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The reason political parties exist — why democracy can’t exist without them — is that they simplify the complexity of politics to make it accessible to regular people who can’t spend much time on politics. With parties, you don’t have to know every view of every politician on every subject, you just need to make a judgment about a handful of brand names. In fact, party labels work just like branding in the consumer world: if you see a McDonalds on the side of the highway, you know what the food is like even if you’ve never set foot in the store.

Yes, politics is and should be about more than consumer choices in a marketplace; people can and should use "voice," not just "exit," to affect the political world; they can and should become active in politics directly. But since most people can’t spend most of their time on politics, the consumer-type mode of political action will always determine a large, usually decisive, block of votes in every election, so it can’t be ignored. (Even I have to rely on labels/branding to make judgments about, say, local politics, which I don’t follow much — and I spend a lot of time on politics.)

But as any economist will tell you, branding only exists because it confers market power: it makes the customer captive to the brand to a greater or lesser degree. There may be many other products out there, but the consumer only knows anything about a small handful of them. If the price goes up a bit or the quality declines a bit, the customer will still stick with "their" brand because learning about all the competing products is impossible, or at least costly — just as it would be impossible for a voter to learn about every individual politician’s views on every subject — and nobody wants to take the risk of spending their money on a product that might turn out to be worthless or worse. The very existence of branding always limits competition at least to some extent. But the *degree* to which brands can exploit their customers in this way depends on how easy it is for competing brands to enter the market.

The US political system is unique in the obstacles it places in the way of competition to the two major parties. There’s a popular myth that says this is just the result of our winner-take-all election system (as opposed to, say, a proportional representation system). No, the barriers are much greater — *much, much greater* — in the US than in any other first-past the post system. You can see this by adding up the "third party" (i.e. non-top-two) share of the vote in the 435 US House districts and comparing the numbers with, say, the 338 ridings in the Canadian House of Commons or the 650 constituencies in the UK House of Commons. 

Here’s a chart that does that for the three countries’ most recent elections:

For third parties to win less than 5% of the vote in *any* district in *any* election is almost unheard of in Canada and the UK; in the US it happens in 90% of districts in every election year. Clearly "something" other than winner-take-all rules is squelching potential competition to the two major parties. I talked about some of institutional aspects in this in an article I wrote a few years ago.

But any social phenomenon of this magnitude is bound to have a "cultural" expression as well, and in this case it’s the maniacally emotional degree of personal identification politically engaged Americans (a group that obviously includes professional pundits) have with their party — in other words, brand loyalty. I don’t have any academic references for you, sorry, this is based on general observation; but I suspect many comparative political scientists would agree with me that Americans have a degree of emotional identification with their party *as a party* that is rarely encountered in other countries.

This has become harder to see as US parties have become more ideological: loyalty to "party" and loyalty to "worldview" are becoming harder to separate. But in the days when US parties were "non-ideological," Americans’ mania for party attachments was if anything even more glaring: in the 19thC you were a Democrat/Republican because the people around you, the people you grew up with, were Democrats/Republicans, and it was often hard for people to put into words why they voted the way they did. (Nobody thought Irish slumdwellers, genteel southern professionals, free-trading Wall Street bankers, and communicants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints all voted the same way because they shared a common worldview. But nobody could explain why they *did* in fact vote the same way, least of all the Irish slumdwellers.)

The conventional wisdom is that the recent ideologization of the US parties has strengthened their hold on their voters: now that the "other" party really does stand for everything you hate, the specter of the terrible consequences to come if the election is thrown to the other side keeps the disaffected in line. But, for one thing, it’s not obvious that electoral defeat was any less personally distressing to the "non-ideological" loyal Democrats of 1880 than it is to the ideologically loyal Democrats of today.

And secondly, in the long run, by teaching voters to see politics as contest of worldviews, not just of competing logos, it will probably undermine their ability to maintain the duopoly. Ideology creates the mass basis for an alternative object of identification that can come into conflict, in voters’ minds, with loyalty to the party-as-mere-logo. Nowadays, more and more voters judge their party against a more exalted standard — navigating by the stars in the sky rather than the other ships in the sea, as it were.

But if the parties nowadays are just as monopolistic as they’ve always been; and if, on top of that, it’s now counterproductive for disgruntled rank-and-file voters not just to threaten them with staying home, but even to disparage them on social media — what *does* influence the behavior of party politicians?

This is kind of like the old economist’s question about competitive consumer markets: if every seller has to charge the "going market price," who decides what the going price is? If nobody is able to influence the parties, what influences the parties? What explains the big decisions they make, the choices on crucial issues that we see them make in front of us?

I admit, I don’t have the answer to this question, only guesses.