Is Proportional Representation On the Way?
If Congress wants to stave off such far-reaching demands, it should start behaving in ways that inspire more public confidence.
Would proportional representation be a better way of electing legislatures? This old idea, which dates back to John Stuart Mill and Nicolas de Condorcet, has been gaining ground among political scientists, commentators, and good-government groups. Protect Democracy and Unite America have released a report making the case for using proportional representation to elect the U.S. House of Representatives.
That would be new for the U.S., which almost uniformly follows the winner-take-all norm that still typifies electoral practice in countries like Great Britain, Canada, France, and India. Most European countries, as well as Japan, employ some version of proportional representation, often as part of "mixed" systems that retain some winner-take-all elements.
As someone who's been friendly toward electoral reform in general but skeptical about proportional representation, the report didn't fully counter all my misgivings. The biggest lesson was that proportional systems vary drastically in their mechanics, and these variations—on seemingly dull numerical details like size of districts and thresholds for representation—can make a big, systematic difference in outcomes such as stability and party structure. There are many varieties of proportional representation, but the idea behind them all is to elect members of a legislative body in some rough proportion to the different bodies of voter opinion. Proponents say that would better reflect overall public sentiment while enabling minority views to be heard, and might curb polarization by, for example, opening the way to cooperation between a center-left and a center-right grouping.
A representative assembly should arguably be representative—"in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large," in the words of John Adams. Yet as the report points out, winner-take-all leaves badly underrepresented the views of voter groups not strong enough to constitute a local majority. Republicans cast a third of the vote in Massachusetts but elect none of the state's congressional delegation, while the reverse is true for Democrats in Oklahoma. A passionate minority may win representation under winner-take-all when it is sectionally based, as with the Scottish National Party in Britain and Bloc Québécois in Canada, but will often be out of luck if spread more evenly around the country as a whole. In general, winner-take-all punishes smaller parties. Our very term for them, "third" parties, reflects our two-party norm.
Imbalances between votes cast and seats held under winner-take-all often manifest at the national aggregate level as well. In Canada's 2015 election, the Liberal Party won less than 40 percent of the popular vote, which nonetheless handed leader Justin Trudeau a large parliamentary majority. Under proportional representation, Trudeau would have had to negotiate with one or more other parties to form a coalition.
Some current American political ills may be traced in part to winner-take-all. The incentives for gerrymandering, for example, are at a peak under that rule; there's much less point to it under proportional representation since shifting around the other side's voters is less likely to keep them from electing someone.
Proportional representation tends to generate a multiparty system rather than a two-party one. There are some real pluses to this: A two-party system jams you into common barracks with a crowd of people you don't actually have much in common with, as opposed to letting you affiliate with a group more closely matching your own preferences. If you consider yourself a classical liberal, you may be aware that many parties with generally pro-market, socially liberal positions can be found in Europe, including the Free Democrats (Germany), VVD (the Netherlands), Centre and Liberals (Sweden), and Centre and Reform (Estonia). Especially across northern Europe, these parties are often part of governing coalitions and some are even the leading party. What's not to like about that?
At the same time, critics have long warned that multiparty coalition governments can be unstable and indecisive. It may take weeks or even months after an election to organize a government (to be fair, it also took quite a while this winter for Kevin McCarthy to nail down his job as House speaker). Governments can collapse if they lose the support of a junior partner, which can in turn put them at the mercy of small parties demanding unreasonable or unpopular concessions. Take Israel, a small country with dozens of parties. About 15 are currently represented in the Knesset, the national legislature; no party has enjoyed a majority there since the country's founding in 1948.
If you want a functional national legislature in the U.S., you are naturally going to worry about the risk of its being sidelined by coalition instability problems. You could argue that such problems have been present under our winner-take-all system for a while now, with no need for proportional representation to add to the fun. You might also point out that despite its reputation for chaotic legislative governance, Israel as a country has acted resolutely and on short notice in the clutch. Or you could argue that the whole problem is overrated: Given that legislatures almost everywhere tend to overspend, overposture, and overlegislate, might some friction, delay, and random motion be a good thing?
Whichever tack you take, any debate over national-level proportional representation must grapple with the lingering folk wisdom—fair or not, and up-to-date or not—that the U.S., Britain, and Canada have governments that act resolutely, while European Union governments dither, and that our strong two-party system is a big part of the reason.
