Earlier this year, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez set off a minor media controversy with an elementary political observation: “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.” Party loyalists howled in protest, but she was absolutely right. Our uniquely terrible party system shoehorns at least four different potential parties — social democrats, neoliberals, country club Republicans, and social conservatives — into just two. Even when one of the parties has unified control of government, this does not necessarily translate into a coherent governing agenda. As former House Speaker Paul Ryan complained before setting off for greener pastures in the private sector, “we basically run a coalition government without the efficiency of a parliamentary system.”

The upshot is a dysfunctional political system that nobody likes, which cannot address the country’s most pressing problems, and yet is seemingly immune to even the most cosmetic changes. Roughly 40 percent of Americans, including a supermajority of younger voters, say they want a third major party. An increasing proportion of the public identifies as politically independent. Congress is widely reviled, and surveys regularly find it to be less popular than head lice, hemorrhoids, and sexually transmitted infections. It’s no wonder Donald Trump is president and Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg are leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Each, in their different ways, represents the widely felt yearning for an outsider, whether counterfeit or genuine, to blow up the system and break the wretched impasse of US politics.

According to Lee Drutman, the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, the only way out is by adopting a proportional multiparty electoral system similar to those found in many other countries. Drutman calls for an expanded House of Representatives elected through multi-winner ranked choice voting, a Senate elected through single-winner ranked choice voting, the abolition of primary elections, and ranked choice voting for the presidency. In his view, today’s toxic partisanship is the product of a fundamental mismatch between the country’s winner-take-all electoral system and its anti-majoritarian governing institutions.