Proportional Representation Is Not the Answer to America’s Problems

The idea that the country’s political dysfunction can be fixed by embracing a new electoral system is a dangerous fantasy.

(Photo via Getty Images.)

America’s two party system sucks.

One of the things that is astonishing to any immigrant to America—even one who grew up in a reasonably affluent society like Germany—is the sheer amount of choice the country offers in just about every realm of life. There is an endless profusion of cable television channels. American grocery stores are incomprehensibly giant, offering a commensurably vast number of different products. Even sports is a notably variegated affair. In most European countries, soccer dwarfs all other sports; but while American football may be dominant in the United States, other sports like baseball, basketball and ice hockey also enjoy massive followings.

Politics is the one realm which stands out for the poverty of the choices it offers. At every election, Americans trudge to the polls and are presented with the same choices. Unless they want to waste their vote on some third party candidate that has no chance of winning, they dutifully pick between two parties that have existed for over a century and a half: Democrats and Republicans.

To the layman, this paucity of choice, so out of keeping with other realms of American life, may seem puzzling. But any political scientist knows that there is a simple explanation. The United States has a “majoritarian” electoral system. If you want to be elected to the House of Representatives, you need to win the largest absolute number of votes in your electoral district. In theory, this means that lots of candidates could vie for office. But in practice, a majoritarian political system strongly incentivizes voters to abstain from voting for smaller political parties or to lend their support to outsiders. For if you vote for a candidate who winds up getting ten or 20 percent of the vote, your preference effectively doesn’t count. Your vote is “wasted.”

Nationally, this mechanism strongly favors the creation and persistence of a two-party system. (Political scientists call this Duverger’s Law.)¹ Even if one of the two main parties goes through a period of sustained unpopularity, many voters will be reluctant to abandon it. As most of them recognize, the likely effect of voting for a third party is simply that the other major political force, which they probably deeply dislike, will sweep the next elections.

These two insights—that the number of political choices we have is oddly low and that this is a result of the majoritarian electoral system—naturally suggest a remedy: why don’t we change the way we run elections to allow voters more choice? This is what a number of political reformers have been arguing for with increasing urgency over the last years. America, they believe, should adopt a system of “proportional representation.” This would allow a much larger number of political parties to vie for the favor of voters, with each gaining seats in the House of Representatives in rough proportion to the overall number of votes they have been able to attract across the nation.

Indeed, this idea has now attracted the support of a veritable who’s who of American academia. In a 2022 open letter, a highly distinguished list of social scientists ranging from Martin Gilens and David Laitin to Daron Acemoglu, last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, advocated for the country to introduce proportional representation in elections for the House of Representatives. Such a system, they wrote,

…would render gerrymandering obsolete and help ensure that a political party’s share of votes in an election actually determines how many seats it holds in the House. Larger, multi-member districts would mean almost every voter could cast a meaningful vote, regardless of where they live.²

The most eloquent and persistent advocate of this argument has long been Lee Drutman, a friend and former colleague who works at New America. On Tuesday, he published a splashy op-ed in The New York Times. Proportional representation, Lee and his co-author Jesse Wegman argue, would “fix” many of the frustrations Americans have with their politics, from polarization to the deep unpopularity of Congress.

Given my own frustration with the country’s major political parties, I too wish that we could dislodge the two-party system. But sadly, the arguments for proportional representation ignore how dysfunctional the politics of many countries that have adopted the system are. Worse, they never grapple with the fact that its introduction into the United States would at most be piecemeal, importing all of the system’s dangers while foregoing most of its advantages. The idea that proportional representation can fix American politics, in short, is a dangerous delusion.

Proportional Representation Makes No Sense in America

Advocates for proportional representation tend to paint a rosy picture of what America would look like if we adopted their favored political system. Most Americans would finally have a large number of choices. With five or six political parties vying for their support, they could vote for politicians who actually represent their values. Even better, this would break the partisan gridlock in Congress. Whereas small minorities with a strong influence over either Democrats or Republicans can currently prevent the passage of overwhelmingly popular legislation, a single political party would no longer be able to stand in the way of progress. As Wegman and Drutman write in the opening line of their op-ed, their proposed reform would result in “a Congress where politicians of different ideologies work together to pass legislation reflecting what most Americans want.”

But there is little reason to think that this is how things would work out. Wegman and Drutman claim that their polling reveals what kind of political landscape an expanded House of Representatives using “multi-member districts”—the form of proportional representation they favor—would produce. Let’s take their projection at face value (at least for now).

