Proportional Representation for the United States?

[lpetrich]

This voting reform solves 2 of America’s biggest political problems - Vox

Back in October, Alec MacGillis penned a provocative New York Times opinion piece titled “Go Midwest, Young Hipster.”

So as to tilt Midwestern-state elections in their direction.

It’s safe to say there will be no hipster invasion of the Midwest. But the question is not going away: Why do we accept an electoral system in which your vote is far more likely to shape Congress if you live in Des Moines than if you live in San Francisco?

The current system is unfair not only because it leaves many citizens on the sidelines in solidly Republican as well as solidly Democratic districts and states, but also because it undermines political accountability and turbocharges polarization.

Not only across states, "red" and "blue" ones, but also in Congressional districts. Many of them are gerrymandered, with politicians picking their voters. It's mainly Republicans who do that, but Democrats also do that.

But gerrymandering probably accounts for less polarization than is often suggested, relative to other important trends, most notably the disappearance of socially liberal Republicans and socially conservative Democrats. They once contributed to many more closely contested and therefore moderation-encouraging congressional elections.

Author Lee Drutman then notes something widely used: proportional representation.

Checking on  Democracy Index,  Fragile States Index,  Human Development Index, and  List of electoral systems by country, the highest scorers mostly use various forms of PR, with the main exceptions being the US, the UK, Canada, and France.

PR has some virtues. It makes everybody's vote count, it is difficult to gerrymander, it is much less vulnerable to the spoiler effect, and it easily permits multiple parties.

LD has a whole section on "How our current voting system fuels bitter political division", also "American politics has lots of safe seats — and also ferocious national elections. The two features are related."

Both parties are constantly trying to stick it to each other in hopes of winning the next election. Rather than being spread across many competitive districts, the battles are fought in a relative handful of contested seats, with appeals targeting swing voters.

Since partisans of each side are uninterested in compromise, each party’s ability to win depends on casting the other party as too extreme, too terrible, too corrupt, too evil, too un-American — whatever parade of horribles resonates. As a result, “negative partisanship” — partisans hating the other party — is now the most consequential force in American politics.

Fair Representation Act - Fairvote proposes a version of Single Transferable Vote, used in Ireland and Australia. It is like Instant Runoff Voting, but with winners along with losers dropping out of the count. The count continues until the target number of winners is selected.

If a state has 5 Representatives or less, then they are elected at large, like at present with only one. But if a state has more, then that state is divided up into districts with 3 to 5 Representatives each.


There are other PR systems that have gotten varying amounts of use. A very common one is party-list, where each political party gets seats in proportion to how many votes it got. This system gets its name from parties typically publishing lists of who they want seated. It has variations like mixed member (lots of single-member-district seats, with the list seats being for overall proportionality) and parallel member (only list seats being made proportional).

 

[lpetrich]

More from Lee Drutman: The Case for Proportional Voting | National Affairs - Winter 2018

"America's two-party system is an increasingly tough place to be a conservative." Under proportional representation, they can have their own party, with their own members seated without having to become Democrats or compete with MAGA Republicans.

Fundamental electoral reform may seem improbable, but it's not as unlikely as it first appears. During the first half of the 20th century, the vast majority of Western democracies changed their electoral systems from single-member majority- or plurality-winner elections like ours to proportional systems. About four in five of the world's democracies now have a proportional representation system with multiple parties, and they have benefited overwhelmingly from the change. Proportional voting democracies with multi-party systems consistently have more centrist governments, more political stability, higher voter turnout, and citizens who are more satisfied with democracy. It's also what Americans want: In 2017, Gallup found that a record-high 61% of respondents said they wanted a third-party option.

So why doesn't anyone ever talk about proportional representation for the US? In this supposed flagship nation of democracy, that lack of discussion is VERY disappointing. Also disappointing is how many nations outclass the US in quality of democracy by having PR and having other such things, like a parliamentary system and one main legislative chamber or only one.

"Two pressing fears of democratic instability loomed in the mind of James Madison as he set out to design a representative system of government: the problem of majority tyranny and the problem of faction." His solution was to try to spread authority around, so that several people's agreement would be required to do anything.

"If majority tyranny was a problem of too much concentrated power, factional warfare was a problem of too much diffusion of power. Factions would pull and tug at unity, tearing the republic apart."

