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This section will cover the essential roles that political parties play in a democratic system.¹ Some political parties perform these roles more responsibly and effectively than others do. However, given the scale and scope of modern representative democracy, it is impossible to conceive of the system working without political parties. As one classic political science text on political parties argues, “to talk, today, about democracy, is to talk about a system of competitive political parties. Unless one chooses to reject the representative model that has been the staple of the theory and practice of democracy since the French Revolution, one must come to terms with political parties.”²

By understanding the roles that political parties should play, we can set out an ideal to work toward. As we will see, a highly polarized, highly nationalized two-party system creates significant obstacles for political parties to perform these roles effectively. But these failures should not mean giving up on parties. They must push us into thinking about how political parties can work better.

Political parties are coalitions of ambitious politicians, political operatives, organized interest groups, donors, activists, and more diffuse supporters.³ These actors would have a difficult time agreeing if they operated independently. But because they have to agree at least somewhat in order to have a chance at winning shared representation, they must find common ground.

Thus, political parties aggregate citizen and group preferences, and fuse those interests into a consistent long-term program. Without this partisan brokering function, independent actors would float around the political space chaotically. Voters would have little understanding of how their vote choices might translate into public policy. Voters would not know whom to hold accountable for public policy failures or to reward for public policy successes, all of which depend on collective coordination across many actors.

Parties give voters clear electoral choices by developing policy programs and group alignments that are somewhat consistent over time. Because parties campaign on policy programs (or, at the very least, values and priorities), elections emphasize policy and value conflicts. To win elections, parties differentiate themselves from each other and strategically elevate competing issues. Conflict and competition, over policies, values, and priorities, are what make elections meaningful. Conflict engages voters and clarifies the stakes. Competitive elections are the most powerful force for citizen engagement and voter turnout.⁴

Without the adversarial nature of electoral democracy, one party could rule indefinitely, without challenge. New ideas enter politics and innovative policy solutions emerge through partisan competition and conflict, not in spite of it.⁵ Without partisan challengers, incumbents and one-party systems drift into corruption.⁶

Much as we might idealize citizen participation as an individual choice and responsibility, real politics is fundamentally a social and group activity. Most people engage in politics because others engage them. Marginalized citizens particularly depend on others to engage them in politics by investing in their participation.⁷

Because political parties are trying to win elections, they organize to mobilize and engage voters. While individual candidates also have the same motivations and can also build organizations to mobilize and engage voters, candidates compete in only single races. They come and go. Only political parties can engage and mobilize voters consistently at scale and across time. Ideally, this gives political parties a longer-term view that must go beyond the personality or charisma of any single leader (though, obviously, party leaders are important).

When parties are institutionally weak, individual candidates take on outsized roles. Candidates cannot rely on parties. They must develop their own organizations, especially if they compete in primaries.⁸ For example, presidents and presidential candidates now increasingly build their own campaign operations distinct from the parties. Barack Obama built his own operation, Organizing for America, rather than building up the Democratic Party. Donald Trump has his distinct organization. Indeed, because parties do not control presidential or candidate nominations, individual candidates have a strong reason to build up their own independent organizations—further undermining the ability of parties to do the important work of long-term mobilization. Candidates come and go. Parties last.

Moreover, because parties are somewhat consistent across elections in their policies, values, and priorities, even voters who are not overly engaged in politics can still make informed choices without having to do extensive personal research. Knowing what the parties stand for enables voters to choose the party that best aligns with their values. This reduces participation barriers for citizens who lack the time or resources to evaluate policies or candidates independently.

Certainly, many other civic and political organizations play crucial roles in mobilizing collective citizen power. A robust pluralism of associations of varying scale is essential for a healthy democracy. However, political parties are unique in both their electoral role and their level of aggregation. A democracy of only civic associations would be too fragmented to function. Many civic associations come and go. Scale and structure matter for consistency and equality of representation.

