Not only would proportional representation be a disaster, but proposals for it distract us from an obvious source of our woes: our system of campaign finance, unique among the world’s democracies.
Our election campaigns cost far more than elsewhere - 40 times the amount in Germany and the UK - and there is no public financing at the federal level.
Our problem is not the number of parties. The problem is what all candidates of both parties must do to win elections: beg ungodly sums from deep pocketed donors, who veto any policy that might gore their financial ox.
Public financing of campaigns, preferably by a Voter Dollars system, is at least a partial solution, one that can command bipartisan support from voters. www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
Campaign financing is a problem, but oligarchy is the source of it.
As long as the oligarchs can focus on two parties, they can gerrymander districts to assure that any threatening group or party remains confined in odd districts and takes on an extremist coloration.
But worst than that, under the current system the oligarchs and their stooges can pack the opposition party into the smallest possible number of districts.
So we get the situation where the GOP has virtually disappeared in the blue states and the Dems are weak in the red states.
In this situation, the primary elections are the only contested ones, and they invariably go to the stoogiest of the oligarchy's stooges.
Spending on the presidential election in 2024 amounted to maybe $11 per American. Spending on ice cream in 2024 amounted to close to $100 per American. Cable TV ~$500. Sports tickets ~$50. Cellphones ~$1300. Dog food ~$130. Nail salons ~$30. Are these things more important than elections? ... Kamala Harris managed to blow through $2 billion, with no evidence that it had any impact at all on the outcome. ... Who cares what the UK and Germany spend? Maybe if they spent more on elections, they wouldn't have such crappy leaders.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
As many demographers, and the result of recent elections have already demonstrated, the movement of the two parties towards the extremes came about because of self-sorting of the voters. Most of corporate America is located in big cities, which means that those with more liberal/libertarian views will tend to accumulate in those cities, leaving behind the nationalists/conservative/patriots to the exurban and rural districts. That is a worldwide phenomenon.
Hi Trudius, thanks for the interesting reply! Yes, geographic self sorting is a real trend, but in my opinion its likely, in whole or in part, just another symptom rather than the disease, but whether it is or isnt, it doesnt explain the fundamental issue: our political system has been hollowed out by centralization to the point where most people don’t fit comfortably into either the "conservative" or "progressive" camps, yet are forced into this false binary by the structure of our politics and media. The near total removal of economic policy from real political contestation has left us with an arena dominated by highly divisive social issues, which, when combined with an enforced uniformity in policy dictated from above, produces a mix of anger, frustration, and apathy.
In the decentralized system of the Old Republic, people had real political agency, regional economic policies could be debated and adjusted based on local needs, and political engagement was about more than just signaling allegiance in culture wars. But in our hyper centralized era, where policy is largely preordained by highly centralized supreme institutions, elections become little more than symbolic contests over identity, not substance. This engineered political landscape, reinforced by a mass media apparatus that frames all debate within narrow, pre approved parameters, makes it so that neither party truly serves the public. People are left feeling powerless:: those who care are angry because their views, especially on economic matters, have no meaningful representation, and those who disengage, who I'd say make up most of teh general population, do so because they sense, correctly, that participation changes little.
In my opinion, the so called called "self-sorting" is actually a by products of a system that strips individuals of meaningful control over the policies that shape their lives. In such a system, people are herded into ideological silos, not because they naturally belong there, but because the structure of our politics and media leaves them no viable alternative. This is not a functioning democracy, it is, as Sheldon Wolin described, an "inverted totalitarian" system where participation is managed, dissent is channeled into dead ends, and the real levers of power remain out of reach for almost anyone, leaving almost all people without any meaningful amount of political agency at all
Understood, thanks, and yes, it would supplement the current forms of financing. Since the courts won’t allow any limits to political donations and spending, a public financing system is the only path to game-changing reform. Thanks for the question, which is indeed important.
Who said anything about banning books? Voter Dollars doesn’t limit anyone’s spending or expression. It levels the playing field by giving candidates who want to serve us an alternative source of funds, not controlled by special interests.
Citizens United was mainly about the question of whether or not other groups, who were not candidates, could still spend their own money however they wanted on influencing elections.
The key point being a certain book highly critical of Hillary Clinton, which was privately published within 90 days of an election.
Hence, why I asked. Under your system, would voter dollars SUPPLEMENT other forms of election financing, or REPLACE other forms of election financing? It's a very important question.
I have doubts. Giving voters a budget to spend individually might be useful, but how does that relate to all the other private donations? And I am deeply concerned about anything which would effectively ban something like private publishing of anti-politician books during election season.
Personally, I'd just remove contribution limits, and encourage political parties to create anonymous donation 'trusts' sufficient to fully fund one candidate per seat per cycle. 1 year prior to each election, the board members of each trust of that type just pick who they'll be funding that year in a public hearing of some sort.
While I have seen arguments for ranked choice voting and similar ways to give the electorate a deeper say, I had not seen that anyone was arguing for proportional representation in the US until now. But I agree with your critique of PR for the US.
Similar "messes" happen in countries that are used to coalitions (see the Netherlands, Germany). I guess the trade-off is always between representativeness and stability. The stability of first-past-the-post is illusory, really - what we're seeing with the public dissatisfaction with politics is fringe right-wing populists rising. The centre-right party then shifting their policy agenda to absorb that vote (UK is what I can speak to). Whereas with populists at the table, they go into a weird hokey-kokey where they get into power and either betray their coalition partners (by staying populist) or their base (by compromising) - this happened with the Netherlands and Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV).
Ah, but the stability you get with FPP is fine until a rotten system collapses into crisis. Consider Britain -- when people get so fed up with the incompetence of both Labor and the Tories -- when the ancien regime collapses, what you get is Farage. That's not stability.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
Lani Guinier was nominated to be Clinton's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1993, and her prospects were destroyed in a very early instance of the now familiar cancellation campaign. She had written an article about proportional representation, and Republicans were all over the media smearing and misrepresenting her, saying that she didn’t believe in the principle of one-person/one-vote, that she wanted a black vote to count for more than a white vote, that she was a “reverse racist”, and so on. (She was a black woman, btw.) Because proportional representation is a complicated thing to explain, and could not fit a sound bite the way the Republicans’ allegations did, her nomination was sunk.
That’s why we haven’t heard anyone bring it up again until now, 30 years later. It can be fatal for a political career. I’m a little surprised it’s coming up at all, especially since the political climate is far more rancid now than it was in the early 1990’s.
I live in France, where the representation system has ground the government to a halt. Both the extreme Left (LFI) and Right (RN) are blackmailing the government, trying to get the pensions reform revoked (which would be disastrous). The Greens, moderate Left and Right can't agree on anything, since everyone is calculating President Macron and his centrist party are toast, and they don't want to ruin their chances for the next presidential election (2027).
The government has already been brought down by these coalitions and we have no budget approved for 2025! Nobody seems to be trying to negotiate or find a middle ground, and the much needed reforms will not pass.
I'm not saying this would happen in the US; I'm just showing what happened over here: every small party hates the other and wants them crushed, so nothing gets done. A word to the wise...
While I am no expert on French politics, from the outside, it looks as if the center and left conspired to freeze out the right in a two-way, highly gerrymandered election. The Greens are a stalking horse for communists and Macron is a bad joke.
Reform will not pass because of the conspiracy of dunces that hobbled accountability and electoral choice in your last snap election.
The French center and left conspiring to freeze out the right or far-right using various forms of either fair or underhanded election tactics has been a long-standing tradition dating back to either 1945 or 1958, depending on how you count.
