What Kind of Electoral Reforms Would Stop America's Slide Toward Authoritarianism?
Replacing its winner-take-all system with proportional representation would help but it'll have to be engineered carefully
This summer on July 11-12 in Washington D.C., the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism—The UnPopulist’s parent organization—convened the largest gathering of genuine liberals from around the world for the inaugural Liberalism for the 21st Century conference. Those who couldn’t attend missed out on a truly special occasion.
Don’t worry, though—we’ve got you covered.
We’ve been publishing select portions of the conference right here on our page—for example, we’ve made available for you to watch, listen to, or read the closing keynote conversation between and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Part 1 and Part 2)—and we’ve been releasing the full conference on our YouTube channel (which you should subscribe to).
To get a further feel for how well the conference went, check out the recaps written by for his newsletter, for The Dispatch, and for The Bulwark.
Today, with less than a month to go before the U.S. presidential elections, we wanted to share with you our conference panel on election systems. One crucial part to strengthening liberal institutions is putting in place the right electoral architecture that translates votes into legislative seats. This is a special focus of ours and as a prelude to this post, on Friday we ran our regular columnist, ’s, insightful piece laying out a slew of things that we can do right here in the U.S.
At the conference, , co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, facilitated a discussion that compared and contrasted the various electoral systems worldwide for guidance. The conversation was technical and deep without ever being forbidding or inaccessible. The panelists included John Carey, the John Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences at Dartmouth and the co-founder/director of BrightLineWatch; , a policy strategist at Protect Democracy and former electoral reform specialist at FairVote, and Tova Wang, director of research projects in democratic practice at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
We encourage you to watch the video of this panel discussion in its entirety, which includes a lively Q&A section that is not included in the transcript below.
The following transcript of the panel discussion has been adjusted for flow and clarity.
Ian Bassin: Let’s start with a tale of two elections. We had an election in France in which the National Rally won the most votes, 37% of the overall vote, but placed third in seats in the legislature. We had another election in the U.K. in which the Labour Party won about a third of overall votes but ended up with two-thirds of the seats in the legislature. Drew [Penrose] and
wrote recently in our If You Can Keep It newsletter that that created a funhouse mirror effect of democracy in which what was fat looked skinny, what was tall looked short. These wildly different results in these two elections just demonstrate how the systems that we choose to translate popular will into governing power can vary wildly and produce incredibly different results—some that you might favor, some you might not. And the question we want to tackle is: As liberals, are there choices that we should make in how we structure our electoral systems that are preferable for preserving liberalism?John, I want to start with you—just to give us a bit of a taxonomy of all of the options across the world, where so many different countries do this differently. If all of us are liberals, and we sit down for the meal and we get a menu to choose from, what’s on the menu? Be our waiter here and help us understand the menu and maybe what the specials are.
John Carey: I’d be happy to. I’m going to be talking about the way we elect legislatures. These are collective bodies. About half of the democracies out there elect presidents—and that is, by definition, a single office. So, I’m going to start broad and think about legislatures, because every democracy elects one and they’re by definition collective. Let’s think about three families of ways to do that.
The first one I’ll call single-winner systems. These are systems where the country’s cut up into mutually exclusive geographical districts, and every district elects a single representative. That’s what we do in this country. Then there’s multi-winner systems, and then mixed systems. So let me talk about the variance within each of those.
When we think about single-winner systems, the first type—the type that we use in this country, the U.K. uses, Canada uses, India prominently uses—is our single-winner plurality systems. It’s one round of elections—whoever runs, runs; whoever gets the most votes wins the representation in that district. And you can end up with these results, especially in a fragmented field like they had in the U.K. this year, where a party well short of a majority of votes ends up with a supermajority of seats.
If we might be a little uneasy with that, one of the responses to that has been two-round systems. (This is still within the single-winner system.) France has the two-round system. The intuition behind that is we want to make sure that whoever comes out of this contest has a substantial amount of support. We don’t want to run the risk of a fragmented field leading to a winner with a small share of the vote. France is a little unusual, actually, because the threshold for advancing to the second round is only 12.5% of the vote. That’s very low. Most two-round systems would say just the top two go through, and then one of them is going to end up with a majority in a second-round vote. Again, France is a variant, but the intuition is the same.
Then the third prominent type within that single-winner category is what we’ll call ranked-choice voting, or sequential elimination. That all takes place in a single round. As a voter, you rank-order your ballot, and then we eliminate candidates sequentially. From that, we’re still trying to get to a winner with broad, maybe majority support. So those are the three types within the single-winner systems.
