American Party Politics and the Crisis of Representation

Lindsay: We are in the third week of a U.S. government shutdown that is a result of a bitter partisan divide and dysfunction in Congress that is unique to the American political system. The way that a system is built, the rules that it has, has an impact on how it works and what it produces. And we’re here today to talk to someone who knows a lot about the American electoral and political system, and the systems of many other countries.

Georgia Kernell is an associate professor in Political Science and Communications at UCLA, and her recent book, Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness, is a deep dive into the rules and structures of different political parties and how the decisions made within Party leadership ripple out to affect political participation and the outcomes of elections.

Georgia, welcome to Talking Policy.

Georgia: Thanks so much for having me.

Lindsay: So when I think about political parties, I think about George Washington’s farewell address that seemed to have been a warning against the formation of political factions. Fast forward to today, and America seems to have one of the most deeply entrenched two party systems in the world, with political parties that are increasingly polarized. How did we get here?

Georgia: So the American political system, as you mentioned, is unique and it’s often described as exceptional, though not always in a positive way. Our system, as the founders designed it, was supposed to have and, and does have, separation of powers, as we all know. And so these checks and balances between the judiciary, the executive, the legislative branch, as well as, through federalism, having state authority over domains that are not controlled by the national government, were designed to control factions or particular interests from taking control of the entire country.

What we see currently is that many of the powers are aligned. So the courts are very supportive of the executive branch currently, and both the House and the Senate are aligned with the Republicans. But that won’t always be the case, and it hasn’t always been the case. And I anticipate we’ll have divided government soon, probably after the midterm elections.

Lindsay: So if I were to say, “Gee, it looks like we’re in a real mess right now,” and a lot of us, regardless of which side of the political aisle we’re on, are feeling that. Could you sum up this anxiety? You know, what’s your take on this? How would you characterize this moment?

Georgia: I think we’re in a political crisis. I think most Americans are unhappy with what’s going on in our country, both Democrats and Republicans. And I think that there’s a general sense of unrest, anxiety, and concern. We got here, not because of a particular leader or a particular movement, but more because of sort of the perfect storm. Our institutions have always had checks and balances, and separation of power, and a lot of institutional checks that prohibit tyranny of the majority. In fact, that’s exactly what the founders created our institutions to do, is to keep from having a tyranny of a particular interest, which now we would call political party, though at the time they referred to them as factions. But that doesn’t prohibit an event from occurring where, in this case, Trump was elected, and the House and the Senate have also aligned with the Republicans. And there’s a conservative court, which does shift the balance to not have a strong separation of powers.

The U.S. system is quite unique. We have an electoral system where candidates are selected using plurality rules, and we have a presidential system. That type of system lends itself to two parties. And for many years, political scientists have thought about a responsible two-party model as sort of the ideal system where the two parties can check each other. And if voters are unhappy with what they have, four years later, or even two years later, they can throw out at least part of the government and check the power of the executive. However, what we’re seeing is that, in combination with this two-party system, when the voters do select one party in power, then it can lead to pretty unified rule.

Lindsay: In a recent post, Yascha Mounk pointed out that although Americans have more choice about more things than almost anyone in the world, especially in terms of all the things we can buy, in politics, we have almost no choice. It’s either Republican or Democrat or a so-called wasted vote. But as you pointed out, that’s not the case everywhere. Can you help us understand why this is the case in the U.S. and maybe unpack some of what you were talking about in terms of just the nuts and bolts of how it works, and how it creates a system that is so dominated by two parties.

Georgia: So in the U.S., all of our national elections and almost all of our state and local elections are decided by plurality rule. Plurality means whoever gets the most votes wins. So you don’t have to have a majority, you just have to have the most. In a plurality setting, what typically happens is there’s only two parties or two candidates that emerge as competitive, and that’s because if you support the third or fourth or fifth candidate, it is a wasted vote. There’s no incentive to vote for them, unless you want to maybe send a protest vote or a signal. You’re not going to impact the outcome of the election if you don’t support one of the top two parties. And so that’s what we have. And interestingly, we have that also in our primary elections in most states, even at the stage prior to selecting candidates. So we have this multi-tiered system where there’s competition between two options and that leads to a very entrenched two-party system.

