(Warning: extra-long diary ahoy. This is, however, something I'm very passionate about, so I will be extremely pleased if you read the whole thing. There's no tl;dr, but there is a treat and a poll at the end!)
The United States Congress is fundamentally broken, and it's the parties' fault. I'm not just talking about gridlock or obstructionism or Republican hostage-taking or the Democrats' capitulation fetish. And don't think for a second that I'm one of those smug centrists who cry "a pox on both your houses" with an eye only to the parties' superficial conduct. I am not a centrist, I'm a political scientist, and my concern is with a much deeper, much more structural problem.
The problem is that our party system is not representative of our electorate. It forces cosmopolitan California progressives into bed with socially conservative blue-collar Rust Belters, and Northeastern moderates into bed with Chicago School market fundamentalists and Southern religious fundamentalists. Our two-party system was built on the electoral strategy of the big tent, of forming cross-cutting coalitions to give a voice to the voiceless. This system is no longer relevant in the age of the internet, when having one's voice heard--and building a coalition around it--is as easy as clicking "Publish." Our parties have failed to evolve with the electorate, and we despise them for it.
Voters today are more informed and connected than the architects of our parties could ever have anticipated, and more and more are waking up to the realization that we need to reform our party system. Popular democracy cannot survive when one party's electoral strategy is to disenfranchise those not likely to vote for it and the other is ostensibly more interested in "compromise" than good policy or even good politics. We need parties that represent the natural coalitions and cleavages in our electorate, not merely differing shades of corporatocracy or differing interpretations of laissez-faire dogma. And we sure as hell need more than two, because Americans' policy preferences are vastly more complex and nuanced than the simple dichotomy we're forced into--never mind jamming a square peg through a round hole, it's more like jamming a tesseract through a mail slot. But it might surprise you how easy it would be to fix it.
Have you ever wondered why the US has only two major parties while many European countries have as many as eight or ten? It's not because Europeans are more ideologically diverse than Americans, or because there's some intangible quality of their policy preferences that makes them lean towards multiparty systems. The answer is much simpler. It's because of the electoral system.
How electoral systems determine party systems
In political science, we have this thing called Duverger's Law. Duverger's Law states that single-member, simple-plurality (SMSP or "first past the post") electoral systems favor two-party systems, while proportional representation (PR) electoral systems favor multiparty systems.
So what are SMSP and PR?
Let's start with the system we all know and love (or love to hate). My state of Texas is divided into 32 House districts, represented by one member each. This is what is known as single-member, simple plurality, or SMSP: "single member" because each district has one representative, "simple plurality" because that representative is whoever gets the most votes in his or her district.
In a proportional representation system, by contrast, Texas would be a single congressional district with 32 representatives, and those seats would be filled based on the proportion of votes each party gets in all of Texas. There would be no local constituencies as such: like in the Senate, each of the 32 members would represent the state at large.
Here's an illustration. In the 2010 election, 4,745,545 votes for Texas House candidates were cast, of which Republicans got 3,058,203 (64%), Democrats got 1,450,150 (30%), and Libertarians got 212,100 (4%) (source: Clerk of the House). Under the current SMSP electoral system, this resulted in a Texan delegation of 23 Republicans (72% of the delegation), 9 Democrats (28%), and 0 Libertarians (0%).
Under a PR system, the seats of the Texas delegation would be allocated by proportion of the popular vote. Republicans would get 64% of the delegation (21 seats), Democrats would get 30% (10 seats), and Libertarians would get 4% (1 seat).
As you can see, the shift to PR would immediately result in at least three parties in Congress, and that's just for the Texas delegation. "So what?" you say, "the Libertarians are awful! I'm sick of hearing my next-door neighbor yammering incessantly about the gold standard--who needs them nutting it up at the federal level?" Okay, fair point. But maybe we could do what the Netherlands does, and have the entire country be one colossal congressional district with 435 seats. This is what the House would look like:
(Vote count source: Clerk of the House)
Imagine that! The Green Party would be represented in the House, even in the Republican tidal wave of 2010. And the Working Families Party--I'd never even heard of them before doing this research, but they sound awesome.
