Over at Vox, my friend Yascha Mounk argues that the end of bipartidismo in Spain has meaningful implications for the stability of the two-party system here in the United States. His argument is that — much like in the US. — in Spain two large, national parties had been dominant for decades, and that has now ended.
Newspapers at a kiosk a day after the most fragmented national election result in Spain’s history in Madrid, Spain, December 21, 2015. REUTERS/Marcelo del Pozo.
Some background on what happened in Spain: on Sunday, Spain’s two traditional large parties lost badly. As I wrote in the National Interest recently:
The center-right Partido Popular (PP) of incumbent Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, while remaining the largest party, went from garnering 45% of the vote in 2011 to 29% this time around. This is its worst score since 1989, the first year in which the PP competed under its current banner. A loss like that would normally imply a big win for the main opposition party, the center-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), but no. The PSOE received 5.5 million votes, or 22%, down 7 percentage points for its worst performance ever (unless you want to count pre-Civil War elections). That is a joint total of 51% of the vote for the two largest parties, a massive drop from the more than 70% that PP and PSOE had been receiving for the past few decades.
In their place two new parties, Ciudadanos and Podemos, broke onto the scene and managed to acquire significant political power (109 out of 350 seats in parliament).
Now, Dr. Mounk acknowledges Duverger’s Law (that the first-past-the-post system helps the stability of the two-party system in the US), but he argues that American parties are weaker than their Spanish counterparts, which are heavy on patronage, slush funds, and centralization, and that this means that the US could see a similar shock to the stability of its system.
That strikes me as incorrect. These are not comparable electoral systems: state-level first-past-the-post presidential elections allow for very different outcomes than provincial-level proportional representation in a parliamentary system.
In Spain, 14% of the vote got Ciudadanos almost 14% of seats (40 instead of 49). 14% in the US gets you nada. 20.7% of the vote got Podemos 19.7% of lower-chamber seats. Again, 20.7% in the U.S. gets you practically nada, unless you somehow luck out in a jungle primary in California or Louisiana. 18.9% of the vote got Ross Perot zero electoral votes.
Between that and the ways in which Democrats and Republicans collude to rig ballot access requirements and the primary system, a situation with three, let alone four, large parties that compete practically everywhere and at all levels is inconceivable.
Perhaps a new party could displace the Democrats or the Republicans – but remember that even Democrats, Republicans, and Whigs never received electoral votes in one and the same presidential election.
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