That’s not the case in most other democracies. So this combination of both a presidential system, meaning that voters are voting for one of two parties at the executive level and first pass the post elections at the legislative level, really leads to a very clear two-party system in the U.S. But in Canada or the UK, they also have single member plurality districts paired, instead of with a president, with a parliamentary system. And so in a parliamentary system, the voters are not selecting their executive directly. Instead, they indirectly select the Prime Minister by voting simply for the lower house, that is their member of the legislature, and then those members together select the government and choose the prime minister. That allows for a little bit more of an opportunity for third parties to emerge, because now those third parties play a role in the legislature by constraining either a majority party or helping a minority party form a coalition to then take on the position as the prime minister and form government. So the UK is often referred to as a two and a half party system, because for a very long time they had Labour, Conservatives, and then the smaller party, the Liberal Democrats, who actually did still play a role.

And we see those small parties play a role in some crucial instances. So the UK Independence Party received quite a bit of support in the 2014 European parliamentary elections, and while they didn’t have many seats in the legislature in the UK, that support led them to exert enough power to push David Cameron, the Prime Minister at the time from the Conservative Party in the UK, to call for a referendum on whether or not the UK should stay in the EU. That’s the Brexit vote. And so even though the Independence Party was not able to control the government, they were able to exert that pressure, and of course, as we all know, the Brexit vote was successful against both of the major two parties; the Labour and Conservative both didn’t support Brexit, and yet the majority of voters did.

Now in most countries in Europe, we actually see parliamentary systems paired with proportional representation. So proportional representation is when a voter, instead of choosing just a single candidate for each party, is choosing a political party that will be selecting multiple candidates within a district. So instead of just choosing one person to represent each district, there’s two or often more, five, seven, sometimes 29 candidates that are being elected in a particular district. Voters then really rely on the party cue in how they decide who to vote for, and whichever party receives, 26 percent of the votes receives approximately 26 percent of the seats. That’s why it’s called proportional representation. So there, there’s not really an incentive to not vote for a third, fourth, or fifth party, because each additional vote will increase the percent of the seat share that that party receives. And so we see a lot more parties proliferate in countries with proportional representation, sometimes only a few within each district, but at the national level, we’ll often see multiple parties that are competitive parties.

Imagine, in the U.S., if you disagree with the Republicans on social policies like abortion, but you agree with them on economic policies like taxing. Then you really have to make a choice. Which issue is more salient to you? And for most people, actually, the economy is the most salient issue when it comes right down to it. And so people have to often sacrifice their position on one issue because they prioritize another issue because there’s only two parties to choose from. In another country, in Europe, often people who have that position will vote for what’s called the liberal party there, but it’s more like a libertarian party here, a party that’s liberal on social issues, and then more fiscally conservative.

Lindsay: Yeah. I want to pick up on a couple of things that you’ve said. One is that, you know, U.S. primaries, many of them are not competitive. And another is voters often have to make a choice between political parties, that ultimately comes down to maybe a single issue, and then there are trade-offs involved in which party they choose.

There is some polling that has suggested that there are some positions where the Republican party as a whole is out of step with the majority of Americans. How is it that a political party can adopt positions that are out of step with a large number of voters and keep winning?

Georgia: Yeah, so ideally parties and candidates are competing in a multidimensional space, right? We have preferences over many different policies, and they may not always align on a single dimension, but because only two parties can really be competitive in the U.S., we, in effect, have to look at competition on a single dimension. So we have to put immigration on the same dimension as climate change, as tax law. It’s very hard to find an issue that has not been put onto this dimension.

One reason is because there’s this push to two parties. And another reason is the primary election system that we have in our country. As you said, the vast majority of legislative seats are not at all competitive here in the U.S., which means that we know a Democrat’s going to win, or we know a Republican’s going to win from that district, barring a major scandal. We know which party will be victorious in any given district for about 80 percent of the seats. And so what that means is the real competition then happens prior to the general election stage at the stage before that, which is the primary election.

