the american two party system

TWO PARTY SYSTEMMr. Geib and Mr. Fitz-Patrick

12th Grade Gov. and Econ.

October 29, 2014

• Always been this way…

• The need to have party

discipline, or else

– 1850s

– Theodore Roosevelt

– Harry Truman exception!

– Hubert Humphrey and

Richard Nixon

– Ross Perot and George

Bush

– Ralph Nader and Al Gore

TWO PARTY SYSTEM

HISTORIAN RICHARD

HOFSTADTER QUOTEThird parties are like bees:

once they have stung, they die.

“American

Independent

Party” and

“Dixiecrats”

NADER AS THE SPOILER

Ralph Nader loses the election for Al Gore in Florida!

ELECTORAL COLLEGE

“... the nasty fact is that our

winner-take-all election

system, adopted from 18th

century England, has the

potential to leave up to 49.9%

of the voters in any district

feeling unrepresented --

whatever their race or

ethnicity.”

--USA Today editorial, 6/30/95

"Because of our peculiar

electoral law, the American

government is divided between

two parties. The American

people are not.“

-- Michael Lind, Atlantic Monthly,

August, 1992

"The system of proportional

representation ensures that

virtually every constituency in

the country will have a hearing

in the national and provincial

legislatures.”

-- Bishop Desmond Tutu, The

Rainbow People of God, 1994

"The case for [P.R.] is

fundamentally the same as that

for representative

democracy. Only if an

assembly represents the full

diversity of opinion within a

nation can its decisions be

regarded as the decisions of

the nation itself.“

--Encyclopaedia Britannica

GOP AS “BIG TENT” PARTY

Liberal Republicans and Libertarians versus Social

Conservatives and “Tea Party” Conservatives

BUILDING OF COALITIONS

“MULTI PARTY” GREAT BRITAIN

“Proportional Representation”

“MULTI PARTY” ISRAEL

“Proportional Representation”