As you can see, PR has two immediate effects: first, it narrows the margin between the largest parties; second, and most importantly, it allows smaller parties into the legislature, giving them room to grow. (I'll explain why these effects happen, and how smaller parties grow once they're in the lege, in the section How PR Could Save Congress below.)
How PR Works
(Warning: This section is long and kind of technical, so if you get bored because you're not an electoral systems geek like me, you might want to skip to the next section.)
So how exactly does PR work? It's a simple concept with myriad variations in practice. In the Western world, the three most common PR electoral systems (each of which has numerous specific variations) are closed list, open list, and single transferrable vote.
Closed list
Under closed-list PR, you vote for a party instead of a candidate. Seats are allotted to each party based on the proportion of the popular vote that party receives, and the seats won by each party are filled based on the party's order of preference for candidates. Each state party prepares a ranked list of as many candidates as there are seats apportioned to the state; this list is kind of the party's fantasy roster for what the state's delegation would look like in the event of a clean electoral sweep, ranked from the person they most want in Congress on down to those who they don't care as much about. A closed-list ballot for a state with 5 representatives would look like this:
Say we have a system where each of the 50 states is one electoral district, and your state has 5 seats in the House of Representatives. Imagine the party-proportion popular vote in your state translates to a PR delegation of 2 Democrats, 2 Republicans, and 1 Green. The first two Democrats on the list would go to Congress (Alice and Bob), along with the first two Republicans (Frank and George) and the first Green (Penelope). This is the system used in Italy, Russia, Argentina, and elsewhere.
Open list
Under open-list PR, seats are still filled by party, but voters have a much greater say in who actually goes to Congress. An open-list ballot would look like this:
Seats are still filled according to the proportion of votes for each party, but instead of simply going down the party list, each party's seats would be filled based on which candidates for that party got the most votes. Say, again, the vote for your state came to 40% for all Democratic candidates (2 seats), 40% for Republicans (2 seats), and 20% for Greens (1 seat). The two Democrats who got the most votes would go to Congress, as would the two Republicans who got the most votes and the Green who got the most votes. This is the system used in Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and elsewhere.
Some countries, like Sweden and Slovakia, have what is called a semi-open list. Under semi-open-list PR, your vote consists of two components: first, a party vote, as in a closed-list system; second, you would have the option (but would not be required) to cast a preference vote, a vote for a candidate from the party you've chosen, as in an open list. The party list order would be the "default" order, but the party's order of preference would be superceded if a candidate or candidates exceeded a certain quota in preference votes. For example, if the Democrats win two seats, the state party prefers that Alice and Bob take those seats, but Chris will go instead of Bob if he receives a certain percentage of the preference vote. If Elizabeth also exceeds this quota but gets less preference votes than Chris, then Chris takes the seat that would have gone to Alice and Elizabeth takes the seat that would have gone to Bob.
Single Transferrable Vote (STV)
Single transferrable vote has a similar ballot to the open list, except you vote for up to as many candidates as your state has seats, and you get to rank them in order of your preference. The "transferrable" part comes in because, instead of just looking at who got how many votes, there would be a simple quota of votes. Any candidate who met that quota would go to Congress, and afterwards, votes for that candidate would go to the voter's next choice. An STV ballot would look like this:
STV is a bit more complicated than simple list systems. Unlike list ballot systems, seats are not allotted directly to the parties, which means the candidates themselves play a greater role. Here, instead of ranking individual candidates by votes, there would be a predetermined quota: the number of votes cast, divided by the number of seats to be filled plus one seat, plus one vote (there are other types of quotas, but this one, known as the Droop Quota, is the most common). Once Democrat Chris got one-sixth plus one of the first-choice votes in your state (i.e. he exceeded the Droop Quota), he would be declared a winner and taken out of the race, and your vote would be counted for your second choice, Green Penelope. Or if Penelope already had enough first-choice votes to go to Congress, it'd be counted for Democrat Alice, and so on. Once all the candidates who got at least one-sixth of the vote had been assigned their seat, the remaining seats would be filled as per an open list, counting your vote for the highest person on your list who did not meet the quota (assuming, of course, that your vote had not already been counted for one of the winners). This is the system used in Ireland, the Australian Senate and state parliaments, Rajya Sabha (the Indian senate), and elsewhere.
