Third Parties

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Third Parties

• POLS 125 Political Parties Elections

Saying we should keep the two-party system
simply because it is working is like saying the
Titanic voyage was a success because a few people
survived on life rafts. Eugene McCarthy
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Third Parties

• Anti-Masonic Party, 1832 (7 electoral votes, 8
  of the popular vote) The party was opposed to
  the alleged secret political influence of the
  Masons. They later became part of the
  anti-Jackson coalition that formed the Whig
  Party.
• Whig-American (Know Nothing) Party, 1856 (8
  electoral votes, 22 of the popular vote) They
  opposed open immigration and Catholics and were
  in favor of electing native born Americans to
  public office. They were called the Know
  Nothings because of their secret greetings and
  rituals and their refusal to divulge any
  information of their activities to outsiders.
• Constitutional Union Party, 1860 (39 electoral
  votes, 13 of the popular vote) The southern
  remnant of the former Whig party. They organized
  to deny Lincoln and the Republicans an electoral
  college victory. They were dedicated to
  preserving the Union by allowing slavery to
  continue.
• Populist Party, 1892 (22 electoral votes, 8 of
  the popular vote) An outgrowth of a movement of
  agrarian protest. They were opposed to the
  economic power of bankers, railroads and fuel
  industries. They favored a graduated income tax,
  government regulation, and the free coinage of
  silver.

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Third Parties

• Progressive (Bull Moose) Party, 1912 (88
  electoral votes, 27 of the popular vote) An
  offshoot of the Republican party organized around
  the candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt. He favored
  liberal reforms like expanded suffrage, improved
  working conditions, the conservation of natural
  resources and antimonopoly laws.
• States Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party, 1948
  (39 electoral votes, 2 of the popular vote) A
  southern splinter of the Democratic party. It
  ran on a conservation, segregationist platform.
• American Independent Party, 1968 (46 electoral
  votes, 14 of the popular vote) The party of
  former Alabama governor George Wallacea
  segregationist opposed to the authority of the
  federal government. Urban unrest made Wallace
  resonate with some voters.
• John Anderson, 1980 (0 electoral votes, 7.1 of
  the popular vote) Most 3rd parties grow out of
  an attachment to a single cause or an intense
  dislike for an incumbent president. Anderson is
  an exception. He had no vivid issues. It was
  the poor quality of the 1980 presidential
  candidates that prompted his to run. In some
  circles Carter was seen as weak and indecisive,
  and Reagan as an aging conservative with a habit
  of making foolish statement. Anderson
  distinguished himself as a man willing to take a
  stand.
• Ross Perot, 1992, 1996 (0 electoral votes, 19 of
  the popular vote) Quirky Texas millionaire
  known for his pie charts.

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Third Party Year of Popular Vote Electoral Votes Fate in Next Election
Anti-Masonic 1832 7.8 7 Endorsed Whig candidate
Free Soil 1848 10.1 0 Received 4.9 of vote
Whig-American 1856 21.5 8 Party dissolved
Southern Democrat 1860 18.1 72 Party dissolved
Constitutional Union 1860 12.6 39 Party dissolved
Populist 1892 8.5 22 Endorsed Democratic candidate
Progressive (T. Roosevelt) 1912 27.4 88 Returned to Republican party
Socialist 1912 6.0 0 Received 3.2 of vote
Progressive (LaFollette) 1924 16.6 13 Returned to Republican party
States Rights Democrat 1948 2.4 39 Party dissolved
Progressive (H. Wallace) 1948 2.4 0 Received 0.2 of vote
American Independent 1968 13.5 46 Received 1.4 of vote
John B. Anderson 1980 7.1 0 Did not run in 1984
H. Ross Perot 1992 18.9 0 Received 8 of vote
Ralph Nader 2000 2.7 0 Received 0.4 of vote
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Barriers to Entry

• Ballot access restrictions
• Campaign finance laws
• Media coverage
• Presidential debates

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The Spoiler Effect
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The Spoiler Effect
Third party candidates often split part of the
vote with a major party candidate. For example,
in 2000 George W. Bush won the state of
Floridaand, consequently, the presidencyby just
a few hundred votes over Al Gore, the Democratic
candidate. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader won
95,000 votes in Florida, and polls suggest that
for most Nader voters, Gore was their second
choice. Thus, if the race had been a head-to-head
contest between Bush and Gore instead, Florida
voters probably would have chosen Gore by a clear
margin.
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Access to Presidential Debates
The Commission on Presidential Debates selects
candidates on the basis of the following criteria
Is this fair to third party and Independent
candidates? Do we set the bar too high?