One of the paper's most valuable features is its summary of political science literature on how the arithmetic of proportional representation systems—on size of assembly, size of district, and qualification threshold—helps determine the equilibrium number of parties. At one end of the continuum you have Israel, in which all members of the 120-seat Knesset are elected from a single nationwide electoral district, and low thresholds for qualifying for representation have encouraged tiny parties to proliferate. On the other hand, some countries draw modestly sized multimember districts—perhaps of two, three, or four seats—combined with rules that a party won't get represented unless it can surpass a certain threshold of the local vote. These details make the difference between a system with dozens of parties and a system that settles in at four or five.
A side note: Some of the decisiveness issues found at the national level may be less severe at the state level, which is a reason to hope for any American experiments with proportional representation to start in state legislative chambers. One of the classic insights about bicameralism is that it can help when the two rival chambers are somewhat different in manner of selection—in size of district or length of term, for example. This can be hard to pull off in the design of state legislatures, but having one chamber elected by proportional representation and the other by winner-take-all is the kind of idea that might be worth trying.
However, a national version of proportional representation presents another problem: potentially weakening local representation. At present, each member of the House of Representatives represents an average of 760,000 residents, well past the point at which personal contact with more than a small sampling of constituents becomes impossible. By its nature, proportional representation requires that single-member districts be replaced with multimember ones. If the districts average three representatives each, and the House remains at 438 members, that would leave each House member representing 2.3 million people.
One option would be to expand the size of the House, an idea drawing a lot of interest lately. (The number once grew with the nation's population, but has been frozen since 1913 at 435.) If you tripled the body's size to 1,305 members, you could set up (on average) three-member districts each the size of a current district. But there are obviously many other considerations to weigh both for and against the idea of expanding the House, and that debate is not one to resolve here.
Proportional representation advocates might respond that even if districts do get more populous, more voters in practice will feel that they've got a representative who's "theirs," as all those Massachusetts Republicans and Oklahoma Democrats finally get their day in the sun. The question still remains of whether voters would prefer someone more truly local to their community versus someone who thinks more as they do.
Related to this is a potential attraction of proportional representation in bringing more functionality, as well as representativeness, to the legislative body. From 1870 to 1980, Illinois used a system called cumulative voting, which has some proportional features, to elect the lower house of its legislature. The body tended to include a couple of Republicans from Chicago along with some Democrats elected from rural areas. Aside from helping make their party caucuses more rounded, these members apparently added real value as a source of wisdom in committee work, since there might otherwise be a shortage of Republicans who understood transit operations or Democrats with a close feel for small-town needs.
With all that said: Is proportional representation constitutional?
If a given state wants to adopt proportional representation for its House races, there is no constitutional impediment to that. There is, however, an impediment in federal law, because Congress has a statute requiring the use of single-member districts. For House proportionality to get off the ground, Congress would have to revisit this ban. To complicate matters, multimember districting in combination with winner-take-all has often been considered suspect under the Voting Rights Act, making it unlikely that Congress will simply lift the restriction without attempting some more complicated form of regulation.
Merits aside, instituting House proportional representation in a given state is likely to run against the political interests of the dominant party there. Why, Massachusetts Democrats might say, should we hand over three of our nine seats to Republicans when there's no guarantee states like Oklahoma will follow our lead?
Perhaps in recognition of this likely impasse, the paper proposes a prescriptive approach in which new legislation would require, not merely invite, states to adopt some sort of proportional representation. (It does propose giving them some leeway as to how.) The Constitution is distinctive in how it handles the administration of congressional elections: Article I, Section 4 recognizes states' first-line responsibility in that task but then grants Congress a backup power to prescribe the manner of its elections by law. In practice, that power to override state choices in favor of uniform federal rules has been used sparingly, in line with Hamilton's comments in Federalist No. 59 about how the document reserves to the national legislature "a right to interpose [in the administration of its own elections] whenever extraordinary circumstances might render that interposition necessary to its safety."
Have such extraordinary circumstances now reached the point where a change of system is necessary to the safety of the institution? I suppose the answer depends in part on the extent to which you regard Congress as a broken and dysfunctional institution. As of September, per Gallup, only 23 percent of the public approved of Congress' performance, while 75 percent disapproved.
If congressional leaders want to stave off public demand for far-reaching reforms like proportional representation, they ought to start behaving in a way that better inspires public confidence.
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Yes, let’s change everything, everywhere, all at once.
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No, let’s implement at-large, ranked choice voting for each state legislature state by state and statewide, at-large ranked-choice balloting for Congress state by state.
Better idea..just go back to the Articles of Confederation.
Because it was working so well.
Or continue doing the same dumb fucking thing time and again.
I know which way I lean.
The sky is falling. The sky is falling! Right now – gotta do it right now. Don’t just stand there – do something, anything.
