Conundrum

[Confuzzled4]

Technically speaking there are third party candidates and write ins; however, anyone running other than a Republican or Democrat has a significantly harder time getting on the ballot in many states. The libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, is the only third party candidate likely to get on the ballot in 50 states. Jill Stein of the Green Party will be on the ballot in many states, but almost certainly not all 50. Look up the 1992 election with Ross Perot, an anomaly in the U.S. election process.

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If you are not entirely joking (), there is a logic behind it.

Presidential systems, surely most people know, are centered around one person that is both head of state and head of government, working with a personally appointed cabinet to exert executive power. Presidents get directly elected through popular vote or through the ever complicated American system of Electoral College (which uses the popular vote in a different way).

Unlike in parliamentary systems, the legislative power has no saying in how the head of government is elected and elections for Congress and President are independent from each other (and in most cases, intentionally scheduled to not overlap). People can (more or less) directly vote their head of government into office and it just may happen that the Legislative and Executive branches end up dominated by opposite political factions.

So, for one person to be able to gain power, he or she depends on gaining (more or less) direct popular support and the chances are greater for that to happen when there are less candidates to choose from. It is only logic, then, that in most cases, only a very few candidates are presented.

What usually happens in presidential systems is that to have better chances to achieve majority for their proposed candidate, they rely on binary blocks (trinary at best) made up of either 2 major parties or a conglomerate of parties gravitating around common ideology (usually liberal lefties and conservatives righties)

In the American case, as you know, a fair amount of candidates started the race especially on the republican side and only 2 will finish it, when they are finally announced as the official candidates by their respective parties. But before that a number of processes of "filtering" have to take place, namely caucuses and primaries.

This follows the historical stance of democrats and republicans as the major parties in US. Any other party will never gain any substantial support, unless something shiftes within the society that affects the status quo of the parties.


In this little land of mine, the system currently in place is less complicated than the American case, simply because Presidents will be elected directly from popular vote if they reach a (50+1)%. If there are more than 2 candidates and none gains that absolute majority, the top 2 voted will go on a second "round" and the winner of that popular vote takes the presidency.

Usually, the left leaning and right leaning parties, which are numerous on each side, form blocks to present a candidate. Although that candidate can be from any of the parties of that block, they appeal to the people by reaching an internal compromise between the various factions and presenting a common program. The candidate is presented after a consensus or internal primary, althogh recently they are trying to gain more legitimacy by conducting popular primaries.

There are other candidates (last elections we had 9 in total) outside of the major blocks, but they usually only serve to dilute the vote. Those diluted votes mean that often the top 2 voted (always resulting to be the ones of the 2 major blocks) must go on a second round of voting.