Proportional Representation for the United States?

[lpetrich]

LD then states that political polarization is the real problem, not the extremism of some individual politicians.

"Scholars of extremism come to a similar conclusion. To reduce extremism, punishing extremists is not nearly as effective as changing the environment that produces extremism."

"McCoy and Somer make a similar point in explaining how majoritarian winner-take-all elections drive pernicious polarization."

"Moderate Democrats are just like Democrats but less so. Moderate Republicans are just like Republicans, but less so. Moderates without a party are just disorganized and powerless dots on a scatterplot of the electorate."

Indeed. Among those who claim no political affiliation, many of them nevertheless support one party or the other.

 

[lpetrich]

"2. The Case for Political Parties: Why Modern Mass Democracy Needs Political Parties and Can’t Operate without Them"

As one classic political science text on political parties argues, “to talk, today, about democracy, is to talk about a system of competitive political parties. Unless one chooses to reject the representative model that has been the staple of the theory and practice of democracy since the French Revolution, one must come to terms with political parties.”

Then saying

Healthy Parties Aggregate Long-Term Policy Programs That Broker among Groups and Interests

Healthy Parties Make Elections Meaningful and Engaging for Voters

Healthy Parties Engage and Mobilize Voters at Large Scale and Over Time

Healthy Parties Vet Candidates for Office

Healthy Parties Make Governance Possible and (Somewhat) Accountable by Organizing Governing Majorities

Healthy Parties Contribute to Democratic Legitimacy by Linking Citizens with Government and Making Voters Feel Represented

Then asking "What Is the Alternative?" LD answers "chaos. Countries with weak or nonexistent political parties fall into authoritarianism and corruption."

It is easy to romanticize a truly equal society in which everybody decides independently and rationally. Indeed, we seem to be hard-wired for this kind of romanticism, since it seems to pop up repeatedly in various utopian visions. But we seem equally hard-wired never to achieve this vision.

 

[lpetrich]

Then saying that a sign of failing democracy is failing parties. About Hungary and Venezuela, LD quotes democracy expert Kim Lane Schepperle: “If one traces the failing and failed democracies, one will generally find that traditional parties in that country had first fallen victim to insidious infighting, ideological drift, or credibility collapse in a way that disrupted the ability of those mainstream parties to screen out toxic choices put to voters. And the voters, not realizing that the safety checks had disappeared when they were offered up seriously bad options, picked one of the options they were given—which in turn sent their countries down ‘the rabbit hole of autocracy.’” About Venezuela and Hungary, “multiple parties collapsed into a two-party system and a punishing-vote practice emerged in which the electorate threw out the government at every opportunity save one… The paths that led to Chávez and Orbán involved progressively narrowing party choices, ending eventually in an election in which the budding autocrat was the only reasonable-looking option among the available limited choices. In short, party collapse preceded democratic collapse.”

There is no need of going back to the bad old days of party bosses making decisions in back rooms, those legendary "smoke-filled rooms". "We can instead envision a twenty-first-century version of political parties that combines leadership and representativeness and builds upon new organizational forms."

Then the problem of two parties. They were long criticized as looking too much alike and not offering meaningful choices to the voters.

However, because twentieth-century American politics centered more on state and local politics than national politics, the national parties operated more like loose labels—more like dispositional than programmatic parties. In practice, this yielded a kind of hidden multi-party system within the two-party system. Organized factions played a significant role. Both parties came in many regional varieties.

But in recent decades, that came to en end. "However, as American politics nationalized and sorted, parties simplified and flattened into two distinct coalitions, with much less overlap."

 

[lpetrich]

Indeed, while parties do make elections meaningful and engaging for voters, binary adversarial competition can make elections too meaningful. In 2020, for example, the United States had its highest-turnout election in more than 100 years. Nothing drives turnout like a crisis.

Limiting choices to only two simplifies elections, which is one supposed benefit of the two-party system. However, limiting choices to just two can also oversimplify elections, which is one of the drawbacks of the two-party system. Elections can become a recursive and reductive us-versus-them conflict, with the same us and same them over and over, particularly when parties turn to negative, lesser-of-two-evils campaigning—a strategy that a two-party system encourages.