Empires often enact a lot of useless reforms before they fall.
Toynbee: “An autopsy of history will show that all great nations commit suicide.”
Every HS student council rewrites its constitution every other year. The year before they head off to Model UN and change the UN Charter.
I’ve always favored a Thunderdome method of selecting representatives. Except the door doesn’t unlock at the end. “Two men enter, no man leaves.”
So more like a roach motel, then.
Will they scatter when the light comes on?
I have access to a Thunderdome we can use for this purpose.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry over this. After spending ninety percent of his verbiage giving all the great reasons to strongly support PR, Olson then gives a brief, vague, untrue list of concerns. For one thing, PR does NOT require replacing single member districts with multi-member districts. And for another, many of us want a LESS decisive, LESS functional legislature at the state and Federal levels. The solution is to make all Federal Congressional elections “at-large” with all candidates listed on the ballot together, and ranked-choice voting resulting in a close approximation of ideological proportions of the voters, and one hundred percent of the constituents knowing who their Representative in Congress is. The goal is to PREVENT the majority of the moment from dominating Congress and rolling over all opposition by requiring coalitions if only for each bill as it comes up for a vote.
re: “For one thing, PR does NOT require replacing single member districts with multi-member districts.”
Please explain. How do you award “proportional” representatives without the possibility of multiple representatives per voting jurisdiction?
The candidates for Congress would all be listed at large for the entire state ballot. Each voter would cast ranked-choice votes (by party if so desired) and the allotted number of representatives for that state would be assigned to “Congressional Districts” randomly. That way you could have 5 Democrats, 4 Republicans, 1 Socialist, 2 Libertarians and 1 Non-Partisan from that state (13 total) representing the state in DC (instead of 7 Dems and 6 Repubs) with no possibility of gerrymandering and almost every voter having a specific representative more closely aligned with their particular political views specifically assigned to them as their representative in Congress.
Under your proposed system, single member districts ARE replaced by a single multi-member district, Not ADMITTING that voids your entire excuse for an argument.
When you START by violating the very meaning of the terms you claim to be arguing, you CANNOT present a rational argument.
And your point is? We would NOT be replacing any single member district with multi-member districts. We would continue to have single member districts, just changing how each member is selected for each district with the same number of members. What is your objection to that, other than your imaginary issue with my argument excuses?
Here’s a better idea. End political parties. Make politicians answerable to their constituents and not party bosses.
Simply removing the party affiliation next to the name on ballots would force people to at least know the candidates name.
For a number of years I’ve wanted votes to be hand written, so as to force the voter to actually know who they’re voting for.
Same. Write in ballots only.
I have worked at the polls since 2000. I have actually had the following conversation at the polls:
Voter: How do I vote for the (insert party here) for President?
Me: To voter for (insert candidate’s name here), press here. To vote for (insert opposing candidate here), press here.
Voter: How do I vote for the (insert party here) for President.
I had to bit my tongue not to say “If you can’t recognize the candidate’s name when you hear it, you shouldn’t be voting.”
Glad you bit your tongue. One important thing about voting being a right and not a privilege -> No one involved in running the elections gets to say anything about how you make your choices. If you want to pick the guy with the best hair, the guy that wears blue ties, the woman that played soccer in college, or the candidate that tells you he will put a chicken in every pot, no one working at the polls should be telling you that it is wrong to base your vote on any of those things.
Political parties come about because everyone understands (whether through rational analysis or gut instinct) that being part of a voting bloc makes it more likely that candidates will try and please you. Candidates will dig into polling data to try and predict what will please the few truly independent voters, but since they don’t engage in politics in groups, they will be less likely to consistently support that candidate in the future than someone that chooses the candidate for partisan or ideological reasons. And they will certainly be highly unlikely to donate or volunteer to assist the candidate.
That is why swing voters get a few lines in speeches and debates thrown their way, some softening of the rhetoric in the candidate’s positions aimed at pleasing the base, and some ads targeting them. But they don’t get much of anything in the way of policy that they want unless a significant voting bloc also wants it.
Add to this the phenomenon of negative partisanship, and the incentive to dig into the issues and candidates on a personal level is low.
The fact of the matter is that a large fraction of all voters, perhaps even most of them, will vote a straight ticket for every race. The names of candidates are virtually irrelevant to them.
I disagree that that is why political parties come about. And, in fact, if you believe that members of a voting bloc will try to please you, then you’re sadly mistaken as that has not been the result of the rise of political parties or the two-party system. Political parties come about because voters are more likely to win elections if they ignore their differences and tacitly agree to vote for the same candidate based on their most important commonalities. Then it becomes more about winning elections that it does about achieving the policy goals they started out with.
