Q&A: Will we ever see a viable third political party?

Periodically, Western Today is reaching out to Western Washington University faculty and staff to get their expertise on topics of interest to the community. Tentatively, we're calling this Western Today Q&A, but if you have a better idea, please let us know in the comments or send us a note.

For today's question, we reached out to associate professor Amir Abedi, chair of the WWU Political Science Department, to ask a question about which we've long wondered:

Western Today: What would need to happen in the United States for there to be a viable, strong third (or fourth) political party?

Amir Abedi:  First, there would have to be a change to the system used to elect representatives. Right now members of the United States Congress are elected based on the “First-Past-the-Post” system, which divides the country up into geographical districts, each of which elects only one member. The winner of each race is the candidate with the most votes in their district. This winner-take-all electoral system makes it very difficult for smaller parties to compete. Voters are less likely to vote for a candidate who has no realistic chance of coming in first place in their district. After all, most voters do not want to “waste” their vote or risk an outcome in which the candidate from the major party they dislike the most wins the race. A system of proportional representation in which districts would be larger and elect more than one or two representatives each would allow even smaller parties to be competitive as the available seats in Congress would be allocated to the competing parties based on their respective vote shares. The more representatives each district elects, the more competitive the race would become. Thus, in a ten-seat district, ten percent of the votes would be sufficient to elect one of the ten representatives. In that hypothetical scenario a party that wins fifty percent of the votes would pick up five of the ten seats.

Second, another major obstacle to the rise of third (or fourth) parties is the difficulty of getting on to the ballot in most states and the exorbitant cost of elections in the United States. In most states ballot access laws only guarantee the two major parties general election listings for all partisan contests. Thus, smaller parties often have to spend a lot of time and resources just to get (and then keep) their names on the ballot. With regard to expenses, $6.3 billion were spent during the 2012 U.S. elections. In the 2010 British general elections all parties taken together spent less than $50 million. In other words, while the parties and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections spent about $19 per person, the equivalent in Britain, where spending is strictly regulated, was about 80 cents per person.  Thus, any candidate or party that wants to be competitive in the U.S. has to raise an exorbitant amount of money.

One reason for the expense is the length of the campaign season (often over a year in the United States, generally less than two months in most other Western democracies). Another reason for the high cost is related to television advertising.  About half of all the money spent during U.S. election campaigns goes into TV ads. In Britain and in Germany parties are allocated TV and radio advertising time and they are not allowed to purchase any additional time. Again, this makes campaigns less expensive and allows smaller parties to be competitive since their message is not drowned out by the major parties’ ability to massively outspend them.   

As the two major parties in the United States have no interest in changing the existing rules, which after all serve them quite well, would-be reformers are well advised to focus their attention on possible changes at the local level before eventually building up pressure for reforms at the state or even federal levels.