MULTIPARTY QUIZ
If California had six political parties, which would you belong to?
In California, our nationalized two-party duopoly has manifested in a single-party monopoly; the Democratic Party has dominated our state legislature for 60 of the last 65 years. Yet, despite their decades-long majority, our legislature has consistently failed to adequately address Californians’ critical concerns – in particular, growing economic inequality, housing affordability, and homelessness.
Frustrated with Democrats, but still broadly too liberal for an increasingly conservative Republican Party, more Californians than ever believe more parties are needed (72%).
Fortunately, there’s a direct path to multiparty democracy in the Golden State. It’s called proportional representation, and you can learn about it by scrolling past the quiz below. But to better understand how a multiparty system would better represent your interests and preferences, inspired by Lee Drutman’s 2021 essay, please take this three-minute quiz to learn which party would suit you best if California had six parties in our state legislature.
LEARN MORE ABOUT CALIFORNIA'S POTENTIAL PARTIES IF WE HAD A SIX-PARTY STATE LEGISLATURE:
The California Democratic Labor Party prioritizes the needs of the state’s middle-and-working-class citizens. The party is in favor of increased labor protections, a strong social safety net and policies to lower costs for working families. Members range from moderate to progressive on social issues like abortion, gender and criminal justice.
WHY DO WE NEED MORE PARTIES?
Despite the Democratic Party winning 75% of the seats in California’s legislature and preserving their six-decade majority, 2024's election results also revealed that Californians aren’t as aligned with the Democratic Party as its prolonged dominance suggests.
Voters shifted to the right both in the Presidential election – ten counties that voted for Biden in 2020 flipped to Trump in 2024 – and in how they responded to the state’s ballot measures: they approved Proposition 36's tougher punishment on crimes, but rejected Proposition 33’s expansion of rent control; Proposition 6’s ban on unpaid prison labor; and Proposition 5, which would have made it easier for local governments to fund affordable housing projects.
While it’d be a stretch to say that these results indicate the emergence of a more conservative California, what they do reveal is an underlying complexity to Californians’ political preferences that our two-party system fails to capture.
In addition to the growing political divide between Democrats and Republicans, there also exist ideological factions and division within both major parties. Within the Democratic Party of CA, there’s a record of tension between the progressive and moderate wings of the party. Within the Republican Party of CA, party leaders have been torn between supporting President Trump’s national agenda versus continuing to operate as a marginalized, regional conservative party.
In most advanced democracies, on the other hand, these factions wouldn’t need to compete within the major parties to advance their agendas, but would likely form their own smaller parties instead. That’s because most advanced democracies use some form of proportional representation to elect their legislatures, a system wherein a party’s share of votes in an election earns it a share of seats in the legislature.
If California were to replace our winner-take-all election system with proportional representation, our binary two-party politics would evolve into a multiparty democracy that would better represent our interests, reflect our diversity, foster coalition-building between parties, and produce more responsive policies. Voters wouldn’t need to settle for the lesser-of-two-evils, but instead could find a party that honestly reflects their preferences, like one of the parties included in the quiz.
The argument for more parties in California – and in particular, proportional representation – overlaps considerably with the argument for representative democracy itself. Our ability to elect leaders to make decisions on our behalf is severely restricted under our current system, which oversimplifies our diversity, pits groups irrevocably against one another, and utterly fails to reflect Californians’ cooperative potential. With PR, nearly all voters’ preferences are reflected in the legislature, lawmakers are incentivized to work together, and, as a result, accountability mechanisms are built into the act of policymaking that enable the government to address our greatest challenges.
While there are multiple potential paths to adopting PR in California, perhaps most promising is our ballot initiative. With enough support, everyday Californians can champion a ballot initiative themselves that would reform our antiquated electoral system. A successful ballot measure for PR wouldn’t just increase the amount of parties representing voters in our state legislature, but in an era defined by political polarization and division, it’d be a transformative step to fulfilling the promise of representative democracy.
Created by Cosmo Garvin & Caledon Myers