Madison and his compatriots hoped to avoid political parties, which they feared might become permanent factions that would tear the country apart. Without attachment to parties, he and his contemporaries hoped that whatever coalitions existed would be fluid, with no permanent majorities, and the process would be consensus-oriented.

But that was not to be. Politicians divided themselves into parties in the first term of the first president, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton's Federalists and Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, and they had a nasty election in 1800.

 

[lpetrich]

Parties ideally function as intermediaries; they are supposed to vet candidates for quality in order to simplify political choices for voters, who have more important things to do than follow politics closely. Voters need shortcuts to figure out who shares their values and interests. Parties emerged to solve these problems. In doing so, they make electoral choices meaningful for voters, and make governing a little more stable by creating more regular voting coalitions.

LD continues: "The problem may not be so much the existence of parties, but the fact that we have only two."

Then noting that parties were rather fluid during the first 80 years of the US's existence. The first two parties lasted until the 1820's, when the DR's squashed the Feds, only to split in two.

One faction of the DR's became the Democratic Party, and the other became the National Republicans, then the Whigs, then the Republicans, with no further changes after the mid 19th cy.

In the 1890's, discontented farmers and others organized the People's Party or the Populists, but they became absorbed by the Democrats. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt organized the Progressive "Bull Moose" Party, but it failed.

Third parties have mostly been irrelevant, with the most successful ones cross-endorsing politicians in the two major parties. Or worse than irrelevant: the Green Party was likely a spoiler in the 2000 Presidential election. That party mainly exists as a vehicle for vanity Presidential runs, without any systematic effort to elect Congressmembers or state or local politicians.

 

[lpetrich]

In the spring of 2016, some Bernie Sanders campaigners asked themselves: what next? They saw how the Republican Party obstructed Barack Obama, so they decided that we need to elect good Congresspeople. Thus, "Brand New Congress". They decided on a 400-headed presidential campaign for Congress, a campaign with unified messaging. They could have founded a third party, but very crucially, they didn't. They decided to run their candidates in the two major parties, so all that was necessary was to win primaries. They were less than successful, recruiting only 30 candidates for 2018, including one Bernie Sanders Republican. But he lost, an only one of them won, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She succeeded in primarying long-time incumbent Joe Crowley, and she had an easy time in the general election. If AOC had run as a Green or as an independent, she would have been crushingly defeated by JC in the general election.


LD notes that "In 1899, Belgium became the first country to adopt a proportional voting system. The system was created to ensure that all significant political groups were represented in the legislature in proportion to their support among the electorate." and followed by other countries over the next half-century.

"First, a growing consensus emerged around the fundamental fairness of proportional voting." No wasted votes or disproportionate results.

"Second, proportional voting gave both parties and politicians more predictability, since results from single-member districts could vary widely depending on narrow swings, especially when there were more than two parties competing (as there often were)."

The case for proportional voting was considerably weakened after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and for a while, the standard argument against proportional voting was that it made it easier for extremist parties like the Nazis to gain a foothold in the legislature. Thus mid-20th-century American democracy, with its moderate two-party politics, looked like a model of stability. In retrospect, however, that stability depended on a series of conditions that were particular to the time. It was in fact thanks more to a period of post-war affluence and the population having broadly shared values and experiences — plus a common enemy in the Soviets — than to any virtue inherent in a two-party system.

"The primary long-standing argument was that, because both parties were theoretically competing for the median voter, both parties should hew to the center." Also, "that it could provide clearer choices to voters, who could choose one of two teams to run the government."

 

[lpetrich]

Both of these arguments have been undermined by a lack of corresponding evidence. The accountability argument works only if a significant number of voters are willing to switch parties based on performance. This assumes that they are otherwise indifferent between the two parties. But when 90% of partisans will blindly support their own party no matter what happens (as they do now), the whole concept of "accountability" collapses.

Yes, many people are yellow-dog partisans, willing to vote for any yellow dog of a politician who runs in their party. How many people voted for the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert because they are both Republicans?

