Compared to most other countries, the US has very unusual political parties. The electoral system predates political parties. The founders of the republic apparently had a view of democracy that was local and based on individual candidates, which reflects to some extent the economic and social environment before the Industrial Revolution. Famously, they warned against parties (“factions”) and designed the US system to be decentralized and to have high inertia, in order to guard against hasty decisions made under the influence of “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions”.

Party membership figures show that the two main US parties have hugely many members as a fraction of the population than parties in other countries. However, membership is the US is a simple affair, requiring only self-reporting, and crucially it does not require payment (for example in UK the major parties have (paid) memberships totaling around 1% of the population, while in the US the numbers are more like 20-25%. Perhaps not surprisingly, parties have very little power over their members in the US, and they are basically run at the state level, although the national committees deal with fundraising and presidential campaigns.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the parties have little power over their own elected representatives. The two large parties consist of large coalitions spanning a large ideological range, and under different historical circumstances would likely be replaced by more coherent parties (e.g. the Trumpists, Clintonists, Warrenists, Romneyists). Explanations why two-party dominance persists in the US when it is so uncommon around the world include the use of plurality voting in single-member districts, gerrymandering and the ability of large parties to constrain the ballot access of smaller ones, but I will not discuss that further in this post. The point is that it is not clear what policies parties actually stand for, and whether they will be able to carry them out even if they win a majority in the House of representatives, Senate, etc. The “whip” system used in parliamentary systems to enforce party-line voting is very much weaker in the US.

In recent years public approval of Congress has plummeted, as partisan gridlock seems to have taken over. Party members may not agree with each other on much (as the recent difficulty of passing aid for Ukraine in the House of Representatives showed) but they are basically united on the fact that members of the other party are bad and should not be given any power. The way that the aid package was passed has been portrayed as exceptionally rare, when in the end it came down to individual pieces that each had a strong majority of support both in the house and in opinion polls. It is hard to see how the party system has been helpful in such cases.

What is the point of political parties at all? They are almost ubiquitous worldwide, and apparently there are many theories as to why. Parties do allow for simplification when it comes to elections for legislative chambers: voters have a smaller number of different policy platforms and ideologies to consider, and have some idea how their representative will work together with representatives from other districts. Why presidential elections are party-based in the US is less clear, but presumably the vast amounts of money and logistical effort required to be elected mean that large national organizations have an advantage.

Coherence in terms of policy and ideology is likely the main point of parties, which makes the dominance of parties in the US very strange. Not only does the label Democrat or Republican convey less information and certainty than an equivalent label in most other countries, these labels are used essentially everywhere. In New Zealand, local elections (for mayor, city council, etc) are mostly not associated (in terms of labels) with national political parties, and there are many independent candidates and local parties. In the US, there are local and state parties but almost every elected office will have Democrat and Republican candidates, even for posts such as Secretary of State, Attorney General or State Auditor, that ought to be nonpartisan and in many places will not even be elected positions.

Overall it seems to me that the US has too few big parties, too many elections for offices in which parties are involved, and yet too little discipline and coherence in the parties to make having them very useful. I don’t yet know how many people agree with me, or what can be done about it.