IIRC the Congress was originally intended to function without political parties, but it seems that the formation of parties is largely unavoidable – and preventing them may violate freedom of association.
I note that “nothing” stops independents from standing – aside from obstacles erected by one or other of the major parties – but voters don’t generally like to vote for independents, so you may have to consider the issue from the bottom up, not just top down.
Agreed, but that doesn’t automatically also result in a “two-party system” which was implemented gradually by a number of overt and covert steps over the decades. We can have freedom of association and political parties and still have proportional representation in the state legislatures and Congress.
Massachusetts is a good example, since the MA Republican party has imploded, gone bankrupt, sued itself, and damn near lit itself on fire; if there were a third (or, really, a second) party, things would be much more stable and reasonable and we would not need the current MA GOP’s assortment of wingnuts, dead-enders, and dingbats to have any political competition.
Agree with ^^ MA has elected several moderate Republican governors. There are plenty of votes out there for non-wingnut Republican politicians. Lots of independents would vote for non-wingnut Republicans. The party is too dysfunctional to let moderates run.
Complain all you want about “wing nuts” etc., but until the “non-wing nuts” get over their distaste for voting in party primaries, well, the “wingnuts” will keep nominating the candidates. If you don’t want to dirty your lily white hands with the process of party politics, well, you really aren’t entitled to bitch about the results.
Don’t blame me! I voted for Kodos!
Or, and here me out, moderates in both parties should try to hew to what the voters want and not be RINO’s or DINO’s.
>> a change of system is necessary to the safety of the institution?
system fine. operators require wholesale replacement and indeterminate confinement
I believe the system in question is the one that chooses the operators. Not fine.
I mean, repeal 16 17 and 19 and end the vote fraud, but the skeleton is fine
Proportional representation ultimately gives the choice to which individual “represents” to the Party leadership, not to the voters.
If your political party is going to be part of a ruling coalition, you are going to have to associate with people who do not agree with you on all things. Whether these people are in your party, or they are in an allied party. That is an inescapable truth of democratic politics.
There is also the problem that the US is not a parliamentary system, proportional representation does not fit well on our political structure of a federal repubic.
That’s one of several erroneous assumptions made by the writer here. There is no need for a ruling coalition in Congress or the state legislatures. Congress does not have to “form a government” as Parliaments in other countries do. For example, a Libertarian caucus in Congress could threaten to vote against socialist AND neonazi legislation whoever proposes it, and also vote against the budget and spending proposals unless they avoid deficit spending or unconstitutional power grabs. This would be a virtual issue-related coalition on each piece of legislation, siding with, for example, the Democrats against the Republicans on one issue, and siding with the Republicans against the Democrats on other issues.
If we were still at the Schoolhouse Rock level of legislative process (I still love “I’m just a Bill”), you’d be absolutely correct. I’ll go further and say that legislators should vote their consciences regardless of party.
But that only addresses the final step of the process. How does your multiparty non-coalition system assign things like committee chairs and memberships? How does it assign responsibility to theoretically “balanced” institutions like the NLRB?
The same way they would negotiate bills to form a “coalition” on a particular issue. Right now appointments to committees has to be ratified by the Committee of the Whole. How would that change? If they couldn’t get a majority to approve the committee appointments they would have to negotiate with the various caucuses until they can.
So they don’t have to form a coalition government to pass a particular bill but they do have to form a coalition pseudo-government to create the committees that do all the work of getting those bills onto the table. I’m not seeing a meaningful distinction anymore.
Well, right now the majority party does whatever they want to, with only the consent of their own party members to contend with and lots of sticks and carrots to keep their own party members in line with upper management. If you introduce more caucuses with no single party in a majority most of the time, the caucuses will have to negotiate a lot more issues (including committee assignments) in order to get things done, and the range of things they can get done will be a lot narrower.
They aren’t going to do this because they already changed it and it’s still working out for them. They expanded their fiefdoms, and that’s just how they like it.
Reapportionment Act of 1929
Yes, it WILL happen whether “they” do it or not. Proportional Representation will start at the state legislature level in more and more states and will be forced by initiative and referendum if nothing else. Then the States, which have the authority under the Constitution to decide how to elect representatives to Congress will implement that level, too.
No doubt it will be complicated (similar to ending the war on drugs state by state?) but at least one state (Alaska) has already changed the “manner” of electing their Congressman and Congress has not yet “altered” that. As more and more representatives to Congress are elected to their positions by PR it may become harder and harder to convince Congress to try to regulate it.
