Tuesday Talk*: Can Proportional Representation Fix Us?

In the not too distant past, I’ve described elections as a person in a pit fill with vomit about to have a bucket of feces dumped on his head. Should he duck? We have a two-party system, no matter what the libertarians say, and for a great many Americans, perhaps even the majority, the choice is no longer acceptable as neither party represents their will.

In early 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democrat from New York, was asked to speculate about her role under a Joe Biden presidency. She groaned. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” she said, “but in America, we are.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s frustration with the two-party system reflects the frustration American voters feel every time they step into the voting booth, when they find themselves stuck with the same two choices — and, in most places, only one with any shot at winning.

By definition, there can be only one president under our Constitution. There are alternative systems, such as parliamentary system where the chief executive isn’t chosen by the people or the states, but by the elected representatives who are constrained to form coalitions in order to achieve a majority.  But Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman propose a less radical change in proportional representation. And before the knee-jerk resistance arises, the outcome is highly likely to favor a more moderate, more cooperative, middle than either side’s most radical extremes.

The heart of the problem is the system of single-winner districts, which give 100 percent of representation to the candidate who earns the most votes and zero percent to everyone else.

Winner-take-all is the electoral software that generates two dominant parties and relegates third parties to playing the role of spoiler and wasting their supporters’ votes. This leads to the same high-stakes contest every two years between the same two parties, resulting either in domination by one or in divided and paralyzed government by both.

What’s proportional representation and how would it work? Consider a modest expansion of the House of Representatives where a congressional district would send not one winner-take-all representative, but a number of representatives based on the population of the district reflecting the vote of majority and minority. To get a fuller understanding of how this would work, it will be necessary for you to read the op-ed (gift link to NYT) and see the graphics as they can’t be easily copied here. Based upon a survey, with the assumption of a six party division, this is how it would flesh out at present.

PartySeats
Progressive74
New Liberal120
New Populist132
Growth and Opportunity122
Patriot52
Christian Conservative93

 

Notably, such a change wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment, but merely a change in federal law enacted in 1967.

Many Americans believe the two-party system is inherent to the American constitutional design. But the nation’s framers didn’t intend it, nor is it found anywhere in the Constitution. Rather, the shape of the House of Representatives is mandated by a mere eight words of federal law, which requires “no district to elect more than one representative” — 435 districts, 435 members.

The law as it exists today was passed in 1967, to address concerns that white-dominated Southern states would exploit multimember districts to marginalize their Black voters, but versions of it have been in effect since 1842. Before then, states regularly used multimember districts to elect their congressional representatives. None of those multimember districts, however, have ever been proportional. All used a form of bloc voting — a majoritarian system in which voters can support as many candidates as there are seats, making it impossible for minority-supported candidates to win. But under proportional representation, bloc voting is impossible because each voter gets a single vote.

Is this the way out of the divisiveness that plagues Congress? Once proportional voting was enacted, would our two legacy political parties split apart into their component divisions, giving voters a choice of a representative that far better reflects their values? Would we be better off with this change or would this produce even greater divisiveness and chaos, giving rise to coalitions that no better reflect the majority will than do the two primary parties now?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.

11 thoughts on “Tuesday Talk*: Can Proportional Representation Fix Us?

    1. Austin

      Anyone else instinctively leery of “I don’t like the result of the vote. Let’s change the voting system,”?

      Or the “You know, in Country X they…” arguments so familiar to any parent with children over a certain age? Darn, if only party affiliation was voluntary!

      Only way to save that manner of argument is to name it after a victimized child.

  1. orthodoc

    The Nobel-prize-winning work of Kenneth Arrow**, especially his “General Possibility Theorem,” proves there’s no perfect voting system that satisfies the four “fairness criteria.” (I think he called them axioms of a social welfare function.) These are: unrestricted domain (it works for all preferences), non-dictatorship (no single person decides), Pareto efficiency (if everyone prefers A over B, so should the group), and independence of irrelevant alternatives (the ranking of A vs. B shouldn’t be affected by a third option). Proportional representation may feel fairer (especially when it works for you), but like any system, it has distortionary effects. For example, coalition dynamics can dilute voter intent, small parties can exert outsized influence, and preference aggregation can still fail to align with voters’ true priorities. Unlike Trump’s perfect Ukraine phone call or the perfect pectorals of Buttercup, The Princess Bride, no voting system can be perfect.

    **Tuesday digression: Kenneth Arrow is Larry Summers’ uncle, and he was not even the most famous uncle at that. Paul Samuelson, also a Nobel laureate in economics and the “father of modern economics,” was Larry’s father’s brother. Yet perhaps Larry’s mother was the most impressive of the bunch (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/business/anita-a-summers-dead.html).