The logic of accountability also leads to over-promising. In a multi-party system, parties can only promise to advocate particular positions, since governing by coalition is more complicated. In a two-party system, parties have to promise to deliver better outcomes, which leads to a politics of over-promising and disappointment. Over decades, this has devolved into deep distrust of politicians (who never seem to deliver on these promises) and of political institutions. The growing distrust has led to ever more radical politics. It has created a self-cannibalizing energy on both sides of the political spectrum, though its influence is most clear in our time in the burn-it-all-down rhetoric of the populist wing of the Republican Party.

Also stating that "The median-voter theorem also has aged poorly." That's the claim that two parties will compete for voters that are between them ideologically.

"The two parties have not converged in the middle. They've pulled to their extremes." and "In most states, the median voter is either considerably to the left or to the right of the national middle." and "Add in primary electorates, which loom especially large in the presidential election, and the electorate is pulled even closer to the margins."

And yet, many would argue, American politics once functioned quite well as a two-party system, with Democrats and Republicans working out plenty of historic bipartisan compromises to accomplish landmark legislation — particularly in the mid- to late-20th century. What's wrong with the two-party system that can't be restored by recovering the lost art of political compromise?

A common bit of nostalgia, especially among politicians and commentators who remember that era as a Good Old Days. But those Good Old Days are now gone.

Bipartisanship flourished because voting coalitions split parties on an issue-by-issue basis. Liberal (Northern) Republicans and liberal (Northern) Democrats had many positions in common, as did conservative (Southern) Democrats and conservative (Western) Republicans. There were few permanent enemies and few permanent allies. Both parties also held a broadly shared consensus on American values, largely united against a shared enemy: the evil empire of the Soviet Union.

Instead of two parties, it was four parties with each major party containing two of each.

Both party coalitions held together liberals and conservatives, who operated as independent factions within the parties. As a result, both parties looked modestly centrist as a whole, and could compete everywhere because their brands were capacious enough to take on different forms depending on local values.

Split-ticket voting was common, with D's and R's sometimes voting for R's and D's because they liked those candidates.

 

[lpetrich]

The US has had six party systems: First (1792 - 1824), Second (1828 - 1854), Third (1858 - 1892), Fourth (1896 - 1928), Fifth (1932 - 1976), Sixth (1980 - ?). The transition from the fifth to the sixth systems was gradual, with proposed dates from the 1960's to the 1990's.

As a result, the culturally conservative South moved from solidly Democratic territory to predominantly Republican territory, turning the Republican Party into a much more culturally conservative coalition. Meanwhile, as Democrats gained dominance on the coasts and in the big cities and lost their Southern conservative "Blue Dogs," the Democrats became much more uniformly culturally liberal. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats essentially went extinct.

As a consequence,

The more closely contested the control of institutions, the more politics devolves into zero-sum partisanship with all its dysfunctional consequences. Every vote becomes a party-line vote. Party leaders raise the stakes of every potential dispute to draw clear contrasts for activists, donors, and voters. Each party denies the other any small victory that might be useful in the next election, and looks primarily to embarrass the other side rather than to collaborate. The permanent campaign takes over.

 

[lpetrich]

"A PROVEN SOLUTION"

Since World War II, hundreds of political scientists have gathered and analyzed extensive data on cross-national democratic performance. The almost universal verdict has been that, on almost every metric, proportional voting performs better than plurality-winner, single-member-district systems. Especially in recent decades, the evidence is now solidly on the side of better outcomes in proportional voting systems.

Countries with proportional voting have shown three notable advantages over our two-party plurality-winner system: Their governments do a better job of representing the median voter, and politics is generally more stable; voting rates are higher, and support for democracy is higher; and it is easier to marginalize extremism.

"First, countries with proportional voting systems have more stable, more representative governments." -- they do a better job of representing median voters than single-member-district, two-party systems. Thus losing in their claimed virtue. SMD two-party systems often jump back and forth in policy. Not good.

"Second, proportional voting systems have higher voter-participation rates and higher political efficacy." Because all votes matter, without wasted voted on sure losers and sure winners. Parties end up ignoring where they will likely win or likely lose, only focusing on swing areas.

Then noting surveys which show that young people are disenchanted with democracy.

However, when political scientist Pippa Norris compared such surveys across 24 Western democracies, she found that "a statistically significant fall in democratic approval by birth cohort" is largely (though not exclusively) limited to Anglo-American countries — the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — in which two parties dominate. In the rest of the countries, which all have multi-party systems and some form of proportional voting, there is generally no decline.

