Small parties no chance

With the midterms, major elections are announced in the US: Tuesday, Americans will elect the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate.

While several parties compete for seats in elections in Switzerland and other democratic countries, only two parties appear in the US: the Democrats and the Republicans. In between is a huge ditch.

Are there really only two parties in the country with 332 million inhabitants? No, on a national level there are about twenty. But the fact that only two parties are so powerful is mainly due to the electoral system. “In most countries, ‘winner takes all’ applies,” explains Claudia Brühwiler (40), US expert at the University of St. Gallen. This means that whoever gets the majority in a state gets all the votes that are up for grabs.

In this electoral system, only the really big parties have a chance. Claudia Brühwiler: “Voters therefore act rationally if they concentrate on one of the two major parties and do not waste their vote on a less promising party.”

The three big little ones

Of the minor parties, three – so-called third parties – are of some importance: the Green Party, the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party.

• Green party: Founded in 1996, it is one of the most successful parties at the local level. As the name suggests, it is committed to climate protection and thus to alternative energy sources and a drastic reduction of CO₂emissions. In 2000, her presidential candidate Ralph Naders (88) won 2.7 percent of the vote.

• Libertarian Party: They demand freedom where they can. With the exception of the police, the army and the judiciary, they want to leave all areas such as social affairs, the economy, traffic and transport to the private sector. It was founded in 1971 and its voter share in the presidential election was less than one percent. In 2020 they were briefly in the House of Representatives, but only because a Republican switched parties.

• Constitution Party: Founded in 1991 as the Taxpayers’ Party, the party is a right-wing Republican party. The conservative group wants to better integrate the church and the Bible into society and ban homosexuality and abortion.

Little ones as king makers

Although these third parties rarely appear in the US, they can still influence elections. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton (75) lost the presidential election to Donald Trump (76), despite being the favorite in opinion polls.

A contributing reason may have been that the candidacy of libertarian Gary Johnson (69) came at the expense of Clinton. Clinton also lost votes because the Greens sent another woman to the election campaign.

Claudia Brühwiler: “In presidential elections there have always been third-party candidates who became a bummer for one of the other two candidates because they snatched the voters with no prospect of a majority.”

Election reform would bring change

The US expert says, “America may only have two sides, but they are quite diverse.” The political trench warfare that we have observed between parties in Switzerland, for example, takes place within the parties in the US.

A multi-party system is only possible with electoral reforms. “If, for example, proportional voting rights were introduced for the House of Representatives, comparable to our National Council elections, the party landscape and thus the balance of power would look very different,” says Claudia Brühwiler.