What role do minor parties play in American politics? Provide examples
What limitations have kept them from achieving major-party status? Given the growing partisan division between Democrats and Republicans, do you think the role of minor parties could expand in the future?
What will be an ideal response?
An ideal response will:
1, Detail that minor parties sometimes articulate new ideas that major parties later adopt, and they can change the outcome of a presidential election by changing the outcome of electoral votes.
2, Provide an example of a minor party affecting the outlook of the major parties, such as Ross Perot's crusade for a balanced budget in 1992 nudging the major parties toward a budget agreement that eliminated annual federal budget deficits for a while, and an example of a minor party affecting the outcome of an election, such as the 1992 election when the votes that went to Perot took votes away from the Republican Party, which allowed Bill Clinton to win.
3, Explain the institutional limitations that have prevented minor parties from becoming major parties, including the single-district, first-past-the-post elections in which the winner takes all; variations in requirements for ballot access between states and the large number of signatures needed in some states; and the difficulty of obtaining public funding.
4, Mention that voter attitudes also limit the success of minor parties, as voters see voting for minor parties as a wasted vote.
5, Propose how minor parties' role might expand or contract in the future. Answers will vary, but an ideal answer might note that it is unlikely a minor party will become a major one. First, major parties are becoming better organized and more ideologically distinctive, so voters know fairly clearly what they will get when a party is elected to power; and second, even though third parties often emerge when the major parties are highly divisive, as they are now, throughout history minor parties (with the exception of the Republican Party) have usually been absorbed by one of the major parties that co-opts their issues and supporters (the Tea Party being a fairly recent example).
You might also like to view...
According to the authors, a major dispute arose within the Obama White House that
A. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was too timid as a bureaucratic leader. B. Obama regularly ignored the advice of his Council of Economic Advisers. C. Obama overly relied on the competitive management style. D. top female staffers felt marginalized by more influential male staffers. E. Obama was temperamental and hostile toward aides who brought him bad news.
A major factor in the elite approach explanation of
policymaking is: A) the effective conspiracies among people who hold power. B) the apathy of most people regarding policy decisions. C) the shared interests of the elite and the mass. D) the fact that the elite is dependent of the mass.
What is the consequence of people demanding their "rights" in the absence of a corresponding sense of responsibility?
A) Demands on government become impossible. B) A decline in business always results. C) The growth of distrust in government fades. D) Volunteerism grows.
One of the fundamental problems for government is reconciling preferences because
a. our preferences are generally closely linked to self-interest. b. the preferences most Americans hold are based on religious values. c. a diversity of preferences is natural among citizens. d. there are usually only one or two dominant interests in society.