Expressions of dissatisfaction with the federal government are common. Many believe that it has overreached its rightful boundaries and become corpulent by feeding on the American public. Individuals expressing such thoughts often see the modern political process in the US as a cause. They see politics as dominated by two political parties that no longer adequately represent the varied preferences of the American people.
The conclusion typically reached in such arguments is that increasing the number of viable parties in the political process would be a step in the right direction. If there were three or four parties, people would have a better chance of finding a candidate that adequately represents their own wants and desires for the country, and the excesses of government could finally be reigned in.
More would be better.
Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, who is widely considered the most influential economist of the twentieth century, spent a career expressing similar dismay at the ways in which the federal government has been allowed to expand. Friedman saw the proper role of the federal government in a free society as being something that could be comfortably summarized on a cocktail napkin. The government should serve as umpire and rule-maker where necessary and look after “madmen and children.” Everything else, in Friedman's view, should be left to the care of market dynamics.
Friedman rejected as inappropriate nearly all allocation functions of government; social security, welfare and cash payments, federal subsidies and tax breaks. . . all were anathema to true freedom in Friedman’s view.
Most of the individuals demanding smaller government and more party options in the political process would likely agree with Friedman, I think.
Yet interestingly, the political process itself was something under which Friedman chaffed. Noting that all governments are inherently coercive by nature, Friedman lamented that “the use of political channels [for any purpose], while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society.” The political process, he posited, always results in wide-spread dissatisfaction for those on the losing side of each and every vote.
So let us look at presidential politics and consider what Friedman might think about our two-party system. With our recent tendency toward very close elections, it is likley that the vote will be roughly evenly split in the 2008 presidential election. About half the country will be happy with the outcome and the other half will be dissatisfied. If the election bucks this trend and shows a wide margin of victory for one candidate, then we might expect 58 to 60 percent of the population to be on the winning side, with 40 percent or more dissatisfied.
Some argue that adding more parties to the mix would help increase overall satisfaction with the process and the popularity of the eventual president. But I (and perhaps Friedman) would argue just the opposite.
Introduce a third party into the mix, and instead of an election win requiring a majority of electoral college votes, such a win might require only a simple plurality (34 percent of the electoral college vote). That could leave roughly two thirds of the country dissatisfied with the election results. Introduce a fourth party into the equation, and our next president could be elected with 26 percent of the electoral vote, leaving three quarters of the country opposed to their new leader.
I honestly do not know how our electoral process would handle three or four or five parties. There may be rules in place that would prevent a candidate from winning with just 24 percent of electoral college votes in a four-party race.
But from just a logical perspective, is more better in this case? If the political process is coercive and leaves the losers of each exchange dissatisfied, then adding parties to the process would necessarily leave more voters on the losing side of the election. More parties means more losers.
We only have to look to other countries and their parliamentary processes to see what elections look like with three or four or five (or ten) parties in contention. It could be argued that few people win in such cases.
More is better? I’m thinking not.
1 comment:
So I did a little research on this one because I’ve been one to advocate a third party in U.S. politics. This forced me to examine my beliefs which I think is always a good thing.
I have come to my own Supreme-Court-type decision of a “majority” and “dissenting” opinion.
The majority opinion would be that a two party system is the system of choice. This would be support by the very history that the US has of operating with just two major parties. If a third party was truly necessary then it would be expected that a third party would have come to being by now.
I also looked at other representative democracies like Great Britain (which actually has several other political parties beyond Labor and Conservatives) Germany and Israel. Each of these countries with several parties generally will form coalitions which end up being two opposing groups when major elections come around.
The dissenting opinion to this is using the same example of the countries with several political parties. These parties don’t always join together to form the same coalitions groups for each election season. They tend to form based on the most similar goals with the same importance.
I think we could look at the US “swing-voter” the same way and the very make-up of the two parties the same way. The Republican Party has its very conservative members which vote for someone like Huckabee while McCain takes the majority of the group. Then the Democratic Party is showing its split between Hilary and Obama. In the end they will all support the one candidate and the swing voter will go with the person who they see supporting what is most important to them at the time.
So I think the “third party” concept might exist, but it’s not a truly formal group.
So in the end I can’t feel as sure about a third party as I have before but I’m willing to change based on a good argument.
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