Gehl and Porter’s article “Why Politics is Failing” makes the critical point that American democracy is collapsing because a two-party system, like duopolies in business, holds the electoral process hostage.
The underlying assumption in their point is that duopolies are bad, which they are not, as Blackstone and Darby point out in their article.
Four traits are essential to consider in business duopolies:
- Two: Only two companies share the market (e.g., Coke and Pepsi dominate the soda market as an example of a duopoly).
- Interdependence: The two companies display interdependence, whereby the actions of one company directly influence the other company (e.g., if one company makes its product cheaper, the other will follow).
- Differentiation: Under certain conditions, the two companies exhibit strong product differentiation.
In politics, these traits are a good thing for compromise.
- Two: As I argue in “The Art of the Compromise,” two political parties are more likely to reach a compromise than three or more, as evidenced by the struggles of the multi-party systems in Europe and elsewhere.
- Interdependence: Interdependence is essential because the two parties respond to each other across the full spectrum of political issues. That is, the parties take a stand on every issue. This situation contrasts with multi-party systems, whereby some parties are single-issue factions that only respond to a single issue and have no stance on the other problems facing an electorate.
- Differentiation: As I discuss in “The Art of the Compromise,” differentiation is important to define the parameters for a compromise beyond the meet-in-the-middle solution that usually satisfies no one.
While I agree with many of Gehl and Porter’s points, I strongly disagree with their desire to drive their solution toward nonpartisan solutions that would devolve the American two-party system into a multiparty system, which has been shown to fail at scale, as in the European Union.