Brendan Nyhan has an intresting piece on why he doesn’t think that there will be a centrist third party. He brings up Duverger’s Law, a theory in political science that states that in a winner-take-all situation, voters will usually winnow the choices down to two major parties. Nyhan points out:
The dynamics of Duverger’s Law are what Brownstein doesn’t understand. It’s a giant coordination game. Even the voters who would prefer a centrist third-party candidate have no incentive to support him if he is in third place because doing so will hurt their second choice. Absent extraordinary circumstances, it’s almost impossible to dislodge the parties and create a dynamic where a third party candidate can become one of the top two contenders. This is why so few liberals supported Nader in 2004, and why Perot lost by large margins in 1992 and 1996.
I’m a big fan of the political analysis of Anthony Downs, an economist who wrote a book called An Economic Theory of Democracy. Downs argued that voters fall along a bell curve. Ideologues on either side are a decided minority, while the most voters lie along the center. Studies have shown that this analysis is more or less correct. The exact distribution may change (for years Democrats had a higher rate of partisan identification than Republicans, only recently have Republicans reached rough parity), but the principle has always remained the same.
That doesn’t leave an opening for a moderate third party because the goal of both parties is to capture more centrist voters. That’s why neither Howard Dean nor Pat Buchanan tend to garner more than a minor percentage of the vote — they only appeal to the far ends of the bell curve where there’s a paucity of voters.
Indeed, that’s why John Kerry became the Democratic nominee in 2004 — because the Democrats made the strategic determination that he was the candidate who could best capture the moderate vote. Dean captured the Democratic base, but the base of any given party represents only a minute fraction of all voters. Radicals like Barry Goldwater or Howard Dean excite the base, but they can’t capture the rest of the country.
And that’s why American politics tend to be less radical than say, Italian politics. Both parties are shooting for the same target — the middle. Excessively ideological parties tend not to make enough of a difference to swing results. Even a moderate party can’t necessarily take up the slack unless both parties abandon the middle, which almost never happens. Our political system has been based on a two-party equilibrium system from the start, even before we had official political parties. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans were political parties in fact if not in organization long before America had political parties — from the very birth of the Republic.
The only way a third party can come to prominance is if one of the big two completely and utterly collapses. The last time this happened was when the Whigs folded before the Civil War. The chances of it happening again is slim. Our parties are designed to appeal to the masses, not ideological cliques. If they go to far to one side of another, they invariably try to recapture the center. One can argue that this makes American politics cautious and “mushy” as parties try to appeal to Joe and Jane Sixpack – I’d argue that’s an important feature of the system. A two party equilibrium acts as a bulwark against radicalism in politics and keeps the system stable. Without dramatically changing our system of government, a third party is only rarely going to have a significant effect on a Presidential election, and then not enough to unseat one of the major parties.
Another reason why third parties always fail is that the “political center” is by no means a unanimous group. The Reform Party’s late 1990s meltdown was evidence enough that John Hagelin and Pat Buchanan have nothing in common other that the fact that they both consider themselves moderates in comparison to the Democrats and Republicans. Essentially, everyone with a gripe against the major parties will initially latch onto a third party made temporarily popular by a celebrity candidate (Ross Perot, Jesse Ventura, Ralph Nader) only to discover their gripes against the major parties as not consistent and that they have little common ideological ground.
Simply put, there is no litmus test to the political center. It’s made up of those who support abortion rights and those who oppose them, of people who detest globalization and those who think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, of people who hate homosexuals and of people who are homosexuals, hawks and doves, etc. etc. etc. Ultimately, these irreconcilable differences will send the various factions of the would-be third party back to one of the two major parties.
The most interesting tidbit of your post was branding Barry Goldwater and Howard Dean as radicals. If Goldwater were in politics today, he’d be considered a liberal Republican and would be excoriated by his party the same way the current senior Republican Senator John McCain frequently is. By the standards of Democratic Party doctrine in the 1960s and 1970s, Howard Dean would be labelled a conservative, positioning himself to the right of Richard Nixon on the major issue of national health care. In other words, your main argument is correct but the way you arrived at it is through your usual lens of revisionist history. I’m confident that if Barry Goldwater were alive today, he’d be branding George W. Bush as a radical, much as he did Bush’s far more centrist father 13 years ago.
Quite the opposite – Goldwater would hate Bush for not being nearly fiscally conservative enough. Remember, Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act because he thought that private property rights trumped racial interests. Goldwater was probably the most libertarian major party candidate ever nominated – compared to him the GOP is a bunch of squishy liberals. He wouldn’t be pushing for private accounts in Social Security, he’d be pushing for getting rid of Social Security.
There are times I wish we had more like him – someone’s got to stand up against bigger government, and it sure as hell won’t be the Democrats.
In 1992, Goldwater identified himself as a “liberal in today’s Republican Party.” I think that speaks for itself.
Believe me, Goldwater’s not a liberal in the modern context. A classical liberal perhaps, but definitely not a modern liberal. His political philosophy, especially in his later years was pretty hard-core libertarian.