Who is qualified to hold public office? Who knows? Who decides? Healthy political parties vet and elevate candidates who have the qualifications and temperament for public office. When this is done responsibly, political parties perform a crucial quality-control function in electoral democracy.⁹

Voters cannot conduct full background checks on candidates. They cannot elevate the candidates directly. They don’t know whose public extroversion is also private psychotic narcissism, and whose public awkwardness is quiet competence. Voters rely on a kind of “peer review” within party leadership that can push aside those who are most likely to abuse their power.

“Weak and unhealthy political parties can easily become fiefdoms of autocratic rulers. Indeed, the failure of political parties to play this key gatekeeping role is a common warning sign of oncoming democratic decline.”

When parties do not perform these roles responsibly, demagogues can come to power. Weak and unhealthy political parties can easily become fiefdoms of autocratic rulers. Indeed, the failure of political parties to play this key gatekeeping role is a common warning sign of oncoming democratic decline.¹⁰

Parties are also solving a collective action problem of would-be candidates by helping them coordinate their campaigns and providing shared branding, technology, and funding. This can lower the barriers to entry for candidates. A hollow party leads to mostly candidates with high personal wealth or dedicated partisan zeal running for office. These qualities best prepare candidates to conquer the costly nomination climb.¹¹

Parties and candidates can make many promises when they campaign. But whether they can turn those promises into public policy depends on their ability to secure legislative majorities for these proposals. Without political parties, every legislative vote would require its own distinct process of coalition-building and renegotiation. Anybody who has ever tried to negotiate an agreement among a large and diverse group will appreciate the limits of open-ended individualistic deliberation.

The first U.S. political parties emerged in the First Congress to solve the chaos problem. The Federalist Party assembled to pass Alexander Hamilton’s banking proposal. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison formed the Democratic-Republican Party to organize the opposition. Though the Framers had fretted about political parties in writing the Constitution, they quickly changed their minds when they set to governing, having realized that without the ability to organize a long-term coalition, governing would be impossible.¹²

Without a team approach to politics, the task of passing legislation devolves into a chaotic free-for-all that is far less likely to yield any resolution, much less a negotiated consensus resolution. More precisely, when each lawmaker is a free agent, many demand side payments for support. This is why weak parties and highly fragmented politics almost always correspond to rampant corruption.

Governing is a team sport. Political parties make governance possible by organizing teams around specific policy promises and the value of a shared “brand” that all candidates can benefit from across multiple elections.

Individual candidates, by contrast, cannot make meaningful policy promises because a single lawmaker is largely powerless without a party. They cannot promise to “deliver results” beyond narrow parochial concerns, since only organized political parties have any chance of delivering anything policy-related. As a result, only parties can be held accountable for how hard they worked toward that policy outcome.

Political parties cohere policy alternatives and manufacture majority coalitions in support of them.¹³ Without political parties, it would be impossible to form governing majorities of any scale in legislatures.¹⁴ Without parties, governance would devolve into endless bargaining. Every individual lawmaker would attempt to extract something in exchange for their support. This is why extensive corruption is commonly found alongside personalized weak parties and highly fragmented party systems.¹⁵

By connecting citizens to government, political parties play a crucial “linkage” role in sustaining democratic legitimacy. Across democracies, citizens report being most satisfied with democracy when they support political parties who they feel represent them well, especially when those parties hold power (including within a governing coalition). Because political parties have clear incentives to mobilize and engage voters, well-resourced political parties contribute to democratic legitimacy. When voters see parties and candidates within those parties who are trying to earn their vote, they are more satisfied with democracy. When citizens don’t see candidates showing up in their communities, listening to them, and reflecting their concerns, they are understandably less satisfied with democracy.¹⁶

Individual elected officials, to be sure, can also help connect citizens to government, separate from parties, through their constituency service. However, because individual elected officials can accomplish little independently, the linkage is limited to simple constituency service. This is one reason many individual representatives run against Congress: it allows them to blame their failures on the system. This, in turn, contributes to further distrust and dissatisfaction with Congress, which further undermines democratic legitimacy.

Healthy parties, however, can engage in a thicker, more long-term way than individual candidates. Parties can set up community offices to enable essential two-way communications, so that party representatives not only campaign but also listen. Parties with a permanent organizational presence can direct party volunteers and employees to hear citizens’ diverse concerns and share them with party leaders and candidates. Parties can invite local civic associations to contribute to a party’s agenda. Ultimately, parties should engage in this kind of “associational party building”¹⁷ because building thick ties with community organizations ultimately gets out more votes.

