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Today the Monitor begins a periodic series of conversations with thinkers and workers in the field of democracy looking at whats wrong with it, whats right, and what we can do in the United States to strengthen it.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in thePolitical Reform programat New America, a Washington think tank. This spring he was one of the main organizers ofa letter signed by nearly 200 democracy scholarscalling for greater federal protection of voting rights.The impetus for the effort was the Republican push in many states to pass new voting bills, including restrictions on voting methods preferred by Democratic-leaning constituents, the granting of new authority to partisan poll watchers, increased legislative control over local election officials, and fines for poll workers who make mistakes or overstep their authority.

The organizer of an open letter signed by some 200 scholars warning of threats to U.S. democracy talks about what makes for free and fair elections, and how to bolster the system going forward.

These changes are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections, the letter states.Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.

In his book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Mr. Drutman proposes increasing the number of major political parties in the U.S.The two-party system turns politics from a forum where we resolve disagreements into a battlefield wherewemust win andtheymust lose, he writes.

Today the Monitor begins a periodic series of conversations with thinkers and workers in the field of democracy looking at whats wrong with it, whats right, and what we can do in the United States to strengthen it.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, a Washington think tank founded in 1999. This spring he was one of the main organizers of a letter signed by nearly 200 democracy scholarscalling for greater federal protection of voting rights.The impetus for the effort was the Republican push in many states to pass new voting bills, whose provisions include some restrictions on voting methods preferred by Democratic-leaning constituents, the granting of new authority to partisan poll watchers, increased legislative control over local election officials, and fines for poll workers who make mistakes or overstep their authority.

GOP-led electoral changes in battleground states are, among other things, transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections, the letter states.Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.

The organizer of an open letter signed by some 200 scholars warning of threats to U.S. democracy talks about what makes for free and fair elections, and how to bolster the system going forward.

Mr. Drutmans most recent book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, argues that increasing the number of major political parties in the U.S. could diffuse the extreme partisanship that currently bedevils the countrys politics and produces legislative gridlock in Washington.

The two-party system with winner-take-all elections leads us to see our fellow citizens not as political opponents to politely disagree with but as enemies to delegitimize and destroy, he writes. It turns politics from a forum where we resolve disagreements into a battlefield where we must win and they must lose.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You were one of the primary organizers of the democracy scholars letter, warning of the deterioration of democracy in the U.S.How did that come about?

There is a real sense of anxiety among a broad community of scholars who have studied democracy for a long time, both domestically and around the world. And there are certain, pretty consistent patterns of democratic decline you can see if you study this stuff and understand what the basics of democracy are. What happens when one party stops believing in the idea that theres a legitimate opposition?

Theres a real sense of urgency, I think. And were having a lot of debate about voting reform, and we felt it was important for folks to know the context that people who think about this for a living can provide. It seems like many people are thinking about democratic collapse something like the way we were thinking about COVID-19 in January of 2020 the sense that it cant happen here because weve never had something like that, or that its something that happens in other countries.

But you know, the signs are there.

There have been a lot of open letters from different professions and academic disciplines over the last year or so. Do you think this will lead to concrete change? And if not, whats the purpose?

Maybe itll change votes; I dont want to rule out that possibility. But I think the point is to communicate a sense of the stakes and to articulate something that a lot of people are feeling in an authoritative, potentially forceful way.

You write that several states are transforming their political systems to the point where they no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Which states are those?

Were thinking about whats happening in Georgia and in Texas though the new voting law in Texas hasnt yet passed.

What is the definition of a free and fair system? Its a system in which all voters count equally regardless of which party they support, or their race or ethnicity, or any other characteristic. Where both parties have an equally fair chance of winning.

When you tilt the playing field decisively in one direction or another, and give power to partisan legislators to override and intimidate election administrators, that does not meet the conditions of a free and fair democracy. Its not a hard and fast line. But the trends are all in the direction of making free and fair competition harder, putting thumbs on the scale, in Iowa, Arkansas, Montana, and so forth.

