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Summary

Democracy in the United States faces a dilemma. Voters feel increasingly unrepresented by both of the dominant parties. Yet these parties now control large swaths of uncompetitive seats at the state and national levels, reducing options for new voices. Obvious solutions, such as increasing party representativeness or creating a third party, may increase polarization, which would likely impede governance. Examples of party revitalization in contemporary Europe and from U.S. history suggest that locally grounded movements that reinvigorate political competitiveness may offer a path forward.

The Challenge of Unrepresentative Parties

• Unrepresentative parties frustrate voters: A growing plurality of Americans identify as independents (44 percent) rather than Republicans (22 percent) or Democrats (32 percent). Since 2013, a majority of Americans have believed political parties are so unrepresentative that a third party is needed.
• Divided electorate stymied by safe seats: Despite an extremely divided electorate, 95 percent of Americans live in safe districts where one party’s national candidate won by more than 5 percent. In 2014, 43 percent of state legislative elections were not even contested by both major parties.
• Polarization undermines easy solutions: U.S. polarization, once confined to party activists, has spread to ordinary voters with such intensity that a third party would likely deepen partisan polarization or populism, while increasing gridlock. Such gridlock deepens Americans’ dissatisfaction with their parties.

Avenues to Reinvigorating Party Representativeness

• The contemporary experiences of France, Spain, and the United Kingdom (UK), and accounts of the United States during the Gilded Age, suggest that revitalizing parties and creating new parties can foster greater representativeness within two-party systems.
• However, in highly polarized countries, such as Spain and the UK, party revitalization has deepened polarization.
• To energize voters while reducing polarization, movements should follow the lead of France and the historical United States by moving voters away from traditional left/right issues toward new choices, such as open versus closed societies or pragmatic versus ideological policymaking.
• Revitalization movements succeed by signaling a radical departure from the establishment. Anti-establishment rhetoric can acknowledge populist anger, while directing voters away from left/right polarization.
• Grassroots organizing around concrete local issues lends credibility to calls for tangible change and allows movements to bring new, less partisan constituencies into politics.
• Successful organizing requires sophisticated data and technology, although such organizing often appears spontaneous and distinct from the activities of the major parties.
• Revitalizing U.S. politics requires changing electoral structures to open races to greater competition. For example, ranked-choice voting, open primaries, and fusion voting could enable greater representativeness.
• Nonpartisan elections appear to be an attractive way to reduce polarization. Yet they may depress turnout and benefit wealthier, more well-known candidates. Structural changes should retain partisan identifiers, while enabling a broader range of candidates to expand representativeness and increase competition.

Acknowledgments

Richard Youngs wrote the UK and Spain case studies and Jonah Belser drafted the France case study. The authors also thank Gareth Fowler and Gustavo Berrizbeitia for their research assistance. Carnegie gratefully acknowledges support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that helped make the writing of this paper possible. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the authors alone.

Introduction

What can be done to improve democracy in the United States? After decades of giving advice to foreign lands, the city on a hill and exporter of democracy is facing multiple, interconnected challenges to its own governing system. Challenges of legitimacy and polarization familiar to more recent democracies now confront the United States and other long-consolidated democracies.

One significant problem is popular frustration with the two dominant political parties in the United States. Gridlock preventing politicians from addressing clear national needs is among the top reasons why Americans are frustrated with Congress. Meanwhile, the widespread view among voters that neither Democrats nor Republicans represent their views, combined with the monopolistic holds each party has gained over an increasing number of elected seats, has created a dangerous sense of democratic deficit. In less consolidated democracies, the sense that political elites are neither doing the job of governing nor representing the public often elides into the impression of a political class enmeshed in self-serving policies that rig the system against the everyday voter. These impressions are now dominant among the U.S. public.

Many Americans believe that creating a third party offers a solution. Indeed, a plurality of Americans has wanted a third party since 2006, and a majority has desired one since 2013, according to Gallup polling. But a closer look at voters’ views suggests that a third party could increase representativeness at the cost of exacerbating polarization, and thus gridlock.

Once citizens are highly polarized in a winner-take-all system like that of the United States, parties are caught in a devilish choice between representing voter preferences (at the risk of deepening polarization) and governing effectively, the latter of which requires compromise and outreach across the party divide.

