The type of party system in a particular country is most influenced by the

A third party is any political party in the US political system other than one of the two major parties. Although there are many third parties, the US political system is correctly classified as a two-party system for several reasons. The most compelling, reflecting Duverger's Law, is the single-member, plurality electoral system used in the vast majority of elections. In addition, laws that limit the ability of third parties to compete successfully have reinforced the two-party system. Examples are laws limiting ballot access, banning fusion candidacies, and governing campaign finance. The first third party was the Anti-Masonic Party, formed in 1827. Third parties became more prevalent on the national political scene during the second half of the nineteenth century. They were organized around specific issues and ideologies. In contrast, major third-party efforts in the twentieth century were personality driven. There is little evidence that significant third-party challenges bring more Americans to the polls. Third parties do make two important contributions to the US political system. First, they offer voters a way to express dissatisfaction with the two major parties and their candidates. Second, they are vehicles for promoting issues and policies that the major parties may ignore.

Classifying Party Systems

Although scholars have paid relatively scant attention to what defines a party system as such, tending instead to assume the existence of a party system in all polities where there exists a plurality of parties, they have devoted considerable effort to distinguishing between different types of party system. The most conventional and frequently adopted approach to distinguishing party systems is based simply on the number of parties in competition, and the most common distinction involved here, which goes back to Duverger (1954), is very straightforward – that between two-party systems, on the one hand, and multiparty (i.e., more than two) systems, on the other. This particular classification was also believed originally to reflect a more fundamental distinction between more or less stable and consensual democracies, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, which were seen as typical of the two-party variety, and more or less unstable or conflictual democracies, such as Fourth Republic France, Italy, or Weimar Germany, which were seen as typical of the multiparty type. Although this simple association of numerical categories of party system with levels of political stability and efficacy was later undermined by reference to a host of smaller democracies that were characterized by both a multiplicity of parties and a strong commitment to consensual government, the core distinction between two- and multi-party systems has continued to be widely employed within the literature on comparative politics, although it is sometimes modified by taking into account not only the sheer numbers of parties in competition, but also their relative size. Thus, Blondel (1968), for example, uses the relative size of the parties to distinguish four types of party system: two-party systems, two-and-a-half-party systems, multiparty systems with a dominant party, and multiparty systems without a dominant party.

The most substantial attempt to move away from a primary reliance on the simple numbers of parties in competition was that of Sartori (1976, pp. 117–323), who combined counting the parties with a measure of the ideological distance that separated them. Sartori's typology was the first that focused directly on the interactions between the parties – the ‘mechanics’ of the system – and hence on the differential patterns of competition and cooperation. Following this approach, party systems could be classified according to the number of parties in the system, in which there was a distinction between systems with two parties, those with up to some five parties (limited pluralism) and those with some six parties or more (extreme pluralism); and according to the distance that separated the parties lying at either extreme of the ideological spectrum, which would either be small (‘moderate’) or large (‘polarized’). These two criteria were not wholly independent of one another, however, in that Sartori also showed that the format of the system, that is, the number of parties, contained ‘mechanical predispositions,’ that is, it could help determine the ideological distance, such that extreme pluralism could lead to polarization. When combined, the two criteria resulted in three principal types of party system: two-party systems, characterized by a limited format and a small ideological distance (e.g., the UK); moderate pluralism, characterized by limited or extreme pluralism and a relatively small ideological distance (e.g., Denmark or the Netherlands); and polarized pluralism, characterized by extreme pluralism and a large ideological distance (e.g., Weimar Germany, early postwar Italy, or pre- Pinochet Chile). Sartori also noted the existence of a ‘predominant-party system,’ in which one particular party, such as, for example, the Congress party in India, or the old Unionist party in Northern Ireland, consistently won a winning majority of parliamentary seats.

Downs's Party Competition Model

In 1929, the economist Hotelling proposed a model explaining why retailers in direct competition often choose to locate their stores in close proximity to one another. He argued that all else being equal, either of two competing companies could improve its market share by moving closer to the center of town. Near the end of his essay, he devoted a paragraph to arguing briefly that this same logic explains why in America's two-party system, “each party strives to make its platform as much like the other's as possible.” Twelve years later, another economist, Smithies, suggested that if demand is elastic, a company will at some point lose more business from customers at the outskirts of town than it will gain from its competitor by moving closer to the geographic center. Although Smithies did not make the connection explicit, others have noted that nonvoting can be seen as the political equivalent of elastic demand. Some people will choose not to vote if they perceive that both parties are too distant from their preferences, and this might help explain why the Republican and Democratic parties are only somewhat similar ideologically.