But most democracies around the world use multi-winner systems. So, I’m going to talk about two broad categories within that. One of them is the most common way to elect legislatures in democracies: proportional representation. The basic intuition there is that parties run lists of candidates and voters cast a preference. Their primary preference is for the party. If you get into the weeds, we can talk about indicating preferences among candidates within the list. But the main thing is, you cast a preference for a party, and then the first thing that happens when votes get counted is that seats get allocated to those parties within the district according to their proportion of the vote. That’s proportional representation.
The second type within that multi-winner system is also ranked-choice voting. But when we do ranked-choice voting in a multi-winner system, political scientists call it single transferable vote. It’s pretty rare. Ireland is maybe the country that’s used it longest. Australia uses it for its Senate. There’s a couple of other examples. But it punches above its weight in reformist circles, because a lot of people really like the principle that instead of voting for a party list, you get to rank-order your preference across all the candidates, and then there’s a mechanism for allocating seats in a multi-winner district. That kind of rank-order voting in multi-winner districts can end up giving representation that looks a lot like proportional representation, but the mechanics of it are pretty different. So those are the multi-winner systems.
The last category I’ll talk about is mixed systems. That is just layering a multi-winner system on top of a single-winner system. But here’s the distinction: It’s not the case that there’s two chambers of the legislature, and one uses one and one uses the other. When I talk about a mixed system, I’m talking about within the same chamber of a legislature you have single-winner contests going on, and then on top of that geographical map with a bunch of single-member districts, you layer a proportional system. There [are] two main variants within these mixed systems. In one of them, those two types of elections take place independently from each other, and the winners in the single-member districts go off to the legislature, the winners in the PR tier, they all go off to the legislature—and that’s your chamber. So, we’ll call that a parallel system, because the two elections take place in parallel. Japan would be a prominent example—Mexico another.
The other main type of mixed system is what we call compensatory. In that case, you have the single-winner contest going on. Single-winner contests tend to give a huge bonus to the winning party, the biggest party, even if it’s not a majority party, like in the U.K.’s recent election. What they do in the proportional tier is actively try to compensate for that winner’s bonus. They allocate the proportional seats, not strictly proportionally—that is, to the proportional vote—but to offset disproportionalities at the lower tier. The most prominent case is Germany, although there are a bunch of other cases around the world that do it as well. In the ‘90s and aughts, a lot of countries adopted these mixed systems as a way to try to mitigate the problems with both single-winner and multi-winner systems. Those are the options as we look around the world.
Bassin: So, Drew … John has kindly come over to our table and told us what’s on the menu. So, I’m now the United States, and I say, “Oh, okay, well, I’ll take that single-member, winner-take-all, plurality district.” I’m reminded of a great 1980s movie called L.A. Story with Steve Martin, and he’s in the restaurant and says, “I’ll have the duck.” And the waiter goes, “The duck? You want the duck?” So, Drew, I just ordered the duck. And you don’t think we’ve made a good choice here. Why do you think that we’ve made a poor choice? What’s your best argument for why we’ve made the wrong choice and maybe want to choose a different system?
Drew Penrose: So, we’ve heard the phrase “politics is broken.” It’s so common that it’s become kind of a cliché. But in many ways the single-member system has always been a kind of awkward fit for the United States.
If you go all the way back to the Founding, they did not have this menu. The menu literally did not exist at the time. Most of the systems that were just described had not yet been invented. So, we inherited, essentially, the system that was used in the English countryside at the time. But if you look at the statements of the Founders, as to what they were trying to achieve, you can find John Adams writing that the legislature should be a portrait in miniature of the people at large; it should think, feel, and reason like them. Or if you read “Federalist 10” by Madison, the way we manage the violence of factionalism is by allowing more factions in, by allowing a greater diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, so that no one can oppress all of the others with a majority.
“What happens in countries when an illiberal force takes over? A really good example is the illiberal democracy in Hungary. When Orbán’s party took power, one of the very first things they did is they took their mixed system—combination of single-member districts and proportional representation—and they made the legislature as a whole smaller, and then they increased the proportion of single-member districts compared to the proportion of proportional representation seats. Frankly, they made the system more like the one we have in the United States.” — Drew Penrose
These are statements that make a clear preference for a proportional system; they sound like a call for proportional representation. I think there’s a very clear case to be made that the Founders would have instituted a proportional system had such a thing been available to them at the time—and the concerns about factionalism that they had then … they had no idea what was in store for the United States. There was a much smaller slice of a much smaller pie at that time. Today, with the diversity of interests and identities that we have, and the existential threats of oppression that we have, there’s a much stronger case to be made for a proportional system than there was at that time. Yet we’re still using today the same system inherited from the English countryside, and that has resulted in a number of consequences. It is a choice, and that choice has consequences.