Alaska’s example was a shitshow done to benefit one person precisely. Cannot imagine other states wanting to take a month to determine election winners.
“At the same time, critics have long warned that multiparty coalition governments can be unstable and indecisive. It may take weeks or even months after an election to organize a government (to be fair, it also took ‘quite a while’ this winter for Kevin McCarthy to nail down his job as House speaker).
“Quite a while.” I believe it was about 15 days. Yeah, that’s some comparison to “weeks and even months.” WTF?
And it required him working with multiple coalitions to get the vote.
Any member can call for a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair – this is significant because it would make it much easier than it is currently to trigger what is effectively a no confidence vote in the speaker.
A McCarthy-aligned super PAC agreed to not play in open Republican primaries in safe seats
The House will hold votes on key conservative bills, including a balanced budget amendment, congressional term limits and border security
Efforts to raise the nation’s debt ceiling must be paired with spending cuts [This could become a major issue in the future when it is time to raise the debt limit to avoid a catastrophic default because Democrats in the Senate and the White House would likely oppose demands for spending cuts]
Move 12 appropriations bills individually. Instead of passing separate bills to fund government operations, Congress frequently passes a massive year-end spending package known as an “omnibus” that rolls everything into one bill.
More Freedom Caucus representation on committees, including the powerful House Rules Committee
Cap discretionary spending at fiscal 2022 levels, which would amount to lower levels for defense and domestic programs
Seventy-two hours to review bills before they come to floor
Give members the ability to offer more amendments on the House floor
Create an investigative committee to probe the “weaponization” of the federal government
Restore the Holman rule, which can be used to reduce the salary of government officials
Founders made a huge mistake by allowing Congress to cap it’s membership and creating a Supreme Court that could declare itself a dictatorship empowered to write (or rewrite) and impose legislation not supported by the Constitution of limited powers,on all of us faster than you can say ‘open borders’. If we went proportional, look for Reason to support the illegals (and the rest of the world) having a ‘seat at the table’.
Taxes are theft – except for public charge immigration.
Rationing is socialism – except for rationing to allow more public charge immigration.
Repeat over and over as in Orwells Double Think
I would prefer a random-draw legislature (“sorry pal, you’re it this session”), coupled with a pay dock for every official action taken while in office over PR.
Maybe make the election a choice between retention of the current office holder and an unknown replacement.
I would also love to see “none of the above” on the ballot and if that’s the winning choice (even if not majority) it permanently disqualifies all other listed candidates.
Repeal the 17A.
“Most European countries . . . ”
The conclusive argument against!
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You can say that again. Even more so historically: the Weimar multi party system was what allowed Hitler to come to power.
Using proportional representation to affect political opinions and polarization is like slicing a pumpkin pie differently in the hopes it will become strawberry rhubarb.
People don’t hold convictions and beliefs because of how you perceive them.
I don’t know who suggested that, but it could not be “intended” to affect political opinions. But it could affect polarization if the impetus for polarization was the perception that you had no effective representation in the seats of power. There is significant evidence that Trump’s success was because of rust-belt workers losing their representation by both the Democratic Party and the Republican. If they could have directly elected representatives to the state legislatures and Congress who represented their actual ideology, they might have been more considerate.
What does it actually mean to reduce polarization? It means people agree. When two choices are so far apart from one another, it isn’t just a feeling of polarization. This is definitional polarization. We are opposite. We think people are divided and couldn’t disagree more on major issues. That perception is correct. The divide is not due to who has representation.
The animosity we’re seeing today stems from the fact that we’re all talking to brick walls and can’t bridge the divide.
I disagree. We evolved from “agreeing to disagree” at a time when one party wasn’t trying to impose their social engineering experiment on everyone quite so blatantly and stuck to incremental socialist program implementation a little bit at a time. The other party came late to the realization that half of their agenda had become seduced by spending and power struggles and that they no longer represented their own constituent base. It degenerated into a mock battle to see which party could occupy the majority position for two or four years instead of achieving policy goals. Polarization occurs because one side consistently succeeded in ramming their agenda down the throats of people who no longer “agreed to disagree” and started reacting.
Proportional representation will lead to more polarization.
In particular, the next three parties to enter congress would be communists, greens, and right wing totalitarian nationalist, in addition to Dems and Reps. One of those fringe parties will provide the swing votes in a coalition and get disproportional power.
How that is in any way good, I don’t see.
I disagree with your unsupported assertion. The libertarian caucus is much larger than the communists, greens and right-wing nationalist caucuses. Libertarians consistently get from three to five percent of the votes in three-way elections even when the outcome is stacked against them, and would likely get ten percent of the representatives in a state-wide at-large ranked-choice election. That would end up with 44% D, 35% R, 10% L and 11% other. Or switch the D and R totals in currently red states.