Which system would be best for America?
Each system has its advantages and disadvantages. My personal favorite is semi-open list, the "Swedish ballot": under open-list systems, like in the Netherlands, low-information voters who comprise most of the electorate tend to just pick a party and vote for the top candidate on the list, which kind of ruins the spirit of the open list of allowing the voters, rather than the parties, to choose the order of preference. Semi-open list allows party voting for those low-information voters, while still allowing the order of preference to be chosen by the voters - those voters who know the candidates.
Aficionados of STV say that system provides the best form of PR, because votes don't get "wasted" on sure winners; additionally, allowing voters to spread their vote across parties maximizes the number of parties represented and reduces the effects of partisanship in voting choice. However, the main drawback of STV is that it is confusing: a referendum to adopt STV was voted down in British Columbia, Canada in 2005 because most voters simply didn't understand how it worked. Additionally, STV has the same problem as the open list: low-information voters who aren't familiar with the candidates tend to simply vote for the person at the top of the list, which kind of ruins the spirit of ranking candidates.
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The other dimension of categorizing PR systems is by average seats per district. PR countries run the gamut from one massive district encompassing the entire country, to hundreds of tiny districts with only one or two seats each. Here are examples from the high, middle, and low ends of the spectrum:
Moving along the scale, it's a simple tradeoff of accuracy versus accountability. The larger the districts and the more seats per district, the more the legislature looks like the national distribution of votes, but ballots become insanely complex (especially in big legislatures with lots of parties) and members are further removed from voters. The smaller the districts and the less seats per district, the more accountable members can be held to local constituents, but the less the legislature looks like the national distribution of votes. However, even the least accurate PR system is vastly more accurate than even the most accurate SMSP system.
Personally, I think the ideal division would be right in the middle: have each state be one district, for an average of 8.7 members per district (the actual numbers would be the same as they are now: 1 for Wyoming, 32 for Texas, 53 for California, etc.). This balance could also have a positive psychological effect on voters: you're never stuck with a representative you hate, because "your representative" is simply whichever representative from your state you happen to like the best. (Unless, of course, you're in a state with only one rep... not much we can do about that.)
How PR could save Congress
But okay, maybe you're not a huge electoral systems geek like I am. You're not interested in mechanisms and quotas and list types; you're a passionate progressive, and you're more interested in how exactly a PR system could fix what's wrong with Congress.
First we need to think about why Duverger's Law holds. It's pretty intuitive, when you think about it. No doubt there are a bunch of you reading this who would love to vote Green, but don't. Why not? Don't tell me, I already know: "The Green would never win. I'd be wasting my vote and splitting the left to the Republicans' advantage." This is an entirely valid concern, no matter what Nader-fans might tell you. In political scientistese, SMSP incentivizes tactical voting and lends itself to dealignment. Translated into English: you vote for the party that can win, not the party that best matches your ideology; this results in fewer, bigger parties with more voters who are less happy with their party identity. It's one thing when the Democratic Party is too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals in the electorate at large--but what happens when, as in the 111th Congress, the Democratic Party is too liberal for Blue Dog Democrats and too conservative for progressive Democrats? What happens is Democrats of all stripes stop going to the polls, and you get elections like 2010.
But what if you knew for a fact that the Green Party (or the Socialist Party, or the Silly Party, or whatever your inclination might be) could and would win seats? What if you didn't have to vote tactically, and could vote freely for whichever party best represented you? What shape might the House take over the next few electoral cycles? We can look to PR countries for an indication. Eduskunta, the Finnish parliament, is elected by open-list PR, and it looks like this:
What parties and ideologies those colors represent isn't important. What is important, and what cannot be overstated, is that people vote for parties when they think those parties can win. You don't get third or more parties in SMSP systems because small parties by definition don't win pluralities. But when parties need less votes to win, then more parties can and do win. That leads to a wider vote dispersion (i.e. less votes for bigger parties and more votes for smaller parties), which means more, better-represented parties in the legislature. Which means parties don't have to take the big tent approach, which means your party's ideology more closely aligns with your own... which means you're happier with your own party identity.