The letter focuses on statutory changes, election procedures, vote certification, and other rules. But the impetus for many of these changes was former President Donald Trumps unfounded claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Whats the bigger danger to democracy bad rules, or people operating in bad faith?

Thats a good question. Its a little bit of both.

Democracy depends on both rules and norms. And you can have good rules, but if you have people who are intent on abusing those rules or changing them, theres only so much the rules can do. On the other hand, the rules can also put some hard constraints on what people can get away with.

Theres an argument that if a party is truly intent on election subversion, there are limits to what the rules can accomplish if that party has power. And we see that time and again, in countries around the world. Plenty of powerful parties break and bend and rewrite the rules. So that is a fundamental challenge. But at the same time, you wouldnt say we shouldnt have any rules, right?

Your most recent book is titled Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop.Why do two major parties in a big country create a doom loop?

We have in the U.S., really for the first time in decades, two truly nationalized parties with no real overlap. For the first time, its a really genuine two-party system. And the fight is over national identity. Its over the story of America. Its over who we are. And that has created this incredibly high-stakes conflict in which we have closely fought elections. Theres an incredible amount of demonization and negative partisanship, which is creating a politics in which winning elections is more important than preserving fair rules of the game.

Democracy is a system that relies on parties being able to lose elections and a set of rules surrounding elections that all sides agree are fair and impartial. When you lose that, it just becomes a matter of competing force. Democracy is a way of resolving disputes without violence. But if you cant agree on the rules, then violence becomes the way that you enforce things. And thats the dangerous trajectory that were on.

What you propose is taking this political polarization and diffusing it among more political parties? Is that right?

Yeah. Exactly.

Essentially, the problem is that [right now] the way that parties win is by being the lesser of two evils, and by demonizing their political opponents, because thats the unifying force in parties and it works. But youve never heard the phrase lesser of three evils for a reason.

If you look at multiparty elections, candidates and parties have to stand for policy. They cant just get by on attacking the other side as extremist and dangerous.

In a multiparty system, parties form coalitions and work together on different issues.If you want to have a sustainable political system, you need to have constantly shifting allegiances you cant have permanent enemies. And theres something about the binary condition that really triggers this kind of us-against-them, good versus evil, thinking.

There wouldnt necessarily be less overall conflict in such a political system, right? It would just be spread around say, between an ethnonationalist right-wing party and a conservative libertarian party, or between a progressive party and a center-left party?

Right, you have shifting conflict. Politics is about conflict, because the issues that we agree on are not political issues, and elections are not about the issues that we all agree on; they are about the issues that we disagree on.

With multiple parties, you can form different coalitions and you can have logrolls [the trading of favors], you can have positive sum deals. It changes the dynamic.

People might be more open to jumping between different parties as happens in other multiparty democracies and considering different ideas. And its not a threat to their identity. They might be more likely to encounter people from different parties in day-to-day life.

But theres plenty of evidence that democracies with single-member legislative districts and winner-take-all voting inevitablytend toward a two-party system. Is there a way around that?

Proportional representation. [Note: This is an electoral system in which the number of seats held by a political group in a legislature is determined by the percentage of the popular vote it receives.]

If you have single-member districts as we do, youre probably going to have two parties. But if you have larger districts, you can have proportionality, and you can have more parties. We can have multimember districts in the U.S. House; its totally constitutional.

Wouldnt an anti-democratic ethnonationalist party remain a force under this system? Thats what weve seen in Europe.

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They would be a powerful force, but they might break up into different groups, some of which are more anti-democratic than others. The dynamics would be different. Youd still have an ethnonationalist faction similar to the AfD in Germany. But the faction would be more isolated and it would be easier for the other groups to organize against it.

On their own, they would be a distinct minority. And they should be! Youve got to give the pro-democracy supermajority in America a chance to organize.

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The signs are there. Is US democracy on a dangerous trajectory? - The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON (AP) Proponents of statehood for Washington, D.C., vowed Tuesday to keep pushing even though the prospects were dim as the bill began working its way through the Senate.

