Beyond Donkeys and Elephants is an edited volume that explores the fortunes of various American third parties, as well as their roles within the American political system. It presents a fresh perspective on the prospects of third parties in the United States and provides a range of insights that make it an important contribution to this literature.

Beyond Donkeys and Elephants echoes many of the main themes within the American third-party literature, which I argue is primarily driven by two questions: Why does the United States have one of the few remaining two-party systems in the world? And how permanent is this lack of multiparty democracy? But at the same time, it takes a different approach than most scholarly books on this topic. Much of the scholarly output on American third parties explores these questions by focusing on large national trends, often focusing their research on presidential or congressional elections. Beyond Donkeys and Elephants instead explores the politics of individual third parties or third-party behavior in specific states. This approach, and the expertise of the authors in this volume, add significantly to our understanding of why third parties are so weak and under what circumstances they might gain more influence in American politics.

Indeed, a careful read of the introduction by the editor Richard Davis suggests that this book is not simply a collection of chapters about various third parties. Although he begins with what might seem like a standard account of American third parties, including a discussion of various barriers facing these organizations, he moves his analysis to the collapse of two-party systems in two other first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral systems: Canada and the United Kingdom. He also presents significant survey research results showing that Americans, and especially millennials, are far less supportive of the major parties than they used to be and that many support an increased role for third parties. Davis’s point, as I understand it, and which I agree with, is that the long-term existence of the American two-party system is not as assured as many political scientists assume. To understand the weakness of American third parties, an important approach would be to examine individual third parties within the particular states they function.

To undertake this exploration, the book examines third parties from two angles. In Part I, the chapters examine specific multistate parties: the Libertarians, the Greens, the Working Families Party, and the American Constitution Party. Part II focuses on state parties, though in truth these chapters could have been divided between studies of individual third parties and analyses of the party systems within individual states. The chapters tend to be rich in detail, providing readers significant information about the history and trajectory of each party or party system within a state.

One common theme across a number of chapters, especially those about multistate third parties, is an intra-party tension between pragmatic and idealistic wings. For example, in his chapter on the Libertarian Party, Christopher Devine argues that this tension is a central, and largely detrimental, characteristic of Libertarian intra-party politics. This conflict often plays out in the party’s decision making when selecting a presidential nominee. A good example, as described by Devine, was the debate over whether to nominate Bob Barr for president. The more pragmatic wing supported Barr’s nomination, because he had gained fame as a Republican member of Congress who helped drive the Clinton impeachment. The more idealistic wing was hesitant, since Barr held positions, such as sponsoring the Defense of Marriage Act and opposing legalizing marijuana, that conflicted with libertarian ideology. Barr, as it turned out, received only 0.4% of the vote. Devine provides evidence of multiple cases like this.

Other authors show that this pragmatism-versus-idealism split played out differently for other third parties. Steven Lem’s analysis of the Greens, for example, includes a discussion on how the party was divided between those wanting a centralized organization that could battle for political gain and those who argued that a decentralized structure would more closely fit the philosophy behind green politics. He also discussed how the Greens were consistently dogged by conflict between Green Party organizations, specifically the Association of Green State Parties and the Greens/Green Party USA.

Of even more interest, from my standpoint, are the chapters on state party systems. The three states explored are Vermont, Minnesota, and New York, with good reason: these are states in which third parties play a much more significant role than across most of the country. In his chapter on Vermont, Bertram Johnson argues that standard explanations for the strength of third parties (notably, multimember districts and the use of fusion, or allowing a candidate to be co-nominated by multiple parties) do not explain the strength of third parties there. Instead, he argues that the key to third-party success in Vermont is that its political institutions are unusually accessible by activists, especially at the local level, because of the widespread use of town meetings. In other words, third parties have greater mechanisms for building support and gaining power, which they did as they gradually have risen in stature since the early 1970s. In this way, Bernie Sanders is not an oddity in Vermont, though he was a trailblazer in the rise of third parties.

Melanie Freeze gives similar insight in her chapter on the rise of the Independence Party of Minnesota. Although she explores a range of reasons why third parties tend to be more successful in that state, she argues that the main reason for their current success is resources. Specifically, she argues, Minnesota has a relatively low ballot-access barrier for becoming registered as a major party; once a party gets that designation, its candidates become eligible for the state’s generous public finance program, which also limits the spending of any candidate who participates. Effectively, a key to the strength of third parties in this state, relative to their performance in most of the country, is that Minnesota levels the resource playing field.

The one weakness of the book lies not in the new information it contributes, but at times in its references to long-standing explanations for third-party weakness, which have been challenged recently. A good example is Duverger’s Law, which several authors discussed, often with detailed explanations of what Maurice Duverger wrote in Political Parties in the 1950s, but without reference to more recent debates on this theory within the electoral systems literature (e.g., in Matthew Soberg Shugart and Rein Taagepera’s Votes from Seats, 1989). Although most electoral systems scholars probably continue to support Duverger’s Law, there is also a softening of the argument that often seems absent when Americanists, including in this book, try to explain why the Democratic and Republican Parties have overwhelming dominance in American politics. This is unfortunate, in my view, because this more recent research strengthens many of the arguments put forward in this book.

This issue however does not take away from the value of Beyond Donkeys and Elephants. Its strength lies in the richness of its specific analyses, which I believe provide valuable insight to anyone interested in the future of the American two-party system.