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THE CORE
Fruits & Votes is the Web-log of Matthew S. Shugart ("MSS"), Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
Perspectives on electoral systems, constitutional design, and policy around the world, based primarily on my research interests. Also experiences with growing many varieties of fruit (always organic) and other personal interests. Please see the Mission Statement for more. (There is also an explanation of the banner.) Other "planters" have been invited to contribute. Please check the "Planted by" line to see the author of the post you are reading.
Join the conversation. Comments are always open. Except, that is, when Word Press mysteriously shuts them down, which happens with distressing frequency. Core principles: Henry Droop on the "moderate non-partisan section" Madison on "dangers from abroad" and "the fetters... on liberty" The Head Orchardist's other sites: PRESERVED FRUIT Dikes and Votes: Consensus government and flood control The 2008 candidates on political reform More fundamental than the climate The radical middle in US democracy Canada's dysfunctional electoral system The Hamas sweep: The electoral system did it
orchard blocks
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05 November 2009
As Steven notes in a post putting New York’s special House election in perspective, the authoritarian absolutists (or “movement conservatives,” as Steven calls them) ought to be pushing for proportional representation. Also recommended for perspective on the unusual contest is Hans Noel, writing at The Monkey Cage. (Also various other posts at that blog in recent days.) Propagation: Seeds & scions (18) 30 April 2009
US political blogger Matthew Yglesias has suggested single transferable vote as ” one solution to polarization” in the US Congress. I would note that his specific suggestion that New York City could form a single 13-seat district might not be the best way to sell STV. But perhaps one should not quibble with such details, important though they are, at this point. I did not look at many of the comments (55 at last check), but I did notice that the first comment advocates expanding the size of the House (as an alternative, but why pick just one of these?), and another makes the all-too-common mistake of conflating the increased district magnitude of PR with “at large” plurality (with reference to such a provision in the Puerto Rican legislature). And at least one of the comments mentions the looming referendum on STV in British Columbia. Propagation: Seeds & scions (7) 20 December 2007
I received this appeal from John Anderson today. I make such a contribution every year, and I hope some of my pro-reform American readers will consider doing the same:
John Anderson was the first presidential candidate whose campaign I ever worked for, and also the first I voted for. In fact, I was the Garden Grove Area Petition Coordinator, helping him get on the ballot in California in 1980. I wish I had a photo of the old red Cougar I was driving back then and dubbed The Andersonmobile for the multiple (and also red) Anderson stickers affixed to it. I even briefly participated in a movement to draft him as the Reform Party nominee in 2000, but it was clear that Anderson was not interested and the Reform Party wasn’t worthy of either word in its name.1 I had the pleasure of meeting him for coffee about six years ago (when he was in San Diego with the World Federalist Movement). That makes him one of three presidential candidates I ever have had the opportunity to meet personally (the others being Ralph Nader and Bill Richardson). Anderson’s commitment to reform impressed me in 1980–when I supported him as much for his energy-saving gas-tax increase as for anything else. He still impresses me today, especially for his role with Fairvote.
Propagation: Seeds & scions (7) 12 June 2007
Following up on a couple of interesting posts at the ever-interesting PoliBlog… Steven refers to a piece by Mark Tapscott, who suggests that it is time for a new party, on account of what is being reported as the “10-year low popularity of the US Congress,”* just months after Democrats took control of the institution.