Our democracy is truly in the hands of this Senate, Mayor Muriel Bowser told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. We will not quit until we achieve full democracy. We will keep pushing until D.C.s tragic disenfranchisement is rectified.

In Tuesdays hearings on a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the 51st state, Democrats framed it as a long-standing injustice finally being made right. The nations capital has a larger population than Wyoming or Vermont, and its estimated 712,000 residents pay federal taxes, vote for president and serve in the armed forces, but they have no voting representation in Congress.

Republicans, however, dismissed the bill as a cynical Democratic power play since the District votes solidly Democratic. They claim statehood was never the intention of the Founding Fathers and insist that Congress doesnt even have the power to change D.C.s status.

What Congress cannot do is override the Constitution anytime it becomes inconvenient for a majority in Congress, said Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. The Constitution endures and that is the fundamental premise of our Democratic republic, and I fear that premise is being threatened by this legislation.

The bill proposes creating a 51st state with one representative and two senators, while a tiny sliver of land including the White House, the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall would remain as a federal district.

Instead of the District of Columbia, the new state would be known as Washington, Douglass Commonwealth named after famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who lived in Washington from 1877 until his death in 1895.

The bill comes as D.C. statehood is receiving unprecedented levels of popular and political support. It received a formal endorsement from the White House, which called Washingtons current status an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded.

The effort has also become intertwined with Americas ascendant racial justice movement, with progressive activists framing it as an issue of civil rights and political enfranchisement. The proposed state would be approximately 46% Black.

An identical statehood bill passed the House in 2020 but died in the then-Republican-controlled Senate. Now, with the 2020 elections leaving Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, statehood advocates had hoped for a different outcome.

This version of the legislation passed the House in April by a 216-208 vote along party lines, but the Senate is a long shot. The Senate is split 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker. Not long after the House vote, however, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia essentially blunted whatever momentum that statehood had gathered by saying he opposed pursuing it through an act of Congress.

Even with Manchins support the measure would have been vulnerable to a Republican filibuster. Barring a dramatic reversal by Manchin or unexpected defection by a Republican, the measure appears stalled. And moderate Republicans like Maine Sen. Susan Collins are already on record as saying they oppose D.C. statehood.

D.C. has long chafed under its relationship with Congress, which essentially has the power to veto or alter any local laws. The limitations were put in stark relief last summer during a series of protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and against general police brutality. After a night of widespread vandalism, President Donald Trump went around Bowser and called in a large federal force to restore order downtown.

On Jan. 6, when a mob of Trump supporters physically overwhelmed U.S. Capitol Police and invaded the Capitol building, Bowser did not have the authority of a governor to call in the National Guard. Instead, that request went to the upper levels of the Pentagon and there was a notable delay in the Guard deployment while dozens of D.C. police officers rushed into the building as reinforcements.

Bowser at the time quickly pointed out the ironies of Washington residents risking their lives to defend a Congress where they didnt have a vote.

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Our democracy is truly in the hands of this Senate, says D.C.s mayor at committee hearing on statehood - MarketWatch

CHICAGO (Project Syndicate)With the prominent antimonopoly advocate Lina Khan having been appointed the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission, it is a good time to consider what influence the so-called New Brandeisians will have on U.S. antitrust law.

Khan is a leading figure in that movement, and another prominent exponent, Tim Wu, now sits on President Joe Bidens National Economic Council. Arguing that antitrust law and enforcement are too weak and ineffectual, the New Brandeisians, named for the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, are more open than traditional antitrust experts to breaking up monopolies.

Their argument was that the robber baronsmen such as the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and the steel magnate Andrew Carnegieand their companies were simply too powerful. Their political and economic power were inconsistent with democratic self-government.

Even before the New Brandeisians achieved prominence, there was a growing consensus that U.S. courts and regulatory agencies do not enforce antitrust law as vigorously as they should. A long period of lax enforcement has led to more concentrated markets, higher prices for consumers, and skyrocketing corporate profits. A partial solution is to give regulators more resources and strengthen the standards that regulators use to approve big business mergers. A bill sponsored by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota proposes to do precisely that.