Also, "because losing parties can be shut out of power entirely in a two-party system, there is considerable evidence that losers tend to seethe much more in majoritarian as opposed to proportional systems." That's because they are less shut out in proportional systems, more able to participate in governing despite their poor performance. "Majoritarian two-party systems, by contrast, instead produce losing partisans who rail aggressively against the system as fundamentally broken and corrupt" noting Republicans during Obama's Presidency and Democrats during Trump's.

 

[lpetrich]

"The third advantage of a multi-party system is its handling of extremism." - offering extremists a voice without letting them take over, and being able to make coalitions that shut them out.

"In a two-party system, an extremist movement is more likely to concentrate its energy on taking over one of the two major parties, since everything else is meaningless. This is a much tougher fight, but the prize is far more consequential." That's what the far right has been doing with the Republican Party, and more establishment R's have been meekly going along with that, with remarkably little pushback.

"The main difference is that by winning the Republican Party's nomination, Trump could tap into the power of partisan loyalty." Thus getting the votes of yellow-dog Republicans.

Then noting solutions like single transferable vote for the US House - dividing each state up into superdistricts that elect 3 to 5 Reps each when the state has enough Reps for that.

And for voters, it would mean that every vote really would matter, because there would be almost no wasted votes. Voters could register their sincere preferences, rather than having to hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Voters will also be more likely to have someone who actually represents their values in Congress.

 

[lpetrich]

Who uses proportional representation? | Internet Infidels Discussion Board - I wanted to update it, but it proved to be a big task.

 List of electoral systems by country and  List of countries by system of government -- big lists. I've made spreadsheets of those for comparison with democracy-quality indices.

 

[Derec]

I think it would be a good idea. It would allow more party diversity in Congress. Proportional representation in the House would make it unlikely for one party to have outright majority at least in the House. Probably also the Senate, even if it continues to be elected as now, since smaller parties would become more viable and more likely to win majority in at least a few Senate races.
It would also make it less likely that one party could either rubberstamp everything the administration is doing, or else block everything the administration is doing. So there will be more need but also more opportunity for compromise.
Speaker of the House for example would also need to be a compromise candidate between at least two parties.

 

[lpetrich]

The Case for Proportional Representation - Boston Review -- March 1, 1998

1. Members of racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented;
2. Voters' choices are restricted to candidates within the two-party, Republican/Democratic monopoly;
3. Most legislative elections are effectively "no-choice" contests in districts dominated by a single party.

Proportional representation would fix all three problems. Ethnic, racial, and ideological minorities could easily form their own parties and be represented.

Proportional Representation: Reimagining American Elections to Combat Gerrymandering - Democracy Docket - November 18, 2021

Proportional representation has several key advantages over our current electoral system.
1. It limits gerrymandering.
2. It better represents the preferences of voters by ensuring fewer votes are wasted.
3. It encourages the development of third parties.

Such scattered dates - proportional representation hasn't gotten the traction that ranked-choice voting has.

 

[Swammerdami]

Changing the U.S. to a proportional-representation system would be massively difficult. Senate, President and Congressional representative from single-seat states have no easy mapping to PR. Would PR advocates want to make House of Rep elections occur in a single nation-wide constituency?

Are there any U.S. states which already use a PR system? Reds would oppose any change which increases Blue power and vice versa, so useful change is difficult in our hyper-partisan environment. Social media is exacerbating the hyper-partisanism so solution is not in view.

Since "many minds are smarter than one," early parties may have enhanced political intelligence. But today's GOP acts like an utter imbecile, despite that GOPsters have a 100 IQ on average.

James Madison already had a good understanding of democracy's difficulties 240 years ago:

Madison's studies of smaller confederacies led him to conclude that when a dominant majority could form, it would. It would then use its power to punish the minority, ultimately creating political instability. Therefore, he wanted to spread power around, balancing ambition and making it hard for any permanent majority to take shape.