In 1957, another economist, Anthony Downs, developed the political implications of these ideas systematically, considering the model under varying conditions (regarding the distribution of voters' ideological preferences, the number of parties, the entry of new parties, and the type of electoral system). His ideas have had a major influence on the way in which political scientists have thought about party competition, and his essay on this topic is a centerpiece of his book, An Economic Theory of Democracy, which Grofman called “one of the most influential and frequently cited works in social science of the post-World War II period.”

10 Legislative Institutions

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of legislative institution are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on the kind of underlying ethical justification of democracy, our conception of citizenship, and our empirical understanding of political institutions and how they function. The most basic types of formal political representation available are single-member district representation, proportional representation, and group representation. In addition, many societies have opted for multicameral legislative institutions. In some cases, combinations of the above forms have been tried.

Single-member district representation returns single representatives of geographically defined areas containing roughly equal populations to the legislature and is present most prominently in the USA and the UK. The most common form of proportional representation is party-list proportional representation. In a simple form of such a scheme, a number of parties compete for election to a legislature that is not divided into geographical districts. Parties acquire seats in the legislature as a proportion of the total number of votes they receive in the population as a whole. Group representation occurs when the society is divided into nongeographically defined groups such as ethnic or linguistic groups or even functional groups such as workers, farmers, and capitalists and returns representatives to a legislature from each of them.

Many have argued in favor of single member district legislation on the grounds that it has appeared to them to lead to more stable government than other forms of representation. The thought is that proportional representation tends to fragment the citizenry into opposing homogeneous camps that adhere rigidly to their party lines and that are continually vying for control over the government. Since there are many parties and they are unwilling to compromise with each other, governments formed from coalitions of parties tend to fall apart rather quickly. The post-War experience of governments in Italy appears to confirm this hypothesis. Single-member district representation, in contrast, is said to enhance the stability of governments by virtue of its favoring a two-party system of government. Each election cycle then determines which party is to stay in power for some length of time.

Charles Beitz (1989) argues that single-member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider. This results from the tendency of this kind of representation towards two-party systems. In a two-party system with majority rule, it is argued, each party must appeal to the median voter in the political spectrum. Hence they must moderate their programs to appeal to the median voter. Furthermore, they encourage compromise among groups since they must try to appeal to a lot of other groups in order to become part of one of the two leading parties. These tendencies encourage moderation and compromise in citizens to the extent that political parties, and interest groups, hold these qualities up as necessary to functioning well in a democracy.

In criticism, advocates of proportional and group representation have argued that single-member district representation tends to muffle the voices and ignore the interests of minority groups in the society. Minority interests and views tend to be articulated in background negotiations and in ways that muffle their distinctiveness. Furthermore, representatives of minority interests and views often have a difficult time becoming elected at all in single-member district systems, so it has been charged that minority views and interests are often systematically underrepresented. Sometimes these problems are dealt with by redrawing the boundaries of districts in a way that ensures greater minority representation. The efforts are invariably controversial since there is considerable disagreement about the criteria for apportionment. In proportional representation, by contrast, representatives of different groups are seated in the legislature in proportion to citizens' choices. Minorities need not make their demands conform to the basic dichotomy of views and interests that characterize single-member district systems so their views are more articulated and distinctive as well as better represented.

Another criticism of single-member district representation is that it encourages parties to pursue dubious electoral campaign strategies. The need to appeal to a large, diverse, and somewhat amorphous sector of the population can very often be best met by using ambiguous, vague, and often irrelevant appeals to the citizens. Thus, instead of encouraging reasonable compromise, the scheme tends to support tendencies towards ignorance, superficiality, and fatuousness in political campaigns and in the citizenry. It encourages political leaders to take care of the real issues of politics in back rooms while they appeal to citizens by means of smoke and mirrors. Of course, those who agree in the main with the elitist-type theories will see nothing wrong in this; indeed, they may well champion this effect. Proportional representation requires that parties be relatively clear and up-front about their proposals, so those who believe that democracy is ethically grounded in the appeal to equality tend to favor proportional representation.

Advocates of group representation such as Iris Marion Young (1993) have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation. They may not be able to organize and articulate their views as easily as other groups. Also, minority groups can still be systematically defeated in the legislature and their interests may be consistently set back even if they do have some representation. For these groups, some have argued that the only way to protect their interests is legally to ensure that they have adequate and even disproportionate representation.

One worry about group representation is that it tends to freeze some aspects of the agenda that might be better left to the choice of citizens. For instance, consider a population that is divided into linguistic groups for a long time, and suppose that only some citizens continue to think of linguistic conflict as important. In the circumstances, such schemes may tend to be biased in an arbitrary way that favors the views or interests of those who do think of linguistic conflict as important.

