Proportional Representation for the United States?

[lpetrich]

More Parties, Better Parties

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

"Proportional Representation"

After noting Israel typically having over a dozen parties, Lee Drutman proposes an ideal range of numbers of parties: 4 - 6 -- "enough to give voters real and meaningful choices and allow different opportunities for governing coalitions, but not too much fragmentation to make governing difficult or voting confusing."

This allows new parties to grow, and old parties to fade away.

Proportional representation takes this a step further by making it possible for a new center-right party, distinct from the MAGA-right, to run candidates and gain seats in the Congress (or state legislature), thus increasing its power and strengthening the identity of such a party. A center-left party could also form, separate from the progressive left.

This making it possible for AOC and Joe Biden to be in different parties, as AOC said would happen in most other countries. It would also enable center-right people to have a political home.

In many multiparty democracies, center-left and center-right parties have governed together in centrist coalitions in order to form a “cordon sanitaire” to keep extremist parties out of a governing coalition. In other multiparty democracies, mainstream parties have tamed populist parties by inviting them into coalitions as junior partners, and effectively sapping them of their antisystem support base through compromise and association with “the system.” Mainstream parties have been able to do this because the flexibility of a multiparty system gives them leverage. If the extreme junior party demands too much, the mainstream party can find another coalition partner.

Thus successfully taming extremists.

 

[lpetrich]

But why a two-party system?

For years, many mainstream American political scientists contended that two-party systems were more effective in confining and minimizing extremism. The argument was as follows: In a two-party system, both parties have to be a broad coalition if they hope to win a national majority. Thus, party leaders have a powerful motivation to marginalize and police extremism.

While in a proportional system, an alternative party could grow and grow and grow.

But as LD noted, mainstream parties may shut out such parties or else tame them by making them junior partners.

By contrast, in a two-party system, once an extreme faction takes over one of the two major parties, the contagion spreads quickly, and politics rapidly polarizes. Moderates have no ability to form a new party and must pick sides. Significantly, an extremist faction only requires a plurality within a major party to seize control. The far-right MAGA movement probably represents at most 20 percent of Americans. But because it is well-placed within the Republican Party, it can achieve total power. In a two-party system with single-winner elections, the Republican Party’s opposition monopoly to Democrats ensures its enduring presence.

Thus, a lot of center-right people grumble about feeling politically homeless.

 

[Elixir]

a lot of center-right people grumble about feeling politically homeless

WTF is "center-right" in 2023?
Same thing as the Goldwater-right of the 1960s?
Anything to the left of Adolph Hitler appears to be the "center-right" of the moment.

 

[lpetrich]

In proportional representation, losers don't necessarily completely lose; because they often have some seats. But in a winner-take-all system, they completely lose.

In proportional systems, political losers have more trust in the political system and report higher levels of satisfaction with democracy and trust in government. In majoritarian, winner-take-all systems, especially polarized majoritarian systems, the losing side has much lower trust after an election loss. Over time, repeated losing can foster extremism and strong antisystem attitudes.

An important part of democracy is support for the system from losers. Keeping their loss from being total is a good way to earn that support from them.

PR also has the benefit of counting every vote equally, regardless of geography. Single-member districts have the problem that one party or the other may dominate, making them safe seats, where the primaries are the only competitive elections. Currently, only about 10% of US House seats are competitive, due to geographical concentration of the parties. Single-member districts are also vulnerable to gerrymandering, drawing boundaries to help one's party get more majorities.

PR is also good for ethnically and racially mixed populations, because each one can be well-represented with some fraction of seats, rather than trying to draw districts so that each one has a majority in some district.

 

[lpetrich]

"A Proposal for Single-Winner Offices: A Two-Round System, with Fusion in the Second Round"

Essentially the CA and WA top-two system, but where parties whose candidates lost in the first round can endorse second-round candidates.

LD proposes moving the primaries up to September, two months before the general elections.

It would be difficult to implement for Presidential elections, unless one can get around the Electoral College or abolish it.

Presidential candidates could promise Cabinet positions to representatives from different parties, which is how presidents often govern in democracies that use proportional representation for their legislatures, a combination that is common in Latin America, and widely considered to function well—as long as presidents are not too powerful and legislatures not excessively fragmented (which is only likely to happen under overly permissive system of proportional representation.)

If such a system were adopted, America would have a dynamic two-month election season, full of negotiations and shifting coalitions and innovative compromises, to build winning majorities. Rather than the staid us-versus-them grind of current politics, parties could fuse and coalesce in response to changing problems.

