Reference no: EM133387318

Case Study: From the book Jansson Ch. 11 using this information : Policy advocates sometimes support, so-called third parties, such as the candidates endorsed by the Green Party in the congressional and presidential elections of 2000, 2004, and 2008. Green Party candidates were considerably more radical than candidates from the major parties on domestic, environmental,' and international fronts. By providing an alternative to the existing parties, third parties have the potential to push established parties to become more progressive. And some progressives hope that a third party might displace one of the major parties, providing voters with a truly progressive alternative. Third parties also present a dilemma for policy advocates because the United States has a winner-take-all system rather than a system of proportional representation as in many European nations. In winner-take-all elections, only the party that gets the majority vote wins an election; in proportional representation, seats are allocated based on the percentage of votes that a party receives. So third parties in the United States get seats only when their candidate gets more votes than either of the candidates from the major Chapter 12 Engaging in Ballot-Based Policy Advocacy 425 parties-a daunting task because the third-party candidate has to convince huge numbers of Republicans and/or Democrats to shift parties. A Green Party in Italy would get 10 percent of the seats in a legislature if it got this share of the vote in parfo1mentary elections rather than no seats, which would be the case in the United States if Green Party candidates received only 10 percent of the votes in local or national contests. Nor have third parties been successful in the United States, last succeeding at the presidential level in the late 1850s when the Republican Party, under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, took the place of the Whig Party.

Question: What are the pros and cons of voting for a candidate from a third party such as the Green Party?