The interesting part is that recently, they appear to have gotten much worse at actually making it work.
Not only will reform not pass, all of 'em are holding us hostage so they can demand the retraction of the Pension reforms. This is insane! The budget is in a shambles, *especially* due to increasing retirement pension costs, yet people expect the reform to be pushed back to 62 years old. Macron barely managed to take it to 64 years old, which is still the youngest in the EU and arithmetically unsustainable; but people want to retire at 62 and expect to get a full pension. This drives me nuts. I mean, I get it: I don't want to work more than necessary, either. But if we're being adults with half a working brain, we can't expect to retire at 62 without blowing a huge hole in the dept, increasing spending, exploding our loan rates (France is currently paying more than Spain and even Greece, FFS) and making everyone objectively poorer. But irresponsible politicians on all sides pander to this populist madness, promising to have the cake and eat it too. We're f*cked :-(
Great critique of proportional representation. I like your acknowledgment that starting conditions matter and total structural design must be appreciated. A presidential system, as found in the U.S., presents certain difficulties that create legislative gridlock between the legislative and executive branches. Parliamentary systems have a different structure for filling the executive branch. Introducing pr to the U.S. House without fully addressing its governance effects is quite risky.
I’m in favor of the creation of an independent national coalition to create more structure for voters before candidates get into elected office. I have covered this argument in my substack. The pre- vs post-vote need to organize around legislative agendas is quite critical, as you clearly call out.
Another critical element of design is the actual structure and rules governing the U.S. House. So much power has been consolidated by party leadership over many decades, making many representatives unable to legislate. The majority/minority committee system has key implications for governance.
Why no discussion of ranked ballot? It avoids the 'Italian' problem -- that is increasingly common throughout Europe -- while still permitting the possibility of real change. You don't end up with chaos, you end up with the final winner being everybody's least-worst choice. I understand several States are already using it.
Nonsense. When people participate in it in practice, like anything else, it will ma l e sense. We have ranked choice for local elections where I live and there are very clear instructions posted everywhere when you go to vote. It makes much more sensr than, for example, the Electoral College, which remains a mystery to most people, and with better reason.
However meant, characterizing a comment as 'nonsense' doesn't exactly encourage civil participation. But to your point, the 'when' can be read as 'if,' since polls I've seen show that many people are averse to the very idea (too much thought involved, no memes available?) I'd love much more ranked voting and congratulate your community! I'd like to see more, not less, voting, period. As to the Electoral College, I was about to write 'no argument' until it occurred to me that plenty of Magas in my community are by now very aware that it swings to their advantage.
Instant-runoff voting (what is sometimes called "ranked voting", although multi-winner STV also uses ranked votes) sees almost always the same winners elected that FPTP would have elected. thus dis-proportional results just as likely.
the backup preferences are used only if no one has majority of votes in first round.
use of multi-member districts in states that elect more than one Representative, and creating multi-member districts even for the Senate by dropping the staggered terms, would allow more fairness than just first past the post/plurality method.
the constitution says one third of senators elected each time but that third can come out of just a third of the states. it would be district magnitude of just two but that allows more fairness than successive FPTP contests one after another after another.
"U.S. senators are divided into three classes whose six-year terms are staggered so that a different class is elected every two years." but that is not how it has to be done.
the author of article first says 6 parties will be created and then that likely not so many would be. perhaps a nice medium would emerge of three or four.
her projected coalition government musings did not mention New Populist and those left of them -- they could find common ground on radical economic solutions, even if nothing else.
while two right parties cannot form majority, and them and the nearest centrist party have nothing in common.
so really four parties on the left is only workable option, not even discussed.
"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. "
That's not all bad. The major flaw of 'democracy' is that it is truly the tyranny of the majority. When a minority can manipulate itself into political significance, that's not automatically bad. And it's not automatically good. As Yascha bemoans the failings of the two party system, as I also do, it would be good to recognize how much smaller factions can do to muscle some power away from thew two bloated parties.
And, please, never compare the USA to Europe without recognizing that, in Europe, there is no equivalent to Washington DC. It is its own unique monster.
It's not just people who vote for third parties who have their votes "wasted". In our winner-take-all system, there's no practical difference between voting for a third-party candidate who gets 1% of the vote, voting for a Republican in a deep blue state/district (or vice versa), or even voting for a major party candidate who loses the election 51%-49%.
Or arguably, voting for a Republican in a deep red state... or even voting at all, considering the unlikelihood that any single vote makes an actual difference in an election.
PR at least lowers the threshold, increasing the chance your vote is on the margin. It's still unlikely, though.
I like ranked choice voting because it increases the information available to the parties. In a Republican district, if the second place candidate is a libertarian, that's more useful information to the representative than if it's a Democrat. It's also useful information to the Democratic party.
Closely argued. Ergo depressing. Certainly the lack of a percentage threshold would scuttle any chance of effectiveness. Yet I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, proportional got Brexit for Britain (would have happened anyway), a current bad patch in Germany although it has served that country astonishingly well up to Olaf, and a gridlock in France--more worrisome because voters there are more individualist, less patient than the other two examples. However, none of them has managed to vomit anything resembling Trump to the top of the heap.
Ideological incoherence is a feature, not a bug. But you’re correct that PR for the House would not affect the Senate or Presidency.
If anyone is truly interested in changing the party system, your first footnote is the way. Here in New England, I could see a moderate Chris Shays/Jim Jeffords style Republicanism emerge desperate from the GOP. There’s probably a cleavage to exploit in the mountain states, too, although I’m not familiar enough with their politics to say. The question is whether regional parties would be good for democracy. The example of Canada suggests probably not, although that might be due to the peculiarities of the Bloc.
Instant-runoff voting (what is sometimes called "ranked voting", although multi-winner STV also uses ranked votes) sees almost always the same winners elected that FPTP would have elected. thus dis-proportional results just as likely.
the backup preferences are used only if no one has majority of votes in first round.
use of multi-member districts in states that elect more than one Representative, and creating multi-member districts even for the Senate by dropping the staggered terms, would allow more fairness than just first past the post/plurality method.
the constitution says one third of senators elected each time but that third can come out of just a third of the states. it would be district magnitude of just two but that allows more fairness than successive FPTP contests one after another after another.
"U.S. senators are divided into three classes whose six-year terms are staggered so that a different class is elected every two years." but that is not how it has to be done.
the author of article first says 6 parties will be created and then that likely not so many would be. perhaps a nice medium would emerge of three or four.
her projected coalition government musings did not mention New Populist and those left of them -- they could find common ground on radical economic solutions, even if nothing else.
while two right parties cannot form majority, and them and the nearest centrist party have nothing in common.
so really four parties on the left is only workable option, not even discussed.
This rejoinder makes some important points more clear-eyed and worldlier than what usually comes through in public debating by and with pro-PR voices. At the same time, I think Yascha evidences here a motif that’s a regular feature of Mounkism: an enchanted immigrant’s idealization of American liberalism, and too little appreciation for the democratic and pro-welfarist gains of other rich democracies by comparison and contrast with the USA.
Most important and valuable in the above essay, Yascha refuses to idealize parties abstracted away from the overall structures of state and elections that condition and incentivize party patterns of action. We need this pragmatism that Yascha injects here.