 

[lpetrich]

"Additional Factors: Campaign Finance and Internal Party Organization"

Not all party activities are equal. A party that mainly focuses on advertising and messaging is typically linked weakly to nonelites and controlled by a small group of donors, consultants, and politicians. Such parties are warning signs of crumbling democracy. Instead, as Didi Kuo and Tabatha Abu-El Haj argue, political parties “should foster deep ties to local communities. They should prioritize social interactions with communities and voters, and they should do so in ways that ‘listen’ to the community. This requires investing in state and local parties as organizations with year-round offices, staff, and events.”

Campaign finance laws and other party regulations can prioritize these more personal and direct modes of political engagement. Currently, campaign finance law and the broader legal conception of political parties favor a very limited view of speech as the most important thing to be protected. The speech under protection, however, is the ability of party leaders to broadcast their message, and the speech of wealthy political donors to broadcast their message, too. Such a cramped view sees politics as a kind of marketplace, in which those who already have power should get to control the conversation. The rest are simply passive listeners.

 

[lpetrich]

Lee Drutman's final section is "5. Conclusion: Imagining a Better Future, with More and Better Parties"

"The signs are powerful that U.S. democracy is now entering a fourth significant period of reform. Though still early, increasing interest in structural change is real." - like this article: This 1981 book eerily predicted today's distrustful and angry political mood - Vox - Jan 6, 2016, 5:30pm EST - by LD himself

LD ends his paper with

Yet we must retain some optimism. We must see that the urgency of combating extremism is equally a chance to build a more representative, effective, and full democracy for the twenty-first century. There are no shortcuts. If we succeed, it will be only because we did the hard work to make more and better parties possible. So let’s get started.

 

[lpetrich]

It's good to see US election reformers start to consider proportional representation.

A Radical Idea for Fixing Congress: Proportional Representation - The Atlantic - July 6, 2023 - "Can proportional representation save American democracy?"

Supporters of proportional representation—which is used in advanced democracies such as Australia, Israel, and countries throughout Europe—view the system as a prerequisite for breaking the two parties’ stranglehold on American politics. It would foster coalitional, cross-partisan governance, while larger, multimember districts would all but eliminate partisan gerrymandering. “Your enemies are never permanent. And your friends today might be your opponents tomorrow, and maybe your friends the day after,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, explained to me. “So there’s something structural about a multiparty [system] that depresses polarization, depresses the risk of political violence—that depresses extremism.”

However,

Drutman knows that the U.S. is unlikely to adopt multimember districts particularly soon. But he believes that other election reforms such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting simply don’t go far enough. They can’t save American democracy, he told me. “You’re bringing buckets to a flood.”

I agree. Those are all single-winner systems, and they don't fix the problems that single-member districts have.

Drutman knows that the U.S. is unlikely to adopt multimember districts particularly soon. But he believes that other election reforms such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting simply don’t go far enough. They can’t save American democracy, he told me. “You’re bringing buckets to a flood.”

Election reformers are a polite bunch. When I asked them about ideas other than their own, they were hesitant to be too harsh. That’s partly out of necessity. When your goal is reducing partisanship and polarization in politics, slinging insults doesn’t exactly help the cause. So they applaud almost any proposal as long as it represents an improvement over the status quo, which to them is pretty much anything.

Yet this public bonhomie masks a vigorous competition of ideas—and a jostling for resources—over the best way to create a more representative government.

Then mentioning Alaska's recently-adopted final-four system: a two-round system like CA and WA top-two, but with the top four continuing from the first round to a second round with IRV.

Developers of final-four voting celebrated when, under the new process last year, far-right candidates lost two key races. Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski staved off a challenge from the right, and moderate Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin, the right-wing former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a race for the House. Peltola became the first Democrat to hold the seat in 50 years.

But that is still a single-winner system.

 

[lpetrich]

And they question Drutman’s push for more parties at a time when more and more Americans are identifying as political independents. “It’s actually a fanciful and incorrect assessment of American politics to believe that there’s a huge demand for more parties,” says Dmitri Mehlhorn, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute who, along with his business partner, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has invested in Gehl’s reform efforts. Her vision, Mehlhorn told me, “is not quite a magic bullet,” but it has more promise than the other reforms.

Referring to Katherine Gehl, supporter of final-four voting.

Many people say that they want a third party, even if they don't vote for existing ones.

Drutman doesn’t see it that way. The final-four system might work well for Alaska, he said, but Alaska, with its relatively depolarized politics and unusually large number of independent voters, is not a representative state. Nor is it clear, he noted, that the new system made a decisive difference in Murkowski’s and Peltola’s victories last year. “I think those reforms are pushing up against the limits of what they can achieve,” Drutman said. “Nonpartisan primaries have not really changed anything at all.”

