The plurality voting system (and gerrymandering) which both reduce voter power and therefore lead to a partisan, corrupt duopoly.
If you can only vote for one person, then you'd better vote for one of the forerunners. That leads to two-party domination; it's called Duverger's law. Just as a commercial monopoly reduces consumer power, leading to high prices and poor service, this political duopoly reduces voting power, leading to corrupt politicians who ignore voters.
In order to stay in the top two, and keep this system working in their favor, candidates develop an insatiable need for money, opening the system to more corruption. Gerrymandering further compounds the problem, allowing politicians to select their constituents instead of vice versa. Soon, the two parties find that their easiest strategy is polarization on social and rhetorical issues, while they both sell out to the highest bidder (ie, the biggest rent-seeker) on economic issues like energy, trade, labor, and agriculture. Such a strategy would be unsustainable, or at least contested, if minor parties were even a credible threat.
Perhaps worst of all, two-party politics is a zero-sum game for those two parties. Anything that hurts your opponent, benefits you; anything that benefits them, hurts you. This of course contrasts hugely with the reality of political outcomes; win/win or lose/lose is actually common if not the norm. So crazy two-party incentives lead to deadlock at the best of times, and not infrequently lead one or other of the parties to consciously, actively work against the interests of the republic. (I'd argue that this tendency is not at all symmetric between the two parties, and I suspect many reading me would agree; but that isn't the issue here.)
As you can see, I think that corruption, capture, and partisanship are also key problems, and I expect to see good answers (such as Lessig's video in a comment to this answer) arguing for those as fundamental. But I think that the plurality system is even more at the root, and an important cause of those problems.
This can be fixed, within the bounds of the US political system. At a first step, approval voting would allow voters to vote for more than one candidate. Once voters were used to this basic improvement, even more-advanced systems such as SODA voting, Majority Judgment, Condorcet, or Range Voting could be explored. Gerrymandering would be irrelevant if we used a proportional representation system; for instance, a system like PAL representation would give proportionality and give over 5/6 of Americans a representative they actually liked, while still using existing districts (no matter how gerrymandered; of course, if gerrymandering was pointless, it would fall into disuse.) None of these fixes require constitutional change; all can be done through federal enabling legislation and/or state-by-state implementation/experiment
If you can only vote for one person, then you'd better vote for one of the forerunners. That leads to two-party domination; it's called Duverger's law. Just as a commercial monopoly reduces consumer power, leading to high prices and poor service, this political duopoly reduces voting power, leading to corrupt politicians who ignore voters.
In order to stay in the top two, and keep this system working in their favor, candidates develop an insatiable need for money, opening the system to more corruption. Gerrymandering further compounds the problem, allowing politicians to select their constituents instead of vice versa. Soon, the two parties find that their easiest strategy is polarization on social and rhetorical issues, while they both sell out to the highest bidder (ie, the biggest rent-seeker) on economic issues like energy, trade, labor, and agriculture. Such a strategy would be unsustainable, or at least contested, if minor parties were even a credible threat.
Perhaps worst of all, two-party politics is a zero-sum game for those two parties. Anything that hurts your opponent, benefits you; anything that benefits them, hurts you. This of course contrasts hugely with the reality of political outcomes; win/win or lose/lose is actually common if not the norm. So crazy two-party incentives lead to deadlock at the best of times, and not infrequently lead one or other of the parties to consciously, actively work against the interests of the republic. (I'd argue that this tendency is not at all symmetric between the two parties, and I suspect many reading me would agree; but that isn't the issue here.)
As you can see, I think that corruption, capture, and partisanship are also key problems, and I expect to see good answers (such as Lessig's video in a comment to this answer) arguing for those as fundamental. But I think that the plurality system is even more at the root, and an important cause of those problems.
This can be fixed, within the bounds of the US political system. At a first step, approval voting would allow voters to vote for more than one candidate. Once voters were used to this basic improvement, even more-advanced systems such as SODA voting, Majority Judgment, Condorcet, or Range Voting could be explored. Gerrymandering would be irrelevant if we used a proportional representation system; for instance, a system like PAL representation would give proportionality and give over 5/6 of Americans a representative they actually liked, while still using existing districts (no matter how gerrymandered; of course, if gerrymandering was pointless, it would fall into disuse.) None of these fixes require constitutional change; all can be done through federal enabling legislation and/or state-by-state implementation/experiment
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