The Duverger Syndrome is democracies' most critical illness. Both the causes and the fixes are known. Solutions must be applied as a matter of priority.
Adversarial Politics is wider than attack advertising. It is a governing philosophy — or rather, an anti-governing philosophy — produced by the binary structure of single-choice voting. In a system with two serious camps, political actors face a permanent zero-sum calculation: anything that makes the other side look competent is a cost to you. The rational response is not to govern well. It is to ensure the other side cannot.
This manifests across every domain of political life:
The voter notices this most visibly in campaign advertising. But the campaign never ends, because the adversarial logic never pauses. The same incentive that produced the attack ad produces the filibuster, the shutdown threat, and the refusal to confirm the other side's judicial appointments. They are the same behaviour in different arenas.
In a two-player zero-sum game — which binary elections closely approximate — every point gained by one side is a point lost by the other. Cooperation has no payoff structure. Making your opponent look bad is mathematically equivalent to making yourself look good. And it is often cheaper.
The result is a race to the bottom driven not by bad character but by rational strategy. In a polarised binary electorate, genuinely persuadable voters are scarce and expensive to reach. Mobilising the base through fear of the opponent is faster and more reliable than persuading the centre through policy vision. Attack advertising dominates positive advertising not because voters are shallow but because the game rewards it.
The backlash risk — the possibility that an attack ad damages the attacker's image alongside the target's — is real in multi-candidate fields but nearly absent in a binary race. When the only alternative to your candidate is the candidate being attacked, there is nowhere for the disgusted voter to go. The binary structure neutralises the main check on adversarial behaviour.
Under Approval Voting or Score Voting, this calculus reverses. A candidate who attacks a rival may lose approval marks from voters who found both candidates acceptable. Negative campaigning becomes strategically dangerous. The incentive structure shifts from destruction toward persuasion — not because politicians have suddenly become more virtuous, but because the game rewards different behaviour.
The clearest historical example of adversarial politics being deliberately codified as strategy came from the United States in the late twentieth century, when a faction of the Republican Party systematically transformed the House of Representatives from a deliberative institution into a combat zone.
The method was explicit: treat the opposing party not as political opponents to be debated and occasionally cooperated with, but as enemies of civilisation to be destroyed. Use inflammatory language as a weapon. Break the unwritten norms of bipartisan cooperation that had previously contained adversarial impulses within limits. The vocabulary was deliberately chosen: words like decay, failure, collapse, crisis, pathetic to describe the opposition; words like change, opportunity, truth, moral, courage to describe your own side. This was not rhetoric in the traditional sense. It was a systematised vocabulary of adversarial dehumanisation, distributed as training material to a generation of candidates.
The strategy produced short-term electoral success. The long-term consequences were institutional: norms that took decades to build were destroyed in a single political cycle. Once destroyed, they proved nearly impossible to restore. The adversarial mode spread across institutions, across both parties, and across the broader political culture — not because everyone shared the original strategy, but because the game theory was contagious. Once one side abandons cooperation, the other side's rational response is to do the same.
This is the self-reinforcing trap that Adversarial Politics creates. It is not a problem of individual politicians making bad choices. It is the system selecting for adversarial actors and punishing cooperative ones.
The empirical literature on negative campaigning contains a counterintuitive finding that deserves attention. Research has shown that attack ads are, on average, more informative than positive ads — because negative ads make falsifiable claims about an opponent's record, while positive ads project image. On this reading, the problem is not negativity as such but the form it takes: policy-based attacks can be legitimate democratic communication; character assassination and personal attacks are not. The binary system drives negative campaigning toward the personal and away from the substantive, because personalised attacks are harder to rebut and more reliably mobilise the base.
A separate body of research examines whether negative campaigning suppresses voter turnout — the "demobilisation" hypothesis. The scholarly consensus is that strong demobilisation effects are difficult to demonstrate, but the question remains live for low-information voters and non-partisans. What is not contested is the corrosive effect of sustained adversarial politics on public trust in democratic institutions — a cost that does not show up in individual election results but accumulates across decades.
Adversarial Politics is not a cultural problem. It does not require better politicians or a more civically virtuous electorate. It requires a different game.
Informed Score Voting — like Approval Voting and Score Voting before it — changes the incentive structure at the root. In a multi-expression system, a candidate's score depends on how many voters find them acceptable or admirable, not on how many find the opponent unacceptable. Attacking a rival risks losing marks from voters who approved of both. Coalition-building and policy vision become the dominant strategies, because the game rewards them.
The same structural shift that transforms campaign behaviour transforms legislative behaviour. When no single party can count on binary alternance to eventually deliver it power, the rational strategy becomes finding agreements that deliver results — because results are the path to continued voter approval. Manufactured dysfunction becomes self-defeating. The incentive to sabotage disappears when sabotage no longer serves you.
Adversarial Politics is what the binary produces. It ends when the binary ends.