A two-party system also leaves dissatisfied voters only one “change” option. This can lead to a constant cycle of “throw the bums out” based on small shifts. If every election becomes a change election, constant policy whiplash undermines effective governing. And if one of two major parties turns illiberal (which is common in a polarized two-party system because having only one opposition alternative breeds oppositional extremism), a vote to “throw the bums out” can become an unwitting vote to install authoritarian leadership. Because the costs of losing seem so high, parties in power often change the rules to avoid losing.

Like gerrymandering. Both major US parties do it, but the Republicans more than Democrats.

"Turning to parties’ role in engaging voters in elections, it is notable that turnout is consistently lower in countries with first-past-the-post elections, like the United States."

Many areas are dominated by one party or the other, and general elections are usually not very competitive. Thus, the parties don't spend much on sure winners and sure losers. But with proportional representation, elections are competitive everywhere.

Then noting that the US primary-election process is unique. In most other places, party leaderships pick candidates. But in the US, many candidates are recruited by various Political Action Committees (PAC's).

If it's not clear who's making decisions, that can cause distrust, like Bernie Sanders supporters claiming that the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination was tilted against him by the Democratic Party leadership.

"In two-party polarized politics, divided government means legislative gridlock. And legislative gridlock means that the executive branch is left to improvise within existing legal authority. This creates more instability." Thus the policy jumps from Bush II to Obama to Trump to Biden.

 

[lpetrich]

In the current era of pendulum politics, both parties get two years of unified government every 12 years or so, and a chance to pass some big, important policies. (Democrats managed to do that during their recent hold on unified government. Republicans did much less during theirs.) But a government that is only able to assemble governing majorities to pass big policies less than a third of the time can hardly be considered effective or efficient.

Although multiparty systems may take a few months to assemble governing coalitions, and although these coalitions may fall apart, such systems nevertheless have greater fractions of time when they can effectively govern.

“Losers’ consent” (the political science term for partisan losers accepting outcomes) is a crucial foundation for modern democracy, since without legitimate elections, the whole system of representative self-government degrades into authoritarianism.

However, as multiple studies have shown, in two-party systems, especially polarized two-party systems, political losers experience a sharper sting from losing.

That's because in proportional representation, losers don't completely lose.

LD concedes that in multiparty systems, parties are sometimes not very good parties. But it's easy to start new parties and leave old ones behind.

But in a two-party system, innovation must come from within major parties, where it is slowest, messiest, and least likely. This means factions challenging each other internally, undermining the ability of parties to perform their essential roles with consistency and coherence. Indeed, American party development is essentially a series of internal party reform episodes—outsiders busting open existing power structures, and then struggling to build something new out of a busted-open institution.

 

[lpetrich]

3. Learning from History: The Flawed American Tradition of “Tearing Open” without “Building Up”

An antipartisan reform tradition lies deep in the American subconscious. This long-running narrative is readily available and poised for dusting off and repurposing: Something has gone wrong with our democracy. Too few have too much power. Party bosses, moneyed interests, and other selfish and corrupt actors have conspired to undermine true democracy. To restore “true” democracy, we must expand political participation. Informed and nonpartisan voters, drawing on their innate wisdom, will consistently make the “right” decisions.

As he says, this is naive utopianism, like both anarcho-capitalist and anarcho-communist utopianism, where everybody is a virtuous anarchist.

What Marxists expected to happen, the  Withering away of the state producing the  Communist society

Periods of democracy reform followed eras when partisan polarization was too low (and citizens lacked meaningful choices, and a political establishment formed an exclusive consensus), or when partisan polarization was too high (and corruption flourished because many voters were unwilling to switch parties in response).