Faction presented a different problem. If majority tyranny was a problem of too much concentrated power, factional warfare was a problem of too much diffusion of power. Factions would pull and tug at unity, tearing the republic apart. The problem here was even more devilish. Power could be shared and diffused. But to limit faction was to limit liberty, especially freedom of expression. Factions needed to be able to make their cases, so political leaders could then deliberate over their claims and find compromises. (Madison hopefully described these leaders as "a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.") Madison's hope was that in an "extended republic" there would be enough competing factions that none would be permanently dominant, and instead public-spirited lawmakers would balance out their interests.

Madison and his compatriots hoped to avoid political parties, which they feared might become permanent factions that would tear the country apart. Without attachment to parties, he and his contemporaries hoped that whatever coalitions existed would be fluid, with no permanent majorities, and the process would be consensus-oriented.

I've reddened the Madison hope that we lack today. Republicans with patriotic wisdom are being driven from office, largely due to perversions of modern media.

 

[Tigers!]

The Case for Proportional Representation - Boston Review -- March 1, 1998

1. Members of racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented;
2. Voters' choices are restricted to candidates within the two-party, Republican/Democratic monopoly;
3. Most legislative elections are effectively "no-choice" contests in districts dominated by a single party.

Proportional representation would fix all three problems. Ethnic, racial, and ideological minorities could easily form their own parties and be represented.

Whilst giving ethnic, racial, ideological minorities has its benefits it does nothing to enhance unity or looking out for the common good. It can cause further fragmentation.

Proportional Representation: Reimagining American Elections to Combat Gerrymandering - Democracy Docket - November 18, 2021

Proportional representation has several key advantages over our current electoral system.
1. It limits gerrymandering.
2. It better represents the preferences of voters by ensuring fewer votes are wasted.
3. It encourages the development of third parties.

Such scattered dates - proportional representation hasn't gotten the traction that ranked-choice voting has.

I am glad that it is noted that PR limits gerrymandering. PR of itself cannot stop gerrymandering, only make it harder.

 

[Tigers!]

The Case for Proportional Representation - Boston Review -- March 1, 1998

1. Members of racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented;
2. Voters' choices are restricted to candidates within the two-party, Republican/Democratic monopoly;
3. Most legislative elections are effectively "no-choice" contests in districts dominated by a single party.

Proportional representation would fix all three problems. Ethnic, racial, and ideological minorities could easily form their own parties and be represented.

Proportional Representation: Reimagining American Elections to Combat Gerrymandering - Democracy Docket - November 18, 2021

Proportional representation has several key advantages over our current electoral system.
1. It limits gerrymandering.
2. It better represents the preferences of voters by ensuring fewer votes are wasted.
3. It encourages the development of third parties.

Such scattered dates - proportional representation hasn't gotten the traction that ranked-choice voting has.

Try compulsory voting too. Your participation rate is abysmally low.

 

[lpetrich]

Rep. Beyer, Donald S., Jr. [D-VA-8] has introduced US House proportional-representation legislation several times.

• H.R.3057 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): Fair Representation Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
• H.R.4000 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Fair Representation Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
• H.R.3863 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Fair Representation Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

He introduces them in the middle of the first year of a term, and that's still some months away for this one.

He has gotten very little traction; his bills have only a few cosponsors, and the same ones each time:

• Rep. Raskin, Jamie [D-MD-8] 2017, 2019, 2021
• Rep. Khanna, Ro [D-CA-17] 2017, 2019, 2021
• Rep. Cooper, Jim [D-TN-5] 2017, 2019, 2021
• Rep. McGovern, James P. [D-MA-2] 2017, 2019, 2021
• Rep. Peters, Scott H. [D-CA-52] 2017, 2019, 2021
• Rep. Neguse, Joe [D-CO-2] 2019, 2021
• Rep. Blumenauer, Earl [D-OR-3] 2019, 2021
• Rep. Leger Fernandez, Teresa [D-NM-3] 2021

It goes into a lot of implementation detail, and it is careful to specify that local and state elections will not be affected.

 

[lpetrich]

Under "Multi-Member Districts": what districts to use

If a state has at least 6 Reps, then it will be divided into at least two districts, each one of which will elect 3 to 5 Reps. Otherwise, the state's Reps will be elected for the entire state.

Under "Tabulation Process": how the votes are to be counted.