So the primary election in most states is limited to voters who support that particular party. So if you’re a registered Republican, you can vote in the Republican primary, but not the Democratic party and vice versa. Now, there’s some experimentation, so in some states actually there’s open primaries and people can vote in parties they’re not registered for. And there are some states like California and Alaska that have recently changed their primary system to have a top two or a top four system, where parties compete with each other in the primary election ballot, and it’s a nonpartisan ballot. And just whichever top two candidates emerge in California, then go on to the general election, not one from the Republicans, one from the Democrats. And so we’re actually looking to that to see how does that change competition? Do we see that it may actually lead to more moderate candidates? I suspect it may.

But those primary elections, because the seats are so not competitive, they allow for much more extreme candidates to gain a foothold, because now, if only Republican voters, and a small subset by the way of Republican voters, are participating in those primary elections, then you can think of the median voter, the pivotal voter in the election is shifting far to the right. And so now a more extreme right candidate has a real chance of winning. They may have a better chance of winning than a moderate candidate who would be more viable in a competitive general election, but it doesn’t matter how viable they are in a competitive general election because there is no competitive general election in that seat.

And so what we have then is, when that’s aggregated up to the national level, because there is not competition on multiple dimensions, parties don’t have to take the majority position on every dimension. They just have to have the majority position on more dimensions than the other competitive party.

Lindsay: Yeah, it’s a really interesting paradox, again, Yascha’s point about that we have so much choice in so many dimensions of our lives here in the United States that, you know, is just unimaginable in a lot of other places, and yet not in this incredibly important dimension of our collective life together. It’s just really ironic.

Georgia: Yeah, and what’s interesting is, for my book, I did research on how political parties select candidates in other countries, and the first thing to point out is there’s a lot of variation within countries outside of the U.S. So here in the U.S. it’s governed by state law, how parties hold their primaries, and they’re actually quite similar. There’s some variation across parties, but not a lot. Like, the Republicans look very similar to the Democrats when it comes to how they run their primary elections in any given state.

That is not the case in other countries because in other countries there aren’t laws about primary elections at all. So parties just get to decide on their own how they want to select their candidates, and many decide in ways that are very obscure or hidden, and we really don’t know how they select their candidates. There’s some closed door, maybe some smoke coming out of it, and then there emerges a candidate list.

And so I researched this by following 65 different parties in 20 parliamentary democracies. And I learned about how are they selecting their candidates and, in particular, their candidates for the lower house elections. And not only did I see a lot of variation within countries, but also quite a bit across countries.

So some countries are more inclined to have a more open system, or what we might call democratic, where anybody can participate. Iceland is one of the most democratic in that example. Anybody can participate without even paying a fee—by the way, that’s very rare. Whereas in many southern European countries, we see a little bit more of a stronghold, more centralization.

We might think that it’s less democratic for a party to not give choice to the public. But when we think of what does it mean to give choice to the public in selecting a candidate, well that’s really giving choice to a very interested subset of the population that’s going to know when primary elections are and go out and participate in those primary elections. That subset of the population is then choosing the candidates that are supposed to compete for the support of the entire district or the entire constituency, or even the entire nation. And so it’s not obvious that empowering very interested voters is going to actually lead to candidates who are more representative of the general public. And in fact, that’s exactly what I find.

So I find that in parties that are more centralized, that is, that don’t give members of the public any control over nominations and that actually just select the candidates themselves, those parties actually do a better job at selecting candidates that then go on to be more moderate and represent the country as a whole. There’s some variation there, so parties can certainly maybe give voters some say, but then they have veto power, or perhaps the central level of the party will come up with a list of “approved” candidates and then let voters choose from among that list. And so that type of shared control also seems successful. But in cases where the parties abdicate all control to voters, first of all, they often regret doing that, but second of all, they’re often less competitive. And that’s because those parties are not offering choices that are really representative of who their potential voters are, instead, who are these most active voters?

Lindsay: That’s really interesting. So wait, if I’m understanding you correctly—and you’re talking primarily about experience in Europe?

Georgia: Yeah, Europe, but also Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand; other longstanding parliamentary systems.

