why POTUS is never an independent

No TL;DR here as it's just a short one! 😀

I’ve seen a lot of discussion this week around why it is that an independent candidate has never had any real success in running for President in the US (bar perhaps George Wallace in ‘68 who you should all read about if you haven’t already). Some might quite rightly say that it’s because of the ground game, the access to funding, various regulations, and perhaps even a strong force of inertia. But they’d be missing the opportunity to point out a big fundamental law of of political science that makes any independent candidate damned to fail before they’re lucky enough to encounter those issues.

That law is Duverger’s Law.

Duverger’s Law says that two party systems emerge in states where there is plurality voting (ie. The person with the most votes wins) and where the districts are single member (ie. There is one elected candidate per district).

The reason for this, says Duverger, is that in these systems (contrasted with proportional representation, for eg.), people aren’t incentivised to vote for minority candidates because they don’t want to waste their votes. The reason votes would likely be wasted are that minority candidates are by definition unlikely to win because districts are only single member. Another consequence of this is that minority parties are themselves then disincentivised from forming in the first place.

And there you have it.

That’s why there are multi-party systems in countries like Germany, and two-party systems in countries like the US. It’s all down to Duverger’s Law, and it’s all a function of the voting system implemented in the state. That’s why conversations about introducing proportional representation in the United Kingdom are inherently discussions of statecraft, because changing the voting system so drastically would, according to Duverger (and the empirical data), also change the nature of government itself.

Whether or not multi-party or two-party systems are more effective at governing, and which sees a better representation of the electorate’s desires enacted, is perhaps one for another blog post…