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The Teacher
In the 1996 Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episode "Citizen Kang," the aliens Kodos and Kang kidnap and create replicates of presidential candidates Bob Dole (R) and Bill Clinton (D). At a joint appearance just before the election, Homer exposes them as the "hideous space reptiles" they are. Kodos (or is it Kang?) states, "It's true. We are aliens, but what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system. You'll have to vote for one of us." The audience murmurs its grudging agreement until someone says, "Well I believe I'll vote for a third party candidate." Kang (or is it Kodos?) retorts, "Go ahead: throw your vote away!" As the camera pans the audience Ross Perot punches out his straw hat. (Kang wins the election.)
Undergraduate students often feel like members of that crowd--forced into a choice between the "lesser of two evils." I have yet to teach an introductory American politics class without at least one student expressing a longing for the choices offered by multiparty systems or the belief that a strong third party (especially an independent or moderate party) could solve many of the perceived problems in US politics.1With the 2012 presidential election rapidly approaching, these concerns are likely to be more salient, and students are more likely to ask questions about why the United States has just two major political parties.
Political science offers several explanations for why the United States has a two-party system and why party systems vary across countries. Although these explanations generally fall into two categories--institutional explanations that focus on the structure of and rules governing a country's electoral system and sociological explanations that focus on the society's underlying social divisions (Ware 1995)--students frequently find the number of explanations, as well as their complexity, overwhelming.2The scholarship of teaching and learning has recently emphasized active learning to solve problems like this (Angelo and Cross 1993; Kolb 1984). Through techniques such as role-playing games and simulations, students act out the course material, making its logic and processes their own, rather than remaining passive recipients. Active learning can help students retain more information as well as increase their enjoyment of class activities (Wedig 2010).
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