We have the whole problem of gerrymandering. Something like 90% of districts are not competitive. We have disproportionate representation of older, whiter, male representatives at a time when more voices should be heard and should be giving their perspectives. And this is not inevitable. We could adopt a proportional system just by a statute. It actually would not require changing the Constitution—just adopting multi-member districts within the states and any number of proportional systems available to us within those states. The result would be that you’d have Republicans from cities being elected, Democrats from the countryside being elected. Those voices are there—they’re just suppressed right now. We would have a fairer reflection on race and gender in our representation than we have today. Every election would be competitive, and gerrymandering basically disappears overnight. When representation isn’t based on districts, then gerrymandering ceases to be a tool that is usable.
I think the arguments for proportional representation in the United States are pretty clear—I think the case is pretty clear. The system that we have today is completely unfit for the kinds of challenges that we have. It worked in the sense that it was relatively stable for a long time, but as factionalism has become the far more salient thing—just as it was, perhaps, for the founding generation—we find that it is not meeting [our] needs. If we want to move forward with the democracy of tomorrow—which is the name of my team at Protect Democracy—I think some form of proportional representation is the way to go.
Bassin: Tova, Drew started to allude to this, but whenever you start talking about changing the system by which you are translating popular will into governing power, the question arises: What impact might that have on participation? And will that impact be equally distributed, or will it affect different demographic groups in different ways?
I also want to ask: If you were striving for the greatest amount of inclusion, what systems might you choose among those options on the menu?
Tova Wang: I think PR may be it—I’m not quite sure. There are studies that show that PR is better for marginalized communities, people of color, and is somewhat better in redistribution. But maybe we back up and figure out what are the values that we’re trying to support when we’re looking at reforming or overhauling a system; we’re striving not just for tolerating or allowing for a multi-racial America, but actually supporting and facilitating it. There is an argument that PR does that.
I would also say: Is there a system in which we do more to address economic inequality? Is there a system that shifts power from people who are lower-income away from the corporate powers that seem to have mostly captured our politics?
I would also mention the need for a strong labor movement in this country for any system to work well. I assume that a predicate for any system that we adopt is that it must have full access and leaves no one out.
There’s a great argument for PR—I’m basically persuaded. But I think that perhaps we should look more at the values that we’re trying to promote and think creatively and expansively about it.
Bassin: When people make arguments in favor of a more proportional system, John, one of the things that gets raised is: Across the world today, you are seeing a rise in illiberalism, a rise in authoritarian politics, in countries with very different systems. It’s not as if proportional representation countries are immune to the rise of authoritarianism or illiberalism. You’ve studied these systems all over the world. What are your thoughts on whether there’s a case out there that these systems are better or worse at fending off the rise of illiberal-populist authoritarianism?
Carey: First point: nothing on the menu is an absolute protection against dysfunction. Dysfunction is ubiquitous. But when I think about your question, I’ll try to separate, What are the liberal-democratic ideals that we’re aspiring to when we set up a bunch of rules for our elections?, and, What are the risks we want to hedge against?
In that first category of ideals: there’s immense diversity in all these societies; we want a system that represents diversity. So that’s the first thing. The multi-winner systems just intuitively offer a vehicle for doing that even within the district. Another ideal that we want to aspire to is accountability of our representatives. Voters like the idea of being able to reward or punish their representatives for good or bad behavior or performance. There’s a tension that we might think about between the ability to reward and punish individual politicians and the ability to reward and punish parties or coalitions. If we’re thinking about broad principles that we want to aspire to, a really important one is legibility to the voters. We want a system where, from the voters’ perspectives, the connection between how they cast their ballot and what they end up with in terms of government representation all the way down to policy is transparent, that they can make sense of it. There are going to be trade-offs there across different electoral systems—but, in general, I favor really prioritizing simplicity on that count. And then the last big ideal that I’ll put out there for consideration is we want a system that’s going to yield at the end policy that’s more or less in the center, toward the center of the distribution of citizen preferences. There’s always an array of citizen preferences out there, and I prefer an electoral system that’s going to avoid extremist outcomes. So, those are the big principles we need to be thinking about.
With risks, you want a system that avoids what political scientists would call Condorcet losers—by that I just mean electing somebody who is opposed by the majority of the population. Because there are election systems, and we live under one of them, that can quite frequently produce Condorcet losers as the electoral winner. You want to avoid that. Relatedly, you want to avoid a system where the losing party or candidate can win the election. Again, we live under an electoral system where that’s quite possible. It doesn’t happen all the time. It doesn’t usually happen. But when it happens, that’s a violation of the principle that all votes count equally. We want to avoid that. And then we also want to avoid a system that really fosters polarization. These are overlapping risks.
