One of the more distinct features of Lee Drutman’s Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020) is that it is an advocacy book. Unlike many political science books that spend most of their chapters describing a phenomenon and then tossing out a few related policy recommendations in the conclusion, this one is guided by a specific vision of electoral reform. Drutman is transparent from the book’s opening that he believes a multiparty system would produce far healthier democratic outcomes for the United States, and he offers a set of possible reforms to produce that outcome.
The current state of hyper-partisanship in US politics, Drutman argues, is crippling to democratic processes. The problem, he claims, is not so much that the main parties are too far apart, but rather that such hyper-partisanship does not work well with US governing systems. What is more, he argues, the problems are getting worse. Each new year brings further polarization. Much as Lilliana Mason (Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, 2018) and Ezra Klein (Why We’re Polarized, 2020) have noted in their recent works, political issues and identities that once cut across party lines now serve to reinforce those divisions. And it is not hard to imagine how the future in this system looks. For example, a Democratic victory in the 2020 presidential race would produce profound efforts to undermine, delegitimize, and obstruct the new administration’s agenda; Republicans possibly winning at least one congressional chamber in 2022; further years of gridlock; and continued decline in Americans’ faith in their government. This is the “doom loop” that Drutman seeks to break.
Unlike many other reform proposals, and much to Drutman’s credit, he does not suggest efforts to depolarize the major parties or get members of Congress to spend more time together across party lines. Rather, he claims, the problem is the two-party system itself. In a polarized country, officeholders and voters will permit almost any sort of mismanagement or even criminality by their own party as long as it keeps the other party out of power, and they will demonize almost any action by the other party. But in a system with three, four, five, or more parties, much of that negative polarization would be ameliorated. Voters could choose a party closer to their own preferences, and a broad range of research that Drutman cites suggests that they would feel better about their country and likely get a more functional government out of it.
Drutman is up front about the challenges of creating a multiparty system, noting that it is unlikely to be achieved in first-past-the-post elections. He offers a number of possible approaches to get there, but largely focuses on ranked-choice voting with multimember congressional districts, with some focus on proportional representation. He notes that the Constitution gives both the federal government and the states the power to set the terms of elections and representation and urges Congress to move ahead with his proposal. Drutman depicts the status quo in the United States as something of a failed experiment. Although a number of modern democracies have shifted their rules to promote multiparty systems, “not a single modern democracy has gone from a proportional system to a plurality system to foster two-party democracy” (p. 33).
The book capably reviews much of the relevant literature on parties, as well as on the history of parties in the United States. Drutman depicts the United States as careening between the irresponsible parties of the mid-twentieth century—the system derided by the 1950 APSA report as producing nearly meaningless elections—to the hyper-responsible parties of today in which elections arguably mean too much (APSA, Committee on Political Parties, “Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System: A Report” American Political Science Review, 1950). Drutman further describes the party system as devolving from arguments over “Who gets what?” that can be settled through negotiation, to arguments over “Who are we?” that are by their nature conflictual and unresolvable. He suggests that, rather than looking for a happy medium, the United States should shift toward multi-partyism, which elides these problems.
Drutman spends a good deal of time explaining the logic and mechanics of ranked-choice voting (RCV), arguing that it tends to produce not only greater voter choice but also more moderate outcomes. He notes that the Academy Awards have used RCV to select Best Picture winners (although I am not sure readers will be swayed by the possibility of being led by the electoral equivalents of The Shape of Water and Green Book) and that a number of countries, states, and cities have employed it in recent years with some success. In particular, he notes that countries that use RCV elections have generally been more successful in avoiding populist takeovers (pp. 180, 190).
One concern with this book is that the opening chapters trade in some bit of nostalgia for the relative partisan comity of earlier US Congresses. This is not necessarily wrong: Congress was more productive and creative in the 1960s through the early 1990s. But if Drutman is right on this point, it tends to undermine a central argument of the book. That is, for much of US post–Civil War history, the nation had two major parties with a relatively functional Congress. Drutman’s take on recent decades seems to be that first-past-the-post elections make two parties and a destructive gridlock “doom loop” inevitable—but the nation managed to avoid that fate for quite some time.
Drutman is also perhaps a bit too ready to ascribe equal blame to the major parties or to suggest they are both equally victims of a problematic electoral system. He notes, for example, that Republicans are more likely to believe that voter fraud is a serious problem, whereas Democrats are more likely to believe that vote suppression is a serious problem, resulting in both parties finding the electoral system to be unfair (p. 164). Are these partisan beliefs really equally valid?
Drutman’s policy recommendations go beyond RCV, and he argues, only somewhat convincingly, that an expanded House of Representatives would help reduce economic inequality (p. 193). He suggests that a multiparty system would boost voter turnout (p. 210), while dismissing other reforms, such as vote by mail, that have actually been shown to increase participation (Daniel M. Thompson, Jennifer Wu, Jesse Yoder, and Andrew B. Hall, “The Neutral Partisan Effects of Vote-by-Mail: Evidence from County-Level Roll-Outs,” Working Paper). He claims that relatively large third-party showings in US politics, such as Ross Perot’s 19% vote share in the 1992 presidential election, are inconsequential and could be ignored by serious people (p. 229)—yet both major parties competed to adopt Perot’s deficit agenda.
Overall, however, Drutman’s book is an extremely thoughtful, well-researched, well-argued, and convincing case for electoral reform in the United States. It provides a credible and serious diagnosis for the problems of the United States’ political system and offers an ambitious, but not unrealistic, remedy. It is also written in an accessible and compelling manner that makes it useful for journalists and policy advocates, as well as undergraduate and graduate students.