Philosophically Yascha’s essay stands as an example of non-ideal theory such as Zofia Stemplowska presents in a vivid 2016 paper ( https://bit.ly/StempZ-2016 ). Non-ideal theory means that we’re trying to promote a better tomorrow, we should care a lot about what actually is in place. Because we should care a lot about how the retained status-quo patterns of society (in this case American political institutions in full, real-life configurations) likely would interact with whatever proposed reform (in this case, PR in the U.S. House of Representatives). If an ideal-minded reform proposal ignores or wishes away some predictable ill interaction with whatever’s going to be persist ongoing, than the reform proposal may do
more harm than good. This *could* peg us at a “dangerous fantasy” as Yascha thinks in his criticisms of the Drutman-led pro-PR reform advocacy.
If one would like the USA to benefit from PR’s pro-democratic and pro-welfarist tendencies — as I do want (somehow!) — then I think we gain a lot from legal scholar Max Stearns’s 2024 book Parliamentary America ( https://bit.ly/StearM-2024-3 ). Stearns also summarizes his book usefully on the Supreme Myths podcast ( https://apple.co/4cwvUgB ). Stearns works up a more holistic reform canvas, and he surpasses Drutman in an effort to survey real-life alternative systems of representation — including parties but *not only* parties.
Though to bring it about, Stearns does hit the problem of path dependent power conservation for those already benefiting from the status quo. This Yascha aptly puts vividly as “turkeys would have to vote for Thanksgiving”.
Despite power-conserving path dependence, changes can and do happen *sometimes* in a modern society, even up against hard-built structures. How and under what circumstances state-structural setups *in countries already a democracy* get jiggered loose for new turns to be contested, has not been widely researched so far as I know; or maybe it has been but I just haven’t seen nor read it.
No, we sell things with rosy scenarios, which is the reason behind buyer's remorse.
But there is no such condition for proportional representation. Under the current system, the biggest states are run by little cliques of insiders, who, for the most part, are able to ignore the public. With gerrymandering and other political dirty tricks at their disposal the insiders can eliminate serious opposition.
In NY where Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul gave her annual address yesterday, the Democrats are in such deep control, that the Governor can promise tax cuts, and big new programs, like universal child care without a word on where the money comes from to pay for the state's "largesse." One can't imagine a more corrupt system. The governing clique, through various Political Action Committees control tens of millions of dollars, buy votes with big spending programs, leave the infrastructure and basic services in tatters, and the only tax relief comes from moving to Florida or Tennessee.
This is in a state with a large congressional delegation and active minor parties on the left and right. Due to the first past the post elections, the minor parties seek cross endorsements from the Democrats and Republicans to stay on the ballot.
In a proportional system in which NY's 27 federal house seats were awarded the Republicans would probably gain two seats, and there would be at least three from minor parties like the socialist leaning Family Workers' Party. In such a political environment, we would at least have accountability.
Yes, the proportional system is not nirvana, but serious political competition remains the best way to uphold high standards and accountability in electoral politics.
Well, the same problem exists for the Senate, each Senator is elected separately in a statewide vote.
DC is a separate thing as it elects a non-voting delegate, the six states would just elect their single Representative in a state wide election, no change.
In the USA House seats are apportioned to district populations of roughly 710,000 people. Take the total vote for each party, divide it by 710k and assign the seats accordingly. If there is a remainder, and an extra seat, the winner gets it.
so you are saying largest remainder method with uniform quota.
likely though, a state with multiple members would have their votes divided by the number of seats in the state, to get the quota
but same difference.
fear that 10 percent is so low -
if each state is given approx its due share of seats,
whether to win takes 1/10 of a 10-seat state or 1/5th of votes in a five-seat state, the number of votes is about the same, --- about 1/435th of the country's votes.
so 10 percent of a ten-seat state seems like a low amount compared to say 20 percent in a five-seat state but they contain the same number of votes.
PR is meant to give some small parties some clout, or at least a voice,
but still to pass legislation takes a majority of members.
the idea of PR is that the majority of members that passes bill was elected with support from majority of voters, whether that is one party or two or more parties.
This morning on the NPR Marketplace, the announcer said that a government shut down is almost inevitable.
The idea that the two party single member system is working is risible.
The Congress can't even pass appropriations, their basic function.
We are a fifty-fifty country and likely to remain one. Forty eight point three voted for Harris- a sign that we vote based on partisanship, not merit.
There are very few who will vote outside their established party patterns, those few decide elections.
We don't know what the people because the few who pay attention and vote the issues are indistinguishable from the die hards who just vote for whatever name has a D behind it.
Until issues mean something, we will continue with a completely irrelevant Congress and the West Wing will continue serving as the introductory part of the legislature, with the courts serving as the confirmatory part.
The solution to divide everything by 710K transfers the problem to the larger states with many House seats. In the larger states, you will have house seats going to very minor local or at best regional parties. House seats held by very minor parties in terms of constituencies could and probably would hold up legislation that would otherwise pass and be of benefit. Further, small local parties are often akin to the hedgehog that know one thing (i.e. concerned about one issue) versus a major party that is forced to be a fox and know many things (i.e. concerned about many issues).
"House seats held by very minor parties in terms of constituencies could and probably would hold up legislation that would otherwise pass and be of benefit."
and equally
House seats held by very minor parties in terms of constituencies could hold up legislation that would -- do harm.
the majority of voters should say what is good and what is not good.
tates, you will have house seats going to very minor local or at best regional parties. House seats held by very minor parties in terms of constituencies could and probably would hold up legislation that would otherwise pass and be of benefit.
The whole point of proportional representation is to provide more parties and give minor parties a chance to either join a coalition or to oppose the major parties on issues.
If a one issue party wins, what is the problem? Either the issue will go away and the party dissolve, or the issue will receive some attention from the majors.
Either we increase the size of the house, or we just learn to live with six states which are still first-past-the-post, and seven states which only have top-two winners.
where you can't make multi-member states, you can't.
even having two-seat district is a help to establish fairness between the two major parties, and using ranked votes in STV would give outlet for third-party sentiment, and encourage its growing strength
But having 415 members elected in MMDs of more than two seats (435 minus 6 X 1 and minus 7 X 2) should make a difference,
with perhaps 62 districts with five or more members (states that have at least five members or multiples of five), should produce great proportionality, fairness, and third-party representation, at least until the number of parties grows to more than 4.
Personally, I'd consider something similar to Ireland's system.
It would take a constitutional amendment, but Senate Seats would change so that 1/3rd of all states take turns every 2 years, but senators aren't staggered: when it's a state's turn to elect Senators, they always elect 2 senators simultaneously, for 6 year terms.
Then, it would be single-vote two-candidate instant-run-off or 'vote transferable by first candidate to receive the vote' So, if you get a result of five candidates running for two seats, with vote tallies of 22%, 21%, 20%, 19% and 18%, either you keep discarding the lowest-performing candidate and re-organizing their votes to the others, until you have two candidates left standing, or else you simply TELL the five candidates that they can transfer any vote they personally received to any other candidate, but no vote may be transferred that way more than one time. The two candidates with the highest pool of votes a week after election day are the winners. Let negotiations for the transfers of your votes begin. Maybe the 18% guy says that two of the other four would both be acceptable recipients of his pool, and he'll give all his votes for whoever pledges to vote for the most tax cuts or something. Or maybe he just splits his vote share in half and gives half to each of those candidates.
In THEORY, that should mean that most states wind up either with one red and one blue candidate in the senate, or else one Candidate that is clearly either red or blue, depending on state, plus one candidate who is more purplish. Even a Far-Right or Far-left state is only going to have like a 60% majority in favor of one party or the other, and using this system means they can only afford to elect one 'extreme' candidate, and the other candidate will always be either more moderate, or from the other extreme entirely.