Single-winner systems as a rule are systematically more inclined toward those risks that I’ve just outlined for two reasons. One: When you drop district boundaries and you have a bunch of elections that take place independently from each other in a single-winner system, the geographical distribution of where votes are can matter just as much as the overall levels of support for candidates and parties. When geographical distribution matters, you open yourself up to the possibility of Condorcet losers and of inversions. The other thing is that when you have a single-winner system, there’s really an imperative to winnow the set of choices in the general election further than in a multi-winner system. A general election in a single-winner system only can make sense to people if you eliminate a lot of options before you present them in the general election. But that sequential elimination of candidates can open you up to ending up with a set, whether it’s two or three or a handful, where you know the only options may be Condorcet losers.
So, those are not just descriptions of where we are in 2024 in the United States—although they do describe where we are this year pretty well—but they’re more broadly systematic to single-winner systems. That, to me, is a compelling argument to consider alternatives.
Wang: I was just going to mention: What John alluded to about the geographic density being so determinative is a major reason why people believe that a PR system would be better in terms of representation for communities of color, because it would not be conditioned on them being geographically concentrated, and you wouldn’t get into this gerrymandering craziness that we have today. ... I think that’s a strong argument.
Bassin: Drew, I want to bring you into this. John’s laid out a compelling justification for some of these alternative systems on the basis of thematic values, where they might align with liberalism. But are there good cases to be made that one or other of these systems are actually functionally better for preserving liberalism?
Penrose: One place we can look is: What happens in countries when an illiberal force takes over? A really good example is the illiberal democracy in Hungary. When Orbán’s party took power, one of the very first things they did is they took their mixed system—combination of single-member districts and proportional representation—and they made the legislature as a whole smaller, and then they increased the proportion of single-member districts compared to the proportion of proportional representation seats. Frankly, they made the system more like the one we have in the United States.
That makes sense when you think about it, because proportional representation requires collaboration of a large majority in order to hold power. But a quintessential feature of autocracy is that it relies on a small coalition of power—either so small that the autocrat can control them with bribery and threats, or a substantial minority of the population that can be manipulated by stoking fears about immigration or racial or religious differences or what have you.
That sort of politics is rewarded in a single-member system, where you often have a two-party system, so you can take over one party and the only choice [people] have is to go to the other party—very difficult in a polarized environment where people have serious policy differences with the opposite party. A proportional system has the complete opposite dynamic: instead of a small coalition, it’s intrinsic to the system that it’s everyone. The whole idea is proportional representation is full representation; instead of one group of people winning and everyone else losing, everybody wins—just in proportion to their numbers. It’s very difficult for an autocrat to manage such a system.
So, it’s not surprising that when we see autocrats start to gain power in places where there’s some kind of combination of proportional representation and winner-take-all, they tend to exaggerate the winner-take-all aspects of the electoral system. It’s very dangerous for us to be maintaining a winner-take-all system under that kind of environment.
Bassin: I wonder if there’s also another dynamic that sometimes plays out: In any liberal, pluralistic society, you’re probably going to have some fairly extremist faction that might be illiberal or have very retrograde views on liberal concepts like equality. Over time, that faction is going to rise and fall in its size and its hold. At low periods, it might hold, if you think about something like the Alternative for Germany party, 7%. But then in higher periods, it rises to 14-15%, or now maybe 27-pushing-30%. And those things fluctuate. You see that in countries like Austria, France, Germany. In these proportional systems, an interesting dynamic seems to take place. When they are on the smallest end, they essentially can’t become meaningful parts of a parliamentary coalition. They can essentially be locked out by the mainstream parties who make a decision that they’re anti-system, anti-democracy, anti-liberal, and [they don’t] allow them into a coalition. But as they rise, they put pressure on the mainstream center right or center left party about whether they’re going to work with them or not. One of the things we’ve seen happen is if at some point the mainstream center right party agrees to form [a] coalition ... let’s say one of these parties that rises to 25% and starts being a meaningful part of the legislature, that far-right party is forced into a choice: If it joins the governing coalition and begins to govern—which requires some amount of pragmatism and cooperation and moderating its view in order to be part of its governing coalition—it alienates the base that originally elected [it], and the next election, its proportion tends to go down. We’ve seen that happen in Austria and a couple of other places. On the other hand, if it strives to keep its base that got it there, it becomes a non-functional partner in the governing coalition—and ultimately gets forced out of the coalition.