No perfect solutions exist to the wicked problem in which the United States now finds itself. Examples from contemporary Europe and lessons from U.S. history, however, suggest strategies for reviving representation and reveal the payoffs and pitfalls to each in terms of polarization. The cases illustrate the importance of building movements based on local, municipal activism that engages a less political portion of the population. These examples also highlight the need for governing reforms that would disincentivize politicians from catering to their existing partisan bases, while enabling new types of candidates to arise from within traditional party structures.

The Failure of U.S. Political Parties to Represent

Democracies rely on political parties to do two things: represent voter preferences and aggregate those preferences into governing policies. The United States’ parties are failing at both tasks. A marked rise in gridlock over some of the most salient legislative issues in the 108th, 110th, and 112th Congresses led to the extended government shutdown of 2013. That year, Americans declared “dysfunctional government” the top problem facing the United States, above any single policy issue.¹ Their frustration at Congress’s inability to pass needed legislation has continued to fuel voter anger according to more recent polling.²

Meanwhile, so few Americans feel represented by a major party that the total number of voters who consider themselves to be independents now nearly equals that of voters who claim a party affiliation. Gallup’s January 2018 polling shows that 44 percent of Americans now identify as independents, with just 22 percent identifying as Republicans and 32 percent as Democrats.³ The trend is slightly more positive among younger Americans, though hardly much better. Pew’s 2016 polling finds that 41 percent of millennials (eighteen to thirty-five years old) identify as independents.⁴

When parties hold near-monopolies over so many elected seats, and voters are disenchanted with these parties, democracy itself is rendered suspect.

The growth of independent voters is not just a problem of representation but also a problem of disenfranchisement. With political choice increasingly being determined in partisan primaries, voters who register as independents in the country’s nine fully closed primary states (including highly populous swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania) are effectively cut off from exercising their democratic voice.⁵

Moreover, the lack of competition in congressional and state legislative elections is now so high that it calls into question whether even voters who identify with a party have real choice. The Cook Political Report claims that 417 of 435 congressional races were uncompetitive as of 2016.⁶ The political scientist Carl Klarner claims that 95 percent of U.S. voters live in safe congressional districts, defined as those where the winning candidates were elected by more than a 5 percent margin.⁷ Klarner found that one of the major parties did not even bother fielding a candidate in 43 percent of 2014 state legislative elections, a range that covers 35.7 percent of the U.S. population. When parties hold near-monopolies over so many elected seats, and voters are disenchanted with these parties, democracy itself is rendered suspect.

The Peril of a Third Party With a Polarized Electorate

No wonder so many Americans want a third option. Polling data (see figure 1) indicates that a substantial share of Americans view the establishment of a third major political party as a possible solution.

Yet a third party could have perverse effects. Many Americans who want a new party are not unhappy centrists but instead are voters looking for something more left, right, or populist than what currently exists. About 87 percent of independent voters tell pollsters they lean left or right, suggesting that these voters are not simply centrists.⁸ In fact, both parties today suffer from being more pragmatic than their base voters, a situation that has arisen from an overly strong Democratic Party and an overly weak Republican one; in both cases, this leaves a group of alienated, angry voters even more polarized than the parties themselves. To see how this situation has emerged, note the changes in U.S. voter affiliation over time, as shown in figure 2.

Democratic Party Strength Alienates a Liberal Base

As this figure demonstrates, Democrats lost nearly 10 percent of their party members in the 1960s as many voters angered by the civil rights movement left to become independents. Even more abandoned the party beginning under former Democratic president Jimmy Carter, a trend that continued into the 1980s; this time, they left to join the Republicans as so-called Reagan Democrats. Unsurprisingly, the Democratic Party concluded after the disastrous presidential elections of 1972 and 1980 that its primary system was nominating candidates too liberal for general election voters. In 1980, Democrats created a superdelegate system, ensuring that 15 percent of their delegation—which translated to about one-third of the votes needed to elect a presidential nominee—were party insiders. The goal was explicitly to tamp down popular pressure so that candidates deemed electable would emerge from the primary process.⁹