Lindsay: Parties that predetermine and choose candidates actually choose candidates who are more representative of larger numbers of voters than parties that allow or bring in voters to the process. That that actually creates a system where the candidates adopt more extreme positions that put them out of step with the majority of voters. Is that right? It’s so weird because you would think it would be the opposite.

Georgia: That’s exactly the finding.

And so the implication for the U.S. is maybe we should do away with primaries. I wouldn’t go so far as saying that we should absolutely get rid of them, but certainly thinking about possibly giving more power to the parties would maybe counterintuitively lead to more power actually for the general public, and less power for extreme interests.

Lindsay: I think for a lot of people, the 2016 election of Donald Trump seemed to represent a kind of stepping away from traditional conceptions of the parties, and the party kind of establishments in the U.S. And part of the way that Trump kind of billed himself as this outsider, not really entirely part of either camp, and that seemed to really appeal to people. Can you talk us through kind of why Trump won, and was his being perceived as outside of either of these parties an important piece of why he won?

Georgia: Yeah, so being an outsider appealed to some people, but for the most part, people voted along party lines in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024. And I think whether he had been more of an insider or an outsider or a totally different candidate, the election results would’ve actually looked very similar.

Let’s remember that back in 2016, Trump was not polling well and he should have been polling a lot better. Typically we more often see an exchange in a change in power, so coming out after eight years of having Obama as president, we would expect the Republicans to be doing better, all else equal, than the Democrats, and they weren’t. Trump was polling lower than almost any out-party president had in a similar situation in the past 50 years. And he did win the election, but it was a very close election. If you remember what was going on prior to the election, the Republicans were not really happy with their choice. In fact, there was a lot of soul searching within the Republican party of how did we get this nominee and how can we correct this for the future, because most Republicans thought they were going to lose the election. Almost every group thought that the Republicans were going to lose the election.

The probability they were going to win, I think, was estimated to be between 10 and 15 percent. Now, that’s not nothing. Certainly, if you were told you were going into surgery and the chance of dying was 10 to 15 percent, you would think that’s quite high. But I think for the most part, as a nation, we thought that Clinton was going to win the election. She didn’t. And political scientists, pundits, pollsters, and members of the parties, for the most part, actually were in agreement on that and were surprised by the election results.

How did he get there in the first place? Well, back in 2015, and it’s hard to even remember what this was like, but if we can think back to March of 2015, there was a survey of Republican voters that asked could you see yourself ever voting for Trump? And 75 percent of them said they could never see themselves ever voting for Trump. Now that’s in March of 2015. They didn’t think they were going to have to have that choice, right? But this goes back to that whole, well, there’s only two parties. What’s the better of the two evils? So of course fast forward, not even a year later, the numbers have reversed. Right? And that’s because Trump was clearly going to be the Republican nominee. But the way that he became the nominee was again, through sort of these odd rules that we have in our primary system.

And so, if you remember, there’s often a lot of choice in the presidential primaries early on, and there were numerous candidates on the ballot in the early primaries, and Trump won the most. But that’s because a lot of candidates, many of whom were more moderate, just split the “never Trump” vote. Had they coalesced behind a single candidate, there’s no chance Trump would’ve been the nominee. My guess is that, had Trump lost the election there would’ve been a lot of discussion about reform.

Lindsay: I’m picturing, I don’t know if you ever saw that movie Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow, where there’s two different versions of her life that play out depending on whether she gets into the Tube in time. I’m picturing this hearing you talk about Trump’s election in 2016, you know, the unlikeliness of it, when you look at it one way. A party that doesn’t support him; extreme positions; and yet he does win the nomination. He gets a plurality of votes, but there were a bunch of Republican candidates that, you know, fractured and splintered the vote. So he ends up getting it. He still shouldn’t have won, but he did win. And now it’s hard to even remember that time about 10 years ago, it feels like a lifetime ago, because boy, are they supportive of him now! I mean, it’s just transformed, and you imagine this kind of alternate universe where he didn’t win, and like you said, where there’s a lot of soul searching.