This is why Duverger's Law presents us with such an elegant solution to our two-party woes. If you want a multiparty system, you don't need to commit to the generations-long Sisyphean task of changing the way American voters think about parties and elections. You merely need to show them what they already want to see, and free them to do what they already want to do.
Another advantage of PR is that we'd never have to worry about redistricting or gerrymandering ever again. Gerrymandering is a problem intrinsic to SMSP, and in fact it's the second major reason (after the fact that small parties don't win pluralities) why representation in SMSP legislatures isn't proportional to begin with. Redistricting is a function of demographics--how many and what kind of people live where; you need to constantly ensure that each district is about the same size and about the same composition. With PR, demographics doesn't even present itself as a concern. You just declare each state a district, and you only need to worry about apportioning seats--which we already do after each decennial census anyway.
What parties would a PR Congress have?
I know you're wondering, so let's talk about it. There are a lot of different ways to break down the American electorate into ideological coalitions. I've been thinking for a long time about what a PR Congress might look like after a few electoral cycles, once people got used to having more than two parties. In my estimation the most likely composition, based on the current electorate, is as follows, from left to right:
- a Green Party: Greens, green-leaning progressive Democrats, and "Nader coalition" (green-leaning progressive independents)
- a Progressive Party: liberal Democrats and "Sanders coalition" (socialist and left-wing independents)
- a Moderate Party: Blue Dog Democrats, moderate Republicans, and "Lieberman coalition" (center-right independents)
- a Conservative Party: socially conservative Republicans/Tea Partiers
- a Libertarian Party: Libertarians and "Paul coalition" (libertarian-leaning Republicans/Tea Partiers and independents)
Of course all the names are just placeholders, and again, this just my best guess based on the composition of the current electorate. If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear them in the comments.
As for what happens to the current parties, that I can only guess at. It's possible that the Progressive Party is the core Democratic Party and the Conservative Party is the core Republican Party, with a modern-day Ross Perot or somebody like Thomas Friedman rising up to form the Moderate Party. It's also possible that the Democratic Party, creeping ever more to the right, is the Moderate Party, with the Progressive Party emerging as a breakaway alternative. I really don't know.
Under my model, yes, conservatives still would have won the 2010 election--because that's who went to the polls. But this isn't about rigging the system so that we always win--that kind of thinking leads inexorably to Tammany Hall, the Rove-DeLay gerrymanders, and Citizens United, and that kind of structural politicking is a big part of what broke Congress in the first place. We should seek instead to restructure the system so that we can provide a visible and viable left-wing alternative to the prevailing narrative, now coming to be accepted even by many in the Democratic Party, that debts and deficits are more important than unemployment and infrastructure, that raising revenues must be secondary to cutting spending, that clean energy and education are not worth public investment, that government is the problem.
What this is about, after all, is restructuring the system so that this country's party system accurately reflects the actual coalitions and cleavages within the electorate. Simply put, a two-party system in which both parties are saying close the same thing leaves huge swathes of the electorate out in the cold, forced to choose the lesser of two evils and not at all happy about it. People identify with parties that stand for what they stand for. PR can provide that.
How would anything get done with so many parties?
What--compared to how much gets done now?
Seriously, though, what happens is that parties of similar ideologies band together to form coalitions. In the model I present above, there would most likely be a coalition between the Progressives and the (initially, at least, much smaller) Greens, and perhaps between the Conservatives and Libertarians. The Moderates would either join one coalition or the other to form a majority coalition government, or would remain independent, holding the balance of power when Congress voted on a bill.
The advantage of having large coalitions over having large parties is that coalitions don't suffer from the same ideological drift as large parties. If the Democrats on Catfood Commission 2: Super Congress Boogaloo start talking about slashing Social Security, it's not like the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatening to leave the Democratic Party would have much of an effect. Coalitions are much less structured; the threat to disband is therefore much more credible, which leads the coalition as a whole to focus on principles and policies all its members can agree on. This greatly reduces the effects of partisanship; by that effect, then, a diverse multi-party system could actually work more effectively than the current two-party system.
