Professor Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl, Photo credits: Stu Rosner, Neal Hamberg

The American political system, contend Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter (MBA 1971), is broken. Their evidence: a 2019 HBS US Competitiveness Project survey of alumni and the general public outlined in a chapter they coauthored in the report, A Recovery Squandered. The survey found that more than half of all Americans believe the country is not electing the right people and that over 70 percent of HBS alumni believe our political problems are structural and require reform of the political “rules of the game.” They also cite Pew Research Center data showing that trust in the federal government has gone from 77 percent in 1964 to 17 percent in 2019. But even in the face of these difficult odds, Gehl and Porter offer a solution—and one that can be implemented in years, not decades.

In their new book, The Politics Industry, How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy, the authors apply Porter’s renowned “Five Forces” business framework to the realm of politics. Gehl, the former CEO of Gehl Foods, and Porter, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard, delve into the root causes of why the political system is failing and propose solving the problem by changing the election system.

America’s political system is designed as a duopoly, where only two parties can compete and where third parties are seen as spoilers, explain Gehl and Porter in a webinar for HBS alumni. The two parties are bitter rivals, but unlike a business duopoly, they “cooperate in setting the rules and structuring the game of competition,” Porter says. Ultimately, Gehl adds, “We get gridlock and increasing polarization, because there’s no incentive for the two sides to come together to solve our problems in a sustainable, scalable way.”

Gehl and Porter believe that changing the method in which America votes will revitalize the country’s democracy. They advocate for a two-pronged change that they call “Final-Five Voting.” The first step, they say, is to replace the typical party-affiliated primaries with a single, nonpartisan primary that uses the same ballot for all voters. The top five finishers then advance to the general election. The second step involves implementing ranked-choice voting in the general election. By ranking the five choices available, voters will ultimately select the person who has the broadest support—and create space and opportunity for new competitors in politics.

“When we do these two things together, we connect solving problems for the American people with a likelihood that [politicians] get reelected, and we create a pathway for new competitors, which is what drives accountability in any industry,” observes Gehl.

“Final-Five Voting is less about changing who gets elected and far more about changing the incentives governing the behavior of those in office. It’s about the benefits of healthy competition in the marketplace for public policy,” write Gehl and Porter in their July-August 2020 Harvard Business Review article, Fixing US Politics.

Gehl and Porter have collaborated for years, and while their new book was written before COVID-19 wreaked havoc throughout the world, the current crisis has reinforced the importance of their research. The pair warn that the government’s ability to pass legislation to stabilize the economy reflects a familiar pattern where an emergency forces a temporary “semblance of bipartisanship” only to return to “business-as-usual political brinksmanship that fails to solve our many other current challenges and prevent future crises.”

“The wonderful thing about business competition,” says Porter, is that it is “rational in the sense that it’s tied directly to value to the customer. Whereas in politics, it’s not.” Changing the process of voting in America, assert the authors, is a giant step in the right direction.

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