…
Two big problems with proportional representation.
First, our districts represent to many people. It’s one thing if a congressman represents 30,000 people, but today congressmen represents an average of 700,000 people. Any sort of proportionality is drowned out by the huge districts.
Second, is that proportional representation is based on parties. So it makes no difference in the US where there are only ever two parties. Besides, the core problem is partially because people are voting for team colors and not for the candidates. Parties are bad. I want good candidates. So if I see a good candidate but they are in wrong party, a vote for them is a vote for bad people elsewhere. My vote for local representative should not count towards the selection of a Prime Minister. Let parties exist and put forth nominees, but let’s continue voting for actual candidates.
So I would rather see… wait for it… some form of ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting.
There have NEVER been only 2 parties in the US. The communist income tax came from barely over 2% earned by communist parties under sockpuppet aliases. Deadly economy-wrecking prohibitionism came from mystical fanatics getting 1.4% of the vote over the course of 11 election campaigns. Now that Libertarians have ALL the spoiler votes, OF COURSE the commies and christianofascists will screech We Wuz Robbed with every violent law we repeal. Their screeches and sobs are sweet music!
Yeah, any “solution” which involves voting for parties instead of people gets a no from me.
Allowing “parties” to be ideologically purer doesn’t have much actual effect on governance. Whether you’re pushed into a coalition with “a crowd of people you don’t actually have much in common with” before or after an election doesn’t change that governance will be by such a coalition. But at least in the American system, voters get to choose which coalition to support before voting, rather than it being a surprise.
It does not require any such thing. Eash state has the authority under the Constitution to decide how to choose representatives to Congress. Also, I question the assertion that Congressional leaders might want to stave off anything because they do not fear it.
How would single district states like Wyoming and Alaska handle proportional votes? How about Montana, Idaho etc who only have two districts? Or is it a national election, which totally destroys the idea of local representation? How does it work for the Senate, where every state has only two senators, who aren’t elected at the same time? There is no way to make it work within the constraints of the Constitution. Also, why should I have to vote proportionally at the state level? I vote for the candidate who best represents the needs of Northeast Montana, I don’t care what the people in Butte or Bozeman vote for, because I’m voting for local matters, and the needs of Bozeman are far different than the needs of Froid. Our system is set up to represent the local needs, not a federal need. The problem is people have forgotten this. Also, this sounds a lot like those who cry about the electoral college and push popular vote tallies. As for gerrymandering, this would be less of a problem if Congress didn’t cap membership in 1929 when our population was a third of what it is today.
I’m not convinced that having 4 digit membership in the House would be a good thing. It’s already too big. Instead of your congressman negotiating to be the 218th vote for something to pass, they’d be negotiating to be the 653rd vote. If they could even get the ear of the party leader at all. I mean, listening to 653 members of a party for just one minute each would take about 11 hours.
Of course, many of these problems would be reduced if the federal government wasn’t doing a bunch of things that are the responsibility of the states.
Wrong. States have that authority only with Senators. The states do NOT have that level of control on how Representatives are elected.
Proportional allocation of Presidential electors would be completely doable without any Constitutional issues at all.
Article II, Section 1
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…
A state legislature could direct that the state’s electors are appointed by the Governor. Or elected by the Legislature. Or by popular vote of the people in a winner-take-all election. Or by proportional election by the people. Or by popular election by the people per allocated Congressional district and two additional statewide electors be overall popular result.
Changing how the House and Senate get elected would be more problematic, like you say.
Coming from a country that implemented Proportional Representation back in the 1990’s I can assure you that it does nothing to increase the reputation of parliament – if anything it has further reduced it as the parties took the opportunity to make their least liked members the ones who were safest from being turfed out.
What does Switzerland do? Australia and Brazil force people at gunpoint to subsidize looter parties, then force them to VOTE for the monsters thus stitched together. All of this began in January 1973 when there was no way of memory-holing the spoiler vote gotten by the pro-choice and pro-freedom Libertarian candidates.
NZ doesn’t have compulsory voting, but there has been plenty of chatter from the political classes about introducing it in an attempt to claim legitimacy. Not voting is just as much a choice and a statement as voting.