“We’re in a moment of crisis right now. The system is not working. It needs some change. It needs some experimentation. What I wouldn’t want us to fall into, those of us who believe reform is needed, is what is known as the narcissism of small differences. … We obviously want to be thoughtful about making sure that we don’t break things—I’m not advocating for a Facebook-style motto on our democracy. And we want to make educated and informed judgments about what things might happen. But we should be careful that we don’t end up in such a war with ourselves that we break what could be a coalition for reform.” — Ian Bassin
So, in that way, those systems tend to moderate the ability of extremist factions from essentially becoming dominant governing parties, whereas in a system like ours, we’ve had an illiberal, authoritarian faction like that essentially capture the mainstream center right party in this country to a great extent because that dynamic didn’t exist. So, in addition to the things you [John] mentioned, there may be other reasons why these systems could be more resilient—to your point against extremism and forcing more compromise and moderation towards the center.
Tova, I want to talk about another aspect of this. Regardless of which of these systems we choose, if you look at a place like the United States, before you get to how a state or a municipality will decide how to translate popular will into a governing majority, the popular will is determined by votes. Obviously, in this country, we’ve had a pretty ugly history of trying to prevent people from voting to begin with. Whatever system [we] have, if there are people who want to block others from voting, that is fundamentally going to be an illiberal, undemocratic system. What are ways we might think about addressing that problem?
Wang: Yeah, exactly: We can’t have a political system based on exclusion, which arguably has been the thread that’s run through our entire history. It’s not just the exclusion of people who feel that they’re being silenced on the right, but the well-founded concerns of communities of color, Native Americans, and others who have a good reason to feel that they’re not being listened to, represented, and are being intentionally excluded at times. There are a lot of ways to get at that—but, fundamentally, you’re going to have huge numbers of people who have negative views of democracy. Why wouldn’t they? Right now, young people who feel completely un-listened-to and unrepresented are turning off the system. That means we’re going to be in really big trouble, if you think about a person who is 20 years old right now and what they’ve experienced as government and politics.
So, it’s not just systemic stuff—the environment can also lead to suppression of vote. I can come up with a million different ways to fight against voter suppression and to increase participation, including among excluded groups, and I fully champion all of that. [But] one thing that is critical to the entire conversation is that any time that [we’re thinking] about making a big change or changing structures or systems, we [must] bring people into the conversation. By that I mean organizers, advocates, practitioners, people who are actually in the field and actually in community with people to understand how these things will really impact them, and whether that will be something where they feel more included. We have to have a system that feels truly inclusive, cannot be based on exclusion, and represents values that we want to promote in the United States. That has to [include] the voices of young people and communities of color and low-income people who rightly feel aggrieved.
If there was a stronger labor movement, it would not only address economic inequality in many ways—so, you would have some of the temperature lowered—but you would have a more productive channel for people to have their economic grievances heard and listened to. It would both be something that puts people in community as working people, and [it would] actually [do] something about the extreme inequality in the United States that leads to a lot of this anger and negativity, which in many ways is understandable.
Given that we have had a tremendous amount of exclusion of many communities in this country, and that a lot of the voter suppression has been rooted in racism and anti-immigrant views, that is unsustainable for a liberal democracy. We need to find a system that supports having the multi-racial, diverse, multi-ethnic society that we have already and will only have more of in the days, months, years, decades to come.
Bassin: In their book, How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky make an argument that, really, there has not been a successful pluralistic, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy that has sustained itself over any period of time. Well, could the United States be that? Is it trending towards that? The argument they make is that, to the extent we’ve ever had one, it really only came about after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and lasted very few decades before we hit the crisis we’re in today. That is probably not coincidental.
Wang: That’s an interesting point. Guy-Uriel Charles, my friend and colleague at Harvard Law School who I admire a great deal, talks about how, if we haven’t lost the Voting Rights Act already, we’re going to real soon.
“There are studies that show that proportional representation is better for marginalized communities, people of color, and is somewhat better in redistribution. But maybe we back up and figure out what are the values that we’re trying to support when we’re looking at reforming or overhauling a system; we’re striving not just for tolerating or allowing for a multi-racial America, but actually supporting and facilitating it. There is an argument that PR does that.” — Tova Wang
So, what is the new paradigm through which we [ensure] representation and voting rights for communities of color? And it should not be really binary anymore. We really are in a multi-racial society now and that paradigm ought to shift a little bit anyway. Things like PR are the next level Voting Rights Act. Because regardless of whether you think the Voting Rights Act no longer works, we have lost most of it, and we’ll probably lose all of it. So, what is the next pathway to a Voting Rights Act of sorts?
Bassin: So, this is a conference on liberalism and the celebration of a plurality of ideas and diversity of views—and we’ve just completed most of this panel with a rousing cheerleading, one-sided argument for moving to proportional representation. To invoke Bill Galston’s excellent Robert Frost quote about how maybe we should try to argue against ourselves, let me ask this: Does someone want to offer the best counter-argument? What is the strongest counter-argument against this push for PR and in defense of something like a first-past-the-post, single-member district?
