None of the Above

Brian Klaas and Stacy Hilliard join Newsweek to explore what happens when voters are fed up of traditional parties and candidates. Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, has calculated that if an independent candidate wants to run for U.S. President he or she has until next week, August 2, to register, to be able to win an Electoral College majority. It got us thinking: given neither Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is particularly beloved among voters, why has no strong third candidate emerged? And is it time that American politics was changed, to open up the system, make it easier to run, and offer voters more choice?We also look at Spain, which offers a cautionary tale: there, two new parties, the centrist Ciudadanos and leftist Podemos, burst onto the national scene in the past three years. Each sought to provide an alternative to the two tired traditional parties of power: the center-right People's Party and center-left socialists. But in the event, they caused an impasse: In one general election in December and another in June, the result has been a four-way deadlock. Does this show it's better to try and reform existing parties than to create new ones?Brian Klaas is a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics and Stacy Hilliard serves as the chairman of American Voices International, a non-partisan Political Action Committee. Newsweek’s Foreign Service is recorded and edited by Jordan Saville.

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