An Examination Of America

’s Two Party System Essay, Research Paper

Democracy in the United States is based on the indirect representation of the people by elected officials who are usually chosen by direct vote. Almost from the beginning of the United States’ history, however, two parties have shared the great majority of the elected positions from the local level to the presidency. However, up until the mid-1850’s when the Republican party was formed, other parties such as the Whigs, Federalists, and Anti-Federalists did not last very long. The Democratic Party has existed for much longer, tracing its roots from Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party beginning around 1792 (Encarta). The two largest parties have changed, third parties have emerged occasionally, and smaller parties–that win few offices–have continued for decades. But the existing two-party system has become institutionalized and has added a persistent layer of mediation between the people and their government. There are both positive and negative sides to this system, but in recent decades citizens’ faith in the two main parties has declined as the Republican and Democratic parties have had difficulty in reconciling the varying interests of the people who make up their memberships. In the 19th century, political parties were much more powerful than they are today. They often motivated voter turnouts as high as 80%. Today, in an effort to appeal to more voters, the Democratic and Republican party platforms have become more vague and moderate. As a result more and more Americans see the two parties as less important and nearly one-third of Americans consider themselves “independent” with no party affiliation, while voter turnout averages less than 50% in each election. The two-party system will probably continue, however, because it has become a key element in the way federal, state, and local government operates.

The two-party system is said to promote governmental stability because a single party can win a majority of political offices and, with less bickering between differing and partisan legislators, govern more efficiently. In a multiparty country, on the other hand, the formation of a government depends on the maintenance of a coalition of parties with enough total strength to form a political majority. The weakness of the ties that bind the coalition may threaten the continuance of a cabinet in power. The stability shown by the government of the United States has not been entirely due to its party system, it has been argued, but has been promoted also by the fixed tenure and strong constitutional position of the president, as well as checks and balances built into the constitution to prevent one branch of federal government from becoming too powerful.

The Founding Fathers of the United States did not mention political parties in the Constitution. When George Washington left office he warned the country of the “baneful effects of the spirit of party”(Crabtree 18). and James Madison believed that the new nation’s politics would be structured around a greater number of “factions representing various segments of the electorate” rather than the overwhelmingly bi-partisan arrangement that exists today (Barone 64). Others felt they existed only to manipulate the independent will of the voters. Yet, by the end of Washington’s first term parties had begun to prevail in the Congress and by the third presidential election the candidates ran on the basis of party support. Parties changed more rapidly in the nineteenth century as, for example, Henry Clay’s Whig party declined after his death and “the Democracy of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren” dissolved in factional squabbling. But in the twentieth century the Democratic and Republican parties have been predominant despite occasional challenges from national-level third parties which usually affected only presidential races.

Since World War II, the third-party candidacies of George Wallace (1968) and John Anderson (1980) had some impact, but the 19 percent of the national vote accumulated by Ross Perot in 1992 was the first that may have affected the election’s outcome. Furthermore, in the 2000 election, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader accumulated a sizable share of democratic votes. More Republicans than Democrats defected to Perot’s Reform party and this may have allowed Bill Clinton to capture the election from the incumbent, President Bush. Yet the biggest problem for any third-party candidate is that the party system is so important that in polls 61 percent of voters “feel that a president who was neither a Republican nor Democrat would have ’serious problems’ dealing with Congress”(Collett 434).

It is also, as Crabtree notes, very significant that “a candidate such as Ross Perot found it necessary to create a political party to support his independent candidacy”(Crabtree 18). This is a strong indication of the broader importance of parties. While it is bi-partisan politics that affect the management of Congressional business and strongly affect the nature of Congressional legislation, the two major parties also function at every level of politics. As Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee put it, someone who got information about the parties only from the popular press would think that “political parties were mere shells through which enormous sums of money were laundered outside the public’s eye to unscrupulous p