Our system - executive system is ill-designed for 3rd parties, parliamentary system is optimally designed for it. In our system 3rd parties usually coalesce around a single to a few issues. Those issues later get adopted by the major parties or die out.
The Founding Fathers purposely designed our system to minimize the number of “factions i.e., parties”. The minimal number and not be a one-party dictatorship is two. In parliamentary systems there is no real executive authority. The majority party or coalition picks all the executive\ministerial\management positions. Everything is subject to party (or coalition) politics. Our executive system doesn’t have as strong or direct enough “political award system” for co-governing to make coalition politics work. You think partisanship is bad in our system, in a parliamentary system it much much worse! You need a very strong “independent (as much as it can be!)” civil service to have any continuity of government. You think our Deep State is bad its nothing compared to the civil services of say the UK, France, Japan, Italy, Germany, etc. In France they have their own ‘bureaucrat MITs’ to train government bureaucrats. In the view of these bureaucrats, they run the government. Politicians come and go and are more an irritating distraction or entertainment then anything else.
As bad as our system is, everything else is much much worse!
Actually the executive system is just fine for 3rd parties. It was always built with that idea. That’s why originally the VP went to the 1st runner up (which implies more than 2 candidates) and Majority Leader and Speaker are 2 different jobs.
The Founders wanted to ban parties because they knew that politicians would become loyal to the party instead of the country. Unfortunately they couldn’t figure out how to do that and not castrate the 1st.
They wanted to avoid tyranny of the majority, and one of the best ways to do that is MORE than 2 parties, because then you’ll not even have a majority. Parties would need to form coalitions, recognize where they share beliefs with these guys to get this thing passed, but those other guys to get the other thing passed.
Actually partisanship is MUCH MUCH worse here than any of those countries you mention. And it’s RIGHT IN YOUR POST. this foolish belief that you must vote for 1 of he 2 dominant parties is the ultimate in partisanship.
Right now our system is the worst. We have 2 parties that have no core beliefs, than only have the support of about 50% of the population, holding 99% of all elected offices and doing whatever the hell they want because even though most of the country hates them BOTH they keep voting for the lesser of 2 evils. Thus voting in evil. And giving us elections like this one where both candidates are pathetic idiots who shouldn’t be elected, but one of them is going to win.