Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

By Theresa Amato, The New Press. Posted July 7, 2009.

Third parties and independents pollinate our political discourse; they offer alternative thinking on, and discussion of, major issues often ignored by the two parties. They instigate election reform and they offer broader choice, even if you don’t choose to vote for them. As Steven J. Rosenstone and co-authors note in their book Third Parties in America, “The power of third parties lies in their capacity to affect the content and range of political discourse, and ultimately public policy, by raising issues and options that the two major parties have ignored. In so doing, they not only promote their cause but affect the very character of the two-party system.” 

I show in this book how the two parties have developed barriers to political competition from third parties and independents to ensure the two parties’ continued preeminence. I have personally seen this, from the application of byzantine ballot access laws to the federal financing system to the presidential debates. Scholars including A. James Reichley and Theodore J. Lowi have been saying this for years. Writing in The Life of the Parties, Reichley states, “It is no accident that no enduring new major party has emerged in American politics for more than 130 years.” And Lowi wrote in “Deregulate the Duopoly” in The Nation, “It is not Providence that takes an energetic social movement and crushes it as soon as it chooses to advance its goals through elections. It is the laws of the state here on earth that keep the party system on life support by preferring two parties above all others.” 

Lowi goes on to list the single-member districts, the antifusion laws, the gerrymandering, and the “countless state laws that prescribe higher thresholds for the number of correct signatures required on third-party nominating petitions than for regulars on two-party ballots.” He notes that

[e]ven the laws that apply equally to all parties are discriminatory, because they are written in such detail that ballot access for third-party candidates requires expensive legal assistance just to get through the morass of procedures. That mind-numbing detail is doubly discriminatory because the implementation of these laws thrusts tremendous discretion into the hands of the registrars, commissioners and election boards, all staffed by political careeristas of the two major parties, whose bipartisan presence is supposed to provide “neutrality with finality”—but it is common knowledge that they can agree with each other to manipulate the laws for the purpose of discouraging the candidacies of smaller and newer parties. 

This book demonstrates in concrete detail the accuracy of these Lowi conclusions.  

Our zero-sum, winner-take-all voting system cements the institutional barriers against third parties, protects the incumbents, and at the end of the day, primarily protects the predominance of the two major parties. The Democrats and Republicans have been unresponsive to making our voting system resemble more enlightened, choice-maximizing systems because such a bold move would allow third parties to gain a foothold among voters and thus threaten two-party supremacy. Consequently, the current structural system continues to dictate how our elections are conducted, in which states the presidential candidates will campaign, which voters they cater to, and thus which issues are raised or solutions discussed to move our country forward.  

Political economist Albert O. Hirschman in Exit, Voice and Loyalty has a theory about the behavior of oligopolists in the economic arena that author Alan Ware in The Logic of Party Democracy applies in the political context to party competition. In short, when you get only two oligopolists, the lack of diversity leaves both competing over image and branding, as they both make lower-quality products. When our presidential contests devolve into discussing Hillary Clinton’s or John Edwards’s hairstyles, whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is the more “likable,” or how much money Sarah Palin spends on clothes and makeup, this is exactly what I think Hirschman and Ware are talking about.  

As a result, we get the canned, polled, three-message-point speeches, and a Fourth Estate focused on the placement of stage props. We have a highly developed economic system that prides itself on competition (falsely and securely in the expectation of socialistic corporate welfare, handouts, and bailouts for the “too big to fail,” e.g. banks), and a neo-Neanderthal, uncompetitive political system that has been dumbed down to squash any enlightened discourse. Voters are left to distinguish between two boxes of soap, each resting on a branding strategy to sell their political product even as they erect barricades against entry to the market for all other suppliers of political thought.  

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Theresa Amato was the national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader in both 2000 and 2004—and the only woman to have managed two high-profile American presidential campaigns outside the two major parties. A graduate of Harvard University and NYU School of Law, she is the founder of the Citizen Advocacy Center in suburban Chicago and a public interest lawyer. Amato lives with her family in Oak Park, Illinois.

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