As Steven notes, the single-seat districts (SSDs) under first-past-the-post (FPTP) by which the US congress is elected makes the emergence of new parties difficult. He mentions both the interparty dimension (the high barrier to entry for a new party created by the need to win a substantial share of the vote in order to gain any significant representation) and the intraparty dimension (the ability of individual legislators to cater to their districts with pork and services distinct from the national party identity). Really, two-partism is over-determined in the US. It’s not just FPTP. After all, most FPTP systems, such as the UK and Canada, have far more important parties other than the top two. It’s also presidentialism, yet most presidential systems, too, have more than two major parties. Also the use of primary elections and the electoral college–both of which are unique to the USA and either raise the barriers to new parties (the interparty dimension) or increase the opportunities for local tailoring of legislative campaigns (the intraparty dimension). My response to such arguments about the unlikelihood of new parties absent institutional reform is always as follows: I can’t name one case in which major change away from single-seat districts to a more representative and democratic electoral system ever occurred without the rise of new parties first. So, my advice to people who feel it is time for a new party is simple: Find one and participate in and vote for it. Since 1990, third-party voting in congress is at the highest it’s been in the post-WWII era (see graphs). Make it higher. On the Tweedle-dee/-dum question, Steven notes that it sounds a bit old-fashioned nowadays:
That certainly is fundamentally right. The centers of gravity of the two parties are further apart than ever, due to greater internal discipline and homogeneity In turn that’s a result of increasing geographic segregation of the parties’ electorates and the impact that has in a single-seat district system. But I doubt the full range of represented views is any greater than in the past. In fact, we would not expect it to be if the major change in the party system is simply the movement of one block of interests (“southern conservatives”) from one party to the other. Even more to the point, I suspect that that actual range of views represented in the US Congress it is actually narrower–largely as a result of the ever-increasing need for corporate money–once you discount the few who speak up for relatively radical viewpoints from the safety of their own uncompetitive districts (Tancredo, Kucinich, etc.). On the general subject of congressional approval (the subject of the other PoliBlog post I alluded to), it seems to me that these numbers need to be situated in the context of a major change that has taken place in the last decade (-plus). Before Newt Gingrich became the closest thing the USA has ever seen (by far!) to a “co-habiting” prime minister, the Speakership and the Congress-as-an-institution that the Speaker heads never had a position within our political system of significant national and partisan profile. I continue to ask myself: how long can we sustain this new combination of increasingly partisan, nationalized congressional elections with a constitutional structure designed for non-responsiveness to the democratic (small-d) will and more suited for nonpartisan, localized congressional elections? And, yes, to articulate demands that are currently either not represented at the national level or are bargained away at the elite level, generating frustration and low public approval of our democratic institutions, we do indeed need new parties. And institutional reform. But we’ll need new parties to arise in the current system before we get democratic institutional reform. ___ 19 January 2007
As the quote from Droop at the top of the left sidebar says, most voters in two-party systems are less interested in the “particular points at issue between the two parties” and much more in seeing their country or state “being honestly and wisely governed.” Reelected in November to his second and final term as California governor, Arnold Schwarzeneger apparently “gets it.” Having run in 2003 above party (bypassing the regular nomination process because the special election concurrent with the recall did not have a primary) and elected by a cross-party electoral coalition, Arnold tried to use his popularity to push through key pieces of the Republican agenda in a special election in 2005. The gambit failed badly, so Arnold reinvented himself again as the “post-partisan” governor. Some of his second-term agenda seems almost Democrat, and some of it even Green, while he maintains broadly popular “conservative” Republican principles on other policies. In an era when the percentage of independent voters in the state has risen from 9% in 1990 to 19% now, the percentage of independent or third-party members of our state and national legislative bodies has remained barely above zero. California is not alone in the trend. As noted in the LA Times, a study by Rhodes Cook based on data from 27 US states shows only 75% of voters registered with one of the two mainstream parties (down from82% in 1994). That means a quarter of the electorate in this sample of states–not all states register voters by party–is now independent or other party. Most independents are moderate, non-ideological voters disgusted with the polarization of the main parties on many issues. Many “other” party registrants hold views that are from beyond the mainstream, or even of fringe ideologies, yet–as I noted in the previous two plantings on these topics–even these parties and their voters may have practical solutions for honestly and wisely governing their country or state that would be valuable contributions to the debate. Now, continuing with the Droop quote:
Of course, this danger of uncontrolled power to the former “outs” under majority voting is precisely the risk faced nationally with a change of power in Congress: will Democrats exceed the mandate they obtained from moderate voters who swung their way? And it is also the risk faced by moderate California voters, as the successor to Arnold Schwarzenegger may be another “party hack” in the mold of Davis or Angelides. Who speaks for the moderate, non-partisan (and multi-partisan) electorate? Hardly anyone, given the lack of representatives speaking for this section of the electorate, and only episodically does a “post-partisan” executive come along to articulate the frustrations of what elsewhere I have called “the radical middle” that is frustrated with the lack of practical solutions offered by the two big parties. ____ Searching for the center: A citizens assembly for California? (7 February 2006) Propagation: Seeds & scions (0) Is it a contradiction that some ideas could be “beyond the mainstream” yet shared by a majority of the public? It may seem so, but political reality is a good deal more complex than that, for at least two reasons. First, what is “mainstream” in terms of accepted political debate within and in the context of election campaigns for our “representative” institutions