Legislative Institutions

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of legislative institution are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on the kind of underlying ethical justification of democracy, our conception of citizenship, and our empirical understanding of political institutions and how they function. The most basic types of formal political representation available are single-member district representation, proportional representation, and group representation. In addition, many societies have opted for multicameral legislative institutions. In some cases, combinations of the above forms have been tried.

Single-member district representation returns single representatives of geographically defined areas containing roughly equal populations to the legislature and is present most prominently in the USA and the UK. The most common form of proportional representation is party-list proportional representation. In a simple form of such a scheme, a number of parties compete for election to a legislature that is not divided into geographical districts. Parties acquire seats in the legislature as a proportion of the total number of votes they receive in the population as a whole. Group representation occurs when the society is divided into nongeographically defined groups such as ethnic or linguistic groups or even functional groups such as workers, farmers, and capitalists and returns representatives to a legislature from each of them.

Many have argued in favor of single-member district legislation on the grounds that it has appeared to them to lead to more stable government than other forms of representation. The thought is that proportional representation tends to fragment the citizenry into opposing homogeneous camps that adhere rigidly to their party lines and that are continually vying for control over the government. Since there are many parties and they are unwilling to compromise with each other, governments formed from coalitions of parties tend to fall apart rather quickly. The post-War experience of governments in Italy appears to confirm this hypothesis. Single-member district representation, in contrast, is said to enhance the stability of governments by virtue of its favoring a two-party system of government. Each election cycle then determines which party is to stay in power for some length of time.

Charles Beitz (1989) argues that single-member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider. This results from the tendency of this kind of representation toward two-party systems. In a two-party system with majority rule, it is argued, each party must appeal to the median voter in the political spectrum. Hence they must moderate their programs to appeal to the median voter. Furthermore, they encourage compromise among groups since they must try to appeal to a lot of other groups in order to become part of one of the two leading parties. These tendencies encourage moderation and compromise in citizens to the extent that political parties, and interest groups, hold these qualities up as necessary to functioning well in a democracy.

In criticism, advocates of proportional and group representation have argued that single-member district representation tends to muffle the voices and ignore the interests of minority groups in the society. Minority interests and views tend to be articulated in background negotiations and in ways that muffle their distinctiveness. Furthermore, representatives of minority interests and views often have a difficult time becoming elected at all in single-member district systems, so it has been charged that minority views and interests are often systematically underrepresented. Sometimes these problems are dealt with by redrawing the boundaries of districts in a way that ensures greater minority representation. The efforts are invariably controversial since there is considerable disagreement about the criteria for apportionment. In proportional representation, by contrast, representatives of different groups are seated in the legislature in proportion to citizens' choices. Minorities need not make their demands conform to the basic dichotomy of views and interests that characterize single-member district systems so their views are more articulated and distinctive as well as better represented.

Another criticism of single-member district representation is that it encourages parties to pursue dubious electoral campaign strategies. The need to appeal to a large, diverse, and somewhat amorphous sector of the population can very often be best met by using ambiguous, vague, and often irrelevant appeals to the citizens. Thus, instead of encouraging reasonable compromise, the scheme tends to support tendencies toward ignorance, superficiality, and fatuousness in political campaigns and in the citizenry. It encourages political leaders to take care of the real issues of politics in back rooms while they appeal to citizens by means of smoke and mirrors. Of course, those who agree in the main with the elitist-type theories will see nothing wrong in this; indeed, they may well champion this effect. Proportional representation requires that parties be relatively clear and up front about their proposals, so those who believe that democracy is ethically grounded in the appeal to equality tend to favor proportional representation.

Advocates of group representation such as Iris Marion Young (1993) have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation. They may not be able to organize and articulate their views as easily as other groups. Also, minority groups can still be systematically defeated in the legislature and their interests may be consistently set back even if they do have some representation. For these groups, some have argued that the only way to protect their interests is legally to ensure that they have adequate and even disproportionate representation.

One worry about group representation is that it tends to freeze some aspects of the agenda that might be better left to the choice of citizens. For instance, consider a population that is divided into linguistic groups for a long time, and suppose that only some citizens continue to think of linguistic conflict as important. In the circumstances, such schemes may tend to be biased in an arbitrary way that favors the views or interests of those who do think of linguistic conflict as important.