Of course, this is only if the parties need wider community support to win seats. Not all parties need such support. Parties that operate in places where they are guaranteed either victory or defeat have no reason to build anything.

Parties can also contribute to democratic legitimacy by accepting elections as legitimate. Indeed, one minimal definition of democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.¹⁸ Parties perform crucial leadership roles in helping citizens accept electoral losses and understand that they will have opportunities to win in the future. Without this leadership, democratic legitimacy is difficult to maintain. Obviously, political parties can also undermine democratic legitimacy. Irresponsible and unhealthy parties are marked by activities that undermine democratic legitimacy, in particular by attacking their political opponents as illegitimate and by advocating for and passing policies that alter the rules of electoral competition to their advantage. Organized power can be abused. Hence, many reformers remain skeptical of organized power. But, again, the solution to antidemocratic or illiberal parties is not to undermine parties altogether—it is to create better and alternative parties that can build up democratic legitimacy.

Those who dislike political parties might imagine a better alternative. But there is a good reason why every stable modern democracy has strong, functioning, long-lasting political parties. The alternative to political parties is chaos. Countries with weak or nonexistent political parties fall into authoritarianism and corruption.

Just as a stable government is necessary to provide some basic law and order (the alternative to government is not freedom, it is complete disorder), so political parties are necessary to provide stable representative government. It is easy to romanticize a truly equal society in which everybody decides independently and rationally. Indeed, we seem to be hard-wired for this kind of romanticism, since it seems to pop up repeatedly in various utopian visions. But we seem equally hard-wired never to achieve this vision.

“Without parties,” writes the political scientist Nancy Rosenblum, “deliberation is disorganized and impossible within legislatures, much less on a public national scale… Parties not only organize debate within government; they can organize debate among activist citizens and can force those into argument who would rather evade it.”¹⁹

A politics without parties lacks any coherent or even semi-stable structure. It is a politics of chaos and anarchy, not reasoned deliberation and compromise.

Indeed, a core warning sign of a degrading democracy is weakening political parties. As democracy expert Kim Lane Scheppele has observed, “Collapsing democracies follow on collapsing political parties.”²⁰ As Scheppele explains: “If one traces the failing and failed democracies, one will generally find that traditional parties in that country had first fallen victim to insidious infighting, ideological drift, or credibility collapse in a way that disrupted the ability of those mainstream parties to screen out toxic choices put to voters. And the voters, not realizing that the safety checks had disappeared when they were offered up seriously bad options, picked one of the options they were given—which in turn sent their countries down ‘the rabbit hole of autocracy.’”

Scheppele offers case studies of Venezuela and Hungary to illustrate. Both countries were once widely described as stable and thriving multiparty democracies. But then, “multiple parties collapsed into a two-party system and a punishing-vote practice emerged in which the electorate threw out the government at every opportunity save one… The paths that led to Chávez and Orbán involved progressively narrowing party choices, ending eventually in an election in which the budding autocrat was the only reasonable-looking option among the available limited choices. In short, party collapse preceded democratic collapse.”²¹

Similarly, developing democracies with weak, incoherent, and transient political parties are most likely to slide back into autocracy. Authoritarian leaders thrive amid the chaos of such gossamer parties. When parties cannot organize politics, charismatic dictators have an opening.

Certainly, core functions like candidate recruitment and agenda-setting can occur without parties. However, broad interest aggregation and reconciliation uniquely depend on parties. Without parties, narrowly organized groups will instead shape candidate recruitment and issue agenda-setting. Without parties at the center, the alternatives are all less transparent, less accountable, and less representative than political parties.

Governing without parties is more difficult. Governing institutions require some mechanism to decide what comes up for a vote, which usually means selecting some leaders. Ambitious politicians will lead and assemble coalitions to pass their preferred policies. These coalitions will behave like parties.

Whatever their flaws, political parties are much better at organizing democratic contestation and representation than any of the alternatives at present.