may be much narrower than the real range of ideas shared within the electorate. That was the essence of the point I was making yesterday about the narrowness of political debate offered by realistic candidates for the US presidency. And, as I noted, the range of options offered to voters in legislative elections is narrower still, even if most views are in fact represented by “the chance opinions of individual members” in districts where it is “safe” to articulate what the rest of the body politic considers beyond-the-mainstream views (quote from Droop). The second reason that it may not be contradictory that some views might be from beyond the mainstream of regular discourse and yet held by a majority is that the public is generally not highly ideological. Some ideas that are not well represented by the established political parties may, in fact, be quite popular and practical. The key is getting them aired and then represented in the legislature, thereby broadening the debate and facilitating the adoption of practical solutions that might otherwise be easily dismissed as “fringe.” The context of this planting is a comment given over at PoliBlog to a previous comment of mine. My comment was essentially a rough draft of yesterday’s planting on From Beyond the Mainstream. The follow-up comment claimed that I was wrong to characterize Tom Tancredo’s views on immigration as beyond the mainstream because, according to the commentator, “Tancredo’s views on illegal immigration are … shared by 75% or so of the country.” Now, I am no expert on public opinion on immigration, or on immigration policy. And my intention is not to debate with someone who runs a blog called The Lonewacko Blog whether his own or Tancredo’s views are beyond the mainstream. However, I would argue that on this issue, as on many others, our immigration policy would be something more sustainable than the mess it currently is if the legislature were elected with some form of proportional representation. Under PR, the broader spectrum of views among the electorate on the issue would be represented, and the balance of that representation in congress would shift with shifting public opinion as to which issues are most important and what proposed solutions to them are most resonating with the electorate. Rather than festering because the narrow range of mainstream interests is deadlocked on the issue or prefers not even to open it up for long periods of time, the agenda would be more open and the proposals more diverse. Personally, I abhor the views of someone like Tancredo. But I would welcome a political party articulating his views having a block of seats in congress that would shift in size depending on the size of the electorate that chose to endorse a hypothetical party led by Tancredo. No, it is not a contradiction that views on a policy may come from beyond the fringe yet be consonant with a majority of the public: We can’t know where the median is on an issue if voters across the country do not have the opportunity to cast an effective vote for their preference among the widest feasible range of views, including those from beyond the mainstream. On that score, our current system of “representative” institutions fails us badly. 18 January 2007
The number of contenders for the presidential nomination of the two major parties continues to grow in advance of what promises to be the most open presidential election in memory. This planting inaugurates a new orchard block on VOTES >> USA >> ’08, and also will grow in the AMERICAN POLITICAL REFORM >> PR-USA block. One of the many unusual features of the American political system is the far greater diversity of views represented in contests for the presidency (both the big-party nominations and the occasional notable third-party or independent candidate in the general) than for the national or state legislative races. Henry Droop, one of my “trinity” of great Anglo-American philosophers of political institutions, noted that the two-party system produces
Today’s formal entrant is Tom Tancredo, a Republican House member from Colorado who is best known for his xenophobic position on immigration. Of course, as Steven Taylor commented, “he won’t win the nomination, let alone the presidency.” Ron Paul, another potential Republican candidate, likewise has no chance. Nor does Dennnis Kucinich have any chance to win the Democratic nomination that he recently announced he was seeking, let alone the presidency. Nonetheless, I welcome all of these men (and, why, so far, only one woman?) to the debate, and I hope more candidates with beyond-the-mainstream ideas will enter the fray. It quite striking that two of these beyond-the-mainstream candidates are Republican–and we could add a third in Duncan Hunter (catering to a similar constituency as Tancredo) and a fourth in Sam Brownback (catering to a Christian “ultra” base), while only one of the national legislators likely to run for the Democratic nomination (see list below) is a politician who could meaningfully be characterized as beyond the (very narrow) mainstream of the US partisan duopoly. Is the Republican congressional caucus really so much more diverse than the Democratic? That would be ironic and surprising, given the level of cohesion and ideological policy-making behavior maintained by the Republicans over the last six years.3 Yet, there it is in the announced field of presidential contenders from within Congress: Paul (Republican, but formerly a Libertarian), Tancredo (who should be in the American Independent or the misnamed Constitutionalist Party1), and Brownback (who could be in something like a Christian Heritage party2). Yet all of these men operate under the label of a major (and allegedly mainstream) “conservative” party. On the Democratic side, only Kucinich (perhaps really a Green) is out of place in the mainstream centrist party that candidates like Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, and Kerry all seek to lead. It’s a shame of our system that the only way voters who share the beyond-the-mainstream ideas of Kucinich, Paul, Tancredo, and Brownback can vote for a like-minded candidate is in presidential primaries and not in legislative elections, where such voters could actually be represented. And, even with regard to presidential nominating races, voters can cast a (semi-meaningful) vote for one of these candidates only if by quirk of geography and calendar they happen to live in a state that votes early, before the field is winnowed to the moneyed few who reflect “the particular differences of opinion upon which the division into two parties is founded.” As for legislative races, voters with views represented by one of these politicians are themselves represented only if they happen to live in (safe) districts where “the chance opinions of individual members” are in line with their own. Of course, there are such systems–they are called proportional representation! _________
Given the importance of this issue as an indicator of the character and judgment of a potential president, there is only one on this list who is even in the running for the much coveted Ladera Frutal endorsement.