Carey: Let’s imagine we made the move in the United States, and we end up with four, five, six parties, none of which commands majority support. Making decisions is going to be a function of coalition-building from then on. But what’s going to be difficult from a voter’s perspective is: What if you really want to throw all the bums out? What if you’re really dissatisfied with the product that you’re getting for the past two or four years? It can be harder. Because these categorical choices tend to be sliced more finely under ... what tends to go in hand with proportional systems is multi-party systems—so it’s harder to throw all the bums out when [instead] there’s a bunch of little units like that. I think that’s a compelling case against the move that we’ve all seeming to be lining up behind. That’s the most compelling argument that advocates of single-winner systems make: What you want is a clear government and a clear opposition, and whenever you come around to elections, you want to give voters the choice between those two things.
But then the next question: What’s the country that first pops to mind when you think of dysfunction under proportional representation? Israel, right? And, in Israel, they have actually gone all the way. When I talked about not having single-winner districts, they just erased all the lines on the map—the whole country is a single district; there are no sub-districts within Israel. They have 120 members in their Knesset, and they’re elected nationwide on these party lists. They’re not the only ones; the Netherlands does this as well—[it] tends to be smaller countries. If you make the move to a multiple-winner system, you’ve got to figure out, how many winners? And one option is the whole legislature in a single basket. I would really caution against that.
I’m going to introduce another political science term, district magnitude, which is the number of winners in a given district where we have our elections. Israel’s [is] 120, and if we went to full PR in the United States, we could imagine a U.S. House Representatives election with a 435-member district. We don’t want to go there. We want to be much closer to the end of the scale where we are right now, which is closer to one than to 435 in terms of district magnitude. That’s still going to require drawing some lines, but to one of Drew’s earlier points, the potential for gerrymandering, the leverage you can get with your line-drawing, goes down precipitously once you get above one. It just becomes way harder to gerrymander effectively.
So, actually, we could gain the lion’s share of the advantages of multi-winner systems by making a relatively modest move. I’d keep the districts in that neighborhood of four or five, rather than 20 or 50 or 100 or 400. One thing that will do is give us a lot more proportionality. It’ll give us a bit more multi-partyism. But it won’t move us to a place, I hope, where, from a voter’s perspective, it becomes impossible to think about: “How do I punish the current government?” You want to keep that door open for voters. If they really dislike what they’re getting, you want to give them a viable opposition, a viable alternative, for how to replace what they’ve currently got.
Penrose: One thing you bring up that I think is really important is: Even if we all agreed that proportional representation [is] the future and we wanted it right now, there’s a whole bunch of design decisions that go into what kind of proportional representation you’re doing. Probably the thing that gives me the greatest pause is just wondering: Which of those are we going to pick? Are we going to pick the right ones? Are there going to be consequences that we didn’t expect?
But we have a couple advantages in the United States. One is that we are, unfortunately, quite late to the game. That gives us a lot of prior examples out there in the world to look at. And the other is federalism. We’ve got states, and you hear the phrase “laboratories of democracy”—right now we have laboratories of autocracy as well, as states are pushing boundaries in the opposite direction. That actually makes state-level proportional representation an option with some urgency to it. A lot of the policy matters that are most important to people right now—crime, education, reproductive rights—are now decided at the state level. Having something fair at the state level can be very important and gives us an opportunity to actually see some of these design decisions in practice. So, lots of states have the initiative. States can experiment. And states have started experimenting—with Maine going to ranked-choice voting [and] Alaska adopting its model. But no state has yet made the plunge and tried proportional representation. But I think it’s close at hand. I expect that we’ll start to see something about that soon.
Wang: I’ll just plus one [the idea] of looking at states and also cities. I believe Portland, Oregon, has started to [go] down the path of implementing a PR system. It’s been a struggle, but they’re getting there. I guess my critique would be that it’s just woefully insufficient, which maybe is to state the obvious. You touched upon the Electoral College—if you want to look at how people feel excluded, look no further than a handful of states being the ones that decide who the president is, and everybody else feeling like they have no voice.
And then beyond the cultural issues, there are other parts of the system … I might raise the Supreme Court—and I don’t have a strong view on how to go about reform of the Supreme Court, but, how do we [adequately] structure for what’s going on, not just actually at the Supreme Court, but at many levels of the court system? So, I guess it’s a path, but certainly not the only thing we need to be thinking about.