That's because they leave single-member districts in place.

 

[Tigers!]

But that is still a single-winner system.

Ipetrich
Reading through all of the info you have provided is good. Thank you for all of it.
Yet I can't help but notice that you are adverse to a single-winner system.
Why is that? In some systems single-winner is a feature not a bug.
For example a presidential system, like the USA, cannot really use PR to elect a president. There can only be a single winner, which is FPTP by definition.
People bag FPTP (sometimes with good reason) but there are times when it is necessary. If only one person can win then FPTP is necessary. If filling a parliament PR is useful.

 

[lpetrich]

Yet I can't help but notice that you are adverse to a single-winner system.
Why is that? In some systems single-winner is a feature not a bug.
For example a presidential system, like the USA, cannot really use PR to elect a president. There can only be a single winner, which is FPTP by definition.
People bag FPTP (sometimes with good reason) but there are times when it is necessary. If only one person can win then FPTP is necessary. If filling a parliament PR is useful.

I agree that one must use some single-winner method for a single-seat position like the US Presidency. But FPTP != single-winner methods in general, and there are plenty of single-winner methods that improve on it in various ways.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In proportional representation, losers don't necessarily completely lose; because they often have some seats. But in a winner-take-all system, they completely lose.

But having 49% of the final vote is the same as having 0% of it.

 

[Tigers!]

Yet I can't help but notice that you are adverse to a single-winner system.
Why is that? In some systems single-winner is a feature not a bug.
For example a presidential system, like the USA, cannot really use PR to elect a president. There can only be a single winner, which is FPTP by definition.
People bag FPTP (sometimes with good reason) but there are times when it is necessary. If only one person can win then FPTP is necessary. If filling a parliament PR is useful.

I agree that one must use some single-winner method for a single-seat position like the US Presidency. But FPTP != single-winner methods in general, and there are plenty of single-winner methods that improve on it in various ways.

There are variants in single-winner methods but all they do is work out 'better' where the line is. Only one winner can cross said line, which is FPTP.
/pendant hat off

 

[lpetrich]

States have been required to elect only one representative per district since 1967, when Congress banned multimember districts to stop southern states from using a version of the system to ensure that white candidates won House seats. Fix Our House wants Congress to amend the law in a way that allows states to adopt multimember districts without returning to the racist practices of the Jim Crow era. The organization’s allies in the civil-rights community argue that if properly designed, multimember districts would increase representation for communities of color, including in places where they have struggled to win elections because they are dispersed throughout the population rather than concentrated in neighboring areas.

This is not only good for ethnic and racial minorities, but also for partisan and ideological minorities. Urban Republicans and rural Democrats can both be represented, as can Greens and Libertarians.

The problem with those earlier multiwinner elections is that they would use non-proportional methods like the bloc vote: vote for as many candidates as positions. With a partisan vote, the bloc vote reduces to general ticket with FPTP, and general ticket is voting for a complete slate of candidates in single-winner fashion.

For the moment, the idea has gained little momentum on Capitol Hill. Republican leaders have become reflexively opposed to reform efforts aimed at reducing polarization, seeing them as Trojan horses designed to topple conservatives. Democrats in recent years have prioritized other election-related proposals focused on expanding access to the ballot, tightening campaign-finance rules, and banning partisan gerrymandering.

The closest legislative proposal to what Fix Our House has in mind is the Fair Representation Act, a bill that Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia has introduced several times to combine multimember districts with ranked-choice voting. But Beyer has struggled to win more than a handful of co-sponsors even within his own party.

Looking under Representative Donald S. Beyer, Jr. in congress.gov I find

• H.R.3057 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): Fair Representation Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress - cosponsors: 5
• H.R.4000 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Fair Representation Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress - cosponsors: 7
• H.R.3863 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Fair Representation Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress - cosponsors: 8

I recognize Jamie Raskin and Ro Khanna among the bills' cosponsors.

 

[lpetrich]

Most election-reform victories have come through citizen-driven ballot initiatives, which exist only on the state and local levels, as opposed to national legislation that would require support from leaders of the major parties. An idea like proportional representation, Beyer told me, is more popular with whichever party is out of power. “It appeals to Republicans in Massachusetts who’ve never gotten elected, and Democrats in Oklahoma,” he said. “So the appeal is to people on the outside, not the people who are making the laws.”

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that advocates for proportional representation don’t necessarily share the same vision for what a new system would look like. For example, Beyer is reluctant to embrace Drutman’s ultimate goal of multiparty, coalition government in the House, viewing it as a step too far in the U.S. “It’s emphatically not the specific goal,” he said. “Talking European-type coalition governments would be a deal killer here.”