_________ 1. Tancredo co-authored a book, Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders, with Jim Gilchrist. 2. The name of a similar small party in Canada and formerly in New Zealand (where an allied, but much more moderate, Christian party merged into the rather socially conservative United Future); notwithstanding that some of this ideological persuasion was incorporated over the last six or more years into the Republican orthodoxy; that does not make it “mainstream.” 3. But, wow, how that has broken this past week!! Propagation: Seeds & scions (4)
11 August 2006
13 August: Additions near the end on parliamentarism and the Virginia Plan. At the propagation bench to yesterday’s “blogiversary” planting on two-party politics in the USA, James Joyner (whose Outside the Beltway post prompted mine) suggests that PR might seem good on grounds of “fairness” but that he has often thought PR to be impractical because of the “tail wagging the dog†result. Fairness to cooky voters like me who favor nutty little parties is all well and good. But the ‘fairness’ argument is the less compelling case for PR. The compelling case is in its aggregate effects on representation, accountability, and governance, not on how nicely it treats society’s cranks of the far left or right or whatever ideological fringe. But what about the supposed “tail wagging the dog” problem? That’s a systemic issue (the “dog” being the system), and if the problem is real, then we should be very cautious about PR indeed, for we certainly do not want to empower the tail. So, do small parties have “disproportionate” influence over coalitions that larger parties must form in order to govern? The actual evidence that this happens is, well, nil. I’ve talked about that here (especially in the New Zealand and Germany blocks), as have many of the propagators over the past year. The best single paper by a political scientist on this question that I can think of is: McGann and Moran, “The Myth of the Disproportionate Influence of Small Parties in Israel” (the link takes you to the abstract and another link there will get you to a PDF of the paper). Basically, there just is not much evidence that small parties get more than their weight in votes would entitle them to, nor that they are able to hold “hostage” the bigger parties (which, after all, are also minority parties that get, by definition, disproportionate influence under plurality elections!). And if it does not happen in Israel (where the largest party often has only a third of the votes and seats, the country is a single 120-seat district, and a party can win a seat with just 2% of the vote) it is unlikely to happen almost anywhere.* Small parties may be needed for coalitions, but they need the larger parties just as much–and often more–in order to exercise any influence and to be able to bring any policy or other rewards back to their voters. An additional factor in limiting small-party “extortion” ability is a simple fact about multiparty systems: For almost all voters, there are more parties close to the voter in the ideological space than is the case in a two-party system. In other words, small and large parties alike are always under pressure from competitors, and if they overbid, they can be shut out and replaced by some other party that a chunk of their constituency likes almost as much (and perhaps more, if it can actually deliver). Those of us who think competition is an inherently good thing–in the markets for goods and yes also in the market for policy ideas–thus like PR. More competition, more prospects for satisfying the greater number of voters. In two-party systems, on the other hand, the problem for a voter who wants to punish one party was well summed up by Henry Droop in the passage from a longer and rich paragraph that I am so fond of quoting (so fond that the beginning of it is up there on the left sidebar). Droop notes that the problem with majority or plurality systems and just two major parties is that moderate, nonpartisan voters:
