Origins and the Framers’ design
The two-party system is not established by statute or by any founding document; as Bob Zadek put it, it “is not done by statute” and “certainly is not in any of our founding documents,” and it was “an anathema to the founding generation.” Lee Drutman traced its emergence to the Framers, who were “quite concerned about political parties” and feared the country “might well split in half and become ungovernable.” They designed a decentralized system — a bicameral legislature, an executive branch, a judicial branch, and federalism — intended to make parties difficult to form. Without debate, they also carried forward plurality voting, a 1430 British countryside innovation in which whoever gets the most votes wins, also known as first-past-the-post. Drutman said this is the voting system most likely to generate just two parties, because if only one winner can emerge, third parties become spoilers and all the energy goes to the top two parties. Had the Framers understood what they were doing, he suggested, they might have thought differently. Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020)
Drutman described the system as having succeeded for about 200 years, during which the two parties were broad, overlapping coalitions that “didn’t really stand for much.” Throughout most of American political history, he said, the critique was not that the two parties were too far apart but that they were too similar. What exists now, in his account, is a new and distinct period: a genuine two-party system with two parties that have no overlap and stand for very different visions of America, both roughly equally represented in Washington so that every election is basically a toss-up. This has raised the stakes of every election to an impossibly high point and created incentives for each party to demonize the other and refuse compromise, producing extended gridlock punctuated by moments of unified government in which policy moves in a very extreme direction. Drutman called this escalating process a “doom loop,” warning of a legitimacy crisis and describing the breakdown of the foundation of democracy, with the two-party system responsible. Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020)
Monopoly power and the psychology of two teams
Zadek framed the two-party system as a monopoly in the political sphere, contrasting it with America’s political DNA — a fear of any accumulation of power in any institution, public or private — and with antitrust law, which prevents the establishment of monopoly power. He observed that in the most important area, the exercise of political rights, Americans tolerate both monopolistic power and the accumulation of enormous power in the two-party system, including who establishes the rules for the national debate and who gets on ballot access. Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020)
Zadek also offered a psychological analogy from summer camp Color War, in which the entire camp was divided totally at random into a Green Team and a White Team, and members instantly became enemies for a short period. Drutman said this replicated a well-known psychological experiment called the minimal group paradigm, in which people put into two arbitrary groups start to really dislike each other. When people are put into three or more groups, however, they do not hate each other as much; something about the binary condition turns on an us-versus-them switch. Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020)
Zadek described the parties as nothing other than marketing cooperatives — disparate people with different beliefs who join together because working together gets them elected office. He cited the Democratic Party’s support among black voters alongside positions such as the importance of public education and eliminating school choice, which he said are harmful to many members of the inner city. In a multi-party system, he argued, nobody has to align with people they do not agree with, and every type of political belief has a home. Drutman agreed that the parties are more diverse than they appear, since we only see them at their top level, and said this diversity creates a challenge for party leaders, who keep their coalitions aligned by reminding voters that the other side is even worse — the source of negative partisanship and lesser-of-two-evils rhetoric. He argued that politics is all about compromising, but that the real difference between a multi-party and a two-party system is when coalitions and compromises form: before the election in the two-party system, after the election in a multi-party system with coalition government. Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020)
The Electoral College as the cause of two parties
Peter Wallison argued that the two-party system exists because of the Electoral College. Because a candidate must get a majority of the Electoral College to be elected president, he said, two parties is the only way one party can be assured of winning the vote. Eliminating the Electoral College, he predicted, would produce 10 or 12 parties — a Right to Life party, a Choice party, an anti-immigrant party, a pro-immigrant party, a pro-gun and an anti-gun party — plus very wealthy people who can run their own campaigns. The winner would probably have 20% of the vote, which he said is much worse than less than 50%, and such a president would not be able to speak for the American people the way an Electoral College winner has been able to. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Wallison said the strongest argument against the Electoral College is the question of why, if we really have a democracy, the president is not elected by a simple majority of the popular vote rather than through what amounts to 50 separate presidential elections brought together through the Electoral College. He described the National Popular Vote as a very partisan issue, saying only Democrats have pushed for it and no state controlled by Republicans has voted to participate; states with 196 electoral votes had voted through their state legislatures to send all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, even if their particular state did not vote for that person. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Zadek noted that the Electoral College was a compromise, like most important provisions of the Constitution, and that the United States in 1787 invented the concept of president, which had not existed on Earth. He said there was not much thought at the time of the founding to direct election, and Wallison said the Electoral College was not a controversial issue in ratification because nobody really conceived of what it meant to have a president; the powers were expected to be held by Congress. Zadek said the modern debate began in earnest after Bush v. Gore in 2000, and that there had been five instances in which the president elected through the Electoral College got less than a majority of the popular vote, the first being John Quincy Adams in 1824, elected by the House of Representatives. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Across episodes: two diagnoses of the same institution
The two episodes treat the two-party system from opposite directions. In the February 2020 episode, Lee Drutman argued that the two-party system is a new and dangerous development responsible for a doom loop of polarization and gridlock, and that the only way out is to change the electoral system the Framers imported unthinkingly and adopt proportional representation in which multiple parties can get representation. In the September 2020 episode, Peter Wallison argued that the two-party system is a stabilizing byproduct of the Electoral College, that it exists only because of the Electoral College, and that removing the Electoral College would fragment the vote among many parties and produce presidents with only about 20% support. Where Drutman treats two parties as the disease, Wallison treats them as the cure; the excerpts show the same institution defended and indicted on incompatible premises, with no development between the two treatments beyond the change of guest.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe any specific legislative proposal, statute or constitutional amendment to change the electoral system, nor do they report any vote counts or enactment dates for the National Popular Vote beyond the figure of 196 electoral votes. They do not state which states have joined the National Popular Vote compact, nor the outcome of any election dispute. The excerpts also do not carry the discussion past the points at which they break off, and they do not present any empirical evidence on how a multi-party system would actually perform in the United States.