Another proposed reform is to increase the size of the House, fixed at 435 nearly a century ago.

Despite scant support among politicians, proportional representation has been gaining momentum within the reform community. The groups Protect Democracy and Unite America recently published a report examining the idea, and another advocacy group, FairVote, has begun to reemphasize proportional representation after years of focusing mostly on ranked-choice voting. Last year, voters in Portland, Oregon, approved the use of multimember districts (and ranked-choice voting) for the city council. Multimember districts have also generated discussion among Republican state legislators in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states, although the idea has yet to move forward there.

Voters OK drastic overhaul of City Hall in Portland, Oregon | AP News - including proportional ranked choice voting (single transferable vote).

 

[Derec]

There are variants in single-winner methods but all they do is work out 'better' where the line is. Only one winner can cross said line, which is FPTP./pendant hat off

FTPT specifically refers to plurality, rather than majority voting. Therefore, not every single-winner method is FPTP.
For example, Squad private Rashida Tlaib "won" her 2018 primary with only 31% of the vote because the field was fragmented.

If you must be a pedant, then at least be correct.

 

[Derec]

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that advocates for proportional representation don’t necessarily share the same vision for what a new system would look like. For example, Beyer is reluctant to embrace Drutman’s ultimate goal of multiparty, coalition government in the House, viewing it as a step too far in the U.S. “It’s emphatically not the specific goal,” he said. “Talking European-type coalition governments would be a deal killer here.”

"European-type coalition governments" would necessitate having something like a prime minister elected from the House, and reducing the power of the President. Therefore, I get why Beyer is skeptical. It would be a radical change in the US system.
But having multiple parties in the House and even Senate would be a good thing I think. Then it would be unlikely a single party would control the majority, and thus could neither just unilaterally pass its agenda nor unilaterally block the passage of any legislation.

The Atlantic article is behind a very restrictive paywall (no free articles anymore apparently), so I could not read the whole thing. This whole excessive paywalling is getting ridiculous.
Edited to add: never mind. Worked on archive.ph.

 

[lpetrich]

Protect Democracy - It can happen here. We can stop it. - supports independent redistricting commissions, ranked-choice voting, nonpartisan primaries, and voting by mail.

Supporting RCV in Vermont, Oregon, Georgia, Washington, Virginia, Utah, open primaries in Pennsylvania, and final-five RCV in Nevada

Unite America — Country Over Party
has
Parties should be fixed, not sidelined

Skepticism of political parties is a central feature of American political culture and only about 11% of Americans express high confidence in political parties. Ultimately, the research supports a surprising conclusion: there’s a near-consensus among scholars that healthy political parties are essential to a stable democracy, and without efforts to improve and strengthen parties, our politics will likely continue to deteriorate.

and
More than Red and Blue: Political Parties and American Democracy

Historically, political parties helped connect coalitions and interests, mobilize voters, negotiate compromises, and restrain the worst and most dangerous impulses of individual politicians. Today’s weakened political parties are making many of the country’s central political problems worse because of their failure to fulfill their critical roles and pursuit of uncontrolled partisanship.

 

[Derec]

But having 49% of the final vote is the same as having 0% of it.

Under winner-take all, yes. Hence the advantage of proportional representation for legislatures. It could also do away with gerrymandering.

 

[lpetrich]

These two orgs have come out with
Towards-Proportional-Representation-_-March-2023-.pdf

Proportional systems include an extraordinary variety of models; no two systems around the world look exactly alike. Additionally, some countries blend electoral system properties to produce systems with facets of both winner-take-all and proportional representation.

This report does not advocate for a particular model of proportional representation. Instead, as described in Part III, amending the UCDA should avoid narrow prescriptions, opting instead to provide states with flexibility in considering variations that might be especially suitable to their own political and cultural contexts. Thus, as a general term, we refer below to proportional multi-member districts as the central policy change of UCDA reform.

Thus not taking sides.

Pointing out such disproportionate outcomes as in Massachusetts and Oklahoma. MA's 9 House seats are all D, yet the vote is around 2/3 D 1/3 R. OK's 5 House seats are all R, yet the vote is around 2/3 R 1/3 D.

But MA politicians won't want to help R's and OK ones won't want to help D's.

The report mentions

Preventing a Revival of Bloc Voting

Throughout most of American history, multi-member districts have been synonymous with the bloc vote. Every congressional multi-member district in American history has used bloc voting, as have many state and local jurisdictions.

With a partisan vote, that effectively becomes general ticket, which is very un-proportional.