Could Hispanic voters form a viable third party in the U.S.?

By Kent R. Kroeger (February 12, 2019)

Political scientists have long accepted that the formation of a viable third party in the U.S. is inhibited by its winner-take-all (simple-majority, single ballot) electoral system.

At the presidential-level, the electoral college doesn’t help either.

Yet, most voters, at some point disenchanted with the nominees of the two major parties, have probably dabbled with the thought of voting for a third-party candidate.

Actually voting for a third-party candidate rarely ever happens.

In his 1963 cross-national study of electoral systems, Political Parties, French sociologist Maurice Duverger concluded:

The simple-majority single-ballot system favours the two-party system…this approaches the most nearly perhaps to a true sociological law.

Until recently, Durverger’s Law had been one of political science’s few durable laws. In recent years, however, research by Patrick Dunleavy and Rekha Diwakar argues that the dominance of the two-party system in the U.S. cannot be explained by Durverger’s Law or its later derivatives. The U.S. two-party system is unique from a cross-national perspective.