What makes you think that improving the reputation of your parliament should be the goal? Most countries with parliamentary systems start with the assumption that each citizen is a subject of the government. The goal of most political activists is to get the parliament to implement their political agenda. If proportional representation results in foiling the aspirations of political activists, that would seem to be a good thing to me. If you can’t get a consensus on your proposals, ways and means and goals, then go back to the negotiating table until you can. Meanwhile in America where a majority of citizens still believes that WE constituted government for a specific and limited purpose and that the government is the tool of the people, not their rulers, our goal is to seize back the stolen power from the officials.
Reason, the House is proportional representation. Each state is represented on the population in the state, divided into districts. The number of Reps is changed on the census. This gives larger states more power. Then in the Senate all States are proportional at two Senators a state. This gives smaller states a safeguard against larger states power.
Any reforms will be used by the left as an attempt to gain total control. We all see it, we all know it, only few are brave enough to admit it, and it will be the end of this country as a representative Republic, and LIMITED democracy. One party rule, often called dictatorship is in our future.
It is not ANY kind of proportional representation currently. The Democrats in Congress represent 33% of the voters; the Republicans in Congress represent 25% of the voters; leaving 42% of the voters without Representatives in Congress. “The left” has already used the two-party system to implement their entire socialist program, imposed on the whole nation one step at a time over many decades. They seem to have been struggling lately to come up with some new “progressive” program to implement and have resorted to provoking reactionary backlash to outlandish, even bizarre, social narratives instead. A proportional representation reform at this point could not end up being worse than the current situation and might do a lot of good at moderating polarization and regaining civil politics again.
JFC, you’re high as shit or dumb as shit. Take your pick.
Locking the numbers in 1929 with the House Apportionment Act capped representation and has done nothing but give outsized influence to tiny ass states.
Do you just hate the fact the “left” is the majority? I mean, I say that ironically because there is no “left” but the right, as you know it, is certainly in the minority.
Proportional Representation? Sure! It’s time the US takes up the practice of the myriad counties we give $Billions in aid to anually…
So called proportional representation GUARANTEES that NO ONE is actually represented.
That’s the WHOLE POINT. It keeps looters and suckers right where they are, only with zero hope of repealing bad laws.
“start behaving in a way that better inspires public confidence.”
LOL, when do you suppose that will happen? That would require honesty instead of platitudes. Honesty is something that congress-critters don’t have and when they do it falls far beyond the pale of authoritarianism which only plays to a subset of voters. Most of whom actively participate in primaries to get their ways. Castigators like AOC are a clear example.
“opening the way to cooperation between a center-left and a center-right grouping.” identified the Cato calamitite as another looter altruist threatened by the way Libertarian spoiler votes have been repealing the evils wrought by obsessed looter parties from 1848 through 1971. Every time a looter is beaten be a better choice thanks to libertarian candidates letting voters go on record as not fooled by either thug, another hand-wringing article is pinched off suggesting subsidies and coercion to replace LP spoiler votes.
Sortition is still far better.
It reduces the impact of party because it eliminates the role of party in elections. PR turns party into God because elections are all about who is what rank on the party list.
Sortition is so representative it scares the duck out of people. More construction workers and teachers than lawyers? Independents and nonvoters getting into Congress? I don’t think so.
It eliminates gerrymandering outcomes even if districts are completely gerrymandered.
It creates civility because critters don’t walk around with party tattooed on their forehead to signal who is friend v foe
There is a reasonable compromise.
Have every 100 people nominate a candidate and then choose 435 randomly from those 3300000. The nominations don’t even have to be by district, just any 100 or more people by state, all write in.
That way, you avoid the problem of having people who are completely incapable of serving, while still being far more representative and destroying politics as a career.
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Remember the USA *was* a CONSTITUTIONAL Republic.
Unlimited congressional democracy is what is FAILING.
Proportional representation doesn’t STOP a totalitarian government.
STOP ignoring what the USA is and maybe it can be saved.
Insist the government OBEY the people’s law over their government.
The consequence of proportional representation by party is that you will get a communist party, a socialist leaning Green Party, and a totalitarian right wing party into Congress, in addition to the Democrats and Republicans. Decisions will be made by coalitions, with tiny, extremist parties holding disproportional power. There will be no independents, and party machines determine all candidates.
Sooner or later that will go off the rails and the nation will become communist or fascist, like parliamentary systems usually do.
Why that is good, I don’t know. More representation of minority views in Congress accomplishes nothing since Congress still has to finally reach one decision on everything. But what it will do is take the decision making process out of the hands of voters and place it into the hands of smoky back room dealers.
For what it’s worth, my crackpot proposal is described here: https://punsalad.com/cgi-bin/ps?spec=2022/05/11/1652297303
The key idea: “Any candidate for the US House of Representatives who receives greater than 1% of the popular vote in the general election shall be entitled to a vote in the House equal to the fraction of the vote he or she receives.”