Georgia: Right. And I think it’s hard for us to remember what it was like then, just as then it was hard for us to imagine that we could be here now. And so it’s hard in either direction, to anticipate or to remember what that’s like. I think that if you have enough elections and you have a system where the plurality winner can win, then it will align at some point where you have a pretty extremist who’s going to become the nominee, and some of the time that person’s going to win. It’s going to depend on what the partisan tides look like at the moment in the country. So I think that Trump actually himself is not, I mean he’s unique, but I think that this could have happened on the left as well, because they have the same electoral primary structure. And that this is just the first time that we’ve really seen this happen at the national level like this.

Lindsay: So how does a party change course so dramatically, from like never Trump to only Trump? How did that happen?

Georgia: Yeah, well, if you’re a Republican voter, you have to think, how bad does a candidate have to be for me to vote for the Democrat? And for the most part, Trump wasn’t that bad. And if you’re a Democrat, you weren’t faced with that. Your candidate probably represented you fairly well. But you can still ask that question of how bad would a Democrat have to be on all these other dimensions, let’s say personal dimensions or sexism, in order to support a Republican or stay home? Staying home might be a lower bar, but certainly to vote for the other side in a two-party system, especially now where things are so polarized that it’s hard to imagine voting against your own party.

Lindsay: Well, so do these parties, do you think they do a good job of doing what they’re supposed to do? Do they represent Americans?

Georgia: No. No, I don’t think so. Most people are unhappy with the parties, and they actually have been unhappy with the parties for a long time. I mean, parties have never been popular. People like their own candidate, they don’t like the party, and that’s not the case, actually, in many other countries where there’s more choice. Interestingly, here, most of us probably know the partisanship of our next-door neighbor or the person that we sit next to at work. Like, discerning someone’s partisanship is becoming more important and salient in our personal lives and our professional lives. And that’s definitely not the case in Europe. So in Europe, it’s actually very taboo to ask people, who did you vote for? Which is interesting. I think, and being an American myself, I may not fully understand why that is, but people certainly change their allegiance more, and doing so is not as indicative of an identification shift.

Lindsay: Yeah. Well, I was going to say, give us a sense of, when we think about Europeans having more choices, like what are the other party choices? The Green Party comes to mind…

Georgia: Yeah, the Green Party’s been pretty successful in various European countries since the late eighties. That’s when they really emerged and started to win seats.

There’s also left parties in various countries that are more like kind of the analog of the extreme right, in the sense that they don’t make it into government typically, but they’re the most progressive parties in those countries.

Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, moderate parties typically receive the largest vote share. There’s often these center moderate parties that actually receive quite a bit of votes. And then we have other conservative parties on the right, and then there’s far right parties. Oh, and I’m not sure if I mentioned, there’s liberal parties which tend to be more libertarian and then labor parties that tend to be more social democratic on the left. So we often will see like a menu of five to seven viable parties in the European context.

Lindsay:  One thing I want to say, just for listeners, when we talk about far right in the U.S. and we talk about far right in Europe, they’re not the same, right? The party platforms are really not the same. They might converge in a sort of anti-immigrant platform, anti-Muslim platform in some cases.

But there are differences between what’s going on in Europe and what’s going on in the U.S. You know, they wouldn’t dare touch the social welfare and protection systems in Europe, which are much more robust than in the U.S. But here, what we see as part of the far right is actually this other dimension about the degree to which we should even have those kinds of safety nets. So there’s this economic dimension, there’s the social kind of cultural dimension. How do you view the differences and similarities in terms of their platforms? Would you agree with that characterization, or how do you see it?

Georgia: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. So it goes back to these rules leading to a two-party system here. So it would be very difficult for an anti-immigration party that was pro-social welfare spending to exist. The Democrats wouldn’t want them, and neither would the Republicans. So they had to choose a side. And that’s not the case when you have multiple parties, because then you can have these multiple dimensions upon which people can differentiate parties, and people are happier, by the way, with their parties in other countries because they’re more aligned.

