Jan. 7, 2022
Lee Drutman contributed to Foreign Policy’s 10 Ideas to Fix Our Democracy issue, making the case for multipartyism.
In an earlier period, when national politics in most Western countries was dominated by a large moderate center, two-party and multiparty systems proved equally adept in holding together a rough national consensus. But today, with urban-rural cultural conflicts driving political competition, majoritarian democracies are amplifying and escalating the zero-sum fights between progressive urban elites and a resentment-driven rural populist right, with no release valve or opportunity for a new center to emerge.
Voting reform can help. The proportional democracies of northern Europe, after all, are more effectively riding out the storms of authoritarian populism. There, center-right voters have been able to support center-right parties without supporting illiberalism, and more flexible multiparty systems have facilitated new coalitions to keep illiberal forces out of power.
The idea of introducing proportional representation in the United States and Britain is hardly new. What’s new is the context. Cultural, educational, and geographic divides are likely to shape politics for decades to come. A two-party system that by definition splits a country in half will reinforce and deepen identity polarization, pushing national politics even further into trench warfare. Proportional systems are far from perfect. But they allow for new and shifting coalitions that can help liberal democracies navigate these difficult circumstances. Most importantly, they avoid the binary winner-take-all conflict that so easily lets politics slip into an irresolvable zero-sum contest of us against them—a toxic polarization that even long-established democracies such as the United States and Britain may not survive.