1.3 Consequences of FPTP

The great virtue of FPTP is its simplicity. Voters make a single choice and the candidate with the most votes wins. However, FPTP has fewer desirable properties than many other methods in multicandidate elections. Compared to other rules, plurality is the least likely to pick a Condorcet winner, i.e. a candidate who is able to beat all other candidates in pairwise contests. Also, simulations show that the plurality rule results in average social utilities that are lower than those under other rules (Merrill 1988). Such drawbacks may not be very consequential when there are only two candidates. Furthermore, when there are only two options, as in a two-party system, there is no need for more complex electoral systems.

When three or more candidates compete in a FPTP election, some of the candidates may divide the votes of some segment that might otherwise agree on a winning candidate. This could result in a victorious candidate who is less preferred by the electorate than one of the losers. If voters are aware of this eventuality they may be able to coordinate in order to elect a more preferred candidate. FPTP encourages voters to cast their ballots strategically and consider the behavior of other voters. If a voter's first-choice candidate has little chance of getting a plurality of votes, the voter may find it advantageous to vote for a less preferred but more viable candidate instead of ‘wasting’ his or her vote on a candidate with little chance. In contrast, multi-member districts and even single-member districts with decision rules other than plurality may reduce the incentives for voters to deviate from their first choice.

Strategic behavior and an aversion to wasting one's vote means that FPTP elections are typified by contests between two major candidates, whereas alternative systems often exhibit several viable candidates. Extending this result to parties, FPTP systems routinely have only two major parties, a phenomenon that has been coined Duverger's law, named after the French scholar who extensively described the relationship (Duverger 1954). Proportional representation systems, however, usually have more than two parties, a result that has come to be known as Duverger's hypothesis (Riker 1982, Cox 1997).

When there are only two viable candidates in an FPTP election, no abstentions, and the candidates are choosing their positions to maximize their electoral support, the candidate ideologically closest to the median voter is advantaged (Downs 1957). FPTP systems thus tend to produce more moderate outcomes than alternative systems. The incentive for candidates to take moderate positions can produce candidates who are only minimally differentiated, leading some to conclude that the choices in FPTP are often of little consequence. One potential advantage to such a system, however, is that the outcomes from one election to the next tend to be more ideologically consistent, resulting in small, incremental policy changes over time.

I.B In the United States

The relationship between politics and the media, of course, depends on the systems of government and the communications that govern this relationship. The conditions in the United States, for example, are very different from those in other parts of the world. The United States has a written constitution which, in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, provides special protection for the press from government control. This feature has been copied in the written constitutions of various developing nations, but with varying results. The interpretation of this constitutional provision by the U.S. federal courts has produced a situation in which prior restraints on material to be published are outlawed. And public figures cannot sue for libel unless they can prove a reckless disregard of the truth.

Electronic media are privately owned for the most part in the United States, although under the statutory authority of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC determines the rules for issuing licenses to broadcasters. Political access to the airwaves is also subject to FCC regulation. Political affairs are dominated by a two-party system and elections determine directly from the voters who fills the topmost office of president as well as seats in the national and local legislatures. This has a definite effect on the way that the media cover elections and report on the activities in Washington, D.C., state capitals, or most local city halls. For example, U.S. journalists like to think of themselves as representatives of the public trying to look beyond the claims of party politicians and the major institutions of government.

Newspapers and magazines in the United States tend to be run by individual proprietors, or, increasingly, large media corporations. The merger mania of recent years means, for example, that Newhouse's Advance Publications has bought out the competition in the sphere of U.S. fashion magazines so that one publisher now dominates the fashion press. U.S. newspapers and magazines are officially independent of the political parties they seek to cover, although many publishers have strong political leanings, which appear from time to time on the editorial pages. The news columns of some newspapers are sometimes accused of reflecting these same biases.

The capital—Washington, D.C.—is by no means the cultural or economic center of the country as is true in many other nations. And the activities of Congress and the executive branch of government are not of equal concern in the rest of the nation as they are to the capital press and Washington bureaus located, as they say, “inside the beltway,” the automobile ring road that physically surrounds the city. For example, the sex scandal involving President Clinton during 1998–1999 and his subsequent impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives and trial in the U.S. Senate proved to be of less interest to the country at large, according to public opinion polls, than to reporters who wrote and broadcast the story ad infinitum from within Washington.

3 Stability or Change?

Although interest groups are an enduring and persistent part of democratic politics, they frequently face significant changes in their political environment. In parliamentary systems with proportional representation, for example, new political movements can quickly metamorphize into new political parties. The lobbying organizations for that cause may have to switch quickly from protest politics to campaign politics. In the American context, with its stable two-party system, the challenge more recently has been the unprecedented growth of interest groups. Looking back on his career, one member of the House remarked ‘When I first came to Congress there were five major financial trade groups, but now there are at least five times that. Now if you're trying to satisfy all the trade groups, it's pretty hard to do.’

