US’ TWO-PARTY SYSTEM IS HERE TO STAY
THE AMERICAN two-party system has long been besieged. Many of the founders feared that organising people along ideological lines would be dangerous to the fledgling nation.
Alexander Hamilton called political parties a “most fatal disease”, James Madison renounced the “violence of faction”, and George Washington feared that an overly successful party would create “frightful despotism”.
Recent events may suggest that our two-party system is, unsurprisingly, cracking. The rise of Donald Trump caused ripples in the Republican Party by upending its traditional hierarchy, and self-described Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders’s surprising front-runner status in the Democratic presidential primary has revealed deep divisions among Democrats.
So, then, as some have argued, is America facing the death of its party system? As a political scientist, I can offer a clear “no”.
Like all democracies – and some autocracies – the US will always have parties. They are necessary and inevitable for two reasons.
First, they facilitate the collective representation of individual interests.
People have the freedom to ask the government to do things, yet the voice of any single individual is quiet. Parties amplify individual voices by combining them into a louder, cohesive message.
Such organised input is necessary for reasonably effective governance, which prevents rebellion. As famed political scientist EE Schattschneider wrote in his 1942 book, Party Government, “Modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties”.
Second, particularly among voters with little political knowledge, party identification simplifies voting.