How the White House and Congress could work better with more parties
Plus, how fusion voting could transform presidential elections
In 1993, an influential political scientist named Scott Mainwaring published a paper exploring why so many presidential democracies in the 20th century were unstable, while parliamentary ones seemed much more solid. His answer — party systems.
Specifically, most of the fragile presidential systems Mainwaring looked at had proportional representation and multi-party systems. He theorized that the frustration of bargaining with multiple parties, sooner or later, led either the president or their opposition to turn against democracy. The classic example? Chile, whose fractious party system contributed to a violent coup against President Salvador Allende, leading to decades of dictatorship. Meanwhile, the world’s only real example of a winner-take-all, two-party presidential system was — at the time — a bastion of stability.
That country, of course, was the United States.
Fast forward three decades, and Mainwaring’s conclusion has been cited in almost two thousand other papers. But, quietly, the pattern has inverted. The United States is backsliding faster than any other advanced democracy, while many presidential systems that use proportional representation — like Uruguay, Cyprus, and, yes, Chile — are today surprisingly resilient, even in the face of significant political and social upheaval.
And so Mainwaring looked to update his assessment. In a new paper, released today by Protect Democracy and New America, Professor Mainwaring, together with Lee Drutman, covers the panorama of scholarship and events over recent decades to reassess the question:
Can proportional representation work in a presidential system?
Their conclusion: Not only is the combination of multiple parties + presidentialism workable, it would be preferable for the United States.
Two-party presidentialism is not working
Mainwaring and Drutman’s key revelation is that the United States was always an anomalous case. For starters, it is one of the only countries that combines presidential elections with exclusively winner-take-all legislative elections (the others are Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone). Multiple parties and proportional representation are the norm, not the exception, for countries led by presidents.
Moreover, they argue our longstanding democratic stability in the United States — in retrospect — was largely due to a two-party system behaving like a multi-party system. (Mainwaring and Drutman identify four distinct sub parties from far-left to far-right, with the two centrist blocs together holding sway on almost every issue.) Our political system worked because it had complex voting blocs, cross-party coalitions, and ongoing multi-dimensional political bargaining between the White House and various groups in Congress. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was advanced by Democratic leadership and signed by a Democratic president, was supported by a greater proportion of congressional Republicans than Democrats.
Then, starting around when Mainwaring wrote his original paper, that complex coalitional system broke down:
And Washington collapsed into the antagonistic, partisan “us-vs-them” that we generally expect under winner-take-all elections. Now, one of the two parties would rather attempt to overthrow democracy than cede power to the other.
Experts disagree on the precise causes of this collapse. But Mainwaring and Drutman say the path forward is clear: proportional representation is the best hope to return our democracy to the stability it once enjoyed.
Read their new paper here.
With more than two parties, how would we elect just one president?
Of course, even if there are more than two parties represented in Congress, by definition, there is only one president. Plus, our system really only has room for two viable presidential candidates. If there is no outright winner in the Electoral College, which is likely with three or more candidates, that triggers something called a contingent election where Congress, instead of voters, picks the president. That scenario would be messy, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. This is already a worrying possibility with our current system, given the unusual number of potential third-party and independent candidates in 2024.
So how do we reconcile a hopeful vision for multi-party democracy with the potential dangers of multi-candidate presidential elections?
According to a new report by Cyrena Kokolis and Beau Tremitiere, one way to make it easier is to let more than one party nominate the same candidate. This is called “fusion voting,” and it used to happen commonly in our elections.
Fusion voting, in short, allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate on different ballot lines. It would encourage cooperation across ideological differences by allowing multi-party coalitions to align behind a single candidate. In lieu of today’s zero-sum, adversarial approach, fusion voting would empower minor parties and their voters to use their leverage constructively — and, as a result — play an important role in winning elections and setting priorities.
This strategy would not just be useful if the United States were to switch to proportional representation in the future; it could have a real impact today. With multiple tickets threatening to divide the pro-democracy coalition at the ballot box, fusion voting could give voice to different viewpoints while uniting a diverse majority in common purpose: defeating the authoritarian threat.
As Kokolis and Tremitiere write:
Today, a fusing minor party serving as a fulcrum between the two major parties could have a substantial impact. By nominating whichever competitive candidate demonstrates a stronger commitment to political moderation and core democratic values like the rule of law, a minor party can give a voice — and a ballot line — to the growing share of voters who report feeling “homeless” between the two major parties.
Read the full report here.