According to Wegman and Drutman, the reformed House of Representatives would contain six parties. From left to right, these would be a Progressive Party, which would presumably be home to left-wing politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; a New Liberal Party which would be headed by more moderate Democrats like Chuck Schumer; a New Populist Party, in the vein of Tom Cotton, which would combine radical views on the economy with more conservative views on social issues; a market-friendly, socially moderate Growth and Opportunity Party in the mold of Michael Bloomberg; a Patriot Party, animated by people like Stephen Miller, which would favor tariffs and strict restrictions on immigration; and a Christian Conservative Party, modeled on politicians like Mike Pence, which would emphasize religious social values.³

What’s striking about this seat projection is that it would result in a giant political mess. One constant feature of systems with proportional representation is that, to provide any form of stable or coherent government, parties must after the election form a coalition that commands a majority of the seats, ideally one that proves stable and ideologically coherent. But which permutation of these political parties could possibly form such a coalition?

Let’s start on the left. Progressives and New Liberals would, despite significant differences, likely agree on some important questions. But since they lack a majority, they would need to add another party to their coalition. The only realistic prospect would be the Growth and Opportunity party. But while the Progressives and the Growthers might be able to iron out their considerable differences on social issues, they stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum when it comes to economic questions. It’s hard to see how their coalition negotiations could succeed.⁴

This brings us to the right. Christian Conservatives and the Growth and Opportunity Party have some overlap on economic issues. But adding the Patriot Party to their column doesn’t give them a majority, and the New Populists are too different from them on economic issues. Similarly, the Patriots and the New Populists might try to forge a coalition based on their rough agreement about cultural issues. But their disagreements with both other right-of-center parties about the economy is likely far too stark for them to form a joint government.

Wegman and Drutman claim that proportional representation would fix the dysfunction and gridlock that now characterizes Congress. But even on the scenario they themselves present, it is clear that the basic problems that have often driven voters in countries with systems of proportional representation to despair would quickly rear their head in the United States: Either these new political parties would fail to form a stable coalition, or the resulting government would likely be highly unstable and ideologically incoherent.

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In reality, things are likely to be even worse. So far, I have gone along with their assumption that electing the House of Representatives in a proportional manner would produce six reasonably stable and coherent political parties. But the model they present almost certainly underestimates the chaos that would ensue in Congress if America actually embraced the reform they favor. Indeed, the number of parties and movements represented in Congress would almost certainly be much bigger than they imagine.

Some countries curtail the number of parties represented in their parliaments by requiring that each of them clear a minimum threshold; in Germany, for example, each party must get at least 5 percent of the national vote for any of its members to be represented in the Bundestag.⁵ But since the Constitution gives states far-reaching powers to determine how to run their own elections, the Supreme Court would almost certainly strike down a system based on national lists. American advocates of proportional representation thus favor the introduction of “multi-member districts,” in which each constituency elects a number of representatives, with the top three or five or nine vote-getters being selected—irrespective of what happens anywhere else.⁶

This form of proportional representation significantly lowers the barrier to entry for fringe political movements and weakens the hold of national political parties. Anybody who wins as little as ten percent of the vote in one newly created congressional district would be elected. And in a hugely diverse country like the United States, the list of movements or individuals able to win political office in this way would likely include all kinds of extremists and lunatics.

So in reality the new Congress that Wegman and Drutman envisage would not just include six national political parties. It would also feature:

• Local or national celebrities of all kinds

• Movements specifically targeting particular ethnic groups, from the New Panther Party to the Latino Alliance

• Leaders of regional independence movements

• Religious leaders such as founders of locally influential mega churches or outright cults.

To be sure, the House of Representatives already contains a depressing number of wingnuts. But at the moment, national political parties retain significant sway over their members. Under the new system, there would likely be many more of them, and they would be completely independent of national political parties. To form a coalition, New Populists and Christian Conservatives wouldn’t just have to strike a deal with the Growth and Opportunity Party; they would likely also have to give handouts and plush positions to five or ten or twenty independents or micro-parties.

There’s another fundamental problem with bringing proportional representation to America: It would make the House of Representatives a complete aberration within the wider political system. For even if America’s most eminent political scientists somehow got their will, totally changing how the House of Representatives works, they wouldn’t be able to introduce similar changes to how we elect the Senate or the president.

In elections for the House of Representatives, it is in theory possible to amalgamate a number of districts in order to create “multi-member” constituencies. But that is not possible in elections for the Senate. Since each state elects one Senator at any one time, the relevant constituencies only have a single member—making any form of proportionality unfeasible. And this means that voters who don’t want to waste their vote in Senate elections would once again be reduced to a choice between two serious candidates.

