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The Two-Party System In The United States

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The United States two-party system has been in effect for the majority of the United States existence. The Republican and Democratic parties have been the leaders in funding and overall influential presence, leaving little room for minor parties to try and squeeze in their own foothold. The Electoral System favors a two-party system as well. The two-parties have not always been the same however. They are the product of years of circumstantial fine tuning and ideology shifts. The majority of America though has the similar, if not the same, values and ideals for how a proper government should be run. When the United States were first conceptualized, the first and primary issue was who should have the majority of power in the states, the federal …show more content…

It is used to elect the U.S. House Representatives. An area is divided into a number of “geographically defined voting districts, each represented by a single elected official. Voters can only vote for their district’s representative, with the highest vote receiver winning election, even if he or she has received less than half of the vote. In addition to the problems endemic to all winner-take-all systems, single member plurality results create some specific difficulties of their own. First,where the boundaries of districts are drawn can have a huge effect on who is likely to win election. As a result, gerrymandering to protect incumbents or weaken political enemies is common under single member plurality systems. Second, single member plurality elections are prone to the spoiler dynamic. Where more than two viable candidates run and split the vote within a district, the “winner” of an election can often be the candidate whom the majority of voters liked least. Generally, parties will limit the number of candidates running to avoid this scenario, leaving voters with minimal choice. These dynamics essentially mean that in the vast majority of single member plurality elections, voters have no effective choice, but to ratify the candidate of the majority party in their district.”(2

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