But beyond supporting these simple measures, the consensus among antitrust experts dissolves. The debate is shaping up as one between centrist or center-left technocrats who consider more enforcement resources and higher merger standards sufficient, and New Brandeisians who seek much more. (The right seems to be sitting on the sidelines, merely grumbling that Big Tech companies discriminate against Republicans.)

For their part, the technocrats are committed to traditional antitrust analysis, which weighs the benefits of market competition against the advantages of size. They believe that firms should be allowed to grow by offering superior products and services, even if they end up dominating markets. Mergers should be permitted as long as they generate economies of scale that outweigh the anticompetitive effects.

The New Brandeisians draw their inspiration from the antimonopoly agitation of the Gilded Age. Late-19th-century populists and 20th-century progressives such as Brandeis were not primarily concerned with efficiency, nor did they distinguish carefully between the effects of monopoly on prices, wages, competition, and other economic variables.

Their argument was that the robber baronsmen such as the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and the steel magnate Andrew Carnegieand their companies were simply too powerful. Their political and economic power were inconsistent with democratic self-government. It was this problem that antitrust law was meant to solve.

In the new antitrust debate, Big Tech is the flashpoint. When the technocrats look at that sector, they see firms that offer superior products and services at low prices, or even at no price at all. Business practices that raise antitrust concerns can be handled under prevailing standards, and should be condemned only after proof that, despite appearances, they raise prices. But the New Brandeisians see the recurrence of Gilded Age monopolization and insist that while the harms are not recognized by traditional antitrust analysis, they are harms just the same.

One such harm is political interference. Monopolies no longer dole out bribes to legislators as they did in the 19th century, but Big Tech clearly exerts substantial influence on U.S. politics. Democrats are still seething that the Russians used Facebook to propagate misinformation before the 2016 election, while Republicans complain that Facebook FB, +2.03% and Twitter TWTR, +2.94% kicked Donald Trump off their platforms. Depending on how you look at it, YouTube GOOG, +0.43% either spreads conspiracy theories or censors legitimate political dissent.

Another concern is perceived unfairness. Google supplies search results that include listings for Google-owned products and services. The Apple App Store sells Apple AAPL apps that compete with third-party apps. Critics argue that these and other companies take advantage of information they obtain from competitors who use their platforms to give their own products and services a competitive edge.

Yet another problem is the loss of consumer autonomy, stemming from the fact that Big Tech knows everything about us, from our shopping habits and search histories to our medical records and personal communications. Never before has so much been known about so many people.

In authoritarian countries, this information is shared with the government. In the U.S., not so much; but it is shared with other companies, and it often falls into the hands of hackers and other bad actors. Worse, some tech companies have used their engineering prowess and psychological know-how to addict and manipulate users.

Finally, the Big Tech companies are seen as a threat to a diverse, textured internet economy. Many people lament the loss of quirky online offerings, which have been replaced by the drab monocultures of Facebook, Google, and Apple.

The suddenness of change helps to explain why people were once so upset when Walmart WMT, +0.46% moved in and destroyed many small towns central shopping districts. While prices fell, a unique, often beloved, local commercial ecosystem was lost. Now, many towns are plowing taxpayer dollars into downtown revitalization efforts, using public funds to recreate amenities that the public valued and that the market destroyed.

Against this backdrop, traditional economists argue that antitrusta technical area of the law concerned with economic efficiencyis not the solution. Threats to small towns or larger democratic and economic values are better addressed with campaign finance laws, zoning laws, health and safety regulations, and so forth.

There is much good sense to this view: if we replace antitrust law with an all-things-considered judgment about the good and bad that any large firm may do, regulators and courts will flounder, and political considerations will intrude. It would be better to address the pathologies of the tech market with well-defined legislative reform.

But New Brandeisians would counter by pointing out that big companies can use their political power to obstruct those very reforms. After all, the tech giants have already opposed privacy and data protections, and regulations of corporate speech will go nowhere with the current Supreme Court precedents that protect it.