For present-day lobbyists the most significant tactical decision may be figuring out what to do just to get noticed. With so many lobbyists working on the same issue, how do the lobbyists from a single organization convince legislators and their staffers that their organization is one to consult with and to work up drafts of legislation with? The competition between lobbyists has put an even greater premium on expertise. Although well-connected lobbyists are always helpful, policy expertise is a particularly important trait of effective lobbyists.

An interesting question that has emerged is whether the new technologies are changing interest group politics. The new technologies have certainly made it easier for interest group organizations to reach their members and attentive publics. Today communication can be virtually instantaneous. If events change rapidly lobbyists in the capital can mobilize their members quickly to let policy makers know that voters back home have noticed what's going on and they are upset about it. Interest groups have also taken advantage of the Internet, establishing their own web sites to serve as vehicles for soliciting members, advertising their views, and facilitating the retrieval of documents by sympathesizers around the country. Another use of the Web is that it facilitates the organization of new groups. Small constituencies with modest resources can use the economies of the Internet to reach those concerned with their issue and to generate communication among themselves.

Yet for all the changes that have taken place in government and in telecommunications, the fundamental nature of lobbying remains relatively stable. At its core lobbyists work assiduously to mobilize their followers and to bring information to the attention of policy makers. Although how those tasks are carried out changes over time, these changes have not revolutionized the process.

As political science has become increasingly sophisticated and the discipline has placed greater emphasis on precise measurement of complex phenomena, lobbying has remained a particularly difficult nut to crack. Assessing the effectiveness of different types of lobbying or different lobbying campaigns continues to be a formidable methodological problem. We know a lot more about many facets of interest group politics, especially in understanding how and why people join organizations. Research on lobbying, however, has made only limited progress.

Politics

Political power is typically gained and held in an outright conflict between rivals. Political opponents must be defeated at the polls, in legislative chambers, in the media, and sometimes in the streets. Political conflicts appear rampant even in single party or dictatorial political systems where rival factions and administrative departments within the same political organization battle for position and power. Of course, the level of conflict in a political system is related to the structure of that system and the degree to which it pits constituencies against one another. In ‘winner takes all’ and two-party systems, such as the United States, there can be great conflict between parties to achieve the majority position. In parliamentary or proportional systems, power-sharing and coalition-building may be more likely, although it is not clear whether such systems reduce the level of conflict between parties when the parties are not forced to cooperate to achieve a majority.

Given the level of conflict inherent to the political process, all politics may rely on a form of identity politics to mobilize and maneuver the specific groups of people needed to gain or maintain power. Political parties with names such as Green, Labor, The People’s Party, New Jewel Movement, National Front, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah identify themselves in a way that supports their constituents’ identification with the party and its platform. In some cases, political parties are explicit in their appeals to ethnic identity, as with the Tamil United Liberation Front or the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress in Sri Lanka, and the Scottish National Party in the United Kingdom. Throughout the world politics is infused with both subtle and obvious appeals to the ethnic identity of potential supporters. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, the leaders of the ruling Congress Party in India went to great lengths to appear strong to their predominantly Hindu constituency by putting down a rebellion organized by members of the Sikh religious minority. At the same time, the Congress Party made great efforts to end the uprising in such a way as to also appear fair and tolerant to their Sikh supporters. In ethnically diverse states such as India, South Africa, and the United States, political groups depend on support from multiple ethnic constituencies and must therefore make complicated appeals to multiple groups.

However, numerous cases exist in which ethnicity has been used as a ‘wedge issue’ to divide political support along ethnic lines. Jill Quadagno, in her 1995 book, The Color of Welfare, discusses US President Nixon’s quiet encouragement of affirmative action programs for some ethnic minorities as a calculated attempt to erode White American support for the Democratic party. As mentioned in the introduction, dominant groups can use identity politics to maintain and consolidate their own political power while limiting that of others. Quadagno documents such a case in US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to promote the Social Security Act of 1935 in the US Congress. Many (White) Southern Democrats opposed the act because it would provide an income to unemployed and retired Black Americans that would exceed the prevailing wages in the region. To guarantee the support of the Southerners in his party, Roosevelt advocated a provision that excluded agricultural and domestic laborers. Because Black Americans typically filled these positions, the provision excluded most Black Americans from a major advance in social welfare and full political enfranchisement. Here, the consolidation of Democratic power and the maintenance of White ethnic domination in the South were achieved at the expense of a subordinate ethnic group.

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