secondary problem for social science is to design social institutions that can
help foster trust at both individual and societal levels.
Two-Party Systems
Genuine two-party systems are actually very rare. The classic examples have
always been held to be the Anglo-American democracies, and the USA, at least
at the federal level, is as near as exists to a genuine two-party system. Even US
presidential elections usually have several more candidates, and in the 1980
election the third party candidate, John Anderson, though ultimately getting a
very poor vote, was seen by some commentators as a serious threat earlier in
the campaign. Ross Perot, who eventually won the highest ‘third party’ vote
since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 presented an even greater threat in the
elections of the 1990s. Moreover, in the 2000 election it was considered that
Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, attracted sufficient votes from the
Democrat, Al Gore, to deprive him of victory in least one additional state, and
thereby of the presidency. Britain has never been a true two-party system since
the early years of the 20th century (and even then, only if pre-independence
Irish representation is discounted); there have always been members of parlia-
ment from several parties, and always, especially, some sort of parliamentary
Liberal party. As the dealignment of voters from the traditional two-class, two-
party model has developed, especially with a modest Liberal (now Liberal
Democrat) revival from its post-war nadir and the rise of the Scottish and
Welsh nationalists, the House of Commons cannot be described as bipartisan.
Generally, as is the case with the one party in asingle-party system, the ‘two’
parties in a two-party system tend to be so broadly based as to be almost
portmanteaus for a set of ideologically conflictual elements. The point is that
unless the socialcleavagestructure of a society is very simple indeed, there
will always be more points of view, and more sectional interests, than can
properly be represented by one or two united and homogeneous parties. The
existence, or apparent existence, of two-party systems owes more to a
combination of the greater salience of one cleavage than of the others and
an election system that is, as in the Anglo-American polities, extremely
unproportional in its representative effects.
Tyranny of the Majority
The tyranny of the majority is a phrase found in John StuartMill’sessayOn
Liberty, but is representative of a general fear found among many liberal
political thinkers in the 19th century, notably in the works ofde Tocqueville.
The idea is that liberal values, especially values of freedom of expression and
the freedom to exercise a life style of one’s own, however unconventional, as
Two-Party Systems