Building healthy political parties does not mean that we have to go back to a bygone era of “smoke-filled rooms” where political “bosses” trade favors with donors and make decisions insulated from public input. We can instead envision a twenty-first-century version of political parties that combines leadership and representativeness and builds upon new organizational forms. A new generation of scholars and organizers is thinking through new innovative approaches to party organizing in the United States.²² Abroad, new parties are exploring new organizing models on the ground.²³ But abroad, new parties can emerge because more permissive electoral rules allow space for new parties to enter.²⁴ Long-standing parties typically have little interest in innovating until their dominance is threatened. Under U.S. voting rules, existing parties face no threat. Both parties have a monopoly on opposition.

To reiterate: Stronger, healthier political parties enhance the quality of representative government. Better political parties are not the goal for their own sake. They are the institutions that make stable, healthy governance possible in the twenty-first century.

Parties are important. But both the sheer size of U.S. political parties (two parties for a diverse nation of 330 million people) and the binary nature of partisan competition (which creates a monopoly on opposition for both parties) makes it difficult for the Democratic and Republican parties to carry out the responsibilities of healthy political parties.

Having discussed the essential democratic roles of political parties above, I will now turn to the ways in which two polarized nationalized parties face significant obstacles to performing those roles.

Let’s start with aggregation. Again, parties perform a crucial policy aggregation role. However, there is a trade-off between size and effectiveness. Parties that are too big must suppress too many potential internal conflicts, thus keeping many issues off the agenda.

A big tent may be necessary to win elections, but a big tent can be stretched so big that it becomes difficult for voters to know exactly what they are voting for because the party they support aims to represent so many perspectives. Indeed, this was the long-standing critique many threw at the U.S. party system for much of the twentieth century—that the parties were too indistinguishable and, as a result, voters lacked meaningful choices, particularly on the crucial issue of civil rights.

However, because twentieth-century American politics centered more on state and local politics than national politics, the national parties operated more like loose labels—more like dispositional than programmatic parties. In practice, this yielded a kind of hidden multi-party system within the two-party system. Organized factions played a significant role. Both parties came in many regional varieties.

Moreover, because many voters had some sympathies with both parties, a vibrant competition of policy innovation could emerge, as party leaders sought new policy aggregations capable of winning over the many groups of voters willing to consider either side. This is how party competition should work. A substantial group of voters should be open to multiple parties. Parties should innovate new policies to attract new voters.

However, as American politics nationalized and sorted, parties simplified and flattened into two distinct coalitions, with much less overlap. Winning over “swing voters” has diminishing returns. Few remain, and those who do are unpredictable, heterogenous, and mostly disengaged and disgusted by politics. Though factions continue to exist within the two parties, they are no longer overlapping. In the twenty-first century, American partisan conflict has collapsed into an all-or-nothing binary. This means party leaders can suppress internal conflict by emphasizing their common enemy.

Only in a binary conflict is the enemy of my enemy my friend. This kind of zero-sum conflict makes partisan competition so totalizing that the potentially innovative benefits of party aggregation disappear into the black hole of us-versus-them group psychology. Politics has now become calcified.²⁵ With few voters up for grabs, the potential for flexible policy innovation and aggregation declines to zero. As COVID-19 demonstrated, even a public health crisis could become a very partisan issue in only a few short months.

Indeed, while parties do make elections meaningful and engaging for voters, binary adversarial competition can make elections too meaningful. In 2020, for example, the United States had its highest-turnout election in more than 100 years. Nothing drives turnout like a crisis.

Limiting choices to only two simplifies elections, which is one supposed benefit of the two-party system. However, limiting choices to just two can also oversimplify elections, which is one of the drawbacks of the two-party system. Elections can become a recursive and reductive us-versus-them conflict, with the same us and same them over and over, particularly when parties turn to negative, lesser-of-two-evils campaigning—a strategy that a two-party system encourages.