Remember, the main 19th-century worry about monopolies was that they wielded too much political power. If you cut them down to size, perhaps they wont, allowing democracy to flourish. Antitrust law is the only existing tool in U.S. law for converting a big company that has too much power into a bunch of small companies that dont.

Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, is the author, most recently, of The Demagogues Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump.

This commentary was published with permission of Project SyndicateBidens Antitrust Revolutionaries

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What's the goal: Democracy or efficiency? How to understand the impassioned debate over Big Tech and antitrust - MarketWatch

Written by Satvik Varma

Given the socio-political milieu we currently find ourselves enveloped in, we frequently need reaffirmation that our Constitution is supreme. That it provides the citizens many rights and liberties and has corresponding duties. That the rights can be restricted only in reasonable and limited circumstances. That our judiciary will step in to prevent state excesses and uphold the letter of the law and the spirit of our Constitution. That while the judicial system may be laden with delays, those are only cracks and it is otherwise intact and as multiple recent judgments from across the country have demonstrated adequately independent. And no matter how majoritarian a government we may have, we are still a democracy of the people, for the people and by the people.

While the judgments delivered by the division bench of Justices Siddharth Mridul and Anup J Bhambhani of the Delhi High Court are indeed only bail orders, an analysis of their contents and the jurisprudence they lay down highlights the role of constitutional courts. Namely, to interpret the law purposively and in a way that advances the objectives of the legislation. Its job is to read the law in such a way that it enhances personal liberties while maintaining a balance with the security of the state. It is to ensure that constitutionally accorded and legally protected citizen rights are not left to the mercy of executive supremacy. And at a time when society is polarised and fractured across various lines and where ideology has reached a vanishing point, courts will do all within their mandate to prevent the misuse of the law and alleviate the anxiety that has come to surround individuals.

For longer than we can imagine, law and society theorists have been preoccupied with attempts to explain the relationship between legal and social change. They view the law both as independent and dependent and variable (cause and effect) in society and emphasise the interdependence of the law with other social systems. British social reformer Jeremy Bentham expected legal reforms to respond quickly to new social needs and to restructure society. Contrastingly, German legal scholar Friedrich Karl von Savigny held that it is the law that follows social change. Whatever view one may support, it cant be denied they influence each other. The law, after all, reflects the will and wish of society as we have witnessed in India in the decriminalisation of homosexuality or triple talaq being deemed against our constitutional values or the striking down of adultery or the recognition of the rights of the transgender community or the granting of equal status to women in temple entry.

This brings us to the fact that the interplay of law and society leads to the development of both.Advancing this proposition, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen believes that legal development is not just about what the law is and what the judicial system formally accepts and asserts, but instead must take note of the enhancement of peoples capability their freedom to exercise the rights and entitlements that we associate with legal progress. For Sen, freedom is both the primary objective of development, and the principal means of development. Accordingly, he holds that development is enhanced in democracy by the protection of human rights. Such rights, especially freedom of the press, speech, assembly and so forth increase the likelihood of good governance. Resultantly, a nations development cannot be considered independent of its legal developments.

The Indian judiciary has made lasting contributions to our development whether by its conceptualisation of public interest litigation or simply by giving meaning to our Fundamental Rights by carrying forward the intention of our Constitution makers for example, declaring privacy a Fundamental Right. In this process, our courts have strengthened the Indian federation, deepened our democratic ideas, facilitated the working amongst various arms of government and furthered the objective of our Constitutions Preamble to promote fraternity and to maintain unity and integrity of the nation.

Examined with this spirit, the recent bail orders of the student activists advance the cause of justice, protect citizen rights, thereby strengthening our democracy, address the prevailing societal needs and consequently contribute to our nations development. After all, our courts do not function in a vacuum and our judges surely have views on whats happening around them. Reports of the fact that less than 2 per cent of the people arrested under UAPA across the country in five years till 2019 were eventually convicted (per data compiled by National Crime Records Bureau) must have weighed on the judges, as the process then becomes the punishment. They must also have been informed that a challenge to the constitutional validity of the 2019 amendments to UAPA, that terms individuals as terrorists, is currently pending where, and while theres no stay on the operation of the law, the state has not even filed its response. Should not the courts then reinstate the liberty of those incorrectly indicted? Doing right, Justices Mridul and Bhambhani only upheld our democratic traditions and advanced our constitutional values. In doing so, they restored peoples faith in our judiciary.