Bassin: As we think about some of these issues, the next question that arises is: Once you determine that you might want to move in a different direction, getting there is a whole other challenge. Are there any lessons that we can draw from around the world on how you actually move one of these reforms from a panel to actual implementation in the world?
Carey: If we think about how most countries that are currently in PR or multi-winner systems got there, the big move was early 20th century, as countries expanded the franchise. There’s a huge academic literature about this, and debates—and I’m going to be doing a violation to all kinds of subtle arguments [here]—but I think one of the central conclusions is [that] PR became a way of hedging bets. In particular, when there was an envisioning [of] the enfranchisement of a big labor movement, or of the working class, the idea among the currently dominant parties was: “Holy cow! If we’re at a single-winner system, we’re going to be the single losers every single time from now on. So, some kind of proportional, multi-winner system is going to be our way of hedging our bets and ensuring that we don’t get completely wiped off the map.”
“When I think about your question, ‘What are the liberal-democratic ideals that we’re aspiring to when we set up a bunch of rules for our elections?’ … First, there’s immense diversity in all these societies; we want a system that represents diversity. … Another ideal … is accountability of our representatives. Voters like the idea of being able to reward or punish their representatives for good or bad behavior or performance. … A really important one is legibility to the voters. We want a system where, from the voters’ perspectives, the connection between how they cast their ballot and what they end up with in terms of government representation all the way down to policy is transparent, that they can make sense of it. … And then the last big ideal … is we want a system that’s going to yield at the end policy that’s more or less in the center, toward the center of the distribution of citizen preferences. There’s always an array of citizen preferences out there, and I prefer an electoral system that’s going to avoid extremist outcomes.” — John Carey
But now, most countries have a pretty wide franchise, so there isn’t that path to reform. I don’t see that as being available to us. I’m going to put this back to Drew in a minute, because I know he’s thought much more about this at the state level, but my concern is that one of the big impediments is: most of the politicians and activists that I talk to that are interested in this idea tend to be on the Democratic side. [And] it can look like unilateral disarmament if you were to do this at the state level, because right now we’ve got some states where the Democrats get the big winner’s bonus, and other states where the Republicans get the big winner’s bonus. And if some states started to do this piecemeal, and they were all Democratic states, what they’d all be doing is sacrificing their winner’s bonus in the state sale. In Massachusetts, they’d go from owning all the representation to owning 65% of it. But what good is that, if you’re not going to have matching, offsetting disarmament on the other side?
Penrose: I do expect states that are very heavily Republican [or] very heavily Democratic to be the first places where there are opportunities. It might be places we don’t expect. You can look at a state like Arkansas, which is heavily Republican, but they have this history of electing their state legislature through counties. This is something that a lot of states had: they used to elect their state houses on a county basis. This was inconsistent with the one person, one vote cases. So, most of those states wound up going to single-member districts. But if you read the Arkansas constitution today, it still says that the legislature is elected on a county basis. They just never revised it. They just ignore it. So, there’s an argument there, that’s kind of a conservative argument, that we could go back to this way of electing multiple members on a county basis, in a way that’s consistent with one person, one vote, in a way that’s consistent with the Voting Rights Act, by adopting a form of proportional representation. Yes, more Democrats would get elected in Arkansas, if Arkansas were to make that shift. But it would go from like 90% to 80%; I just don’t think it would be quite as threatening.
Even still, it might be a challenge to get it through the legislature. But a lot of these states have initiative rights so voters can get things through on their own. Illinois used a semi-proportional system. It used to use three-member districts with cumulative voting, which is not a party-list system and not single-transferable vote, just a system that guarantees some level of minority representation. It adopted it in 1870, right after the Civil War, when Illinois was highly polarized between Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats. As a result of using this cumulative voting system, well into the 1970s, until 1980 when it repealed it, you would have Republicans elected in urban centers in Chicago and Cook County, Democrats elected downstate. Unfortunately, it was repealed as part of a measure that was largely sold as, you mentioned, kicking out the bums. They shrunk the size of their legislature by a third, and that was the thing people actually liked about the proposal. Cumulative voting itself was very popular in Illinois, and since then, there have been occasional calls to bring it back. But anyone who knows Illinois politics might recognize the date 1980 as right around when Mike Madigan took control of the state and held it until a couple years ago. But now that that machine has been changed, there may be an opportunity in a state like Illinois to return. These arguments, they go beyond the simple partisan arguments. They are arguments grounded in history and benefits that states have gotten historically from systems like this.
Bassin: This has been a remarkably agreeable panel on reforms. If you spend your time in this world, most panels on electoral systems reform are not nearly this agreeable. There’s a lot of different perspectives on what should be done. One of the risks of that, that I’ve always feared, is that the reform movement will essentially end up in a war with itself, and that that war will end up hampering the overall ability of the reform movement to push forward with any sort of change. So, one of the things that I would encourage us to be, when it comes to these sorts of reforms, is pansexual about them, which is we should be into all of them.
