Why Do Third Parties Form Against Duverger’s Law? The Case from the Post-Civil War U.S.

Starting a new political party is always a costly endeavor, but it is a well-known fact that doing so and challenging the existing two-party system usually ends up in miserable electoral defeat under the first-past-the-post voting system, at least in most circumstances. If this is the case, why would anyone want to launch a third party in such a situation in the first place? Employing the concepts of organizational repertoire and organizational form, hitherto used primarily in sociological research on social movements, this paper seeks an answer to this question by investigating why a couple of reformist social movements, prohibitionists and labor reformers, began forming their own political parties several years after the Civil War. In the course of analysis, two subproblems to the original research question are addressed. First, why did the social movement leaders think creating a political party was better suited to achieve their reform than their previous mode of action? Second, even if forming a political party was superior to their earlier organizational form in terms of policymaking, why did they think that they could win elections once they formed a political party? My analysis, which treats these reformers as utility-maximizing actors rather than narrow-sighted zealots, reveals that the political experience of the immediate past, namely the rise of the Republican Party and its conduct of the war, served as an organizational model that changed their views on political parties and party system change in a positive way. This experience convinced the reformers to follow its course by starting a party founded on a reformist political issue, thereby realizing their reform through federal public policy after a party realignment, just as the Republicans did, in the reformers’ view, with the slavery issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]