The Consequences of a Winner-Take-All Electoral Process: A Structural Look at the Societal and Political Ills of the Modern United States

Abstract

The primary hypothesis of this paper is that the winner-take-all electoral system employed by the United States is partially responsible for many of the political problems faced by contemporary society including: chronic wage stagnation, soaring economic inequality, an extremely polarized political climate, rampant dissatisfaction with parties, and all-time low levels of trust and participation in the political system. This follows from Minimum Winning Coalition logic, which dictates that a two-party system is likely to form. Additionally, these parties are composed of coalitions of citizens with specific interests that change over time. As time goes on, the parties become divorced from their original policy roots and become policy agnostic with the main focus on winning. Parties then shift their policies in order to steal coalitions from the other party. In order to minimize voter loss from these shifts, and playing on the difficulty of policy evaluation, parties begin to rely on rhetoric instead of result which inflames humanity’s tribalistic tendencies. In our case, high costs of staying politically competitive, incentivized both parties to adopt more accommodative stances towards capital economic interests. Over time, these pro-capitalist policies resulted in the dismantling of labor unions, chronic wage stagnation, and rises in economic inequality. In addition, because the parties could no longer pivot on economic issues, they were left only to navigate around intractable social issues which results in demonizing the other party and extremely high levels of political polarization. As a potential further consequence, this polarization could lead to the low levels of trust and participation in the political system overall.