, 1970). Yet despite winning a Senate seat, they’ve never been able to break through again.
The winner-takes-all nature of almost all races (though that is changing in some localities) makes a two party system viable. The parties themselves have worked since the Civil War to solidify the system in every precinct in the country. They’re successful because they’ve worked at it for 150 years. It can change, but it won’t change top-down. A party needs to build itself from the bottom up. That’s nearly impossible.
One major point, though. In the past, the two parties each had liberal, moderate, and conservative wings and so pretty much anybody who wanted to enter politics could join either party and get away with positions that fit locally. In today’s world, all Republicans are to the right of all Democrats and all Democrats are to the left of all Republicans (technically so in the Senate, where voting records show this is strictly true, and true to a good generalization overall). That does open a middle niche for a moderate party. (Not a right or left party, since those are always minorities.) Nothing like that has made any signs of emerging, but it’s not as obviously impossible as such a thing would have been 50 years ago. I don’t expect to see one in my lifetime, though.
Actually, it’s the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.
Also in Minnesota, the Green Party has 2 people serving in elected local offices (City Council and Park Board) in Minneapolis, the largest city. in fact, within Minneapolis politics, the Republican party has become so irrelevant that battles are between the DFL and the Green parties. So still a two party system, really.
New York is actually one of the few places where this is not true. Due to the electoral fusion law, several third parties have built considerable followings by cross-nominating major-party candidates. It can be very difficult for a Republican to win statewide office in New York without a nomination from the Conservative Party, for example. New York’s third parties are still small relative to the major parties, but they have more influence than most third-party organizations.