There are 50 sets of rules for the 50 states.
I don’t know if there are any federal laws that would regulate this, but there are many court rulings about fairness.
I know, but the most names I’ve remembered seeing is around 6. Why aren’t there more joke candidates filling up the presidential ballot? If the opened it up like they did to CA’s governor race, I bet that you’d have at least a few dozen people appearing on the ballot. Why doesn’t that happen?
One thing people often don’t understand is that in the modern American political system the party bosses don’t choose the candidates, most candidates are chosen via primaries. And you can put any party affiliation after your name. You can be a revolutionary socialist and still run as a Democrat or Republican, you aren’t restricted to only running on a revolutionary socialist party ticket. So it’s ridiculous to complain that the system locks out revolutionary socialists because the revolutionary socialist party isn’t on the ballot.
If you actually look at your ballot next time there will often be a third party candidate listed, the problem is that no one votes for them because they’re all cranks. And why is it that third party candidates are invariably cranks? Because if they weren’t cranks they’d just run on a major party ticket, because that’s a lot easier and doesn’t obligate you to do anything, not even vote the same way as the rest of your party. And so anyone with a lick of sense runs as a third party candidate and tries to influence the party in their direction. This is how the Republican party over the last 150 years morphed from an northern liberal urban industrial antislavery party to a southern conservative rural white person’s party. This is why you can just write off anyone running on a third party ticket, because they must be an idiot who isn’t qualified to hold office or else they wouldn’t be running on a third party ticket.
And the point is, the party leadership consists of people who hold elected office, and their consigliere. But the consigliere don’t run the show, they are hired hands who work for the officeholders. The days when a party boss would decide who should be the mayor and the mayor took orders from the boss are over.
Partisanship isn’t the problem. Partisanship just means that a group of someones support a party. Without a 2-party system, or the current 3-party system, or a dozen-party system, voters would still provide support for a candidate, or a slate of candidates. The fact that you will thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people supporting a candidate is partisan political support.
Parliamentary systems have a plethora of political parties but it still seems to come down to a majority versus a minority that runs a country.
The independent executive office as opposed to a parliamentary system is what suppresses parties outside the two principal ones. Looking at third party candidates over the years, they (nearly?) always drew more votes away from the losing candidate than the winning candidate. This has contributed to the awareness that no third party can be successful. Similarly, in legislatures, following the Congressional model, committee chairs are assigned by the majority party. The president or governor has no requirement to pick a cabinet from among a coalition of legislators when his party fails to achieve a majority in the legislative body–actually choosing the cabinet from persons not in that body. With neither a requirement nor an incentive for political parties to form coalitions with smaller parties, (what would such a coalition actually do under the current rules?), the is no impetus to form or accept coalitions, thus the two parties remain dominant.
As to running for officer without parties: as soon as John Doe asks a handful of people to help him collect enough money and provide enough support for him to run, he has created a political party. For that matter, if Mary Roe decided to run “all by herself,” the moment that a group of people decided to get together to help her, she would have a political party. The only way to prevent this would be to prevent anyone from providing any support for any candidate, effectively forbidding them from exercising their right of free speech to support candidates they like. This is the problem that has brought SCOTUS down to overturn most campaign finance reform laws.
Well, it would never happen, that’s why. Even in countries with viable 3rd parties you have political parties (note the ‘parties’ in ‘3rd parties’ ;)). I don’t know of any system of modern government in any country where they have no parties at all. Even in Communist countries at least you have one party (and in some Communist countries there actually are other parties, though perhaps ‘faction’ would be a better term).
Well, that’s true enough. I think that rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, however, we ought to fix the system we have and bring it back to where it’s a matter of compromise instead of vicious partisan battles where success is measured in victory over the opponent on some obscure political yardstick instead of the good of the country. However, the reason it’s like it is today is because these are the people the voters put into office and obviously the divide is fundamental. One has but to look at how the extreme wings of both parties can set off a political powder keg any time they want that ripples through the entire nation and causes people to take sides instantly. Just look at the firestorm that the recent shootings, the hack of Sony with it’s political implications or the ‘new’ Senate report about torture that happened over a decade ago has set both sides alight with accusation, counter accusation and defense almost being automatic. All the while, the fighting continues on things like the budget with both parties jockeying for position and political gain and barely compromising enough to keep things going.
