Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction

PART I: Origins
1 - What the Framers Got Right and What They Got Wrong
2 - The Paradox of Partisanship
3 - The Great Reordering of the Parties
4 - The Collpase of the Four-Party System and the Rise of Zero-Sum Politics

PART II: The Contemporary Crisis
5 - The New Era of Toxic Politics
6 - All Politics Is Conflict; Not All Confllict Is Toxic
7 - The Breakdown of Political Fairness

PART III: The Solution
8 - Designing the Save American Democracy Act
9 - Two Few: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America
10 - The Politics of Electoral Reform
11 - The Future of American Democracy

Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes Index

About the Author

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying (Oxford University Press, 2015) and winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association's Robert A. Dahl Award, given for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy." In addition, he writes regularly for Polyarchy, a Vox blog. Drutman also teaches in the Center for Advanced
Governmental Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

Highly Recommended.
*S.E. Schier, emeritus, Carleton College, CHOICE*

Lee Drutman is one of our most perceptive political thinkers, and this book is the type of fresh, clear-thinking we need to learn how to live with our age of partisan polarization, rather than simply to complain while it destroys us.
*Ezra Klein, Editor-at-Large and Co-Founder, Vox Media*

American democracy is badly broken, but the enormity of fixing it so often seems impossible. Lee Drutman offers an accessible, lively, and deeply compelling antidote to despair, giving us a new way to think about American political history and to understand what is possible. This is a book of refreshingly big ideas that also provides a pragmatic path forward to a multi-party democracy that works.
*Anne Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America*

Lee Drutman's Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop is a lucid account of how our broken party system has undermined our constitutional order, and how rising ethnic and class antagonisms threaten to make matters worse in the decades to come. Drawing on cutting-edge social science and the wisdom of the founding generation, he offers a series of bold, unconventional reforms designed to foster a healthier, more durable American democracy, and that merit close attention.
*Reihan Salam, President, Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor of The Atlantic*

Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America, writes that moving to a multiparty democracy can create fair representation, reduce partisan gridlock, lead to more positive incremental change, and increase both voter turnout and voter satisfaction. And through concrete reforms, like implementing ranked-choice voting and expanding the size of the House of Representatives, Drutman lays out the path forward.
*Washington Monthly*

The force of his argument, rigorous and limpidly expressed, is almost irresistible. He emerges as one of the keenest observers of America's political pathologies-if only because he questions what others take for granted. Tracing the arc of the doom loop, he also spies a way out.
*The Economist*

Lee Drutman has quickly established himself as a first-rate scholar and public intellectual: deeply learned and with an ambition and capacity to speak to both academics and broader publics. He is at the very top of his cohort in thinking creatively and writing gracefully about the problems of American democracy. His new book is a brilliant analysis of our toxic partisanship and a transformational agenda of electoral reform for breaking out of it.
*Thomas Mann, Senior Fellow, Brookings, and Resident Scholar, Institute of Governmental Studies, UC Berkeley*

Whatever your politics, Lee Drutman's profound and important new book will leave you thinking differently about our polarized moment and the possible paths to recovery." -Yuval Levin, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, and Editor of National Affairs

Lee Drutman is one of the most shrewd and most creative new voices in political science and an engaged citizen deeply worried about our democracy. Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop is a welcomed recess from gloomy political punditry and offers an evidenced-based solution to challenges we face. I continue to see advantages to two-party systems, but Drutman has offered a rigorous and brilliantly argued case that scrapping it is a national imperative." -E J Dionne, Professor of the Foundations of Democracy and Culture, McCourt School of Public Policy and Government Department, Georgetown University

Lee Drutman is one of the foremost students of American politics today. His new book will bring his formidable research to bear on the central issue affecting American democracy, namely, our intense polarization and the possibility that our democracy could break down altogether if it continues to intensify. He goes against conventional wisdom that says parties and partisanship are to blame, but points to the need to open up space beyond our current two-party system." -Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and Mosbacher Director, Stanford University

No one has written in a more penetrating or insightful way about the state of our politics than Lee Drutman. He is able to combine real insights with compelling data and do so in a fashion that professionals appreciate and the lay reader can understand. I have no doubt his book will have broad resonance for a wide range of readers.
*Norm Ornstein, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute*

[A] sophisticated yet accessible volume.
*CHOICE*

Rather than hoping to find ways to fix our system of government, read this book for what's in the middle: a thorough, incisive, and passionate diagnosis of how we broke it in the first place.
*Washington Independent Review of Books*