PR and the future of Congress
Political scientist Marjorie Randon Hershey writes that democracy is unworkable without parties, and she's right. A party's most important role is to send signals to voters: even if you don't know either of the names on the ballot, it should be a safe bet that the Democrat is closer to where you stand than the Republican. But even in this, their most fundamental responsibility, our parties have failed us. When you check that box, you have no way of knowing whether the Democrat you're electing is going to be an Alan Grayson or a Max Baucus, just as your Republican neighbor in the next booth has no idea whether he's voting for an Olympia Snowe or a Sharron Angle. Signalling only works when the parties have coherent signals to send--and I don't know about you, but the signals I've been getting from the Democratic Party over the last two and a half years have been mixed at best.
The two-party system as it currently stands will not survive the 21st century. The people of my generation--those too young to remember the Clinton Administration with any real clarity, those who first became aware of politics in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the invasion of Iraq--tend more and more to find the two-party system antiquated and frustrating. I, for one, do not identify as a Democrat. I'm a democratic socialist in the vein of Bernie Sanders, and I like some individual Democrats--Nancy Pelosi, Alan Grayson, Henry Waxman, and Al Franken, off the top of my head--but I have no great love for the Democratic Party as a whole, which to me represents merely the lesser of two evils. I vote straight-ticket Democratic, but I feel no sense of pride or efficacy in doing so (I did once--for my first ballot in 2008, but I won't go into that). I can't vote for what I believe in; I can only vote against what I oppose.
And virtually everyone I know feels the same way. If you ask the more intellectual and politically attuned of my generation about our politics, we'll use words like "progressive," "environmentalist," "socialist," "libertarian," and occasionally even "conservative," but rarely to never will you hear us extolling the glory of either the Democratic or Republican Party (or if you do, it's because we see their policies and positions as means to ends, not ends in themselves). To us, they are the bulwarks of the obsolete politics of our parents' generation, incomprehensible institutions that consider controversial and contentious issues we consider settled questions--questions like gay marriage, the war on drugs, and campaign finance reform.
My generation is the future of American politics. We are disillusioned and alienated, and we are hungry for systemic change.
Where do we start?
Instituting PR just might be easier than you'd think. We would not need a Constitutional amendment, only an Act of Congress. The Constitution does not state that the House or Senate must be elected by SMSP. Really, the only reason we use SMSP is because at the time this country was founded, it was the system used in Britain (and still is--Britain is actually one of the notable exceptions to Duverger's Law, having a "two-and-a-half" party system).
The place to start would be at the state level. Popular referenda or acts of state legislatures could erase the district maps and adopt PR for the House delegation from individual states. Once enough states had adopted PR, an Act of Congress could convert the holdouts and institute nationwide PR.
This would be a long and arduous process, but it might not be the pipe dream it sounds like. Already we have examples of states taking it upon themselves to change how they handle federal elections. Since only 2000, eight states have passed bills that would give their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote for President. And instituting PR could be even easier than that: people may not care much for the Electoral College, but if polls are any indication, you would be seriously hard-pressed to find an American voter who thinks Congress is working fine and dandy.
So talk to your friends, family, neighbors, classmates, and coworkers (yes, even the conservatives). Write your governor and your state legislators (yes, even the Republicans). If we want to break the two-party duopoly, the first step is to educate people about what PR is and how it could save Congress. PR is not just good policy, it's good politics: I've been banging this drum for most of my college career, and virtually everyone I've talked to about it has gotten on board with the idea (once they could understand it, that is).
Congress cannot fix itself. If we don't act, if we don't fix our broken Congress, we're fast headed for a political calamity, a breakdown in public confidence in our government to which Watergate won't hold a candle. If it keeps on raining, the levee's going to break.
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Once again, I apologize that this diary was so long (I just reread Gravity's Rainbow, and I'm still kind of desensitized to great rambling passages full of technical blather), so thank you very much if you actually read the whole thing.
If you find you like the idea of proportional representation, you can check out Fair Vote for more information on how you can get involved. They support what they call Choice Voting, which is a form of single transferrable vote that uses the Hare Quota instead of the Droop Quota.