Again, in theory, House Elections would work about the same way, and you don't need a constitutional amendment for that. Congress has the power to specify that any state with more than 1 or 2 house representatives must elect it's house members using as many 3-winner 1-vote instant-runnoff or bartered transfer districts as possible.... which even in a 66% red state means an end result of 1 insane right, 1 moderate right, and 1 leftist who is either moderate or insane. Or the other way around for 66% blue states.
We probably wouldn't get six parties... more likely, what we we would get is three "hyphenated" sub-group parties on each side, plus maybe one more independent party. All the "blue" sub-groups would frequently have some sort of alliance to pool 'enough' votes after each election to secure at least one victory between them, all the "red" sub-groups likewise, and the third victory could go to anyone, including the independent.
The nice part of that system is that it makes it almost impossible to truly dream of a massive 'swing' victory in congress, or to justify gambling on that basis. You're always going to wind up with a like 48% some flavor of blue, 47% some flavor of red, and maybe 5% independents who have to be pandered too. In the house definitely, but possibly also in the senate. And the big advantage is that it creates a guaranteed pool of up to 1/3rd actual moderates who don't need to be nearly as worried about primary challenges.
About this part of the plan: “or else you simply TELL the five candidates that they can transfer any vote they personally received to any other candidate”—Is this how it works in the Irish system? Or is this a modification you’re adding?
I’m intrigued by the results you project from the system you describe here, and would like to learn more. Is there somewhere you can point me, for further reading?
That's a modification I'm adding. It seemed simplest and offers the best potentials for negotiations with a guaranteed end date.
I'm still reading up on the Irish system myself. It seems to be some strange version of instant-runoff, but the descriptions are a little unclear. I think MAYBE they use instant-runoff rules for all 'overvotes' to a given candidate, AFTER that candidate has secured the minimum number of votes needed to guarantee himself his own seat?
So if it's a one-vote five-winner district, where you need 20% to guarantee yourself a seat, and Adam Adamson gets 24%, he keeps the the first 20%, and the remaining 4% 'extra' get split between the other candidates using some sort of instant-runoff rule? I think maybe? And the 'top five' then are declared winners?
I'm still learning about the Irish system myself, so if you find any good documents, feel free to share them with me. All I really have are the wikipedia articles at this point and a few google searches. I came up with my variant because to me, it makes more SENSE.
the ability of candidates themselves to say where their surplus votes go is part of the Gove system, AKA Indirect STV.
the candidates say in advance of the election where the votes will go, if possible.
then the process would move quickly on election night - and anyone can follow it.
It is is described in brief in the Wiki STV article
basically two ways Gove could work
(likely more could be invented like Krenn's idea (which may be more a form of "liquid democracy")
candidate gives a series of names, so that back-up preferences can be used in case the first name is already elected or eliminated,
or
gives a list and the votes go to the most-popular listed on the list, to assist in getting him or her to the quota as quickly as possible, thus it is partly voter-driven.
I think I actually do have a handle on the basics already—I perhaps should have said I’m interested in finding additional in-depth discussions/analyses of what you’ve described (but I’m getting the picture that maybe none yet exists, as it sounds like this is a new variation you’re proposing!)
Yeah, the Bartered-transfer variation of STV/Multi-winner is something I came up with entirely by myself, and I've only discussed it briefly and privately with a few other fellow political nerds before now.
Basically, you have, say, one week after election day for the elections clerk to specify what every candidate's exact total of balloted votes will be.
Then, after he gives out those numbers publicly, all candidates have an additional week to each write a formal message to the same clerk, saying exactly what they want to do with the votes they, personally, received from the voters. Keep them all, keep some give some away, or give all away, to one or more candidates. Basic arithmetic of how many votes they actually have to give away must be honored. Mathematically impossible orders given to the clerk will be discarded.
Also, Candidates are allowed to enter multiple orders with different dates on them as the week progresses. all orders must be complete and self-contained, without reference to any prior order. Once the closing date and time comes around, the clerk will only bother to read the most recent formal note a given candidate actually gave him, and will discard all previous orders which were overtaken by events.
So if you're currently in negotiations, but are worried you might miss the deadline, you can post 'preliminary secret' instructions to the clerk, then replace them at the last minute if negotiations go well. But if you go past the deadline, at least the clerk received your 2nd-best backup strategy, so it's not a total loss.
The clerk does not monitor or enforce negotiations, he only reads vote-transfer forms given to him by candidates. If candidates want a 'binding' promise, they can make public statements in local news channels about what the deal was, and then honor them or not, and take revenge in the next election, or not.
Also, no candidate can give away any votes except the ones the voters personally and directly gave HIM. So If A transfers all his votes to B, B cannot re-transfer A's votes to C.... but B can transfer some of B's original votes to C.
Which makes sense, since B didn't even really know for sure how many votes A was even going to give him until the final deadline anyway. A might have been lying on local media when he revealed his intentions. The clerk only cares what the signed documents A gave him before the deadline actually say, not what A promised to anyone else.
It's just like the board game Diplomacy, but with votes instead of armies.
Also, all final orders to the clerk are public record, obviously.
Once the deadline passes, the clerk reads all final orders and publishes them, and the revised vote totals are published.... If it's a 2-winner district, the 2 people with the largest final pools of votes are elected. Or 3-winner, or 5-winner or whatever.
Arguments about dirty tricks, betrayals, selling out your party, failing to honor your public deals, etc, etc may then begin for the next election cycle. Votes are owned by individual candidates, not parties, so choose carefully who you entrust your vote to.
Would this still be an issue if you neutered the speaker's power? I'm thinking that building durable coalitions is only really necessary if it means you get to decide what comes up for votes. If that wasn't the case and the president was still elected individually, wouldn't that free up parties to cooperate whenever it suits them (ignoring the senate for now)?
What about an RCV or STAR voting system with TWO SEAT proportional representation districts? I could see Rs and Ds sharing the win of many (most?) districts. These would likely be moderates. Then in heavy red or blue states, you'd have winners from moderate and far right/left - so in total, 4 parties, 2 coalitions. Though the downside might be that the far left/right would force their moderate counterparts to vote in extreme ways in order for them to reciprocate votes.
perhaps if in presidential elections, each party put up two candidates,
and if no party had majority of votes in first count, votes transferred from unpopular candidates until a party had accumulated a majority of votes,
and then the most-popular candidate of the party with majority support is elected.
that would give choice to Republicans, and choice to Democrats, and allow small parties to play a part, and ensure that the president was elected by a majority of votes, at least by party choice.
Not only would proportional representation be a disaster, but proposals for it distract us from an obvious source of our woes: our system of campaign finance, unique among the world’s democracies.
Our election campaigns cost far more than elsewhere - 40 times the amount in Germany and the UK - and there is no public financing at the federal level.
Our problem is not the number of parties. The problem is what all candidates of both parties must do to win elections: beg ungodly sums from deep pocketed donors, who veto any policy that might gore their financial ox.
Public financing of campaigns, preferably by a Voter Dollars system, is at least a partial solution, one that can command bipartisan support from voters. www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
Campaign financing is a problem, but oligarchy is the source of it.
As long as the oligarchs can focus on two parties, they can gerrymander districts to assure that any threatening group or party remains confined in odd districts and takes on an extremist coloration.
But worst than that, under the current system the oligarchs and their stooges can pack the opposition party into the smallest possible number of districts.
