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Third Party Handicaps

Kevin Drum links to a R. W. Bradford article on the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate this year, Michael Badnarik, who has some very unorthodox views that seem rather paranoid. For example, he refuses to get a driver’s license because he doesn’t want to provide his fingerprints or Social Security number, and he also eschews postal ZIP codes. Kevin’s reaction?

Man, that’s some crazy stuff. He refuses to use ZIP codes?

Read the whole story when you have a few spare minutes and need a laugh. And a note to libertarians: this is why everyone thinks you’re a bunch of loons. What else would you expect them to think?

Well, I won’t try and defend Badnarik on this. Not to imply his behavior is indefensible, but the real point Kevin is making is that this stuff is so way out of the mainstream. And he’s right.

The spoiler effect moves third parties to the margins (link)

But this is exactly because of the two-party system. I blogged earlier about the spoiler (splitting the vote) effect inherent in our plurality electoral system. Look at all the grief Nader’s getting from liberals who accuse him of trying to hand the election to Dubya by splitting the liberal vote. This is an obstacle that any third-party candidate has to face. Even if a potential voter likes you, they know that you really don’t have a chance to win, and furthermore, that voting for you is likely to hurt their second choice.

So if the voter cares at all about the eventual winner, they won’t vote for you. This means that the only way a third-party candidate can attract any sort of attention at all is to be out on the fringes of the electorate, close to voters who are so far out of the mainstream that they hate both major candidates and don’t really care which one of them wins (note that Nader’s views are similarly way out of the mainstream, and that he is similarly being mocked).

There are, in fact, plenty of moderate libertarians, but many of us are registered Republicans or Democrats, not because either party mirrors our political beliefs, but because we don’t think we’ll have much of a voice otherwise (personally, I’m a registered Republican so I can support libertarian-leaning candidates in their primaries). Thus, we’re willing to settle for a party that barely reflects some of our views, leaving just the extremist libertarians for the Libertarian Party.

This is an effect that even libertarian conservatives forget, like the ever-effervescent Jane Galt (okay, “ever-effervescent” weren’t my words, but Tyler Cowen’s):

How many times have I heard libertarians bemoaning the lack of proportional representation? Sure, libertarians would get a couple of representatives, but so would Uncle Ralph’s Raiders, counterbalancing and possibly overriding any libertarian influence. There is an emotional failure here to recognize that the reason that all of your ideas aren’t getting enacted isn’t that there’s something structurally wrong with “The System” that is preventing it, but that “The System” is rather efficiently weeding out ideas that a majority of the population disagrees with.

In reality, the Green Party would be counterbalanced, not by the libertarians, but the far right, who are mostly within the Republican Party but would likely split off in a multi-party system. But regardless, this is not a case of “The System” working as intended. A big reason a majority of the population disagrees with us is the above marginalization effect. Our two-party system means that the public voice of libertarians is going to be an extremist who sounds so out-of-touch with the mainstream. So it’s no wonder that the mainstream views libertarians as crazy kooks.

Libertarian split (link)

In addition, libertarians tend to be split between the Democratic and Republican Parties. If you’ll recall the Political Compass (which I blogged about earlier), the political spectrum is a lot more complex than the one-dimensional right/left axis. The Political Compass adds a second axis describing where you are on the authoritarian/libertarian scale. Of course, since there are only two major parties, and they are aligned along the left/right axis, this means many libertarians will be equidistant from both parties.

So what ends up happening is they get split between the Democrat and Republican parties based on whether they value social liberty or economic liberty more (indeed, it might even make more sense to make those the two axes, and hopefully I’ll illustrate that in a future post). Note, this is not true of the social conservatives, who are all stuck on the Republican Party because they are far to the right, and thus have nowhere else to go (going to the Democrat side just isn’t an option because the Democrats are even further away from them than the Republicans). Thus, they have a strong interest in making their voices heard within the Republican Party, and thus a much stronger voice in the party (and in our politics as a whole) than libertarian conservatives.

Political parties seek power (link)

Furthermore, the two-party system concentrates a lot of political power in the two parties. What is the one thing that large and powerful political entities seek? More power. So what does such an entity do when it wins control of the government? Expand the size and influence of the government’s power.

So even though the Republican Party pays lip service to the libertarian goal of shrinking government, it’s not in the party’s own best interest to do so when it has control of the government because that would decrease the power it could wield. You can see this in practice in Dubya’s term: the Republican Party, faced with the rare opportunity where it pretty much had control of all three branches of government, increased the size of the government and government spending (and not just in defense, but in domestic spending, like the expansion of Medicare).

So as a result of this effect, both parties are less libertarian than the electorate (i.e. would be above the zero point on the authoritarian/libertarian scale). And because you only have two viable choices, neither party has much incentive from voters to move more libertarian (rather like an oligopoly in economic terms).

How to fix this? Well, I planned a series of posts on electoral reform, and so far I’ve completed only Part I on the spoiler effect in plurality voting (which I referenced above) and Part II on Instant Runoff Voting. But basically, what I support is to institute Proportional Representation (PR) for Congress, and Condorcet or Approval Voting for the President (although IRV would also be an improvement).

Again, I’ll eventually explain all of these things, but if you’re interested in learning more, here are a few sites worth checking out: the PR Library, ElectionMethods.org, and Accurate Democracy. I think I can do a better job of explaining the concepts, so if any of these sites gets too confusing, just stay tuned…

Update 7/19/04

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has a more academic and knowledgeable response to Jane Galt. And they also have an interesting exchange on the comment section there, where it seems to me that Jane does a bit of defensive back-pedaling. She deserves kudos for responding at all, but she fails to update her original post, which is not that surprising if you read my post on A Culture That Rewards Inaccuracy.