We’re in a moment of crisis right now. The system is not working. It needs some change. It needs some experimentation. What I wouldn’t want us to fall into, those of us who believe reform is needed, is what is known as the narcissism of small differences. So, yes, we obviously want to be thoughtful about making sure that we don’t break things—I’m not advocating for a Facebook-style motto on our democracy. And we want to make educated and informed judgments about what things might happen. But we should be careful that we don’t end up in such a war with ourselves that we break what could be a coalition for reform.
Wang: I’m not in the tank for PR. I think it sounds good, but ... we need to think expansively. I’ve learned so much from Hahrie Han about this over the last 10 years or so, about the need to invest and speak with and negotiate and engage with base-building organizations that are truly rooted in communities to know what some of these answers are, and they may have some ideas that we don’t. They know what’s going on out there. So that would be my plea.
Bassin: I’m glad you added that, because I think part of what, to me, underlies the narcissism of small differences point is a point about humility, which is that for all of the great thinking that anyone might do on what reform might produce, none of us know for sure. I would point to the campaign finance reform movements of the early 2000s that were convinced that the solution for saving democracy was broad-based, small-dollar donations, which are now the engine that is fueling Marjorie Taylor Greene’s rise in politics. You just never know what you’re going to get. So, we should have the humility of not knowing exactly what we [will] produce.
But the underlying point is we also want to make sure that we hold the democracy reform coalition together. We held a summit on democracy with several other organizations back in 2017 where we invited, like today, a group of people who had been battling illiberal, authoritarian movements around the world to offer advice to all of us here in the United States for what we were about to be entering into in this era, starting in 2017. The opposition minister from Poland, Agnieszka Pomaska, when we asked her what’s the one piece of advice she had for Americans entering this period, she said, “Don’t let the pro-democracy coalition fracture.” That was a lesson learned from hard experience in Poland, where, as a result of a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about today, the Law and Justice Party had largely risen to power on plurality support, not majority support. The same is true with Fidesz in Hungary, and the same is famously true with the Nazi Party in Germany, which never achieved a majority in any election. It was the system design choices that those countries made that translated extremist minority pluralities into powerful governing majorities.
So, those are the stakes on this, and for us to survive that, we need to make sure the pro-democracy, pro-liberalism coalition stays united, as it did in Poland, which is what ultimately led to the win there. And I would argue that it was enabled to do that by some of the structures of the Polish system that make it a little bit more challenging here in the United States, because one of the most disenfranchised factions in the United States today on these systems are traditional, mainstream, conservative Republicans who are neither Democrats nor identify with the current incarnation of the Republican Party. And yet negative polarization does create barriers to them pulling the lever for a party that they don’t identify with and agree with. That’s another argument for why systems that provide more choices, options, items on the menu, might actually empower us to protect a more liberal and more democratic form of government.
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© The UnPopulist, 2024
Wonderful discussion!
My own preference would be to eliminate congressional/legislative districts entirely.
Vote for the party of one's choice. The percentage of party votes determine the number of seats "won" by the party. For example there are 100 seats in the legislature. The GOP gets 1/3 of the votes and roughly 33 seats. The Democrats get 1/3 of the votes and 33 seats. Libertarians get 1/6 of the votes and 17 seats and Greens get 1/6 of the votes and 16 seats. The actual vote percentage and seats allocated to a party would be more precise than the example. Then it is up to each party to determine the geographical and demographical distribution of the seats.
Who becomes a representative is determined by the party at a party conference after the election and those mechanisms would be entirely up to the parties and paid for by the parties.
Governor, traditional state offices, US Senate seats would be elected by state wide votes under the winner takes all model.
The President would be elected by popular vote and the electoral college (which has never worked the way Hamilton thought it would) abolished. Simultaneously there needs to be a reevaluation of Presidential powers compelling Congress to cease deferring "difficult things" to the executive.
The federal judicial system and SCOTUS needs to replace the executive appointment and advise and consent role of the Senate with a permanent independent judicial appointment system. Mandatory retirement for any judge at 75. The Supreme Court should be composed of one judge from each judicial circuit. The senior (in terms of service within the federal judiciary) justice would be the de facto Chief Justice.
Looks to me like a constitutional convention is in order. Perhaps constitutional conventions should be called every 25 years?
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) has been slowly but surely adding more states to its signatory list. It still needs roughly another 60+ EC votes to get over the line.
In the long run, proportional or preferential voting needs to replace the current first-past-the-post system which is a relic of a previous century.