The two-party doom loop

Lee Drutman and Farbod Faraji wrote for The Boston Globe on how winner-take-all electoral system amplifies divisions and suggest that transitioning to proportional representation could foster more productive policymaking.

Unfortunately, the binary structure of the political conflict today — it’s always “us-versus-them” — has made fighting to win power more important than fighting to resolve disagreements. In an earlier era, we had something more like a four-party system, where liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats existed alongside conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, lending more fluidity to potential issue coalitions, and allowing Congress to do the hard work of assembling majorities around compromise solutions.

Today, rarely do these stars align. US politics has flattened from a flexible four-party system into a rigid two-party system, thanks to nationalization, sorting, and continued close-fought, knife’s-edge elections. According to one study, the United States features among the world’s strictest two-party systems — the only democracy, in fact, that did not see a single new major party emerge since the start of the 20th century. Making matters worse, an authoritarian faction has taken over one of the two parties.