Going forward, one hopes that every time our democracy is in peril, our judges, in keeping with their oath to office bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution and will, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will uphold the Constitution. If in the discharge of such duties, they embrace the role of judicial torch-bearers they will also be contributing to our nations development. Each time this happens will indeed be a great moment in the history of our democracy.

The writer is a senior advocate based in New Delhi

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UAPA bail: A triumph of rights and democracy - The Indian Express

As the Big Lie of a stolen election continues to dominate the Republican Party, GOP-controlled states enact restrictive voting laws and pursue preposterous election audits, aspiring candidates embrace the fiction of a stolen 2020 election, and a majority of GOP voters still believe Trump is the true president, the obvious questions follow: Where is this all headed? And is there any way out?

In one telling, the Republican Party will eventually come back to its senses and move past former President Donald Trump and Trumpist grievance politics, especially if Republicans lose a few elections in a row and realize that its a losing strategy. But theres another possible outcome: More contested elections, more violence and, ultimately, a collapse into competitive authoritarianism enabled by electoral advantages that tilt in one partys favor.

Trump and his particular style of party leadership are easy and obvious targets to blame for the decline of American democracy, as well as the Republican Partys increasing illiberalism. But if Trump was transformative, the more important question is: Why was he able to succeed in the first place?

The most compelling theory based on historical patterns of democratic decline is that hyper-polarization cracked the foundations of American democracy, creating the conditions under which a party could break democratic norms with impunity, because winning in the short term became more important than maintaining democracy for the long term.

In order for democracy to work, competing parties must accept that they can lose elections, and that its okay. But when partisans see their political opposition not just as the opposition, but as a genuine threat to the well-being of the nation, support for democratic norms fades because winning becomes everything. Politics, in turn, collapses into an all-out war of us against them, a kind of pernicious polarization that appears over and over again in democratic collapses, and bears a striking similarity to whats currently happening in the U.S.

Theres no shortage of plausible explanations for why U.S. politics has become so polarized, but many of these theories describe impossible-to-reverse trends that have played out across developed democracies, like the rise of social media and the increased political salience of globalization, immigration and urban-rural cultural divides. All of these trends are important contributors, for sure. But if they alone are driving illiberalism and hyper-partisanship in the U.S., then the problem should be consistent across all western democracies. But it isnt.

Whats happening in the U.S. is distinct in four respects.

First, the animosity that people feel toward opposing parties relative to their own (whats known as affective polarization in political science) has grown considerably over the last four decades. According to a June 2020 paper from economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, the increase in affective polarization in the U.S. is the greatest compared to that of eight other OECD countries over the same time period.

Second, the change in how Americans feel about their party and other parties has been driven by a dramatic decrease in positive feelings toward the opposing party. In most (though not all) of the nine democracies, voters have become a little less enthusiastic about their own parties. But only in the U.S. have partisans turned decidedly against the other party.

Boxell, Gentzkow and Shapiro caution that the cross-country comparisons are not perfect, since they rely on different survey question wordings over time. But they also dont pull any punches in their findings: [O]ur central conclusion that the U.S. stands out for the pace of the long-term increase in affective polarization is not likely an artifact of data limitations.

Third, more so than in other countries, Americans report feeling isolated from their own party. When asked to identify both themselves and their favored party on an 11-point scale in a 2012 survey, Americans identified themselves as, on average, 1.3 units away from the party that comes closest to espousing their beliefs, according to an analysis from political scientist Jonathan Rodden. This gap is the highest difference Rodden found among respondents in comparable democracies. This isolation matters, too, because it means that parties cant count on enthusiasm from their own voters instead, they must demonize the political opposition in order to mobilize voters.