It would never happen because if it did nothing would ever get done. You’d have dozens of people with dozens of different view points trying to figure out what to do, and nothing binding any of them together. Just look at the Democratic party. Consider if they didn’t have any structure at all, what would they individually vote on? A left wing agenda? A green agenda? A liberal agenda? A moderate agenda? Hell, a conservative agenda? Gods know…it would be freaking chaos. And that doesn’t even address what would happen to all the current Republicans and their various factions.
What you’d end up with is the various factions basically coalescing into something like the current parties anyway just to get things done. Oh, you might have some current Republicans who are libertarian minded, or moderate joining with the new ‘party’ on the left…but you’d have former Democrats joining whatever the new conservative party would be as well, and you’d still end up with big tents just to get stuff done. The only way you could really shake things up would be to change our voting system and remove the first past the post type elections, but that would just mean you’d have no big tent parties but instead a bunch of factions that would have to form coalitions to do the same thing.
So what would happen if we just lowered the bar to running for president? Say, citizen of at least 35 years old, 10 years (or whatever it is) living in the country, $1000 check made out to some election committee, and a million signatures. Anyone who makes that qualification gets a spot on the ballot. For sanity’s sake, lets say we cut off the candidate registration at 300 people, with those part of establish political parties getting automatic qualifiers. Can 295 people make that criteria every 4 years to run for president? Will it affect the race much?
Aren’t there multiples parties in other countries with a presidential system, like in Latin America, for instance?
The requirment of one million signatures will certainly limit a lot the number of potential candidates.
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There are currently three major political parties, Democrat, Republican, and Tea Party. Four if you count the independents as a single party but they caucus with the Democrats, so back to three. It could be said that the Tea Party caucuses with the Republicans, so it’s back to two. It still comes down to a majority vs minority if you want to pass a bill. It could be a majority of Democrats, Republicans, Tea Party, a party-to-be-named-later, and independents vs a minority of Democrats, Republicans, Tea Party, a party-to-be-named-later, and independents.
IIRC, committee chairmenships goes to the party with the most seats. Which, under the current situation, means that the majority party claims the Chairman positions. It would be interesting if a party with only 35% could claim Chairmanships in some distant future.
FYI - A U.S. President must be born in the U.S.A…
Point of order, and apologies for the nitpick, but the Tea Party movement is not a political party, major or otherwise.
The Tea Party has elected Tea Party candidates. Candidates that have proven to be a thorn in the side of the Republican party and have produced apoplexy-like symptoms in Democrats. Sounds like a major political party to me.
No, they’re part of the Republican party. They support Republican candidates almost exclusively. If they were a third party than they’d have a Presidential candidate and a non-Republican (and non-Democratic) candidate in most races.
Of course. Likewise in Asia. But that won’t stop people posting over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over that the reason the United States has only two parties is because of the Presidency. Guaranteed, it will be the first thing posted the next time we discuss this topic.
They’re a minor party, nowhere near the two major sides.
You can ignore them. I doubt that they would care if you do. They might prefer it? The last 3rd party that had gotten this far was the Bull Moose party. What would have been the long term effect if Teddy had decided to run office, one more time?
Most 3rd parties don’t survive very long. One, or both, of the major parties absorb whatever issues made the 3rd party popular and “poof”, the rising 3rd party slips back into being another almost-was.
Political parties have candidates with the party name (or abbreviation) next to them on the ballot. Political parties have presidential candidates. The Tea Party doesn’t qualify at this time. I wish they would – I would love it if they became an official and registered political party. But they don’t meet the definition right now.