So (for example) if the Republican in AOC’s district (NY-14) got 26.8% of the vote (as she did), she (Tina Forte) goes to DC to cast 0.268 of a vote.
Advantage: “true” proportional representation. Gerrymandering a non-issue. More details at the link. (Warning: I’m a crackpot.)
Winner-take-all in a House District race or even a Senate seat seems quite reasonable. Winner-take-all in the ballot for Presidential electors for a state like California or Florida seems undemocratic.
The people clamoring for electing the President via popular vote, and especially those states that join the popular vote compact always complain about representation and democracy. But not a single one of those states ever even consider changing their OWN winner0take-all rules to proportional representation.
If California allocated its electors proportionally, Trump would have gotten 18 electors and Biden 37. Instead Biden took all 55.
If California allocated its electors by congressional district, then given the +2 electors (Senate) to the winner, Trump would have had 10 electors and Biden 45 (43 districts + 2 statewide). Instead Biden took all 55.
So, by joining this compact, states are saying that not only do they feel that proportional representation of their citizens votes are not important–winner-take-all still rules the day–the results of their statewide elections can be tossed out completely in favor of what people in other states do. Imagine for one minute that the Compact was in force, and that Trump had actually won the popular vote. The Compact would have California subordinate their statewide elections that (presumably) still would have gone widely in Biden’s favor and hand their 55 electoral votes over to Trump? I doubt it. The Compact is meant to only work in one direction.
Of course it’s only meant to work in one direction- it’s meant to work for the popular vote winner which except for what, 1 time in 5, has been the Democrats.
It’s absolutely absurd that small states not only get outsized influence in the Senate and House but all that plus swaying presidential elections. Uncap the house, popular vote for the president. It’s about time the majority finally starts being represented.
So NYC can rule the entire nation?
How about votes that actually represent USA ownership (acres)….
Yeah; That’s what I thought. Oh whoops; better hide tail and run.
The USA wasn’t founded on [WE] mob RULES (democracy) d*psh*t.
And there is a very good reason for that; so F’tard Power-mad freaks with absolutely no foundation outside of building urban gangs can destroy everything with their Gov-Gun toting criminal mentality.
How is NYC going to rule the nation with 6% of the population? (NYC metro area population is ~20 million, US population is 339 million at current estimates.) Houston and Dallas/Ft. Worth together come close to NYC’s metro area population. Does that balance it out for you?
I think the real issue you might have is with the 80-20 split in urban vs. rural population of the country and that urban populations have more Democrats than Republicans.
No; My real issue is Nazi-fanboys who pretend their [WE] gang of urban gangsters are limitless criminals can take-over and do anything they want to the rest of the nation and blow-air about how that’s the only ‘fair’ way to govern.
Democrats by their very name “democracy” is treasonous to the USA. They are founded on a political ideology that the USA is NOT. The USA is a *CONSTITUTIONAL* Republic.
How about votes that actually represent USA ownership (acres)….
Sounds like you want to go back to voting rights being based on land ownership. Why not just go all the way back to landed aristocracy while you’re at it?
Land does not have rights, people do. That is why people vote. One person one vote comes from the idea enshrined in the Constitution that everyone is entitled to the equal protection of the law. People that own more land getting more of a say in government? That pretty much destroys the idea of equal rights.
Oh booo hoooo…. Votes cannot possibly represent land-mass in the USA… Oh no! /s
Just as I thought; Stupid hypocritical bigots pretending ‘fair’ can only be accomplished by giving urban gangsters all the voting power.
You seem to think it’s urban voters right to OWN everything in the USA just because they can build a bigger [WE] mob. That is the very problem with every leftard Nazi-fan. Your rights are ***INDIVIDUAL*** by LIMITING government powers. Not by [WE] mob gangster voting. How the F does that ensure anyone any rights or justice?
“If you want a functional national legislature in the U.S., you are naturally going to worry about the risk of its being sidelined by coalition instability problems. ”
Excuse me- do we have a functional national legislature now? The one that continually fights and heckles over a budget every single year? A coalition might look like the most stable thing compared to what we have now.
Correction; The one that continually fights and heckles over a **UN-Constitutional** budget every single year? Your skipping every part of how it got that way.
Sorry, but there will be no proportional representation in the MAGA States of America. There will be no Reason.com, and its former writers and readers will be properly reeducated in the camps along with all registered Democrats, ungodly persons claiming to be “trans,” and other dangerous deviants.
Democrats are the one’s pushing re-education standards and are the big fans of Commie-education.
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