So we get the situation where the GOP has virtually disappeared in the blue states and the Dems are weak in the red states.
In this situation, the primary elections are the only contested ones, and they invariably go to the stoogiest of the oligarchy's stooges.
Spending on the presidential election in 2024 amounted to maybe $11 per American. Spending on ice cream in 2024 amounted to close to $100 per American. Cable TV ~$500. Sports tickets ~$50. Cellphones ~$1300. Dog food ~$130. Nail salons ~$30. Are these things more important than elections? ... Kamala Harris managed to blow through $2 billion, with no evidence that it had any impact at all on the outcome. ... Who cares what the UK and Germany spend? Maybe if they spent more on elections, they wouldn't have such crappy leaders.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
As many demographers, and the result of recent elections have already demonstrated, the movement of the two parties towards the extremes came about because of self-sorting of the voters. Most of corporate America is located in big cities, which means that those with more liberal/libertarian views will tend to accumulate in those cities, leaving behind the nationalists/conservative/patriots to the exurban and rural districts. That is a worldwide phenomenon.
Hi Trudius, thanks for the interesting reply! Yes, geographic self sorting is a real trend, but in my opinion its likely, in whole or in part, just another symptom rather than the disease, but whether it is or isnt, it doesnt explain the fundamental issue: our political system has been hollowed out by centralization to the point where most people don’t fit comfortably into either the "conservative" or "progressive" camps, yet are forced into this false binary by the structure of our politics and media. The near total removal of economic policy from real political contestation has left us with an arena dominated by highly divisive social issues, which, when combined with an enforced uniformity in policy dictated from above, produces a mix of anger, frustration, and apathy.
In the decentralized system of the Old Republic, people had real political agency, regional economic policies could be debated and adjusted based on local needs, and political engagement was about more than just signaling allegiance in culture wars. But in our hyper centralized era, where policy is largely preordained by highly centralized supreme institutions, elections become little more than symbolic contests over identity, not substance. This engineered political landscape, reinforced by a mass media apparatus that frames all debate within narrow, pre approved parameters, makes it so that neither party truly serves the public. People are left feeling powerless:: those who care are angry because their views, especially on economic matters, have no meaningful representation, and those who disengage, who I'd say make up most of teh general population, do so because they sense, correctly, that participation changes little.
In my opinion, the so called called "self-sorting" is actually a by products of a system that strips individuals of meaningful control over the policies that shape their lives. In such a system, people are herded into ideological silos, not because they naturally belong there, but because the structure of our politics and media leaves them no viable alternative. This is not a functioning democracy, it is, as Sheldon Wolin described, an "inverted totalitarian" system where participation is managed, dissent is channeled into dead ends, and the real levers of power remain out of reach for almost anyone, leaving almost all people without any meaningful amount of political agency at all
Understood, thanks, and yes, it would supplement the current forms of financing. Since the courts won’t allow any limits to political donations and spending, a public financing system is the only path to game-changing reform. Thanks for the question, which is indeed important.
Who said anything about banning books? Voter Dollars doesn’t limit anyone’s spending or expression. It levels the playing field by giving candidates who want to serve us an alternative source of funds, not controlled by special interests.
Citizens United was mainly about the question of whether or not other groups, who were not candidates, could still spend their own money however they wanted on influencing elections.
The key point being a certain book highly critical of Hillary Clinton, which was privately published within 90 days of an election.
Hence, why I asked. Under your system, would voter dollars SUPPLEMENT other forms of election financing, or REPLACE other forms of election financing? It's a very important question.
I have doubts. Giving voters a budget to spend individually might be useful, but how does that relate to all the other private donations? And I am deeply concerned about anything which would effectively ban something like private publishing of anti-politician books during election season.
Personally, I'd just remove contribution limits, and encourage political parties to create anonymous donation 'trusts' sufficient to fully fund one candidate per seat per cycle. 1 year prior to each election, the board members of each trust of that type just pick who they'll be funding that year in a public hearing of some sort.
While I have seen arguments for ranked choice voting and similar ways to give the electorate a deeper say, I had not seen that anyone was arguing for proportional representation in the US until now. But I agree with your critique of PR for the US.
Similar "messes" happen in countries that are used to coalitions (see the Netherlands, Germany). I guess the trade-off is always between representativeness and stability. The stability of first-past-the-post is illusory, really - what we're seeing with the public dissatisfaction with politics is fringe right-wing populists rising. The centre-right party then shifting their policy agenda to absorb that vote (UK is what I can speak to). Whereas with populists at the table, they go into a weird hokey-kokey where they get into power and either betray their coalition partners (by staying populist) or their base (by compromising) - this happened with the Netherlands and Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV).
Ah, but the stability you get with FPP is fine until a rotten system collapses into crisis. Consider Britain -- when people get so fed up with the incompetence of both Labor and the Tories -- when the ancien regime collapses, what you get is Farage. That's not stability.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
Lani Guinier was nominated to be Clinton's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1993, and her prospects were destroyed in a very early instance of the now familiar cancellation campaign. She had written an article about proportional representation, and Republicans were all over the media smearing and misrepresenting her, saying that she didn’t believe in the principle of one-person/one-vote, that she wanted a black vote to count for more than a white vote, that she was a “reverse racist”, and so on. (She was a black woman, btw.) Because proportional representation is a complicated thing to explain, and could not fit a sound bite the way the Republicans’ allegations did, her nomination was sunk.
That’s why we haven’t heard anyone bring it up again until now, 30 years later. It can be fatal for a political career. I’m a little surprised it’s coming up at all, especially since the political climate is far more rancid now than it was in the early 1990’s.
I live in France, where the representation system has ground the government to a halt. Both the extreme Left (LFI) and Right (RN) are blackmailing the government, trying to get the pensions reform revoked (which would be disastrous). The Greens, moderate Left and Right can't agree on anything, since everyone is calculating President Macron and his centrist party are toast, and they don't want to ruin their chances for the next presidential election (2027).
The government has already been brought down by these coalitions and we have no budget approved for 2025! Nobody seems to be trying to negotiate or find a middle ground, and the much needed reforms will not pass.
I'm not saying this would happen in the US; I'm just showing what happened over here: every small party hates the other and wants them crushed, so nothing gets done. A word to the wise...
While I am no expert on French politics, from the outside, it looks as if the center and left conspired to freeze out the right in a two-way, highly gerrymandered election. The Greens are a stalking horse for communists and Macron is a bad joke.
Reform will not pass because of the conspiracy of dunces that hobbled accountability and electoral choice in your last snap election.
The French center and left conspiring to freeze out the right or far-right using various forms of either fair or underhanded election tactics has been a long-standing tradition dating back to either 1945 or 1958, depending on how you count.
The interesting part is that recently, they appear to have gotten much worse at actually making it work.
Not only will reform not pass, all of 'em are holding us hostage so they can demand the retraction of the Pension reforms. This is insane! The budget is in a shambles, *especially* due to increasing retirement pension costs, yet people expect the reform to be pushed back to 62 years old. Macron barely managed to take it to 64 years old, which is still the youngest in the EU and arithmetically unsustainable; but people want to retire at 62 and expect to get a full pension. This drives me nuts. I mean, I get it: I don't want to work more than necessary, either. But if we're being adults with half a working brain, we can't expect to retire at 62 without blowing a huge hole in the dept, increasing spending, exploding our loan rates (France is currently paying more than Spain and even Greece, FFS) and making everyone objectively poorer. But irresponsible politicians on all sides pander to this populist madness, promising to have the cake and eat it too. We're f*cked :-(
France doe not use PR
Great critique of proportional representation. I like your acknowledgment that starting conditions matter and total structural design must be appreciated. A presidential system, as found in the U.S., presents certain difficulties that create legislative gridlock between the legislative and executive branches. Parliamentary systems have a different structure for filling the executive branch. Introducing pr to the U.S. House without fully addressing its governance effects is quite risky.