A two-party system also leaves dissatisfied voters only one “change” option. This can lead to a constant cycle of “throw the bums out” based on small shifts. If every election becomes a change election, constant policy whiplash undermines effective governing. And if one of two major parties turns illiberal (which is common in a polarized two-party system because having only one opposition alternative breeds oppositional extremism), a vote to “throw the bums out” can become an unwitting vote to install authoritarian leadership. Because the costs of losing seem so high, parties in power often change the rules to avoid losing.²⁶

Turning to parties’ role in engaging voters in elections, it is notable that turnout is consistently lower in countries with first-past-the-post elections, like the United States. This is not surprising. In a system with single-member districts, many districts are not two-party competitive. When districts are not competitive, parties have little incentive to mobilize voters. The dominant party has good reasons not to mobilize voters (since it is already in power). The opposing party sees no chance of winning; why waste precious resources?

By contrast, in multiparty systems with proportional representation, every voter counts the same, regardless of geography. And with more parties competing everywhere, more parties are out mobilizing and engaging voters. More parties also mean more options for voters, and thus more likelihood voters will feel excited about supporting a party.

Turning to parties’ role in vetting candidates, the United States is unique in so fully turning candidate selection over to the public. As a result of the direct primary—a Progressive Era reform—voters (not party leaders) choose party nominees. In all other advanced democracies, political parties have their own internal processes for selecting candidates, though some parties have moved toward more open elections among party members.

However, though U.S. parties do leave nominations open to the public, party networks and factions do work behind the scenes, supporting particular candidates with their money and public endorsements.²⁷ Parties also rely on outside groups with narrow agendas to recruit and support candidates.²⁸ These fuzzy lines of responsibility blur the meaning of political parties in the United States and make money even more important, contributing to unrepresentative candidate recruitment patterns.

They also contribute to a vague and ever-present distrust. When it’s not clear who is actually making decisions, conspiracy thinking thrives. This fuels more antisystem sentiment. For example, in 2016, many Bernie Sanders supporters believed that the Democratic presidential nomination process was somehow rigged.²⁹ Was it? The rules were not always clear to voters, and party leaders almost certainly intervened to clear the field for Hillary Clinton. No process is entirely neutral.

As for governance, political parties make governing possible because political parties broker coalitions and compromises to pass legislation. A long-standing argument for a two-party system is that having two cohesive, responsible parties allows voters to choose one, assess its performance, and evaluate the results in subsequent elections. This is the so-called Responsible Party Government theory.³⁰

Nonetheless, this theory seems ill-suited for the American government. Separated powers and bicameralism frequently generate divided government and blur responsibility. Biennial congressional elections leave little time to evaluate policy results. The American system of government was designed intentionally to frustrate narrow majoritarian governing with overlapping and ever-changing authority. In modern American politics, divided government has been the dominant situation in Washington.³¹ Unified government is rare, and it is even rarer for one party to hold a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.³² And even here, the Supreme Court offers a potential veto, since the United States is unique in having widespread judicial review.

In two-party polarized politics, divided government means legislative gridlock. And legislative gridlock means that the executive branch is left to improvise within existing legal authority. This creates more instability. The Obama presidency marked a major reversal from the Bush presidency on a range of administrative policies. The Trump presidency marked an even bigger reversal on even more policies. The Biden presidency has intensified the executive branch whiplash. The next Republican administration will accelerate the instability even further. This policy whiplash leads to high executive branch turnover, which contributes to poorer and more inefficient governing. It also undermines American global leadership and industry, given the extent to which the rest of the world cannot count on American promises from one administration to the next.

Meanwhile, a polarized Congress becomes helpless to take back any of its power. Under unified government, one-party rule fuses congressional powers with the presidency. Under divided government, the congressional opposition is left to either pass bills that will be vetoed, or just to engage in oppositional oversight. Compromise is not rational for either party. Blurring the differences by cooperating undermines a clear electoral message: The other side is dangerous.

In the current era of pendulum politics, both parties get two years of unified government every 12 years or so, and a chance to pass some big, important policies. (Democrats managed to do that during their recent hold on unified government. Republicans did much less during theirs.) But a government that is only able to assemble governing majorities to pass big policies less than a third of the time can hardly be considered effective or efficient.

