Chocolate or Vanilla

Is the Current Duopoly in U.S. Politics a Market Failure?

Consumers generally like having a wide assortment of products to choose from. The greater the selection, the more confident they feel they’ll find something that closely matches their needs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in America, where at any supermarket you can find over a dozen brands of toothpaste.

And yet, also in America, in any given political race there are typically only two parties: Republican and Democrat. If this were an ice cream shop, it would be like only having two flavors to choose from, chocolate or vanilla. No strawberry, butter pecan, rocky road, mint chocolate chip, and no lactose-free.

Unfortunately, voting options in the U.S. are actually worse than having to choose between just two ice cream flavors. In 2020, approximately 30% of all U.S. elections were uncontested. Only chocolate or only vanilla. No choice.

In economics, when two companies dominate a market, it is called a duopoly. Famous examples of this include Coca-Cola & Pepsi, Visa & Mastercard, iPhone & Android, and Boeing & Airbus. Because duopolies, like monopolies, are inefficient, they are considered market failures. In U.S. politics, the Republican and Democratic parties are a duopoly, a political marketplace failure that is limiting voter choice.

So why has this occurred? Is it because U.S. voters don’t want other party options? Opinion surveys suggest otherwise. According to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject, 62% of Americans want another major political party in the U.S. Is it because voters don’t like what the other parties have to offer? With over 80 other registered political parties in the United States, it is unlikely that none have a broadly attractive message. And, of course, we at the Benjamin Franklin Party believe that our approach has wide appeal.

So why do we have so few choices each election? There are several contributing factors, but the number one reason we will cover today is how U.S. elections are constructed. Despite nothing in the Constitution prescribing it, almost all U.S. elections utilize Single-Member Plurality voting (SMP). As we can see in the political marketplace, SMP tends to produce a duopoly (a phenomenon political scientists call “Duverger’s Law”). Luckily, both aspects of SMP – single-member districts and plurality voting – are changeable.

The obvious fix to single-member districts is multi-member districts. Multi-member electoral districts were common in the U.S. before the Civil War. And multi-member districts also have three additional advantages: 1. They facilitate proportional representation, 2. They foster multi-partisanship, and 3. They reduce gerrymandering.

Plurality voting, the second part of the SMP equation, can be confusing because it doesn’t mean a person votes a plurality of times. They only vote once and only for a single candidate. What plurality voting means is that the candidate who gets the biggest share of the votes (a plurality) wins, even if that share is not a majority.

For example, imagine you have an election where Candidate A gets 35% of the vote, Candidate B gets 25% of the vote, and Candidate C gets 40% of the vote. With plurality voting, Candidate C would win, even though they did not have a majority (over 50%) of the vote. One problem with plurality voting (there are several) is that it creates a “spoiler effect” when more than two candidates are in an election. If Candidates A and B are both moderate, and Candidate C is radical, the moderate vote gets split between Candidates A and B, and the radical Candidate C wins. This happens even though the combined moderate positions represent a majority of the vote (60%). Not wanting to “spoil” the vote causes people to not vote for minor party candidates even when they better represent their views, which is why only the two major parties regularly win elections and maintain a duopoly within the U.S. political marketplace.

Plurality voting is a very old style of voting that the American colonies inherited from England. Since the time of our nation’s founding, many better methods of voting have been invented which avoid the spoiler effect.

One notable innovation in this regard is Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV). Due to its worldwide success, RCV is currently used in many U.S. cities and at the state level in Alaska and Maine. RCV is also endorsed by many non-partisan election reform groups, such as FairVote.org.

Coupled with multi-member electoral districts, RCV can help the U.S. break free of its current political duopoly and bring more party choice to its elections.

So, let’s not only have chocolate and vanilla political parties in the U.S., let’s also have a wide variety of other flavors, so each election can be a delicious and satisfying ice cream sundae!

Yours in republic keeping,
James Carroll
BFPNC Chair