I’m in favor of the creation of an independent national coalition to create more structure for voters before candidates get into elected office. I have covered this argument in my substack. The pre- vs post-vote need to organize around legislative agendas is quite critical, as you clearly call out.
Another critical element of design is the actual structure and rules governing the U.S. House. So much power has been consolidated by party leadership over many decades, making many representatives unable to legislate. The majority/minority committee system has key implications for governance.
Again, great article detailing the many concerns.
Why no discussion of ranked ballot? It avoids the 'Italian' problem -- that is increasingly common throughout Europe -- while still permitting the possibility of real change. You don't end up with chaos, you end up with the final winner being everybody's least-worst choice. I understand several States are already using it.
Maine, for example. Great idea. One problem seems to be that most US voters are too (pejorative deleted) to grasp how it works.
Nonsense. When people participate in it in practice, like anything else, it will ma l e sense. We have ranked choice for local elections where I live and there are very clear instructions posted everywhere when you go to vote. It makes much more sensr than, for example, the Electoral College, which remains a mystery to most people, and with better reason.
However meant, characterizing a comment as 'nonsense' doesn't exactly encourage civil participation. But to your point, the 'when' can be read as 'if,' since polls I've seen show that many people are averse to the very idea (too much thought involved, no memes available?) I'd love much more ranked voting and congratulate your community! I'd like to see more, not less, voting, period. As to the Electoral College, I was about to write 'no argument' until it occurred to me that plenty of Magas in my community are by now very aware that it swings to their advantage.
(Btw, I didn't mean "Nonsense" there as an attack, just an emphatic expression of disagreement. No disrespect intended.)
People who are too dumb or disinterested shouldn't be voting anyway.
Tough one to legislate.
Instant-runoff voting (what is sometimes called "ranked voting", although multi-winner STV also uses ranked votes) sees almost always the same winners elected that FPTP would have elected. thus dis-proportional results just as likely.
the backup preferences are used only if no one has majority of votes in first round.
use of multi-member districts in states that elect more than one Representative, and creating multi-member districts even for the Senate by dropping the staggered terms, would allow more fairness than just first past the post/plurality method.
the constitution says one third of senators elected each time but that third can come out of just a third of the states. it would be district magnitude of just two but that allows more fairness than successive FPTP contests one after another after another.
"U.S. senators are divided into three classes whose six-year terms are staggered so that a different class is elected every two years." but that is not how it has to be done.
the author of article first says 6 parties will be created and then that likely not so many would be. perhaps a nice medium would emerge of three or four.
her projected coalition government musings did not mention New Populist and those left of them -- they could find common ground on radical economic solutions, even if nothing else.
while two right parties cannot form majority, and them and the nearest centrist party have nothing in common.
so really four parties on the left is only workable option, not even discussed.
"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. "
That's not all bad. The major flaw of 'democracy' is that it is truly the tyranny of the majority. When a minority can manipulate itself into political significance, that's not automatically bad. And it's not automatically good. As Yascha bemoans the failings of the two party system, as I also do, it would be good to recognize how much smaller factions can do to muscle some power away from thew two bloated parties.
And, please, never compare the USA to Europe without recognizing that, in Europe, there is no equivalent to Washington DC. It is its own unique monster.
Small minorities of insiders already run the governments in the USA, and much of the EU.
The fear of the majority is reactionary crap, the majority are never allowed a victory.
It's not just people who vote for third parties who have their votes "wasted". In our winner-take-all system, there's no practical difference between voting for a third-party candidate who gets 1% of the vote, voting for a Republican in a deep blue state/district (or vice versa), or even voting for a major party candidate who loses the election 51%-49%.
Or arguably, voting for a Republican in a deep red state... or even voting at all, considering the unlikelihood that any single vote makes an actual difference in an election.
PR at least lowers the threshold, increasing the chance your vote is on the margin. It's still unlikely, though.
Not to mention the people who deplore both parties. If I were an American I'd spoil my ballot because my choice is 'none of the above'.
I like ranked choice voting because it increases the information available to the parties. In a Republican district, if the second place candidate is a libertarian, that's more useful information to the representative than if it's a Democrat. It's also useful information to the Democratic party.
Closely argued. Ergo depressing. Certainly the lack of a percentage threshold would scuttle any chance of effectiveness. Yet I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, proportional got Brexit for Britain (would have happened anyway), a current bad patch in Germany although it has served that country astonishingly well up to Olaf, and a gridlock in France--more worrisome because voters there are more individualist, less patient than the other two examples. However, none of them has managed to vomit anything resembling Trump to the top of the heap.
Ideological incoherence is a feature, not a bug. But you’re correct that PR for the House would not affect the Senate or Presidency.
If anyone is truly interested in changing the party system, your first footnote is the way. Here in New England, I could see a moderate Chris Shays/Jim Jeffords style Republicanism emerge desperate from the GOP. There’s probably a cleavage to exploit in the mountain states, too, although I’m not familiar enough with their politics to say. The question is whether regional parties would be good for democracy. The example of Canada suggests probably not, although that might be due to the peculiarities of the Bloc.
Instant-runoff voting (what is sometimes called "ranked voting", although multi-winner STV also uses ranked votes) sees almost always the same winners elected that FPTP would have elected. thus dis-proportional results just as likely.
the backup preferences are used only if no one has majority of votes in first round.
use of multi-member districts in states that elect more than one Representative, and creating multi-member districts even for the Senate by dropping the staggered terms, would allow more fairness than just first past the post/plurality method.
the constitution says one third of senators elected each time but that third can come out of just a third of the states. it would be district magnitude of just two but that allows more fairness than successive FPTP contests one after another after another.
"U.S. senators are divided into three classes whose six-year terms are staggered so that a different class is elected every two years." but that is not how it has to be done.
the author of article first says 6 parties will be created and then that likely not so many would be. perhaps a nice medium would emerge of three or four.
her projected coalition government musings did not mention New Populist and those left of them -- they could find common ground on radical economic solutions, even if nothing else.
while two right parties cannot form majority, and them and the nearest centrist party have nothing in common.
so really four parties on the left is only workable option, not even discussed.
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This rejoinder makes some important points more clear-eyed and worldlier than what usually comes through in public debating by and with pro-PR voices. At the same time, I think Yascha evidences here a motif that’s a regular feature of Mounkism: an enchanted immigrant’s idealization of American liberalism, and too little appreciation for the democratic and pro-welfarist gains of other rich democracies by comparison and contrast with the USA.
Most important and valuable in the above essay, Yascha refuses to idealize parties abstracted away from the overall structures of state and elections that condition and incentivize party patterns of action. We need this pragmatism that Yascha injects here.
Philosophically Yascha’s essay stands as an example of non-ideal theory such as Zofia Stemplowska presents in a vivid 2016 paper ( https://bit.ly/StempZ-2016 ). Non-ideal theory means that we’re trying to promote a better tomorrow, we should care a lot about what actually is in place. Because we should care a lot about how the retained status-quo patterns of society (in this case American political institutions in full, real-life configurations) likely would interact with whatever proposed reform (in this case, PR in the U.S. House of Representatives). If an ideal-minded reform proposal ignores or wishes away some predictable ill interaction with whatever’s going to be persist ongoing, than the reform proposal may do
more harm than good. This *could* peg us at a “dangerous fantasy” as Yascha thinks in his criticisms of the Drutman-led pro-PR reform advocacy.
