Political Parties in American Democracy

Political parties perform several functions that make a large democracy workable: they recruit and nominate candidates, simplify complicated choices for voters into a recognizable label and platform, organize the internal work of legislatures (committee assignments, leadership), and hold whichever party is in power accountable through organized opposition. The United States has, for most of its history, had essentially two major parties at a time, a pattern political scientists partly explain through Duverger's Law: winner-take-all elections in single-member districts, where whoever gets the most votes in a district wins that seat outright, with nothing for second place, tend to produce two dominant parties, because voters and donors gravitate toward whichever major party is closest to their views rather than "wasting" support on a smaller party unlikely to win any seats. Countries that instead use proportional representation, where a party earning 15% of the vote wins roughly 15% of the seats, tend to produce several viable parties that then form governing coalitions.

Today's two major parties are not the parties the founders knew. The first real party system pitted Hamilton's Federalists against Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans in the 1790s; by the 1850s that had reshuffled into the modern Democratic Party and the newly formed Republican Party, and both parties' coalitions and platforms have shifted more than once since then, including major realignments around the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s civil rights era. Described neutrally, as a civics textbook would: today's Republican Party generally favors a smaller federal role in economic regulation, lower taxes, and more traditional social policies, while today's Democratic Party generally favors a larger federal role in economic regulation and the social safety net, and more progressive social policies -- both parties contain real internal disagreement, and both have changed positions on specific issues over time. Third parties (the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and historical examples like Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Progressive "Bull Moose" Party) regularly run candidates and sometimes shape debate or draw votes from a major party, but rarely win office themselves, mostly because of the same winner-take-all structure described above, plus difficult ballot-access laws and a lack of the large-scale funding major parties attract.