• 1820's Era of Good Feelings -- parties too similar: one-party rule (the Democratic-Republican Party) -- 1830's Jackson Era
• 1890's Gilded Age -- political polarization: few people changed sides -- 1900's Progressive Era
• 1950's Fifties Era (Good Feelings II?) -- parties too similar: bipartisan consensus -- 1960's: Sixties Era
• Present: Gilded Age II -- political polarization

In such periods, the political parties become problematic. The parties either exclude the concerns of many voters (too much partisan consensus leaves many voters unrepresented), or the parties fight so intensely that little gets accomplished and corruption can flourish (when voters will support their parties no matter what, leaders can get away with many things).

 

[lpetrich]

Lee Drutman then discusses previous reform periods, going into a lot of detail.

"The Age of Jackson: The Search for Populist Equality and Limited Government Discovers Patronage and Spoils Instead"

The lessons of this early period of democracy reform are complicated. The Democrats stood for popular participation and limited government and constant rotation of people, and so they loved elections for everything. Judicial elections, for example, are a Jacksonian-era electoral innovation. Jacksonian democracy, in its fullest aspiration, meant that nobody should be above anybody else, a noble spirit indeed, but a challenging way to run government efficiently and effectively. In practice, it set back American state-building capacity tremendously and built up a corrupt system of office-seeking patronage politics that grew even worse following the Civil War, until it was eventually tamed (somewhat).

"The Progressive Era: An Attempt to Build a Pure Democracy, Organized Power Fights Back"

• civil service reform (moving from a patronage-based system of government employment to a merit-based system);
• the secret, government-printed ballot (replacing the party “ticket”);
• the direct primary (replacing the party convention);
• the direct election of U.S. senators (replacing appointment by state legislatures);
• the initiative and referendum; and
• recall elections.

"The 1960s Participatory Party Reform: The Path to Polarization and Populist Backlash"

The immediate impact in the 1970s was that candidates developed their own organizations, independent of parties, and used television to speak to their constituents. But unlike the old model of parties as on-the-ground and in-the-community organizations, television advertising was one-way. It was all talking and no listening. Candidates promised a more direct, unmediated relationship with constituents (as compared to parties). What constituents got instead was a one-directional stream of unmediated advertising and promotional mail.

As spending on television and direct mail replaced local organizing and community presence as the currency of politics in the 1970s, both parties coordinated and centralized into national networks of campaign consultants, organized around national committee offices headquartered in Washington, DC, starting in the 1980s. Politics went from the local union and American Legion halls to the airwaves and, eventually, social media. As conflict over race and religion displaced conflict over business regulation and labor regulation, politics became more moral, emotional, and irresolvable. With weakened local parties, politics became more nationalized. As politics became more nationalized, it became more polarized, with parties standardizing their brands everywhere. Local variation in parties, which had contributed to multidimensional fluid coalition, gave way to two nationalized parties, fully sorted, distinct, and at war with each other for total dominance.

 

[Worldtraveller]

It would be an interesting experiment. Honestly, the voting system needs to change (no more first past the post). Once that happens, these other options would naturally open up. I imagine some states would go with PR, others will just have more parties available.

 

[lpetrich]

Once again, a generation of reforms had failed because they didn’t take political parties seriously enough. Instead, the 1960s reformers simply assumed that a more open, participatory approach to politics would lead to “better” outcomes because an enlightened public would emerge organically, without structure, without organization. Once again, those with resources and concentrated power reasserted that power, taking over the institutions of governing and elections. And once again, the mass public responded with anger.

An important historical irony is that a key democratizing reform of earlier generations—the direct primary—played an important role in creating the current hyperpartisan polarization. Clearly, bypassing parties to give citizens more control does not yield more responsive politics. Yet, it’s unclear if we’ve learned this, given some current proposals.

LD then discusses minor parties, common in the 19th and early 20th cys.

Third parties could thrive in the nineteenth century primarily because of the widespread use of fusion voting. Also called “multiple-party nomination” or “cross-endorsement,” fusion describes a system in which a single candidate can run on multiple party lines—typically a major party and a minor party. The votes are then tallied, first separately by party (to assess where the votes came from), then aggregated, or “fused,” together to determine a candidate’s total votes.

This practice gave minor parties an opportunity to wield modest power within the winner-take-all system of single-member districts.