If one would like the USA to benefit from PR’s pro-democratic and pro-welfarist tendencies — as I do want (somehow!) — then I think we gain a lot from legal scholar Max Stearns’s 2024 book Parliamentary America ( https://bit.ly/StearM-2024-3 ). Stearns also summarizes his book usefully on the Supreme Myths podcast ( https://apple.co/4cwvUgB ). Stearns works up a more holistic reform canvas, and he surpasses Drutman in an effort to survey real-life alternative systems of representation — including parties but *not only* parties.
Though to bring it about, Stearns does hit the problem of path dependent power conservation for those already benefiting from the status quo. This Yascha aptly puts vividly as “turkeys would have to vote for Thanksgiving”.
Despite power-conserving path dependence, changes can and do happen *sometimes* in a modern society, even up against hard-built structures. How and under what circumstances state-structural setups *in countries already a democracy* get jiggered loose for new turns to be contested, has not been widely researched so far as I know; or maybe it has been but I just haven’t seen nor read it.
Proportional representation in the U.S. is a red herring. Ranked choice voting is what's important.
No, we sell things with rosy scenarios, which is the reason behind buyer's remorse.
But there is no such condition for proportional representation. Under the current system, the biggest states are run by little cliques of insiders, who, for the most part, are able to ignore the public. With gerrymandering and other political dirty tricks at their disposal the insiders can eliminate serious opposition.
In NY where Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul gave her annual address yesterday, the Democrats are in such deep control, that the Governor can promise tax cuts, and big new programs, like universal child care without a word on where the money comes from to pay for the state's "largesse." One can't imagine a more corrupt system. The governing clique, through various Political Action Committees control tens of millions of dollars, buy votes with big spending programs, leave the infrastructure and basic services in tatters, and the only tax relief comes from moving to Florida or Tennessee.
This is in a state with a large congressional delegation and active minor parties on the left and right. Due to the first past the post elections, the minor parties seek cross endorsements from the Democrats and Republicans to stay on the ballot.
In a proportional system in which NY's 27 federal house seats were awarded the Republicans would probably gain two seats, and there would be at least three from minor parties like the socialist leaning Family Workers' Party. In such a political environment, we would at least have accountability.
Yes, the proportional system is not nirvana, but serious political competition remains the best way to uphold high standards and accountability in electoral politics.
How would proportional representation be implemented in the six states with only one House seat and the seven states with two house seats?
Well, the same problem exists for the Senate, each Senator is elected separately in a statewide vote.
DC is a separate thing as it elects a non-voting delegate, the six states would just elect their single Representative in a state wide election, no change.
In the USA House seats are apportioned to district populations of roughly 710,000 people. Take the total vote for each party, divide it by 710k and assign the seats accordingly. If there is a remainder, and an extra seat, the winner gets it.
so you are saying largest remainder method with uniform quota.
likely though, a state with multiple members would have their votes divided by the number of seats in the state, to get the quota
but same difference.
fear that 10 percent is so low -
if each state is given approx its due share of seats,
whether to win takes 1/10 of a 10-seat state or 1/5th of votes in a five-seat state, the number of votes is about the same, --- about 1/435th of the country's votes.
so 10 percent of a ten-seat state seems like a low amount compared to say 20 percent in a five-seat state but they contain the same number of votes.
Seat by seat, each one is 1/435th, true.
But Congress runs by caucus, not be seats, so a party that got thirty seats in twenty five states could have a big impact.
PR is meant to give some small parties some clout, or at least a voice,
but still to pass legislation takes a majority of members.
the idea of PR is that the majority of members that passes bill was elected with support from majority of voters, whether that is one party or two or more parties.
Good morning Tom, and readers.
This morning on the NPR Marketplace, the announcer said that a government shut down is almost inevitable.
The idea that the two party single member system is working is risible.
The Congress can't even pass appropriations, their basic function.
We are a fifty-fifty country and likely to remain one. Forty eight point three voted for Harris- a sign that we vote based on partisanship, not merit.
There are very few who will vote outside their established party patterns, those few decide elections.
We don't know what the people because the few who pay attention and vote the issues are indistinguishable from the die hards who just vote for whatever name has a D behind it.
Until issues mean something, we will continue with a completely irrelevant Congress and the West Wing will continue serving as the introductory part of the legislature, with the courts serving as the confirmatory part.
The solution to divide everything by 710K transfers the problem to the larger states with many House seats. In the larger states, you will have house seats going to very minor local or at best regional parties. House seats held by very minor parties in terms of constituencies could and probably would hold up legislation that would otherwise pass and be of benefit. Further, small local parties are often akin to the hedgehog that know one thing (i.e. concerned about one issue) versus a major party that is forced to be a fox and know many things (i.e. concerned about many issues).
"House seats held by very minor parties in terms of constituencies could and probably would hold up legislation that would otherwise pass and be of benefit."
and equally
House seats held by very minor parties in terms of constituencies could hold up legislation that would -- do harm.
the majority of voters should say what is good and what is not good.
tates, you will have house seats going to very minor local or at best regional parties. House seats held by very minor parties in terms of constituencies could and probably would hold up legislation that would otherwise pass and be of benefit.
The whole point of proportional representation is to provide more parties and give minor parties a chance to either join a coalition or to oppose the major parties on issues.
If a one issue party wins, what is the problem? Either the issue will go away and the party dissolve, or the issue will receive some attention from the majors.
Either we increase the size of the house, or we just learn to live with six states which are still first-past-the-post, and seven states which only have top-two winners.
where you can't make multi-member states, you can't.
even having two-seat district is a help to establish fairness between the two major parties, and using ranked votes in STV would give outlet for third-party sentiment, and encourage its growing strength
But having 415 members elected in MMDs of more than two seats (435 minus 6 X 1 and minus 7 X 2) should make a difference,
with perhaps 62 districts with five or more members (states that have at least five members or multiples of five), should produce great proportionality, fairness, and third-party representation, at least until the number of parties grows to more than 4.
Personally, I'd consider something similar to Ireland's system.
It would take a constitutional amendment, but Senate Seats would change so that 1/3rd of all states take turns every 2 years, but senators aren't staggered: when it's a state's turn to elect Senators, they always elect 2 senators simultaneously, for 6 year terms.
Then, it would be single-vote two-candidate instant-run-off or 'vote transferable by first candidate to receive the vote' So, if you get a result of five candidates running for two seats, with vote tallies of 22%, 21%, 20%, 19% and 18%, either you keep discarding the lowest-performing candidate and re-organizing their votes to the others, until you have two candidates left standing, or else you simply TELL the five candidates that they can transfer any vote they personally received to any other candidate, but no vote may be transferred that way more than one time. The two candidates with the highest pool of votes a week after election day are the winners. Let negotiations for the transfers of your votes begin. Maybe the 18% guy says that two of the other four would both be acceptable recipients of his pool, and he'll give all his votes for whoever pledges to vote for the most tax cuts or something. Or maybe he just splits his vote share in half and gives half to each of those candidates.
In THEORY, that should mean that most states wind up either with one red and one blue candidate in the senate, or else one Candidate that is clearly either red or blue, depending on state, plus one candidate who is more purplish. Even a Far-Right or Far-left state is only going to have like a 60% majority in favor of one party or the other, and using this system means they can only afford to elect one 'extreme' candidate, and the other candidate will always be either more moderate, or from the other extreme entirely.
