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Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. By Drutman Lee. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 368 p. $27.95 cloth.
One of the more distinct features of Lee Drutman’s Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020) is that it is an advocacy book. Unlike many political science books that spend most of their chapters describing a phenomenon and then tossing out a few related policy recommendations in the conclusion, this one is guided by a specific vision of electoral reform. Drutman is transparent from the book’s opening that he believes a multiparty system would produce far healthier democratic outcomes for the United States, and he offers a set of possible reforms to produce that outcome.
The current state of hyper-partisanship in US politics, Drutman argues, is crippling to democratic processes. The problem, he claims, is not so much that the main parties are too far apart, but rather that such hyper-partisanship does not work well with US governing systems. What is more, he argues, the problems are getting worse. Each new year brings further polarization. Much as Lilliana Mason (Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, 2018) and Ezra Klein (Why We’re Polarized, 2020) have noted in their recent works, political issues and identities that once cut across party lines now serve to reinforce those divisions. And it is not hard to imagine how the future in this system looks. For example, a Democratic victory in the 2020 presidential race would produce profound efforts to undermine, delegitimize, and obstruct the new administration’s agenda; Republicans possibly winning at least one congressional chamber in 2022; further years of gridlock; and continued decline in Americans’ faith in their government. This is the “doom loop” that Drutman seeks to break.
Unlike many other reform...