...
However, around the turn of the twentieth century, major parties outlawed fusion voting. They could, because around this time, states took control of ballot access.

Instead of each party issuing its own ticket, a state election agency would issue ballots listing all the candidates together as alternatives. Not only did major politicians outlaw fusion voting in most places, they also increased barriers to participation for alternative parties.

 Electoral fusion and Fusion voting - Ballotpedia - only a few states still allow it, like New York State.

 

[lpetrich]

About the Jackson, Progressive, and Sixties Eras,

In each era, reformers worked to undermine party leadership. But rather than establishing new parties or new collective organizations, they simply attempted to make existing sources of power harder to manage and control. Often reformers try to counter problems of legitimacy by expanding participation, hoping more open participation would restore the legitimacy of institutions. But more open participation without clear structure just makes organizations and institutions more difficult to lead and less effective—and thus less legitimate, creating a recurring set of crises.

"Yet despite reform efforts to push them to the margins, political parties are resilient, inevitable institutions."

Across the pond, as some people jokingly refer to the Atlantic Ocean, things turned out differently.

While the United States aimed for more nonpartisan and disinterested politics, reformers in other global democracies—mired in more open class conflicts—harbored no such illusions. Around the turn of the twentieth century, politics was disputatious everywhere. Across Europe, new socialist parties were gaining, particularly in the cities. The franchise was expanding beyond the traditional landed classes as governments everywhere tried to gain legitimacy through electoral democracy. Between 1899 and 1919, most European democracies adopted proportional representation, essentially guaranteeing representative multiparty democracy.

"Andrew McLaren Carstairs, A Short History of Electoral Systems in Western Europe (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1980)."

 

[lpetrich]

"4. The Contemporary Choice: Will We Repeat the Mistakes of the Past or Build Something Better for the Future?"

Noting that the US is now in the sort of crisis that was produced by the Era of Good Feelings, Gilded Age I, and the Fifties Era.

Some reforms envision a kind of politics that has never existed before on a mass scale—a politics free of political parties, with everyone acting independently and with individual voters devoting unprecedented time and energy to political engagement.

Others, and I put myself in this category, start instead from the basic reality that most people don’t want to think about politics most of the time; that political parties are inevitable and necessary; and too much independent action makes collective governing impossible.

But 2023 is not 1787, and we now have much more experience with large-scale representative democracy. LD then defends political parties again.

He then notes candidate-centric reforms with the goal of “more moderate candidates” - more compromise-oriented ones. Reforms like open primaries, ranked-choice voting, and combinations of the two.

What they envision, either implicitly or explicitly, is something akin to the weak and incoherent parties of the 1970s, in which overlapping factions existed and moderates thrived in both parties. The theory is that by opening up the electoral process further, moderates that loosely affiliate with Democrats and Republicans can return to Washington.

Thus being much like what the Founders apparently wanted: a no-party system.

Then noting that a "moderate" has changed from someone who agreed with each party on some issues to someone who agrees with neither party.

"Better" candidates at odds with their parties will not produce better parties, but instead, to less coherent parties.

 

[lpetrich]

Some more on who "moderates" are - "Moderate does not mean centrist. It often means someone who doesn’t pay close attention to politics."

Of course, some percentage of the American population is centrist, independent, follows politics, and has thought through the issues. This highly engaged profile is especially common in the world of democracy reformers and especially democracy-reform funders and their friends. However, it is not so common beyond these elite circles.

Then discussing open primaries.

In much conventional wisdom, primaries are a main cause of polarization. The explanation is this: Since incumbents fear being primaried by more extreme candidates in their parties, many incumbents either adjust to ward off primary challengers, drop out in anticipation of such challenges, or lose.

Eliminating primaries outright would revert to party leaders selecting candidates.

The most common kind of open primary is for people to vote in whichever party primary they want. "Still, the consensus across multiple studies is that primary type does not affect candidate ideology, on balance. The share of moderate candidates elected is consistent across different primary types."