While the Democratic Party is currently debating whether to maintain such strong control over presidential elections, it continues to play a strong kingmaker role in selecting candidates for congressional, state, and sometimes local downballot elections.¹⁰ Parties wield power over candidates through access to data, donors, media, and get-out-the-vote resources. The Democratic Party today controls access to the main donor database (NGP VAN), which aggregates data from nearly all races across the nation. Only candidates approved by the Democratic National Committee have access. The data are particularly meaningful because Democratic fundraising requires greater reliance on broad networks of grassroots donors, whose contact information, giving amounts, and other relevant information are easily aggregated through the database.¹¹ Meanwhile, the decline in union membership means that there are few pre-organized, get-out-the-vote groups at a scale that Democrats can rely on separate from the party, making data access and party financial support essential for identifying the voters to mobilize to the polls.

These various tools of control mean that the Democratic Party significantly shapes the spectrum of candidates that voters may choose from in presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and often state legislative races. To cite just one recent example, in a 2016 Pennsylvania primary race, the party recruited another candidate to mount a primary challenge against former Democratic representative Joe Sestak after he refused to select a party-approved campaign manager. The Democratic Party put more than $1 million into the challenger’s campaign, drummed up major endorsements, and provided staff and get-out-the-vote support to dissuade others from helping Sestak.¹² While occasional outsiders, such as Representative Seth Moulton, can win a campaign in the face of such a juggernaut, it is rare.

The Democratic Party establishment now finds itself more conservative than its base.

Yet, as demonstrated by Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and the attempt since the mid-2000s of liberal political action committees to mount primary challenges against conservative Democrats, many Democrats are unhappy.¹³ The share of voters who describe themselves as leaning Democratic has included a growing percentage of self-described liberals over the past fifteen years—from 27 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2015.¹⁴ Having lost its more conservative voters and, thus, having consolidated its membership as a more progressive voting bloc, the Democratic Party establishment now finds itself more conservative than its base.¹⁵

Republican Party Weakness Alienates Activists

On the other side of the aisle, the Reagan revolution led to a rapid rise in the Republican voter rolls in the early 1980s. Yet gains to Republican market share in the decades following former president Carter’s administration were achieved in part by outsourcing media and other key operations to activists outside the party establishment. The success at building an echo chamber of bloggers, talk radio outlets, and Fox News contributors eventually diluted the strength of the party to control its message. While these outlets can amplify ideology and messaging, they are independent of the party. For example, it was Fox News, not the Republican Party, that controlled the criteria determining which candidates would appear in the party’s 2016 primary season presidential debates and the amount of stagetime and airtime the candidates received during these debates.¹⁶ Probably interested in ratings more than ideas, Fox News and other similar outlets have pushed a more populist line that reflects tribal politics of identity—otherwise known as affective horizontal polarization—rather than conservative ideology. Conservative politicians such as Senator Jeff Flake now speak openly about the need to retake their party from these media outlets.¹⁷

Popular pressure from the most activist Republicans, rather than the party itself, determines its candidates.

Beyond media coverage, Republican fundraising and voter outreach often evades the control of the party establishment. A small number of high-net-worth donors and activists have been able to exercise inordinate control over conservative media outlets, organizations, and candidates. Rather than give through the Republican Party apparatus, the biggest of these donors contribute outside of party structures. Charles and David Koch, for instance, have created a 400-person donor network known as the Freedom Partners Policy Leaders Conference, to which Republican candidates come to gain support—entirely separate from the Republican National Committee (RNC).¹⁸ The Mercer family’s significant role in the rise of President Donald Trump’s outsider campaign has been thoroughly documented.¹⁹ Get-out-the-vote activity has also been outsourced. Evangelical churches have long formed a pre-organized, get-out-the-vote base for Republicans but are not controlled by the party. Donors such as Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers have also financed get-out-the-vote campaign field assistance, further weakening the gatekeeping role of the RNC.

Together, these trends mean that popular pressure from the most activist Republicans, rather than the party itself, determines its candidates. Republican activists throughout the 2000s have been far more likely to run successful primary challenges against less conservative candidates—a reality that burst into the open after 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party.²⁰ That year, Tea Party candidates won nearly one-third of their primary contests, ousting so many long-serving Republican politicians that no candidate could ignore their preferences.²¹ The Tea Party’s Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives has shaped the house speaker’s priorities over the last two congresses.

