Tyranny of the Two-Party System

Tyranny of the Two-Party System

EnglishPaperback / softback
Disch Lisa
Columbia University Press
EAN: 9780231110358
On order
Delivery on Monday, 27. of January 2025
CZK 927
Common price CZK 1,030
Discount 10%
pc
Do you want this product today?
Oxford Bookshop Praha Korunní
not available
Librairie Francophone Praha Štěpánská
not available
Oxford Bookshop Ostrava
not available
Oxford Bookshop Olomouc
not available
Oxford Bookshop Plzeň
not available
Oxford Bookshop Brno
not available
Oxford Bookshop Hradec Králové
not available
Oxford Bookshop České Budějovice
not available
Oxford Bookshop Liberec
not available

Detailed information

The closely contested presidential election of 2000, which many analysts felt was decided by voters for the Green Party, cast a spotlight on a structural contradiction of American politics. Critics charged that Green Party voters inadvertently contributed to the election of a conservative Republican president because they chose to "vote their conscience" rather than "choose between two evils." But why this choice of two? Is the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans an immutable and indispensable aspect of our democracy? Lisa Disch maintains that it is not. There is no constitutional warrant for two parties, and winner-take-all elections need not set third parties up to fail. She argues that the two-party system as we know it dates only to the twentieth century and that it thwarts democracy by wasting the votes and silencing the voices of dissenters. The Tyranny of the Two-Party System reexamines a once popular nineteenth-century strategy called fusion, in which a dominant-party candidate ran on the ballots of both the established party and a third party. In the nineteenth century fusion made possible something that many citizens wish were possible today: to register a protest vote that counts and that will not throw the election to the establishment candidate they least prefer. The book concludes by analyzing the 2000 presidential election as an object lesson in the tyranny of the two-party system and with suggestions for voting experiments to stimulate participation and make American democracy responsive to a broader range of citizens.
EAN 9780231110358
ISBN 0231110359
Binding Paperback / softback
Publisher Columbia University Press
Publication date May 7, 2002
Pages 172
Language English
Country United States
Readership Professional & Scholarly
Authors Disch Lisa
Series Power, Conflict, and Democracy: American Politics Into the 21st Century