The victory threshold is \( \displaystyle{ \frac{ \text{ (total votes)} }{ \text{(number of seats)} + 1 } } \)

The algorithm uses reweighting and not ballot dropping for ballots that elected winners. The initial weight of every ballot is 1. This reweighting is what makes this method proportional, because in a partisan vote, it otherwise degenerates into general ticket, voting for complete slates of candidates in single-winner fashion.

That reweighting is multiplying by \(\displaystyle{ \frac{ \text{(votes)} - \text{(threshold)} }{ \text{(votes)} } }\)

The bill specifies rounding off to four decimal places, presumably to ensure numerical repeatability.

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion | The U.S. has four political parties stuffed into a two-party system. That’s a big problem. - The Washington Post - March 8, 2022

In 2017, he proposed the Democrats, the Trump-aligned Republicans, the Trump-skeptical Republican Old Guard, and the anti-Trump Republicans.

In 2022, he proposed two factions of Republicans: the Trumpies and the Old Guard, continuing the first two R factions from 2017. The Trump Party includes the likes of Ron DeSantis, while the Old Guard includes the likes of Mitch McConnell. Some of the Old Guard is anti-Trump, like Sen. Mitt Romney and fmr MD Gov. Larry Hogan.

There are some differences between the two factions. The Old Guard is more conservative about foreign policy and the Trumpies more conservative about immigration. The Old Guard also cannot stomach the Trumpies' election denial and attempted coup d'état. They differ in style: "The Old Guard is resistant to America becoming a more multicultural, multiracial country, but not in the loud, aggressive way that the Trump Party opposes that evolution."

Meanwhile, “Never Trump” Republican activists and intellectuals have largely been absorbed into a third party, the Center-Left Democrats. This is the party of, for instance, President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the policy group Third Way and the MSNBC show “Morning Joe.”

The fourth party is "Left-Left Democratic Party".

This party includes Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, publications such as the American Prospect and the Intercept, and groups such as the Working Families Party. ...

There is an ideological divide between the two Democratic parties, certainly, but their differences are also generational and attitudinal — the Left-Left Democrats tend to be younger, newer to politics and more confrontational with the Republicans than the Center-Left Democrats are. “Much of the divide is about approach, confrontation, urgency, as well as policy,” said Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University.

 

[lpetrich]

About this arrangement of four parties in two, author Perry Bacon then notes how it helps Trumpie Republicans win. All they have to do is excite the base enough to get them to win a Republican primary, and they can then count on all the other Republicans to vote for them.

We are seeing the worst kind of governance in states such as Florida and South Dakota, where Trumpian officials have gained power and are mirroring the terrible tendencies of the former president.

Further, because the Trumpian Party is gaining strength, the Old Guard is also moving in a radical direction to compete.

That happens in the Democratic Party also.

Center-Left Democrats view people with very left-wing ideas such as Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) as tarnishing the party’s brand. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2020 correctly noted that she and Biden would be in different parties in many countries, regularly complains about what she describes as the lack of urgency coming from the Center-Left Democrats on major issues. This tension shows up on issue after issue, and it seems intractable.

"Third, many voters, particularly anti-Trump Republicans and people with a mishmash of views that don’t fit into one of these four groups, have fairly little representation in this structure"

Author Perry Bacon then mentioned proportional representation.

That would be ideal -- these four parties would then become separate parties, not uneasy coalition partners. We may also see some economic left-wing and socially conservative party, like what Trump ran for President on, and like some European far-right parties -- they like a welfare state, but only for Real Citizens. We may also see a right-libertarian party, socially left-wing and economic right-wing party. There seems to be that sort of politician in Congress: Kyrsten Sinema. She would be very out of place among social conservatives, but she is a shameless corporate lackey, eagerly doing what she earlier condemned as "bribery".

 

[lpetrich]

Lee Drutman Makes the Case for Multiparty Democracy in America ‹ Literary Hub -- I'd noted his work earlier in this thread, and he's the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America a book by Lee Drutman

In that interview, LD stated that Congress has become polarized. Instead of the two parties overlapping ideologically, like half a century ago, they have almost no overlap, something true for around a decade. The most conservative Democrat is now Joe Manchin (Kyrsten Sinema left the party), and the most liberal Republican may be Lisa Murkowski (I'd add Susan Collins). Each one votes with their party about 80% of the time, making a 60% gap.