With PR, given that there are almost always multiple possible majorities that can form–the essence of Madison’s famous argument about checking “factions,”–it is much harder for any one party to push its advantage too far. If it does, it risks breaking the coalition. This, coupled with the presence of multiple parties competing to please unafiliated voters, gives such voters a voice between elections, something recent experience in the USA clearly shows is lacking (as I wrote about last November). James raises a valid point about fragmentation in the USA currently and how it would be reflected in a PR system. Actually, that fragmentation of interests is one of the best arguments for PR: With multiple parties, rather than just two (at best–increasingly districts and states are not even two-party competitive), these interests are reflected in a way that is transparent. Under our current winner-take-all systems, interests are reflected by individual members of congress who are accountable to no one outside their districts, and given safe seats, not even clearly within them. It is much better that voters and politicians alike be able to see–from shifts in the votes for Greens and Libertarians and so on–which direction the electorate is moving in. Two-party competition–and again, in fact, we do not even have that in many places–is an awfully blunt instrument. So, numerous interests are represented, but in a nontransparent and non-accountable way. And many interests aren’t represented at all. Then there is the question about presidentialism. Of course, multiparty politics works best with a parliamentary system–to keep the coalition partners that run the executive accountable to the people by way of the proportionally elected legislature. We might have had a parliamentary system if Madison’s original Virginia Plan had not been thwarted by the small-state delegates. (The plan called for the House to elect the executive–and also the Senate, with the latter election based on nominations from the state legislatures, each state represented by population.) Alas, we did not get parliamentarism or weak bicameralism–the best systems for multiparty politics. We wound up with presidentialism along with strong bicameralism. Looking on the bright side of the not-so-Great Compromise at Philadelphia, an advantage of presidentialism in a multiparty system is that the chief executive does not “fall” when coalitions shift. However, that is also a disadvantage, inasmuch as it limits the range of possible alternative coalitions that can form and rules out the possiblity of early elections to refer interparty disputes back to the electorate. Besides, as I alluded to above, the role of small parties in forcing such crises in parliamentary systems is much exaggerated anyway. Basically, presidentialism would be almost certain to keep Democrats and Republicans as the major parties even under a House (and ideally, Senate, but that’s more complicated) elected by PR. Smaller parties ideally should be given a role in forging coalitions for presidential elections, which is hard to do with the electoral college. But even if the electoral college were not abolished, the National Popular Vote concept would be highly likely to generate pre-election coalitions for presidential competition–and especially if PR were also adopted. One concern I have with the NPV idea (which, basically, would have states collectively having 270+ electoral votes agree to give their electors to the national popular-vote winner) under the current congressional electoral system is that third parties would expand their influence in presidential elections without a corresponding influence in congress. For multiparty politics to work, it has to be in both branches, consistent with the Madisonian incentives for interbranch cooperation upon which the entire edifice of separation of powers is premised. (Already, third parties are more active and receive more votes for president than for congress, though the gap is not as great as it once was, and in 2004–unusually for the USA–third party voting was higher for House and Senate than for President.) Would US Presidents appoint coalition cabinets if neither their nor the main opposition had a majority in Congress? I do not know. Behavior in other presidential systems is mixed on this point. It would be advantageous to them to do so, but they would retain the right not to do so. But just eliminating the single-party Leviathan in control of the House of Representatives (and, to a lesser degree, the Senate) would be in itself a powerful advantage of PR: No more minoritarian governance of the legislative bodies.** It would become genuinely majoritarian, in that parties collectively representing a majority of the electorate (and less regionally biased, too) would be in control of the production of legislation. With a direct vote for President and PR in Congress, you come pretty close to a best-of-both-worlds scenario (or at least as close as one can get under presidentialism): Pre-election coalitions among parties to elect the president (and these coalitions could shift from election to election), and inter-party bargaining in Congress between elections to keep the partners accountable to their respective constituencies.