It is true that in multiparty systems, coalitions sometimes take a few months to come together after an election, and sometimes coalitions fall apart and change (in parliamentary systems, this sometimes involves a new election). But compared to the U.S. two-party system, which spends most of its time mired in gridlock in which little can happen, multiparty systems are much more effective in solving public problems on an ongoing basis, in large part because coalitions have more flexibility to change over time.

When it comes to democratic legitimacy and the importance of partisan “linkage” in maintaining that legitimacy, a polarized two-party system presents a problem.

First, on the problem of “linkage:” Because two major parties are inevitably big, broad coalitions (even if they are polarized), it is difficult for a big party to connect meaningfully with a wide range of voters, especially in a large and diverse country. Smaller parties can speak more directly to different communities and represent their concerns more effectively. Of course, parties must also act as aggregators, so parties that are too small would not perform this crucial democracy-enhancing function. A middle ground exists between too small and too large.

Additionally, because the single-member districts that maintain two-party competition inevitably result in large numbers of districts that are uncompetitive (even in the most competitive times), two geographically polarized parties have mostly safe districts and safe states, where they do not need to worry about any competition. This lack of competition means that both Democrats and Republicans need not invest in meaningful “linkage” activities in large parts of the country.

Yet both parties still need some way to motivate and unify voters. A geographically polarized two-party system provides the obvious answer: the threat of the other party winning. Nothing unites like a common enemy. Not only does a fearsome common enemy absolve parties of having to listen to concerns of many of their voters, it also allows—and perhaps even encourages—party leaders to refuse to concede elections.

“Losers’ consent” (the political science term for partisan losers accepting outcomes) is a crucial foundation for modern democracy, since without legitimate elections, the whole system of representative self-government degrades into authoritarianism.

However, as multiple studies have shown, in two-party systems, especially polarized two-party systems, political losers experience a sharper sting from losing. This makes losers less likely to trust the government, and more skeptical of democracy generally when they are out of power. In proportional multiparty systems, the sting of losing is less severe, since power is much more broadly shared and fluid, and the differences between the opposition coalition and the governing coalition are usually smaller.³³ Thus, in proportional, multiparty systems, losers’ consent is much higher, and voters are more satisfied with democracy and more trusting in the government even when the party they supported isn’t in power.

“Newer parties can find new ways of organizing, can highlight new solutions and new concerns, and can find new ways of linking citizens with governing.”

To be sure, political parties in multiparty systems are not always healthy and effective either. Established political parties in European multiparty systems tend to rise and fall in a somewhat cyclical and even dialectical manner. As parties centralize internally and govern predictably, they often make hard compromises that leave many supporters cold. In response to a crisis of legitimacy, voters—particularly younger voters—can migrate to newer parties. Newer parties are not bogged down by old structures and old leadership. Newer parties can find new ways of organizing, can highlight new solutions and new concerns, and can find new ways of linking citizens with governing.³⁴

This process of “creative destruction” makes political systems resilient. In many ways, the recent party volatility in European multiparty democracies is a clear and ultimately healthy sign of this. Political parties throughout history have innovated in how they organize and connect citizens to the government. The European story of party development, by contrast, is a story of change through the rise and fall of particular parties, with innovation coming from new parties rather than from attempting to retrofit old parties.³⁵

But in a two-party system, innovation must come from within major parties, where it is slowest, messiest, and least likely. This means factions challenging each other internally, undermining the ability of parties to perform their essential roles with consistency and coherence. Indeed, American party development is essentially a series of internal party reform episodes—outsiders busting open existing power structures, and then struggling to build something new out of a busted-open institution.³⁶

The American story of party reform is anti-party. This is partially because the American political tradition holds major skepticism toward any organized power. It is also because Americans have repeatedly tried to refashion the existing parties, trying to make them into something they cannot be—truly open and porously participatory—and yet still be effective in carrying out the basic roles of political parties in modern democracy. The end result has been a worst-of-both-worlds compromise: not effective enough to be legitimate and capable, and not participatory enough to satisfy small-d democratic demands. Stuck with just two options, many Americans get little out of party democracy. But they can’t govern themselves collectively without party democracy.