Fourth, and perhaps most significant, in the U.S., one party has become a major illiberal outlier: The Republican Party. Scholars at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have been monitoring and evaluating political parties around the world. And one big area of study for them is liberalism and illiberalism, or a partys commitment (or lack thereof) to democratic norms prior to elections. And as the chart below shows, of conservative, right-leaning parties across the globe, the Republican Party has more in common with the dangerously authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey than it does with conservative parties in the U.K. or Germany.

The U.S. is truly exceptional in just how polarized its politics have become, but its not alone. People in countries with majoritarian(ish) democracies, or two very dominant parties dominating its politics like in the U.S. think Canada, Britain, Australia have displayed more unfavorable feelings toward the political opposition.

In fact, in a new book, American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective, another team of scholars, Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, shows that citizens in majoritarian democracies with less proportional representation dislike both their own parties and opposing parties more than citizens in multiparty democracies with more proportional representation.

This pattern may have something to do with the shifting politics of coalition formation in proportional democracies, where few political enemies are ever permanent (e.g., the unlikely new governing coalition in Israel). This also echoes something social psychologists have found in running experiments on group behavior: Breaking people into three groups instead of two leads to less animosity. Something, in other words, appears to be unique about the binary condition, or in this case, the two-party system, that triggers the kind of good-vs-evil, dark-vs-light, us-against-them thinking that is particularly pronounced in the U.S.

Ultimately, the more binary the party system, the stronger the out-party hatred. But there is also something particular about whats happening in the U.S., even compared to other majoritarian(ish) democracies. For example, the major parties on the right in Canada and Australia have not become as illiberal as their American counterpart. Canadian politics scholars would point out that in Canada, regional identities are often stronger than national partisan identities, and this regionalism has kept Canadian politics more moderate. And Australian scholars would point out that ranked-choice voting has exerted a moderating force on Australian politics.

In the U.S., meanwhile, (and to some extent the U.K.), politics have become extremely nationalized. Cities became more socially liberal, multiracial and cosmopolitan, most of the rest of the country held onto more traditional values and stayed predominantly white, and suburbs turned into the political battleground. And as Rodden explains in Why Cities Lose, parties with rural strongholds often wind up with disproportionate electoral power, since their opposition tends to over-concentrate its vote in lopsided districts. This rural bias is especially pronounced in the U.S. Senate, for instance.

But while its true that cultural values have emerged as a more important organizing conflict across advanced democracies (one compelling explanation is that following the collapse of Communism and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, parties of the left and right converged on support for market economics), the urban-rural split in countries with more proportional voting systems is far less binary. Thats in large part because in proportional democracies, multiple parties can still win seats in geographically unfriendly areas, with coalition governments including some balance of both urban and rural representation.

Its not just the lack of a stark urban-rural divide that makes proportional democracies less polarized, though. There is also less of a clear strategic benefit to demonizing the opposition in an election that has more than two parties. For instance, in a multiparty election, taking down one party might not necessarily help you. After all, another party might benefit, since negative attacks typically have a backlash. And because parties can take stronger positions and appeal more directly to voters on policy, theres less need to rally your supporters by talking about how terrible and dangerous the other party is. Moreover, in systems where parties form governing coalitions, demonizing a side youve recently been in a coalition with (or hope to be in the future) doesnt ring quite as true.

While it is both easy and appropriate to criticize Trump and fellow Republicans for their anti-democratic descent in service of the Big Lie, it takes more work to appreciate how the structure of the party system itself laid the groundwork for the former presidents politics of loathing and fear. A politics defined by hatred of political opponents is a politics ripe for hateful illiberalism.

The new scholarship on comparative polarization is crucial in understanding this dynamic. In one sense, it offers a very depressing view: Given the current binary structure of American party politics, this conflict is mostly locked in. No level of social media regulation or media literacy or exhortation to civility is going to make much of a difference. But it also offers a kind of master key: If the structure of a party system is as crucial as these studies suggest it is, then the solution is obvious: The U.S. may want to change its voting system to become more proportional.

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Why The Two-Party System Is Wrecking American Democracy - FiveThirtyEight