Advantages Of Minor Parties

want implemented-in return for joining a coalition. Major parties need the minor parties and are therefore willing to bargain.
Thus the multiparty system favors the existence of minor parties by giving them incentives to persevere and disproportionate power if they will help form a government. In some multiparty parliamentary systems, parties run slates of candidates for legislative positions, and winners are determined, in which the parties receive a proportion of the legislators corresponding to their proportion of the vote. In our single-member district, system, only the candidate with the most votes in a district or state takes office? Because a party does not gain anything by finishing second, minor parties in a two-party system
can
rarely overcome the assumption that a vote for them is a wasted vote:a For this reason an election system in which the winner is the candidate in a single-member district with the plurality deciding the winner, there is tendency to have two parties.
This regularity is called Duuerger's
Although we have a primarily two- party system in the United States, we also have minor parties, sometimes called third parties.
Candidate-based parties that arise around a candidate usually disappear when the charismatic personality does. In most states, candidates can get their names on the ballot as an Independent or minor party candidate by securing the required number of signatures on a nomination petition. This is hard to do.
In 1992, Ross Perot spent his own money to build an organization of volunteers who put his name on the ballot in all 50 states. Minor party candidates such as Ralph Nader in
2000 secured their nominations as candidates of existing minor parties.
Minor parties that are organized around an ideology usually persist over a longer time than those built around a particular leader. Communist, Prohibition, Libertarian,
Right to Life, and Green parties are of the ideological type. Minor parties of both types come and go, and several minor parties usually run in any given election. Some parties arise around a single issue, like the Right to Life party active in states like New York.
The Green Party is another example of an ideological third
party.
Major parties have criticized minor parties as "spoilers," diverting votes away from the major party candidate and costing that candidate the election. Nader was accused of doing this to Al Gore in
2000, just as Perot was accused of costing
George Bush reelection in 1992. Minor parties have had an indirect influence in our country by drawing attention to controversial issues and by organizing such groups as the antislavery and civil rights movements.!" Ross Perot, for example, elevated the importance of balanced budgets in 1992 and made it more difficult for George Bush to attack Bill Clinton on character issues.'! However, minor parties have never won the presidency
(see Table 5-1) or more than a handful of congressional seats.F They have done only somewhat better in gubernatorial elections.P They have never shaped national policy from inside the government, and their influence on national policy and on the platforms of the two major