Even when Tea Party candidates lost subsequent general election contests, and although few of them won Senate seats, their primary victories (such as the ones that successfully toppled former senator Richard Lugar in 2012 and other long-serving Republican moderates) played a significant role in shifting the Senate to the right in terms of voting and—equally important—partisanship and rhetoric.²² After 2010, the National Republican Senatorial Committee made a policy decision not to interfere in primary battles. At the presidential level, the party cannot and does not determine its candidates. Republican superdelegates control just 7 percent of votes and are tethered to the votes of their states, so they serve to amplify rather than moderate popular pressure.²³ Thus, three Tea Party candidates unknown before 2010 were among the Republican presidential contenders in 2016 (Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker).

Yet, despite their largely successful insurgent takeover of the Republican Party over the last two decades, the most active Republicans do not feel well represented. In sixteen out of seventeen states where Republican voters were surveyed in primary exit polls in the fall of 2016, more than 50 percent of Republican primary voters declared that they “feel betrayed by politicians from the Republican Party”; similarly, a September 2015 CBS/YouGov poll of Republican voters found that 81 percent of Iowa Republicans, 72 percent of South Carolina Republicans, and 59 percent of New Hampshire Republicans believed that “Republicans in Congress compromised with Barack Obama too much.”²⁴

Consequently, although Republican congressional voting is the most conservative it has been in a century (according to the DW-NOMINATE dataset created by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal), the ongoing drop in Republican voter identification probably represents many voters for whom the party is not right wing enough.²⁵ As scholars Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution claim, and as Pew polling implies, while the bases of both parties are radicalizing, conservatives are moving far more to the right than liberals are moving to the left.²⁶

A Polarized, Extreme Electorate

The polarization taking hold in the United States is not simply a case of an electorate with different, strongly held viewpoints—that is a normal part of democracy. The danger is what scholars call affective polarization, which takes place when citizens hold such intense and personal negative feelings toward the other party that they regard their party as part of their identity—to the extent that a threat to one’s party becomes a direct, personal fight. Meanwhile, members of the opposition are seen not just as wrong but also morally corrupt. Affective polarization between parties is evidenced by 2014 Pew survey data that found that 27 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans view the other party as “a threat to the nation’s well-being.”²⁷ Polls suggest that these figures have been rising steadily. The share of Americans who feel the other party is “selfish” has more than doubled since 1960. A 1958 Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of Republicans did not care what party their children married into. When Lynn Vavreck, a scholar at UCLA, reposed the question in 2016, 60 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans wanted their kids to marry within their respective political parties.²⁸

While many American voters continue to hold more amorphous views and are not tightly linked to either party, many of those people do not vote.²⁹ Individuals who identify as either Republican or Democratic are highly polarized; this fact suggests that what was once a phenomenon of committed party activists pushing politicians toward fringe positions has percolated to the mass of party members.³⁰

It is unwise to assume that a third party would improve the functioning of U.S. democracy. The twin goals of increasing representation and improving governability are at loggerheads.

Voters are not only moving further out along the horizontal left-right political axis than their parties, fueling what could be called “horizontal polarization”; they are also alienated from party establishments along a second, vertical axis: socioeconomic polarization, or a sense that the establishment has “rigged” the country’s economic and political system for its own benefit.³¹ Trump’s success suggests that a significant portion of Republican voters feel unrepresented by the more open economic and immigration policies of the traditional Rockefeller Republican Party. On the left, Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign was driven as much by strong vertical polarization on socioeconomic issues as by horizontal party polarization. Despite palpable differences on left-right issues like abortion and women’s rights, many liberals claim that “there is no difference between the parties,” because they are looking less at these cultural issues than at the fact that the legal and financial industries have been the greatest Democratic fundraising contributors in recent presidential elections.³² It is vertical polarization that explains the fact that 12 percent of those who voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries switched to Trump in the general election.³³

To depict the extent of socioeconomic polarization, the author arranged responses to the 2014 Pew Research Center’s Political Typology data along the familiar left-right political axis. The same respondents were then split between citizens who prefer more open borders and believe in a globally engaged America (“cosmopolitans”) and those who espouse anti-immigrant, America First policy preferences (“nativists”). Finally, the group was broken down into those who feel that the economic and social hierarchies of the United States are generally fair (“status quo” voters) versus those who feel that the country’s social hierarchies and wealth distribution are unjust and that the government does not listen to people like them (“rigged system” voters). (See appendix 1 at the end of the paper for a full methodological explanation and a compilation of the questions used to create figure 3.)