He likes the Finnish model, an open-list system. One can vote for a candidate in addition to a party, and one's vote can help determine a candidate's priority for seating. A low-priority candidate will get elected if a party gets a lot of seats, but not otherwise.

His interviewer asked about Israel, where far right parties can get a big say by making what they want a condition for entering a coalition. But that's not very common in proportional representation, and the interviewer asked what might reduce the power of the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and the Lauren Boeberts of Congress. One does not hear about such parties in places like Denmark and Finland because they don't have much power, because the other parties can form governments while ignoring them. Parties like the True Finns.

He notes that the Netherlands has the same electoral system as Israel, without having politics nearly as dysfunctional.

He thinks that 5 or 6 parties would be ideal.

He said that political parties have to be more than opposition to the other one.

He called the Electoral College the oldest and creakiest and most cockamamie part of the US Constitution. Oldest? It was composed by the Constitution's writers after they had decided on the structure of Congress, and they composed it because they could not think of anything much better. Election by Congress? Election by state governors? But I agree on it being very creaky and cockamamie. He also noted that it's hard to get rid of when one party benefits from it and the other doesn't.

He also said that the US Constitution is the hardest to amend in the world. He also said that we ought to address the Senate and the Supreme Court. He mentioned two-round voting (CA and WA top two, widely used around the world for elections of presidents).

What might provoke a change? Some sense of crisis? 1830's, 1900's, mid 1960's - early 1970's, the Revolution. We are due for another one.

He called the far right the "dermatology caucus" and referred to "fringe dermatologists". Whatever that might refer to.

 

[lpetrich]

What Lee Drutman listed were what Samuel Huntington called periods of creedal passion, period of government reform to try to make government follow American ideals more closely -  Cyclical theory (United States history)
He described the "American Creed" of government in these terms: "In terms of American beliefs, government is supposed to be egalitarian, participatory, open, noncoercive, and responsive to the demands of individuals and groups. Yet no government can be all these things and still remain a government."

What LD identified was those times of creedal passion: the Revolution, the Jackson Era, the Progressive Era, and the Sixties Era. There were other times of great reform that did not involve creedal passion: the Civil War Era and the New Deal Era. Arthur Schlesingers I and II also identify the Jefferson Era, but that does not seem like much.

American Democracy Is Broken. Can Proportional Representation Fix It? - Mar 7, 2022 - by Osita Nwanevu - "A proposal to reform House elections and give more power to the people is gaining traction with activists. Now they just have to convince the electorate to fight for it."

Notes the Fair Representation Act, which mandates state-by-state STV elections for the US House, which I'd posted on earlier.

The only technical hitch is that Congress would also have to repeal a 1967 law mandating single-member districts for all states with at least two allotted seats—a measure that was passed in part because some states had used multimember districts to dilute Black votes.

That was to outlaw systems like bloc vote, where one votes for candidates up to the number of seats. In practice, it acts like general ticket with first-past-the-post. General ticket itself has sometimes been used in US history. It is voting for slates of candidates in single-member fashion,

Fix Our House - has a page on Why Proportional Representation?

The first map, proposed by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature, packs Democratic voters into districts containing Milwaukee and Madison, leaving the six other districts to Republicans. No district is competitive, and Republicans are likely to win three fourths of the seats, even though Wisconsin is very closely divided between Democrats and Republicans.

The second map -- a proportional map -- avoids these problems entirely. It has just two districts: one with three representatives and one with five, so that each party's percentage of support can be reflected in the election outcome. As a result, the likely elected representatives (shown above by red and blue dots) are much more proportional to the evenly split state: four likely Republicans, three likely Democrats, and one Democrat-leaning tossup.

The difference is clear: The proportional map with multi-member districts listens to the preferences of voters, while the single-winner district map intentionally drowns them out.

The source of the first of their maps: What Redistricting Looks Like In Every State - Wisconsin | FiveThirtyEight
Estimated leaning: D+48, D+36, R+8, R+9, R+20, R+20, R+24, R+28

The second is for a map with the state divided in two with a roughly east-west line that leans northwest - southeast. The northern district has 2 R's and 1 D, and the southern district 2 R's, 2 D, and 1 lean D. In total: 4 R's, 3 D's, and 1 lean D.

Much closer to how the people of that state voted.