One piece of evidence in the independents-are-not-necessarily-moderates column is that independents voting in the 2016 Democratic primary preferred Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, leading Sanders to call for an end to closed primaries. In the 2016 primary, Donald Trump did better in open-primary states than closed-primary states. Trump did best among voters tired of all the messy fighting in Washington.

 

[lpetrich]

Then talking about a completely open primary, a nonpartisan, "jungle" primary that all candidates participate in. CA and WA "top two" and AK "top four".

Same-party general election contests occur roughly one-sixth of the time, and when they occur, the moderate candidate is more likely (but far from guaranteed) to win. But political elites in the dominant party are often effective at clearing the field for their side, leading to lower levels of same-party competition than a simple partisan-voter index would expect.

Then talking about ranked-choice voting, counted in instant-runoff fashion.

As more cities and states have adopted RCV, scholars have analyzed its impacts. The effects appear somewhat limited, particularly in partisan elections where the electorate is already polarized.

As a recent comprehensive report I coauthored on ranked-choice voting noted, “while single-winner ranked-choice voting does have many positive effects both in theory and in overseas usage, in practice these benefits have been somewhat limited and/or difficult to quantify based on limited usage thus far in the United States. On balance, the benefits of RCV outweigh the downsides, and RCV has many appealing qualities that make it a strong improvement over more traditional single-mark plurality voting. However, the benefits appear to be more marginal than many had initially hoped.”

...
With extreme minor parties and center-oriented major parties, ranked-choice voting effectively allows noncentrist candidates to express dissenting views without affecting election outcomes. However, when major parties polarize, ranked-choice voting is less likely to benefit centrist minor-party candidates.

Because they may not get enough votes to continue in the system, the "center squeeze" effect. "Indeed, increasing evidence suggests that when RCV is attempting to bridge an enormous gap with a bimodal electoral distribution, centrist candidates do not do well."

But RCV can do well in the absence of party polarization, like in nonpartisan elections, party primaries, and general elections in places dominated by one party.

 

[lpetrich]

Approval voting seems good in theory, voting for multiple candidates in a single-winner election. St. Louis MO currently uses an approval-vote round followed by a top-two round.

Multivote systems like approval and RCV are vulnerable to bullet voting, voting for only one candidate, but that does not seem very common.

To be sure, ranked-choice voting lowers the barriers to candidate entry. Challenger candidates from outside the political mainstream can campaign without fear of being spoilers. This is a potential positive benefit of ranked-choice voting, though the extent to which RCV has truly stimulated more diverse candidates (across demographic and ideological categories) is still unclear, based on the very limited studies conducted. RCV stimulates new candidate entry initially upon passage. But over time, as outsider candidates realize it is more difficult to assemble a winning majority, the number of candidates declines.

Then discussing Alaska's Top Four system: a nonpartisan primary followed by a RCV election of the top four in that primary.


Candidate-centric systems have a problem: recruiting candidates. Self-recruited ones tend to be richer and better-connected than average, thus tending to a profile of an old white male lawyer.

A major shortcoming of candidate-centric reform is that it does not wrestle with the core question of the candidate pipeline and desire of candidates to run for office. Instead, the view assumes that candidates will just emerge if the opportunity presents itself. Yet, running for public office in the United States is a tremendous commitment and a tremendous personal sacrifice. In other, more party-centric democratic systems, political parties do far more to recruit and support their candidates. Most U.S. candidates launch their campaigns independently.

An alternative is recruitment by a PAC, and PAC recruitment is much like what LD describes of other countries' parties.

AOC was recruited by the PAC Brand New Congress, and in her first election, she was supported by it and a spinoff PAC, Justice Democrats. BNC is now kaput, but JD is still active, and it's still doing recruitment by nomination: Nominate - Justice Democrats

 

[lpetrich]

"Candidate-Centric Reforms That Don’t Reshape Party Dynamics are Unlikely to Succeed"

Reforms built around advancing particular candidates or particular factions in particular moments are vulnerable to backlash. We see this in the history of ranked-choice voting in the United States. Between 1915 and 1948, many U.S. cities implemented ranked-choice voting, often using the proportional form of it. In every city save one (Cambridge, Massachusetts), RCV was eventually repealed by partisans who wanted to strengthen their party.