It’s interesting because you’re actually going to feel closer on like policy positions to those parties, but you may not feel closer in the sense of like, that’s the only party I could ever see myself voting for. Because the next closest party isn’t as far away. So it’s sort of interesting, because in the U.S. we have this extremely strong partisanship, yet nobody really likes their party. Whereas in other countries, people might be happy with their party, but the second choice is not so unbelievably bad that they could never envision supporting that party, or having dinner with people who support it.

Lindsay: So because in Europe there’s a greater likelihood that you vote for a party that you agree with—more than here, where you’re voting for kind of often the lesser of two evils—is voter participation stronger in Europe than it is in the U.S.?

Georgia: It is, although participation in the U.S. I think has gone up, because the “evil” is so evil on the other side now that participation goes up.

Participation’s a function of various things, but it’s also a function of how competitive the elections are. So in the U.S., like I said, a lot of the elections are not competitive, so people vote to sort of express themselves, but not necessarily to sway an election. And most people are not going to the polls for the down ballot, more competitive elections, although in an ideal world they would be. In other countries, if you have proportional representation, your vote counts no matter what, right? So it increases the percent slightly of their party. But you don’t have to increase the percent that much to get an extra candidate into the legislature. So that incentivizes people. So we do see higher participation rates typically because of those systemic differences. And then of course in some countries, like Australia, there’s mandatory voting. So there, we see the highest turn out.

Lindsay: So given the sense of crisis here in the U.S., there are lots of conversations happening all over the country by people like yourself who are expert in electoral politics and party politics and how the system works or doesn’t work.

What are some of the solutions that are being debated right now? You know, is there a way to build a system differently in the U.S. that’s realistic here?

Georgia: Yeah. There’s a group of political scientists and other scholars who have advocated for, and recently published a letter advocating for a change to proportional representation (PR) in the U.S. I personally believe that would ideally be paired also with a move to parliamentary systems because PR paired with presidential [elections] often leads to a proliferation of lots of different fragmented parties and then a more populist president because a presidential candidate who’s simply the leader of one party is not going to ever really get the amount of support that they need. So they have to have kind of more of a personal populist message in order to appeal to voters across parties. And that’s something we actually see in Latin America where we have that presidential/PR combination.

I do think a reform to our electoral system in various ways is something that could really benefit voters and lead to greater representation. I think it’s far off, but less far perhaps than it has been ever before, in the last half century at least.

I also think that the level of crisis, if it continues to escalate as it is right now, and voter unrest increases, we’re going to see more protests, and it’s possible that the dimension of conflict will shift. Instead of being one that’s on what we typically refer to as, like, an ideological left/right dimension, maybe the dimension of conflict will shift to a pro-democracy, anti-corruption, anti-regime shift. And so we see that with the No Kings rallies. They’re not focused on, you know, more social spending, right? They’re focused on democracy.

So I think if the crisis leads to the point where there can be a change in the dimension of conflict to this pro-democracy, then we might see more bipartisan alignment against Trump, not necessarily in favor of the Democrats, but in favor of a different party.

Lindsay: So at IGCC, we are focused, as you know, on promoting global cooperation and peace, and we think about maintaining a healthy democracy as an important piece of that.

If you were to offer one piece of advice to American political party leadership, or just to Americans, in terms of how they’re thinking about these things, what would it be?

I’m interested in what you said about shifting the debate away from Democratic/Republican, which we’re all dissatisfied with anyway, right? What is the most important thing that we should be thinking about, given where we are?

Georgia: I think you’re right. I mean, most Democrats and Republicans aren’t happy; the ones who are are the ones that are elected and in power. So when you ask like, what would the advice be for the elected officials? It’s tricky, right? Because many of them are quite happy with the situation that they’re in. In fact, the rules of the game are what led them to be elected.

And so we really need politicians who are willing to lead, and then stand down, and by stand down, I really mean design institutions that will force them out, potentially. And so my advice to elected officials would be: think way down the line, what got you into this in the first place? And think about what would be the best system, if you were not in government, if you were not going to be elected?

And my advice to the public would be to demand that your politicians represent you, not that they represent outside interests or special interests.

Lindsay: Georgia Kernell, author of Inside Parties, thank you for being with us on Talking Policy.

Georgia: Thanks so much for having me. This was great.