The same goes for presidential elections. Voters might have the luxury of voting for new-fangled parties like the Patriots or the New Populists in elections for the House of Representatives. But any presidential candidate who wants to be viable would still be bound by the logic of Duverger’s Law. When it comes to the most consequential choice they get to make, voters would continue to feel constrained to choose the lesser of two evils.

Of course, all of this means that the Patriots and the New Populists may never get off the ground in the first place. Since voters care more about the presidency than the Senate, and more about the Senate than the House of Representatives, a reform that only affects the lower chamber of Congress simply wouldn’t be capable of provoking a radical change to the country’s party system. The idea, implicit in Drutman’s and Wegman’s scenario, that Democrats and Republicans would disappear overnight turns out to be a fantasy.

In the end, America would likely remain hostage to Democrats and Republicans. The only difference would be that the newly created multi-member districts allow a new smattering of random celebrities, regional separatists and or religious extremists to grandstand in the House of Representatives—while elections for senators and presidents still present voters with the same old choice between the two same old two parties.⁷

Even Outside America, Proportional Representation Has Serious Drawbacks

Any electoral system needs to empower political actors to bundle the highly idiosyncratic views of millions of people into a winning coalition that commands the support of over half of voting members in the legislature. There are basically only two ways of doing this: The first, typical of majoritarian systems with two political parties, is to build a broad electoral coalition before an election. This limits the choice of voters but gives them a clear sense of which political faction will benefit from their vote. The second, typical of systems of proportional representation with multiple political parties, is to encourage parties to cobble together an electoral coalition after the election. This gives voters much more choice on the day of the election. But it also leaves them in the dark about who the party they vote for will ultimately get into bed with.

In the United States, voters need to pick between Democrats and Republicans, something that many of them are understandably unhappy about. But if they voted for a Republican representative last November, they can now be reasonably confident that he or she will support Donald Trump’s agenda in Congress. Conversely, if they voted for a Democrat last November, they can be pretty sure that he or she will oppose most of what the incoming Trump administration is planning.

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In Germany, by contrast, voters have much more choice. In the upcoming elections for the Bundestag, there are about seven political parties that have a real chance of gaining representation in the national parliament. But German voters pay for that luxury by having little sense of what happens to their votes once they are cast and the leader of their party enters coalition negotiations with all kinds of other political forces. Even a vote for a left-of-center party, like the Greens or the Social Democrats, might ultimately help to elect a right-of-center Chancellor, like Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats.⁸

One way to think about this is that majoritarian political systems tend to create characteristic problems: a lack of choice which results in society’s polarization into two mutually antagonistic blocs. This is a real problem that many Americans are rightly upset about, and it explains why there is some degree of popular support for a wonky notion like the introduction of a different electoral system.

But what most Americans fail to recognize is that systems of proportional representation tend to result in characteristic problems of their own, including:

• The Problem of Coherence: Proportional representation tends to result in governments that lack ideological coherence. In Germany, for example, every new election is now a game of musical chairs in which most major parties from both the left and the right claim some posts in the cabinet, with one or two parties more or less arbitrarily left out of the mix.⁹

• The Problem of Stagnation: Proportional representation can make it difficult or impossible for voters to oust unpopular parties from government. In Austria, for example, a so-called “grand coalition” between the party’s two most popular parties governed for 44 out of 72 years from 1945 and 2017; their hold was only broken once voters got so upset with the country’s political stagnation and corruption that they flocked to more extreme parties en masse.

• The Problem of Outsized Influence: Proportional representation often hands small parties that happen to hold the balance of power outsized sway over national policy. In Israel, for example, radical representatives of ultra-orthodox Jews have long had effective veto power over large areas of national life because the country’s electoral system makes more traditional right-of-center parties dependent on their support.

• The Problem of Instability: Proportional representation tends to result in high levels of political fragmentation, which in turn lead to chaos and corruption. Italy’s postwar republic, for example, had over fifty governments in the first fifty years of its existence; the main reason why Italian politics has become somewhat more stable of late is that, tired and exasperated, the country has largely abandoned the system.¹⁰

Fantasies Won’t Fix America

I don’t have a general preference for either majoritarian or proportional electoral systems. Institutional design is the realm of vexing and inescapable trade-offs. When you are designing a new constitution from scratch, you can make a decent case for either system—and in some political contexts, proportional representation really may be preferable.