* What about Italy? I think the evidence is also limited there, though I am aware of no study of precisely this phenomenon. However, there were various factors–more or less unique to Italy–that might have made Italian small parties more capable of making high demands than elsewhere: the absence of a feasible coalition centered around any large party other than the Christian Democrats (because of the large Communist party), the high internal factionalization of the largest party, and the presence of secret voting by MPs on most matters in parliament. Of course, since 1993, Italy has abandoned PR (and, no, it did not return to it in April, 2006). The peculiar form of a mix between overall majoritarianism and intra-alliance PR that both Italian electoral systems since 1993 have consisted of probably–and ironically–gives small parties far more blackmail potential than is the case under almost all PR systems. ** Whereby the leadership of the single party in control–which can even be the second most popular party nationwide–often refuses to bring to a vote a bill on which there is majority support in the public and even in the chamber itself, but which divides the party internally. Propagation: Seeds & scions (10)
10 August 2006
Joyner and Taylor have addressed the question of whether two-party politics is here to stay in the USA or not. This is as good a topic as any with which to mark the first anniversary of Fruits and Votes! Joyner (expanded at TCS Daily):
I would say that the US constitution comes close to guaranteeing that parties will be programmatically weak, but not what their number will be. Joyner goes on to note the extent to which the “catch all” nature of US parties–closely related to their relatively non-programmatic nature–makes them so adaptable that the current two parties are likely to remain our two parties for a long time to come. He may well be right about that. However, it is worth focusing on the extent to which institutions–both the constitutional structure and the legislative electoral system–can be considered to “all but assure” the domination of “exactly” two parties. Is the relationship really so deterministic? Could multiparty politics emerge? Could multiparty politics even be emerging? Let’s start with the constitutional structure of the executive. Only a few presidential systems have genuinely programmatic parties of the sort that typify all the advanced parliamentary democracies (and, to a significant degree, even most of the new parliamentary democracies of the post-Communist world). The key distintion is that parties form in parliamentary systems to constitute the executive, based on their control of or bargaining power within the legislature. Parties form in presidential systems to elect an independent executive, or to transact with the executive from within the legislature. This is really a fundamental distinction, and someone should write a book about it. (Note to self: write this book!) However, it is also the case that very few presidential systems have only two major parties. In part that is because very few presidential systems use our plurality system to elect the legislature. Nearly all presidential systems use proportional representation or some form of mixed system. But even in the Philippines, which uses a mostly plurality system, multiparty politics prevails: many parties, almost of all of which are programmatically weak. It is important to realize that programmatic parties–by which I mean parties that present reasonably coherent policy platforms and act more or less as a unit in the legislature–typify parliamentary systems regardless of whether parliament is elected by plurality or proportional representation. It is also important to realize that multiparty politics also typifies parliamentary systems, regardless of the electoral system. The UK is not a two-party system, and really has not been for about thirty years. Yet it uses a plurality (FPTP) system, just as the USA uses to elect its congress. And then there are Canada and India, which no one would confuse with two-party systems, notwithstanding their use of the plurality electoral system. So, to sum up so far, we have presidential systems with multiparty politics and we have legislatures elected by plurality that have multiple parties. And then we have the USA–presidential and plurality–with two-party politics and with third parties barely present. I agree with Joyner that part of the reason is the electoral college and, specifically, the “unit rule” by which states give all their electors to the candidate with the most votes (even if this is under 50%). But such a rule could generate separate regional party systems, and of course that is exactly what it did in the years leading up the Civil War. The 1948 and 1968 elections showed tendencies in that direction, too, though they were not sustained into subsequent elections. The legislative electoral system used in the USA is likewise compatible with regional subsystems–just as has been the case in India and (to a lesser extent) Canada.* So, while Joyner has correctly identified presidentialism, the electoral college, and plurality voting as factors that inhibit third-party success in the USA, the entrenchment of the two parties is actually somewhat difficult to account for, because either presidentialism or plurality voting is typically associated with much more competitive politics than we find in the USA. And, while the electoral college with its unit rule hampers national third parties, it might be expected to facilitate regional parties (and has done so in the past). On the “here to stay” question, Taylor chimes in:
