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.
This article is a stub. You can help by expanding it. You can join and suggest improvements or edits to this page.
The two-party system is destroying America
Democrats and Republicans are in a death match and the American people are caught in the middle. [1]
This was headline and opening sentence of an op-ed in 2016 in a major American political website. Politics today is extremely dualistic and antagonistic, and not only in the USA. This same duality can be observed, throughout the world, with local variations due to the local electoral system, history and culture. This is the first and by far the most obvious symptom of the Duverger Syndrome.
American politics has long been dominated by two parties: the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
The increased polarisation of politics in the United States is such that there is less and less split-ticket voting . After the 2020 elections, out of 100 senators, only five caucus with the party that lost the 2020 presidential race in their state. In the House of Representatives, only 18 Republicans are in districts that Biden won, and 5 Democrats are in districts that Trump won. It is increasingly the same for governors: only nine states out of fifty have governors from the "wrong" party.
The bi-polarisation of the US politics is an excellent case in point: it is a rule much more than an exception.
In every democracy, we have by and large two largely defined political camps: the right vs the left, the progressive vs the conservative, the Catholics vs the Protestants, the Royalists vs the Republican, the Jacobins vs the Montagnards, etc. etc.
How could we consider natural the fact that democratic countries throughout the world all have electorates of millions or tens of millions of voters who seem to neatly fall into two broad camps? Can't democracy cope with a wider variety of opinions? What are the costs of such a division?
Some countries, like France, have a two-round election system, whereby the top two contenders of the first round go to the second round. This type of electoral system gives some breathing room to smaller parties, whose supporters can support more freely in the first round.
As we shall see, however, this approach is not without its major drawbacks.
What influence, if any, does a parliamentary system, like in the UK, affect the tendency for dualism.
Federal systems, like Germany and the EU, without a strong central leader, or maybe combined with a parliamentary system, can leave room for a multitude of regional parties to thrive.
In the end, however, we still end up with two broad camps: progressives vs conservatives, with each regional party falling in line with one side or the other.
It a political field which, in most countries, is basically reduced to two main contenders or two main parties, it is critical for candidates to cultivate wedge issues in order to reduce the inherent complexity of any serious political debate to a single issue that casual voters can relate to more easily, dumbing down the issue to simply being "for or against" a narrow aspect of the issue.