But Americans remain strikingly ignorant about the problems that real-life systems of proportional representation have created around the world; it is, for example, striking that neither the open letter nor the latest op-ed in The New York Times explicitly grapple with any of these problems. Worse, these problems are likely to be even more pronounced when, as would inescapably be the case in the United States, any reform would be half-arsed and half-baked—introducing some elements from an alien political tradition without fully sweeping aside the remnants of the homegrown one.

And of course the prospects for proportional representation in the United States are in any case slim. The system won’t be adopted here for the simple reason that it would require turkeys to vote for Thanksgiving; unless Democrats and Republicans agree to abolish themselves, it is very hard to see how the necessary legal changes could possibly come about.

For all these reasons, it’s time to abandon the idea that proportional representation can fix American politics once and for all. Anybody who actually wants to address the deep dysfunction of our politics will need to come up with a solution that isn’t quite so devoid of political realism or common sense.

1. The idea that a majoritarian electoral rule leads to a two-party system holds in many contexts. But as Maurice Duverger himself recognized, there are important exceptions. Where one part of the territory has strong independentist tendencies, for example, this additional “political cleavage” can allow a third political party to gain a foothold in the political system. (Think of the Bloc Québécois in Canada, for example.)

2. The list also includes some of the luminaries of the Persuasion universe, from Francis Fukuyama to Rachel Kleinfeld and Sheri Berman, as well as other stalwarts of political science like Steven Levitsky, Margaret Levi, Arend Lijphart and Brendan Nyhan.

3. I have picked the names of potential leaders for these parties for illustrative purposes; Wegman and Drutman may disagree about this element of the classification. I did not include Donald Trump since Wegman and Drutman seem to assume that the current MAGA movement would splinter between the New Populists and the Patriots; it is therefore unclear to me which of these two parties Trump would lead in their imagination.

4. Alternatively, the Progress Party and The New Liberals could try to forge an economic coalition with the New Populists. But because of their vast differences on cultural issues, this would be even less likely to succeed.

5. Such electoral thresholds make complete chaos less likely by reducing the number of viable political parties. But they also mean that who gets to govern can depend on whether some minor party happens to gain 5.1% or 4.9% of the national vote. In Poland, for example, the far-right Law and Justice party only won a majority in the Sejm in 2015 because a number of opposition parties that had failed to coordinate fell just short of their respective electoral thresholds.

6. Multi-member districts have a number of significant drawbacks relative to other forms of proportional representation. For one, they tend, especially in highly diverse countries, to favor extreme fragmentation: since moderate local popularity is enough to get elected, they tend to weaken the hold of national parties. For another, they actually can’t deliver on the core promise of the system: Some candidates get elected with far more of the vote than necessary. Others, especially in the smaller constituencies that would be inevitable in less populous states like North Dakota, will fall just below the necessary threshold despite attracting a significant percentage of the vote. As a result, it would still be possible for one party to get a disproportionately small or large share of seats in the House of Representatives relative to their share of the national vote.

7. More broadly, systems of proportional representation work best in countries, such as Germany, in which members of the national parliament elect the head of government. Forming coalitions in such a parliamentary system may still be difficult. Voters may still dislike some of the partners with which the party they supported end up striking a deal. But at least there are strong incentives for forming a stable coalition because a parliamentary majority allows its members to divvy up coveted posts like ministerial appointments.

By contrast, systems of proportional representation tend to create gridlock and frustration in countries, such as Peru, in which elections for the most important office in the land are decoupled from such parliamentary negotiations. With much less incentives for political parties to strike a deal, these systems often result in a directly elected president having to curry favor with a large number of rival factions in the national parliament—with their ability to pass legislation of any kind severely curtailed.

8. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the center-right Christian Democrats, is very likely to become Germany’s next Chancellor. But because he too is unlikely to command an ideologically cohesive majority, he is likely to go into government with a left-of-center party like the Greens or the Social Democrats. So if you are a progressive German, you can by all means vote for a party that claims to stand for your views; but the likely upshot is that your vote will help a proudly conservative politician to lead the next government.

Something similar happened at the last election. The FDP is a center-right pro-business party that is largely supported by Germans with conservative political views. But because neither left-of-center nor right-of-center parties could muster a coherent majority after the last election, the FDP ended up in government with two left-of-center parties: the Greens and the Social Democrats.

9. I am borrowing this metaphor from an upcoming podcast with the excellent Wolfgang Münchau.

10. While Italy retains elements of a proportional system, new rules give the political party or coalition that wins the most votes a large seat bonus; even if they only get a few more votes, falling far short of fifty percent, they will end up with a clear majority of seats in the lower chamber. This effectively forces parties that were used to striking deals after the election to form broad coalitions before the election.