Advantaging Authoritarianism: How the U.S. electoral system favors extremism (original) (raw)
America’s authoritarian faction is both more extreme and more successful than similar movements in other advanced democracies. Yet despite its ascendency, this faction does not enjoy broad-based support. So what explains its outsized success?
In Advantaging Authoritarianism: How the U.S. electoral system favors extremism, Protect Democracy examines the links between escalating antidemocratic extremism and the U.S. electoral system. Specific features of the U.S. electoral system are structurally favoring political extremism, such as by exaggerating one party’s electoral wins over the other, diluting minority voting power, weakening competition between the major parties, and preventing an electorally viable new center-right party, among other effects.
As political scientist Robert Dahl once observed, the U.S. system, “natural as it may seem to us, is of a species rare to the vanishing point among the advanced democracies.” Advantaging Authoritarianism examines its anomalous features; the ways in which those features are aggravating extremism; and how various reforms could help to turn the tide. While the authoritarian threat confronting the U.S. is a near-term crisis, successfully confronting it will also require long-term, structural solutions.
The U.S. is an electoral system outlier. There are only a few democracies left that elect their officials like we do. This report critically examines how our outdated system is systematically advantaging America’s ascendant authoritarian faction—and how absent reform, extremism will escalate.
Grant Tudor, Policy Advocate, Protect Democracy
The report argues that understanding the escalating extremism and success of America’s authoritarian faction requires understanding the U.S. electoral system: one uniquely translating limited factional support into outsized political influence.
It also examines the core components of the electoral system used for most U.S. elections—winner-take-all—and ways its basic features are aggravating the authoritarian threat. In particular, the report assesses at least three ways the design of the U.S. electoral system is likely accelerating antidemocratic extremism, including by:
- Generating electoral biases, or exaggerating electoral wins in one party’s favor,
- Rewarding coherent factions at the expense of less coherent majorities, and
- Collecting limited information about the electorate’s preferences, including underlying consensus against extremism.
Additionally, it examines at least three ways the U.S. system blunts efforts to counter antidemocratic extremism, including by:
- Weakening competition such that the far-right is increasingly insulated from competition,
- Diluting minority voting power such that racial and ethnic minorities are systematically underrepresented, and
- Entrenching binary conflict that exacerbates animosity between partisans and marginalizes in-group moderates.
Absent changes to the machinery of the system, the behaviors of the actors are unlikely to change.
Electoral system reforms like fusion voting and proportional representation could help to “give the pro-democracy coalition a fighting chance.” Read more about the work Protect Democracy and our partners are doing to advocate for these and other reforms.
Featured Press
Gerrymander, U.S.A.
The New York Times, July 12, 2022
By Jesse Wegman
Current United States Authoritarian Threat Index score: 3.4/5 Severe Threat •
- Elections 3.2/5 • Severe Threat