Fragmentation and Function

Guest Post at Election Law Blog

This essay was originally a guest post at Election Law Blog…

The following is a guest post from Michael Latner:

Richard Pildes’ thoughtful essay on yesterday’s Election Law Blog distinguishes two lines of debate over the virtues of proportional representation that have emerged in the aftermath of Callais and the gerrymandering arms race still under way. One version is being developed as a remedy to partisan and racial vote dilution, which, importantly, Professor Pildes believes could “preserve the two-party system” and protect us from the other line of PR advocacy, which has as its specific goal the break up of the two-party system into numerous competing coalitions.

I want to acknowledge the importance of a leading PR skeptic engaging with those of us who have been making the case, for some time, that PR is the most effective remedy for vote dilution. I also want to acknowledge that PR advocates could use a little more humility in their proselytizing about how PR shapes substantive outcomes far downstream from electoral systems, like claims that PR would have reduced political violence in the US, or the horde of RCV disciples who believe that ranking ballots will cure economic downturns, lower back pain, and depression.

But I have to take issue with Pildes’ claim that party fragmentation in Congress would somehow make the United States less governable than it currently is.

The United States is the only large democracy in the world that operates as a two-party system. Every other large, established democracy — without exception — has a legislature with three or more meaningful parties, and most have five or six. If two-partyism were the prerequisite for effective governance, we would expect chronic policy failure across the OECD and a singularly productive Congress at home. The evidence runs the other way.

Consider what “ungovernable” would actually look like. Over the last fifteen years, the multiparty democracies of Western and Northern Europe have legislated on the questions that have stalled in Washington for a generation. Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Austria each have binding climate frameworks with statutory emissions targets and sectoral implementation plans; the United States has the Inflation Reduction Act and a Supreme Court busy dismantling the administrative authority needed to enforce it. The European Union — built on the consent of twenty-seven coalition governments — produced the GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the AI Act, four landmark regulatory frameworks for the digital economy. The U.S. Congress has not passed a comprehensive privacy statute in any form. On trade, multiparty governments in Europe negotiated a coherent response to the 2025 tariff regime; in the U.S. we produced an executive order issued unilaterally and then partially withdrawn after the bond market reacted.

The most consequential comparison, however, is on the question of democratic survival. Pildes worries that fragmentation produces instability. But which system has actually destabilized? In the last decade, authoritarian and ethno-nationalist parties have appeared in nearly every European legislature, and in nearly every case the multiparty structure has contained them. The AfD has been excluded from every German governing coalition at the federal level. The Sweden Democrats have been brought to heel even while supporting a minority government from outside. The Finns Party, Austria’s FPÖ, and the Dutch PVV have all entered government at various points — and in each instance their participation forced platform moderation, public coalition agreements, or, where they refused to moderate, the collapse of the government and a return to the voters. That is democracy functioning as designed: bad actors face a choice between compromise and irrelevance. The U.S. two-party system offered no such choice. An authoritarian faction captured one of two available vehicles and inherited the full machinery of government. There is no third party for Republican moderates to defect to, and no coalition partner whose exit would force a course correction.

Immigration illustrates the same dynamic in reverse. Multiparty democracies in Europe responded to the 2015 migration wave with substantive legislation — asylum reform, integration funding, border-procedure changes — passed by coalitions that included parties on multiple sides of the question. When some of those measures overshot, as in Denmark and the Netherlands, subsequent coalitions corrected course. The United States, by contrast, has not passed comprehensive immigration legislation since 1986. The two-party system has produced four decades of stalemate punctuated by executive orders that the next administration reverses. As Anthony McGann and I argued in earlier cross-national work on social welfare spending, fragmented party systems do not paralyze policymaking; they generate the bargaining space in which policymaking happens. A two-party system offers exactly one available bargain: the other side. When that bargain is refused, nothing moves. A multiparty system always offers another partner.

This is the structural point Pildes’ essay misses. Governing is not a function of how few veto players sit at the table. It is a function of whether there is more than one available deal on the table. The most legislatively productive period in modern American history was not the era of disciplined two-party competition. It was the mid-twentieth century, when the United States functioned as a de facto four-party system — Northeastern Republicans, Northern Democrats, Southern Democrats, and Western Republicans — whose cross-cutting coalitions made possible the New Deal, the interstate highway system, Medicare, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The VRA passed because Northern Democrats could find a working majority with Northeastern and Western Republicans over the objection of the Southern wing of their own party. That bargain is structurally unavailable in a disciplined two-party Congress, which is why the Voting Rights Act would not pass today.

Fragmentation, in short, is not the threat to American governance. Its absence is.