Do you have a cite for that proposition? Because it doesn’t match the experience in the U.K. and Canada, which also have first-past-the-post plurality voting.
For example, in the 2005 General Election in the U.K., 10 parties won at least one seat, as the 2005 electoral map shows. The pattern of more than just two parties dates back to the 19th century, when the Irish nationalists started electing MPs who were not members of the Liberal or Conservative parties, and picked up when Labour started electing members. There’s no suggestion that the number of parties is in decline in the U.K.; if anything, it’s gradually increased over the past century, as the various nationalist and regional parties have gathered steam.
Similarly, in Canada, multi-party representation in the House of Commons started at the end of World War I, nearly a century ago, and shows no signs of declining. There are currently four parties represented in the Commons, as shown by the 2008 electoral map.
Now, it is correct that it’s difficult to break the dominance of the top two parties. As you commented, in the U.K. it was the Conservatives/Liberals, then Conservatives/Labour that formed government, and none of the smaller parties. And in Canada, it’s always been either the Liberals or the Conservatives/Progressive Conservatives/Conservatives that have formed the government. But that’s a different issue than suggesting that the first-past-the-post system inevitably reduces the number of parties to two.
Add in that we don’t have an election season any more. Our major parties start the next campaign while the present one is getting counted. They have people on TV talk shows, the Sunday Press programs and all over the Radio. How can a third party compete with that?
I’m afraid that RealityChuck slightly misstated the effect of FPTP. FPTP tends to create districts/constituencies that are controlled by two parties. Thats why, if you notice today’s UK general election, almost all the constituencies are only contested between two parties: Con-Lib, Lab-Lib, Con-Lib. That’s why the UK (and Canada) have more than two parties even with FPTP, because Duverger’s Law works on the district level.
The difference in the U.S.? We have a national Presidential election held at the same time as the legislative elections. We all know how much a Presidential election sucks the air out of an election year. So Duverger’s Law works on a national level to incentive politicians to form two national parties.
And apropos of nothing, FPTP is a much more preferable system than PR, but that’s a question for Great Debates, I guess.
Both the UK and Canada have significant regional parties that have no chance of winning seats outside their region (they almost certainly don’t try) but make strong showings at home. There’s effectively no regionalism at all in the United States; a very small fraction of people care about their home region to the extent that a Scot or Quebecois might with regard to theirs.
That doesn’t explain the success of a non-regional third party in these nations though. It might be that the success of regional parties, having already broken the two-party stranglehold, makes people more aware of the fact that the two main parties do not have a monopoly on good ideas. However, I think the reasons for the lack of minor party success in the United States are its sheer size and its parties willingness to accept people who don’t fully support their platform. The two major parties are gigantic coalitions that have the massive amount of funds needed to run campaigns across the country.
Thus, I feel that any significant third party will start out regionally, both to speak to specific problems of that region and to limit the amount of funding they need to spread the word to the targeted voters.
That’s the system they use here in Australia and I’m not a fan- if I’ve voted for John Smith of the Sensible Party and he doesn’t win, I don’t want my vote being transferred to Frederick Ramesses Biscuit Tin III of the Extremely Silly Party (for example). If I wanted to vote Extremely Silly, I would have voted for them originally.
In NSW and Queensland state elections they allow optional preference voting.
Victoria and Western Australia have tried and reverted.
After a review in 1998, the Joint Standing Committee of Electoral Matters were not persuaded by arguments (chiefly by One Nation supporters and also Albert Langer) to use optional preferences in Federal Elections.
IMHO it’s one of the great pleasures of preference voting, you get to pick the person you’d like most to win and the person you’d like most to lose.
I take as much time deciding who gets last place (usually Fred Nile’s Call to Australian if One Nation is not standing) before I decide who gets #1, then fill in the rest in reverse order.
I must say I’m glad that we haven’t adopted MMP here- it basically guarantees that at least one “single issue” or “unpopular (political) minority party” will end up with entirely too much influence in Parliament.
Maybe I’m missing the point but that seems to open up the possibility of sabotaging somebody’s political campaign. If somebody else can spend money campaigning against a candidate and have it count against the candidate’s spending ceiling, what stops people from running a bunch of expensive anti-candidate ads early? That would hit the ceiling and the candidate wouldn’t be able to spend any of his own money defending himself.
I don’t know. New York’s system is notoriously biased against third parties and independents. The laws required to enter the candidate list are designed to be near impossible to meet*. But the big loophole (as appears to be the case in North Carolina) is a grandfather clause that allows the establsihed parties to skip the qualification process.
*For example, getting your name entered the ballot requires you to collect a bunch of signatures. Every signatory has to be a registered voter and has to sign his name exactly the same as he or she is registered - if you’re registered as John Q. Public and you sign the petititon as John Public (or vice versa) your signature is invalidated. You cannot sign more than one petition for the same position - if you do, both of your signatures will be invalidated. If the person who ask you to sign the petition is not a registed New York state voter, your signature is invalidated. If you are a registered voter but you sign in some other location besides the one you’re registered in, your signature is invalidated. You have to sign in a certain color of ink - if you sign in a different color your signature is invalidated. And the petitions are organized by pages - if any signature on the page is invalidated, the entire page is invalidated
There are obviously many reasons. Only MD2000, I think, mentioned one of the most important: if I wanted to run as a Republican, all I have to do is to win that primary (see the history of Wayne Morse in Oregon). The result has been, historically, that parties have had to represent a wide variety of points of view. Here in Canada, a maverick, even if chosen as candidate by his riding representative, can be thrown off the ballot by the party leader and the party leader’s brother-in-law substituted, even if BIL lives at the other end of the coutry. Thus the only way to represent another point of view is to start another party and sometimes this happens. The current Canadian government’s party started as a rump party dissatisfied with both major parties and quickly took much of the west and then took over one of the older parties (which had gone from governing to exactly two seats, in one election).
The more recent injection of massive amounts of money has also made third (or thrid) parties much much harder.
Incidentally, both Canada and Britain have plurality elections so, while that is a consideration, it is not the whole story.
I predict that if the Republicans become ideologically “pure” and even taken over by tea partisans, you could see a new center-right party. I don’t regard that as likely, but it is first recent opening for a new third party.
In my opinion, the biggest opening in American politics is on the left. The Republican Party has moved to the right and seems determined to stay there. The Democrats have filled the void by moving into the center. The result has been that there is no genuine liberal party in the United States.
There is only one regional party in Canada represented in the Commons - the Bloc québécois. The other three parties in the Commons (Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats) are national parties, that run candidates in every province and territory at the general election.
They do have regional strengths (as matt_mcl can tell you, standing for Parliament as an NDP candidate in Quebec), but that’s different from being a regional party.
I think you’ve flipped the progression around here. When the two-party system broke down after WWI in Canada, it wasn’t regional parties per se that emerged - it was a series of small parties, starting in different regions of the country, that started to emerge. However, they weren’t advocating just for regional interest - their proposals for a new economic system, for example, were meant as a solution to national issues across the country. Eventually, those smaller parties tended to amalgamate into national parties, such as the Social Credit and the CCF.
So the Canadian experience is that it’s easier to start a party that has a strong regional base, and grow into the national scene - but I would say that’s different from a regional party, such as the Bloc or the early Reform party, which limited their attempts to elect members from only one region, and clearly ran on platforms designed to benefit their regions.