Again, in theory, House Elections would work about the same way, and you don't need a constitutional amendment for that. Congress has the power to specify that any state with more than 1 or 2 house representatives must elect it's house members using as many 3-winner 1-vote instant-runnoff or bartered transfer districts as possible.... which even in a 66% red state means an end result of 1 insane right, 1 moderate right, and 1 leftist who is either moderate or insane. Or the other way around for 66% blue states.
We probably wouldn't get six parties... more likely, what we we would get is three "hyphenated" sub-group parties on each side, plus maybe one more independent party. All the "blue" sub-groups would frequently have some sort of alliance to pool 'enough' votes after each election to secure at least one victory between them, all the "red" sub-groups likewise, and the third victory could go to anyone, including the independent.
The nice part of that system is that it makes it almost impossible to truly dream of a massive 'swing' victory in congress, or to justify gambling on that basis. You're always going to wind up with a like 48% some flavor of blue, 47% some flavor of red, and maybe 5% independents who have to be pandered too. In the house definitely, but possibly also in the senate. And the big advantage is that it creates a guaranteed pool of up to 1/3rd actual moderates who don't need to be nearly as worried about primary challenges.
Yikes. let's not create new terms:
"single-vote two-candidate instant-run-off or 'vote transferable by first candidate to receive the vote' that is two-seat STV,
AND "3-winner 1-vote instant-runoff" that is three-seat STV.
1-vote is implied by the S (single) in STV
easy to see because Ireland is known to use STV and Krenn mentions Ireland.
and let's not confuse term "candidates" with members or seats
a two-candidate contest is not much of a contest...
About this part of the plan: “or else you simply TELL the five candidates that they can transfer any vote they personally received to any other candidate”—Is this how it works in the Irish system? Or is this a modification you’re adding?
I’m intrigued by the results you project from the system you describe here, and would like to learn more. Is there somewhere you can point me, for further reading?
That's a modification I'm adding. It seemed simplest and offers the best potentials for negotiations with a guaranteed end date.
I'm still reading up on the Irish system myself. It seems to be some strange version of instant-runoff, but the descriptions are a little unclear. I think MAYBE they use instant-runoff rules for all 'overvotes' to a given candidate, AFTER that candidate has secured the minimum number of votes needed to guarantee himself his own seat?
So if it's a one-vote five-winner district, where you need 20% to guarantee yourself a seat, and Adam Adamson gets 24%, he keeps the the first 20%, and the remaining 4% 'extra' get split between the other candidates using some sort of instant-runoff rule? I think maybe? And the 'top five' then are declared winners?
I'm still learning about the Irish system myself, so if you find any good documents, feel free to share them with me. All I really have are the wikipedia articles at this point and a few google searches. I came up with my variant because to me, it makes more SENSE.
the ability of candidates themselves to say where their surplus votes go is part of the Gove system, AKA Indirect STV.
the candidates say in advance of the election where the votes will go, if possible.
then the process would move quickly on election night - and anyone can follow it.
It is is described in brief in the Wiki STV article
basically two ways Gove could work
(likely more could be invented like Krenn's idea (which may be more a form of "liquid democracy")
candidate gives a series of names, so that back-up preferences can be used in case the first name is already elected or eliminated,
or
gives a list and the votes go to the most-popular listed on the list, to assist in getting him or her to the quota as quickly as possible, thus it is partly voter-driven.
https://www.electoralcommission.ie/irelands-voting-system/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
that's enough to get you started, and it's about all I know at this point.
Thanks for your kind replies, Krenn.
I think I actually do have a handle on the basics already—I perhaps should have said I’m interested in finding additional in-depth discussions/analyses of what you’ve described (but I’m getting the picture that maybe none yet exists, as it sounds like this is a new variation you’re proposing!)
the blogsite Montopedia wix.site has much information on STV,
and how it was used in 20 Canadian cities, and to elect MLAs in two provinces, between 1917 and 1971.
Yeah, the Bartered-transfer variation of STV/Multi-winner is something I came up with entirely by myself, and I've only discussed it briefly and privately with a few other fellow political nerds before now.
Basically, you have, say, one week after election day for the elections clerk to specify what every candidate's exact total of balloted votes will be.
Then, after he gives out those numbers publicly, all candidates have an additional week to each write a formal message to the same clerk, saying exactly what they want to do with the votes they, personally, received from the voters. Keep them all, keep some give some away, or give all away, to one or more candidates. Basic arithmetic of how many votes they actually have to give away must be honored. Mathematically impossible orders given to the clerk will be discarded.
Also, Candidates are allowed to enter multiple orders with different dates on them as the week progresses. all orders must be complete and self-contained, without reference to any prior order. Once the closing date and time comes around, the clerk will only bother to read the most recent formal note a given candidate actually gave him, and will discard all previous orders which were overtaken by events.
So if you're currently in negotiations, but are worried you might miss the deadline, you can post 'preliminary secret' instructions to the clerk, then replace them at the last minute if negotiations go well. But if you go past the deadline, at least the clerk received your 2nd-best backup strategy, so it's not a total loss.
The clerk does not monitor or enforce negotiations, he only reads vote-transfer forms given to him by candidates. If candidates want a 'binding' promise, they can make public statements in local news channels about what the deal was, and then honor them or not, and take revenge in the next election, or not.
Also, no candidate can give away any votes except the ones the voters personally and directly gave HIM. So If A transfers all his votes to B, B cannot re-transfer A's votes to C.... but B can transfer some of B's original votes to C.
Which makes sense, since B didn't even really know for sure how many votes A was even going to give him until the final deadline anyway. A might have been lying on local media when he revealed his intentions. The clerk only cares what the signed documents A gave him before the deadline actually say, not what A promised to anyone else.
It's just like the board game Diplomacy, but with votes instead of armies.
Also, all final orders to the clerk are public record, obviously.
Once the deadline passes, the clerk reads all final orders and publishes them, and the revised vote totals are published.... If it's a 2-winner district, the 2 people with the largest final pools of votes are elected. Or 3-winner, or 5-winner or whatever.
Arguments about dirty tricks, betrayals, selling out your party, failing to honor your public deals, etc, etc may then begin for the next election cycle. Votes are owned by individual candidates, not parties, so choose carefully who you entrust your vote to.
Ireland uses STV,
the voter gives instructions of how the vote is to be transferred if it needs to be
Would this still be an issue if you neutered the speaker's power? I'm thinking that building durable coalitions is only really necessary if it means you get to decide what comes up for votes. If that wasn't the case and the president was still elected individually, wouldn't that free up parties to cooperate whenever it suits them (ignoring the senate for now)?
What about an RCV or STAR voting system with TWO SEAT proportional representation districts? I could see Rs and Ds sharing the win of many (most?) districts. These would likely be moderates. Then in heavy red or blue states, you'd have winners from moderate and far right/left - so in total, 4 parties, 2 coalitions. Though the downside might be that the far left/right would force their moderate counterparts to vote in extreme ways in order for them to reciprocate votes.
perhaps if in presidential elections, each party put up two candidates,
and if no party had majority of votes in first count, votes transferred from unpopular candidates until a party had accumulated a majority of votes,
and then the most-popular candidate of the party with majority support is elected.
that would give choice to Republicans, and choice to Democrats, and allow small parties to play a part, and ensure that the president was elected by a majority of votes, at least by party choice.