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The Debate over Realigning Elections: Where Do We Stand Now?
John C. Berg
Suffolk University/Rothermere American Institute
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I always voted at my party’s call,
And never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought for myself so little, you see,
That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Navy.
-William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, H.M.S.
Pinafore
Since the time of Gilbert and Sullivan the public has bemoaned the thoughtlessness, cor-
ruption, and lack of concern for popular needs and interests of the large political parties. In
America Theodore Lowi recently declared that “the two-party system has long been brain-dead,”
and Marvin Wattenberg has demonstrated persuasively that voters find the major parties increas-
ingly irrelevant, not only to life but even to politics.
2
For the reasons I discuss elsewhere,
3
the
major parties tend to present themselves as vague and insipid, and potential voters respond in
kind. Some fail to vote; others vote unhappily for the party they judge slightly better, of for
which they have always voted.
But sometimes the political scene is disturbed by a sudden breath of fresh air. Public in-
terest is aroused, voter turnout rises, and party loyalties are rethought—all this because one or
both parties have responded to a new issue that has new relevance to voters’ real concerns. Such
an election has the potential to define a new kind of politics, a new set of cleavages, which may
then last for decades. This phenomonen has come to be known as a critical election, one “in
which voters are . . . unusually deeply concerned, in which the extent of electoral involvement is
relatively quite high, and in which the decisive results of the voting reveal a sharp alteration of
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With grateful thanks to Suffolk University for my sabbatical leave and many happy years, to
the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford for a wonderful place to work,
and to both for financial support of my travel to this conference.
2
Theodore J. Lowi and Joseph Romance, A Republic of Parties? Debating the Two-Party System
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 3,Martin P. Wattenberg, The Decline of American
Political Parties, 1952–1996 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
3
See chapter 2 of John C. Berg,
Ralph Nader, the Greens, and the Crisis of American Politics (Lanham MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming 2004).
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Convention