Is a Two-Party System Good For America's Confidence in Government?

 The Problem with American Confidence

It's no secret that the average American's confidence in government has decreased over the past year. The 2020 election showcased stark mistrust in the American electoral system as 33% of Americans and 68% of Republicans found the election to be unfair. Concerns over the government's handling of the coronavirus has caused trust in public health officials to drop to 36% and trust in state and local governments to drop to 26%. At the same time, events associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have caused American confidence in the police to drop to 52%. These numbers make it clear that there is a major problem when it comes to public confidence in America's government and public institutions.

Two-Party Troubles and Multi-Party Solutions

Some people, both within the general public and within political science research have proposed that the solution to this problem of decreased public confidence is the introduction of more political parties into government by moving away from the two-party system that America has had since its inception towards a multi-party system. A party system is a systemic relationship between the viability of political parties, the number of political parties, constitutional law, and electoral law. It's typically named for the number of viable parties within the system. Those who advocate introducing a multi-party system say that America's two-party system has failed to decentralize power, failed to represent the people adequately, and causes political polarization. On the other hand, they claim that a multi-party system will help improve public confidence in government by encouraging greater political competition as more than just two candidates would be viable in elections, discourage partisanship because parties would need to cooperate more to pass bills, and increase representation for people whose positions are not covered under the two-party system. Would a multi-party system really inspire greater public confidence than a Two-party system?

The Analysis

    I wanted to look into this claim that a multi-party system would improve public confidence in government, so I did the research comparing public confidence in various government institutions across different types of party systems. I used election data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union and International Foundation for Electoral Systems in order to categorize every country into five party systems: nations without any viable parties, nations with only one political party, nations with a single dominant political party, nations with two major political parties, and nations with more than two viable parties. I then used polling data from the World Values Survey to receive about nearly 400,000 responses from people around the world to questions about their confidence in the police, civil services, elections, political parties, the legislature, and the government as a whole. Using the public confidence in each government institution separately as a dependent variable and the party systems as independent variables, I ran regressions to see the relationship between public confidence and the party systems, compared to the relationship between public confidence and the two-party system.

    The results of the regressions are included below for the reader's convenience:

  

The data above suggests two major things. The first thing it suggests is that political parties do have a significant impact on the public’s confidence in government. The research also suggests that establishing a multi-party system would not give the desired effect of increased confidence in government, rather it would likely decrease the amount of confidence the average American has in government even more. Multi-party nations reported less confidence in all aspects of government institutions, except elections, than two-party systems and overall was responsible for a 0.413 decrease in public confidence compared to a two-party system. The data also suggests that the more concentrated political power is in smaller amounts of political parties, the more public confidence there would be. 

What does this Mean?

Using this data we can know that the solution to America’s distrust of her public institutions is not the abolition of the two-party system. While it may seem on the surface that more parties would increase confidence in government, there are certain aspects of the multi-party system that make it ineffective at creating confidence. Although the multi-party system would seem to promote less corruption, more competition, and less polarization. In doing so, it also promotes inefficiency, instability, and other avenues for the possible failure of representation as parties negotiate on their campaign promises in order to secure government positions in coalitions. For these reasons, multi-party systems fail to inspire public confidence in government as well as two-party systems currently do.