• Evidence of Constitutional eligibility
• Must be at 35 years of age
• Must be natural born citizen, and a resident of
  the U.S. for at least 14 years
• Must be otherwise eligible under the
  Constitution
• Evidence of ballot access
• The candidate must qualify to have his/her name
  appear on enough state ballots to have at least a
  mathematical chance of securing an Electoral
  College majority
• Indicators of Electoral support
• The candidate must have a level or support of at
  least 15 of the national electorate as
  determined by five selected national public
  opinion polling organizations

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The Iraq ballot offered a choice of 111 parties.
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Consider a simplified scenario in which voters
are electing a single candidate purely based on
their preference on a single ideological
dimension or policy. The voter popularity over a
range of policy positions is drawn as a bell
shaped curve, and candidates are arranged under
the curve depending on their specific policy. If
there are only two candidates, A and B, the one
with the closest policy to what the majority
wants (B) will win.
However, if a third candidate C is included,
votes are taken away from the most similar
candidate B, which can cause the opposite
candidate A to win instead.
This is not ideal, because B is actually still
preferred over A by a majority of voters.
Plurality voting is even problematic when more
parties are added. Again, the candidate (A) with
the largest number of votes wins, even if most
voters would actually prefer another candidate
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Achieving an Optimal Result
How can we best aggregate preferences to

• Determine a clear winner
• Avoid wasted votes
• Prevent spoilers

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Alternatives to Plurality Voting
The plurality system used in U.S. elections
allows voters to cast ballots only for their top
choice. By ignoring how voters might rank the
remaining candidates, it opens the door to
unsettling, and even paradoxical results.

1. Instant run-off voting (IRV) allows voters to
   rank candidates in order of preference. To count
   the votes, you look at each ballot and mark a
   vote for the top listed candidate. If no
   candidate wins a majority, the candidate who
   received the least number of votes is identified
   and eliminated, after which every ballot is
   counted again. (This time one name will be
   crossed off, so the top listed candidate on some
   ballots will actually be the voters second
   choice). The process is repeated until some
   candidate gets a majority. That candidate is
   declared the winner.
2. Condorcet voting also asks voters rank candidates
   in order of preference. The vote counting
   procedure then takes into account each preference
   of each voter for one candidate over another. It
   does so by conceptually breaking the election
   down into a series of separate races between each
   possible pairing of candidates. For this reason
   it is sometimes referred to as a pairwise
   method.

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Alternatives to Plurality Voting

• In the Borda election method, voters rank the
  candidates as first, second, third, etc. The
  first choice of each voter gets a number of
  points one less than the number of candidates.
  Each subsequent choice then gets one less point
  than the preceding choice, until the last choice
  get no points at all. If the number of candidates
  is four, for example, the first choice gets three
  points, the second gets two points, the third
  gets one, and the last choice gets none. The
  points from each voter are added together to
  determine the winner. The Borda election method
  is one of the better known methods for tallying
  ranked ballots. It is used by the Associated
  Press (AP) and the United Press International
  (UPI) to rank teams in NCAA college sports, for
  example.
• In approval voting, each voter simply votes for,
  or approves, as many of the candidates as
  desired (without ranking them). As in plurality
  voting, the votes are counted, and the candidate
  with the most votes wins. No new voting equipment
  is needed, and the ballots do not need to be
  changed. Moreover, the change to the current
  voting rules is trivial vote for one simply
  becomes vote for one or more.

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IRV An Alternative to Plurality Voting
The plurality system used in U.S. elections
allows voters to cast ballots only for their top
choice. By ignoring how voters might rank the
remaining candidates, it opens the door to
unsettling, and even paradoxical results.
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Criticism of IRV

• More complex
• Requires new voting machinery
• Voter fatigue

Are reforms like this at odds with third parties?
More parties could make it cumbersome and
impractical.
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The French mathematician Condorcet developed an
alternative system based on ranking of
preferences. For three candidates, ballots simply
allow both a first choice and a second choice
vote 1st 2nd x      The candidate you
really want.    x   The candidate you prefer
if your 1st choice doesn't win.         The
candidate you don't want. When votes are
collected, instead of just counting 1st choice
votes, the winners between each pair of
candidates are determined. In the example above,
the voters with C as the 1st choice would
probably have B as their 2nd choice, so If B
ran alone against A the winner would be B. If B
ran alone against C the winner would be B. If A
ran alone against C the winner would be A. B
is the winner of all of his pairwise matches, so
B is declared the overall winner.
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The Future of Third Parties

• In an article titled What Will Happen When a
  National Political Machine Can Fit on a Laptop,
  Everett Ehrlich argues that the internet will
  soon displace major parties, much to the
  advantage of third party and independent
  candidacies.
• He cites the insight of Ronald Coase, who in
  1937, declared that the cost of gathering
  information determines the size of organizations.
  Since the internet drives the cost of
  information down to virtually zero, outside
  candidates and their virtual parties may soon
  be able to drive the Democrats and Republicans
  out of business. Ehrlich says Now anyone with
  a Web site and a server, a satellite transponder
  and about 100 million can havein a matter of
  monthsmuch of what the political parties have
  taken generations to build.

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The Future of Third Parties

• Will the internet eventually displace major
  parties, to the advantage of third party and
  independent candidates?
• As Everett Ehrlich says Now anyone with a Web
  site and a server, a satellite transponder and
  about 100 million can havein a matter of
  monthsmuch of what the political parties have
  taken generations to build.