The big problem is that these alternative techniques didn't build up a big enough constituency with an interest in keeping them going.

"We see this today in the Republican backlash to ranked-choice voting, which Republicans believe has helped Democrats." FL and TN banned RCV in 2022, and at least 4 Republican state legislatures have advanced such bans, after seeing Sarah Palin's loss in Alaska.

WY banned open primaries in this year, because the year before, Liz Cheney urged Democrats to vote for her.

Some reforms institutionalize an organized constituency whose success depends on the reform. These reforms are durable. Reforms that do not organize a constituency to defend the reform are not durable. This is a key finding in broader studies about reform sustainability.

 

[Tigers!]

You yanks have > 50 states. Why can you not set up competitive testing of differing versions amongst N states?
(Yes I know. Easy to say but hard to achieve.)

 

[Tigers!]

"Turning to parties’ role in engaging voters in elections, it is notable that turnout is consistently lower in countries with first-past-the-post elections, like the United States."

Is the turnout lower because of FPTP or because the quality of candidates/parties is poor? Then the punters can't be bothered turning out. (Compulsory voting anyone?)
Its easy to blame FPTP without looking deeper.

 

[lpetrich]

"Pro-Parties Reform: Building More and Better Parties"

"Fusion Voting" - two or more parties endorsing the same candidate.

New York, where fusion voting has remained legal since 1911, consistently features minor parties, often positioned at the ideological flanks. Examples include the Conservative and Working Families parties, which lean right and left, respectively, of Republicans and Democrats. Both play a credible, durable role in the political and policy landscape of the Empire State. Fusion voting yields a modest turnout increase in New York, with Democrats and Republicans gaining approximately 3 and 5 percentage points, respectively, when appearing on a second party line.

What about a New York Moderate Party? In 2022, Matt Castelli, a moderate Democrat challenging Elise Stefanik in the twenty-first district in New York, helped to establish a new Moderate Party of New York and ran as its candidate. Castelli lost, but the Moderate Party helped to make it a closer race. As Castelli explained in a 2023 post, “Our Moderate Democrat brand resonated. Despite zero political experience and name recognition, I outperformed most statewide Democrats on the ballot in NY-21—including Governor Kathy Hochul. In a cycle that saw an 11+ point average shift to the right from 2020 Presidential results in Congressional districts across New York, the shift in NY-21 was the smallest. It’s easy to imagine a closer race if not for the terrible environment for Democrats in NY that mobilized Republican voters at Presidential election levels.”

Fusion might be hard to get past the politicians, but one might be able to legalize it by litigation.

 

[Derec]

Is the turnout lower because of FPTP or because the quality of candidates/parties is poor? Then the punters can't be bothered turning out. (Compulsory voting anyone?)
Its easy to blame FPTP without looking deeper.

I think FPTP system plays a big role, as it creates a lot of safe areas. If you live in California, the presidential winner in the state is a foregone conclusion, as are Senate and governor races (at least usually). Most congressional districts are safe as well for one party or the other (mostly D). So I can see a lot of people not bothering to vote.

In a proportional system for electing a parliament, every vote counts no matter where you are. You do not have to be one of the lucky few who live in a swing congressional district. Of course, in such a system the quality of candidates matters less because you are not voting for one candidate but for the party slate.

 

[Derec]

You yanks have > 50 states.

No, we have = 50 states.

Why can you not set up competitive testing of differing versions amongst N states?
(Yes I know. Easy to say but hard to achieve.)

A state would have to pass a law to that effect. So far none has, neither for US Congress nor for their own state legislatures. As far as the latter, state legislators are loathe to make a change to the status quo that gives most of them safe seats - at least safe not counting intraparty primary challenges.
As far as US Congress, only big and medium states could pass a meaningful proportional representation law. Many states have too few seats. So we'd need to expand the House. 435 is probably too few anyway given how much the population expanded since that number has been enshrined in law (1929, when US population was ~120M).