Does Fusion Undermine American Third Parties? An Analysis of House Elections from 1870 to 2016

Abstract

Many third-party scholars argue that fusion, or the co-nomination of a single candidate by multiple parties, strengthens American third parties. They argue that a widespread use of fusion in the late nineteenth century fueled third-party support, that the prohibition of fusion by most states around 1900 undermined third parties, and that the continued use of fusion in New York State is a primary reason why third parties remain strong there. In this paper, which is based on a district-level analysis of all elections to the House of Representatives since 1870, I argue the opposite. In recent elections, third-party candidates have fared worse, not better, in fusion states, and the historical evidence shows that a widespread use of fusion has consistently led to the destruction of third parties. The evidence presented here suggests that the primary impact of fusion is that it helps major parties co-opt third parties, and therefore, the more effective strategy for third parties would be to instead challenge the major parties more aggressively. The paper also suggests, on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Caucus for a New Political Science, how statistically driven research can be better integrated into the Caucus’s mission to make the study of politics more relevant for progressive change.

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS), held on 26–28 February 2017 at South Padre Island, Texas. I wish to thank Drs Rie Debabrata Tamas, Manfred Steger, Kenneth Janda, and Garrett Glasgow as well as the reviewers and editors for their feedback.

Notes

¹ David B. Reynolds, Taking the High Road: Communities Organize for Economic Change (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), p. 296.

² Harold Meyerson, “Dan Cantor’s Machine,” American Prospect, (November 4, 2014), available online at: https://prospect.org/article/meet-working-families-party-whose-ballot-line-play-new-york.

³ Peter H. Argersinger, “‘A Place on the Ballot’: Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws,” The American Historical Review 85:2 (1980), pp. 287–306; Howard A. Scarrow, “Duverger’s Law, Fusion, and the Decline of American ‘Third’ Parties.” The Western Political Quarterly 39:4 (1986), pp. 634–47; Richard Winger, “Institutional Obstacles to a Multiparty System,” Multiparty Politics in America: People, Passions, and Power, in eds. Paul S. Herrnson and John C. Green (Lanham, MI: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), pp. 159–71; J. David Gillespie, Challenges to Duopoly: Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 2012), pp. 28–30; Lisa Jane Disch, The Tyranny of the Two-Party System (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 39–42.

⁴ The data for this analysis from 1870 to 1996 was collected from Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), pp. 217–807. The data for all House elections from 1998 to 2014 was collected from Federal Election Commission, “Election Results,” available online at: https://www.fec.gov/pubrec/electionresults.shtml. The data from the 2016 election was collected from The Green Papers, “2016 General Election,” available online at: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/G16/.

⁵ Conversely, a candidate nominated by a third party and a major party is considered to be a major party candidate. Many third-party scholars define a third-party candidate as any general election candidate, including independents, not nominated by a major party. See, for example, Steven J. Rosenstone, Roy L. Behr, and Edward H Lazarus, Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 9–10. I argue that there are two problems with this definition. The first is that calling an independent a third-party candidate violates the basic notion of a political party, which most party scholars define as an organization that runs candidates for elected office under a single label. See, for example, Janda, Kenneth. Political Parties: A Cross-National Survey (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1980), p. 5. Moreover, while there was dramatic rises and drops in activity and support for third-party candidates over the past century and a half, the percent of independent candidates has been consistently very low since the Civil War.

⁶ There are varying types of fusion candidates. Some are co-nominated by multiple third parties but no major party, and others are co-nominated by both the Democratic and Republican parties and sometimes additional third parties. The most common, and most studied, form of fusion is when candidates are co-nominated by a major party and at least one third party. This type made up eighty-five percent of all fusion candidacies since 1870 and ninety-six percent since 2000. For the remainder of this article, the term “fusion” will refer to this type of candidate.

⁷ Bernard Tamas and Matthew Dean Hindman, “Ballot Access Laws and the Decline of American Third-Parties,” Election Law Journal 13:2 (2014), p. 262.

⁸ Melissa R. Michelson and Scott J. Susin, “What’s in a Name: The Power of Fusion Politics in a Local Election,” Polity 36:2 (2004), p. 308.

⁹ Ibid., 301–21.

¹⁰ There are two other ways that a cross-nomination by a third party can gain votes on a separate ballot line. (1) A voter who was going to vote for the major party candidate anyway does so on the third-party ballot line. In this case, the candidate gained no votes, and the switch to the third-party line is symbolic. (2) A voter who was going to vote for the other major party candidate switches parties because of the third-party cross-nomination. Michelson and Susin discuss all four of these possibilities in detail. Ibid., pp. 303–7.

¹¹ Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. Trans. Barbara and Robert North (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1954), pp. 224–6.

¹² During the nineteenth century, US citizens generally voted by asking for a ballot from representatives of a political party and then dropping it into a box in full view of everyone in the polling location. In order to reduce voter intimidation, states passed laws requiring that all elections be conducted through secret ballot, as they are today. Because this reform was developed in Australia, it is often referred to as the “Australian ballot.”

¹³ Scarrow, “Duverger’s Law, Fusion, and the Decline of American “Third” Parties,” p. 634.

¹⁴ Argersinger, “A Place on the Ballot,” p. 288.

¹⁵ Disch, Tyranny of the Two-Party System.

¹⁶ Jonathan H. Martin, Empowering Progressive Third Parties in the United States: Defeating Duopoly, Advancing Democracy (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), p. 77.

¹⁷ In southern states like Alabama, Texas, and especially North Carolina, the Populists often followed the opposite strategy by co-nominating Republican candidates as a challenge to the dominant Democratic Party there. See Helen G. Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894–1901 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), pp. 1–7; Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, pp. 313–20.

¹⁸ Kenneth Waltzer “The Party and the Polling Place: American Communism and an American Labor Party in the 1930s,” Radical History Review 23 (Spring 1980), pp. 104–129.

¹⁹ NYS Board of Elections, “Governor/Lt. Governor Election Returns,” (November 4, 2014), available online at: https://www.elections.ny.gov/2016ElectionResults.html.

²⁰ N.Y. Election Law §6–142 (Consol. 2016).

²¹ Tamas and Hindman, “Ballot Access Laws and the Decline of American Third-Parties,” p. 267.

²² Charles Tilly and Sidney G. Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 2nd Edition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).

²³ Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone, Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, & Republican Resurgence (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

²⁴ New York State Board of Elections, “2016 Election Results,” available online at: https://www.elections.ny.gov/2016ElectionResults.html.

²⁵ Likely, the first to discover the rise in third-party activity in House races were Christian Collett and Martin P. Wattenberg, “Strategically Unambitious: Minor Party and Independent Candidates in the 1996 Congressional Elections,” in John C. Green and Daniel M. Shea, The State of the Parties (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 231–48.

²⁶ Tamas and Hindman, “Ballot Access Laws and the Decline of American Third-Parties.”

²⁷ Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 1–15.

²⁸ Federal Election Commission, “Official 2016 Presidential General Election Results,” (January 15, 2017), available online at: https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2016/2016presgeresults.pdf.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Rapoport and Stone, Three’s a Crowd.

³¹ David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 20–25.