As is clear from these pie charts, the voters who feel the system is “rigged” represent a majority more than twice as large as the citizens who believe that the social and economic hierarchy is fair. Meanwhile, while cosmopolitans represent a clear majority of the electorate, nativists whose preferences on trade, immigration, and multilateral alliances had not been reflected in either party’s major policies until the arrival of Trump represent a significant plurality of previously unheard voters, a populist silent plurality.

Given the extreme left-right polarization of the U.S. voting public, the majority of voters who feel the system is rigged, and the strong plurality of nativists, it is unwise to assume that a third party would improve the functioning of U.S. democracy. The twin goals of increasing representation and improving governability are at loggerheads. A centrist third-party base would likely leave existing parties with the most polarized voters, who would then push left/right polarization further to make the parties more representative of their views. This increased polarization would undermine the ability of parties to agree on policy solutions and thus harm the country’s capacity to govern. If, instead, a populist third party arose, it would likely attract voters from both the left and right, increasing the representativeness of the U.S. system at the cost of pulling political rhetoric and policy toward illiberal economic, cultural, and foreign policy positions, as Republicans and Democrats would vie with the new party to claim the populist mantle and retake voter market share.

Revitalizing Parties and Fighting Polarization

The United States is, of course, not alone among long-established democracies in facing high levels of public dissatisfaction with its dominant parties. For many years, European voters have expressed waning approval for their political parties. (Although the dynamics in Europe have differed from those in the United States—the former being as much about parties’ and governments’ lack of power within the European Union (EU) as about horizontal or vertical polarization.)

Yet new forms of political parties and civic activism in the United Kingdom (UK), France, and Spain offer lessons on how to revive representativeness in the United States. They also invoke caution. The UK and Spain revived citizen excitement about political parties by doubling down on polarization. The French case, like the history of U.S. democratic revival during the Gilded Age, offers more hopeful lessons on how crafting a new cross-party alignment of voters can produce more moderate policymaking without aggravating polarization.

United Kingdom

The UK’s June 2017 general election revived voter excitement, especially among young people, and garnered the country’s highest electoral turnout in twenty years. The election destroyed the country’s conservative populist party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which was left without a single seat in parliament. Though it did not win the election, the Labor Party regained support previously lost to the UKIP and generated an unprecedented surge in party membership. The enthusiasm behind Labor’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, also helped elevate overall voter turnout to its highest level since 1997.³⁴

New forms of political parties and civic activism in the United Kingdom (UK), France, and Spain offer lessons on how to revive representativeness in the United States. They also invoke caution.

While many argue that Labor’s surge owed more to the Conservative-Party-led government’s failings than to positive support for Labor, its electoral gains were built on a set of structural advances that the party has been making since Corbyn assumed party leadership. First, Labor vastly increased its membership in partnership with a left-wing grassroots movement called Momentum. The years spent creating this organizing groundwork meant that when Prime Minister Theresa May announced the 2017 snap election, Momentum’s local networks and organizers were already in place to campaign for Corbyn on an accelerated schedule.

Momentum’s devolved leadership structure aims to foster a sense of ownership at the community level. It presents itself as a new form of politics that bridges traditional party structures and civic activism.³⁵ Early on, Corbyn ran what were termed organizing academies to get ordinary members into senior positions in the party. Momentum ran courses such as Corbynomics and People’s PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), as well as community-based public debate sessions.³⁶ Using these public education sessions, activist training programs, and more traditional voter registration drives, Momentum mobilized over 100,000 Labor supporters in just two years.³⁷

Labor’s electoral gains were built on a set of structural advances that the party has been making since Corbyn assumed party leadership.

The community-level organizing fed a national movement that expanded Labor Party membership from under 200,000 when Corbyn became the leader in 2015 to 560,000 today. In the four