  2. Redditlaw

    Consider radically expanding the House of Representatives from 435 members to 4,350 members instead. Before everyone goes, “Eww. More of those terrible, no-good Congressmen?”, consider that each Congressman would represent only approximately 55,000 people, meaning that each one would be both more representative and responsive to their constituents. If 55,000 people in Queens want AOC, then AOC they get, but other parts of what were her district may choose very different candidates.

    When considering the venality of our present Congress with lobbying jobs awaiting them at retirement, their ability to score magical returns through individual stock trading, and kickbacks to miscreant relatives and campaign contributions from large government contractors, each Congressman will have their power and ability to be influenced diminished by almost an order of magnitude.

    The fact that all of them won’t fit into the chamber is also a bonus. Most of them could be kept back in their home states by law and vote virtually.

    In my opinion, that is a better fix than proportional representation, which hasn’t been used at the federal level for a very long time.

  3. Anonymous Coward

    I don’t think more congress critters per district is going to solve the problem of tyranny of the majority. If we’re going to mess around with representations making large cities separate entities would reduce their domination of their states.
    Also looking at parliamentary systems, splinter groups can have an outsized influence if they are the key to a ruling coalition. Then again an extremist like Lexi Cortez might see that as a feature rather than a bug.

    1. Robert E. Malchman

      The issue this Century hasn’t been Tyranny of the Majority, but Tyranny of the Minority: The popular vote winner twice isn’t elected President, Wyoming gets the same representation in the Senate as California, it takes a 60% super-majority to get most things done in the Senate. That said, the problem in November 2024 is that a majority of people voted for the government they deserve in all their ignorance, bigotry and venality, but now the rest of us have to go along for the ride to perdition.

    2. The Dude

      > If we’re going to mess around with representations making large cities separate entities would reduce their domination of their states.

      Pennsylvania kinda does this with Philadelphia. If Pittsburgh, the next largest city, were to surpass whatever arbitrary population count it would also be given the same leeway in self-determination.

      I used to think it was weird, and it is, but more recently I began to seriously consider it. The nation is arguably most divided along rural/urban lines. The solution isn’t necessarily for X to win but instead to let the biggest two divisions of people choose their own destiny.

      What really led me to this was recently seeing rural areas oppose run-off voting. I honestly believed most people would support it regardless of political opinion, even if it is imperfect. Guess I was wrong.

      — then I begin to ramble —

      Or, maybe, we need to stop letting senile grandparents with the attitude of school children hijack the country . I’m not sure how popular he is around here, but Sanders really gave me hope that we could find a way to get along. Even Joe Rogan supported him which still shocks me. Maybe the problem isn’t so much urban/rural, which I know I _just_ said that. Maybe people just want someone that feels *real* to them. I think for a certain segment of the population, Trump certainly does that. People are forcibly dehumanized all day in their corporate jobs, why would they vote for a drone running for office. On the other hand, Portland Oregon seemed creepily into Kamala and Biden.

      Beats me. Hope this came off not hostile or non-argumentative. Never commented before but people seem generally thoughtful. Hoping I contributed to that. Maybe not.

  4. Hunting Guy

    I read the article. It sounds like something put together by an “East Coast Democrat” with no experience outside of the NY area.

    Flyover country and the “wacky” west coast would have very different party alignments, as would the south and deep south.

    This might work in a physically smaller country with less diversity and a smaller population, or on a state level, but I don’t see it working in the U.S.

    Are we going to limit the parties by law?

    And as a final note, the alliances between parties would fall apart all the time again because we are too diverse. While a wheat farmer in Kansas might have something in common with a progressive, their togetherness will diverge when it comes to fertilizer. And don’t get me started with guns.

    On the other hand, there are some parties that would get started that might be “interesting.” There are enough positions with enough people in them that I can see a bunch of parties, some not so tiny.

    Free Silver
    Polygamy (Parts of Utah, the Four Corners region, Eldorado, TX., possible part of MIssouri.)
    Weed Forever
    TN Volunteers Forever (CLS for Chairman?)
    Kill all the Lawyers
    Ban Meat

    Yeah, yeah. Bluesky (not the social media) thinking.

  5. rxc

    I understand the way this works, but the degree of planning and scheming needed to make sure that the candidate you really want hurts my head. I cannot envision that much of the populace will understand it which makes it even more susceptible to manipulation.

    No, no, a thousand times no. I don’t want to end up like Italy or Israel.

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