As much as I would consider it a gift from on High for PR to suddenly appear in the USA, this formulation actually puts it backwards. Where does PR come from? I can’t think of any case in which a change from plurality to proportional representation has occurred without a prior emergence of competitione among three (or more) parties. Electoral systems shape party systems (where have I read that?), but major electoral reform follows party-system change, not vice versa. And, of course, the arguments allegedly favoring plurality elections are all post-hoc. The plurality system was never consciously designed. (Really, presidentialism, with the concept of national electoral campaigns for separate executive office, never was, either.) Plurality systems were simply an inheritance of pre-democratic forms (and presidentialism an adaptation of a very different idea of executive structure born of expedient compromise at the US Constitutional Convention). The arguments in favor of PR, on the other hand, began to emerge before actual electoral reform had made much headway. The set of national or state/provincial jurisdictions around the world that have adopted or made affirmative decisions to keep plurality is close to an empty set. When the issue is seriously debated, PR almost always results, in some form. But, again, such debate happens only after three or more significant parties are present. (And, of course, there are exceptions where majoritarian-leaning mixed systems replace PR or other systems more favorable to third parties, but it is almost an iron rule that no one consciously adopts plurality, as opposed to reinstates it after an authoritarian period or inherits it from a colonial or authoritarian regime.) So, what would it take to break the hold of two-party politics? It would take the emergence of one or more programmatic parties that threatened the electoral position of one or both of the major parties.** Such a party could not just exist at the presidential level, a la Ross Perot. It would have to contest seriously at least some House and Senate races. The emergence of multiparty politics could come in the form of a party that plays “spoiler” and thereby makes one of the major parties’ internal calculus about the electoral system shift.*** That would at least put electoral reform on the agenda, and even if the other major party were to be quite happy to see its major competitor “spoiled,” once PR is on the agenda, experience in other cases where reform has been adopted or seriously debated says the genie (and genius!) of the idea of PR can’t always be put so easily back in the bottle(neck) of big-party politics-as-usual.
** The first part of this–the emergence of new parties–has been underway for some time, as I have shown with graphs. In most US presidential, House, and Senate elections since 1990, neither major party has won 50% of the vote. This has yet to rise to the level of threatening the major parties, however–at least in a way that has changed the debate. (In the 1968, 1992 and 2000 presidential elections, third parties were clearly a factor; we probably need many more such elections!) *** The extent to which the major US parties are non-programmatic complicates this, however, to the extent that parties are much less cohesive, strategic actors in the way that they tend to be in parliamentary systems. However, the parties–especially the Republican–have clearly moved in a direction of acting more like programmatic and strategic decision-making units in recent years. Propagation: Seeds & scions (10)
03 March 2006
And they are right. So concluded the Power Inquiry in a report sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, prepared with the help of more than 1,500 public submissions, and released on 27 Feb. The report is about Britain, but with suitable changes to country-specific references, its fundamental conclusions apply
Actually, the two-party system–and criticisms of it–are far older than the earlier twentieth century, even if the identity of one of the two major parties indeed changed early in the 20th century. Critiques of bipartism and FPTP date at least as far back as the still very relevant writings of Henry Droop, from 1869.
Of course, that reference to the BNP, ironically, shows how much healthier British electoral competition is, compared to American. Disaffected British voters have parties like the BNP as outlets in many constituencies, whereas similar expressions in the US are highly localized, such as ‘Minuteman’ James Gilchrist’s 25% in a special congressional election, or episodic, such as the period eruptions of what I have called “the radical middle,” but which always become “domesticated” by the two-party system and plurality voting. The Power Inquiry also warns that “The executive in Britain is now more powerful than it probably has been since the time of Walpole.” Its recommendations include many items other than electoral reform–e.g. lowering the voting age to 16, more participatory lawmaking (including initiatives), and caps on campaign donations. Also upper-house reform, yet another idea we could use. The Power Inquiry report is very comprehensive and could have far-reaching impact.
If that is accurate, and both parties would find themselves competing over who is the better reformer, reform is likely to happen. Will we Americans ever see the two parties both disposed towards reforms to close our democracy deficit, and competing over who can deliver? I am not holding my breath, but in the meantime, I will continue to support budding movements like the California Citzens Assembly and National Popular Vote, while watching the process unfold across the Atlantic.
Hat tip, Make My Vote Count. Propagation: Seeds & scions (1)
07 February 2006
Something I have been wanting to get around to for a while: There is a proposal soon to go before the California state legislature (ACA 28) to create a citizens assembly to review possible electoral reform for the state. The idea is derived from the recent Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform in British Columbia. A similar institution will begin work in Ontario* this year. From the Sacramento Bee, December 20, by way of FairVote (emphasis below is mine).
So far, not only a good idea, but a good newspaper report about a good idea. But then there is this:
OK, well, it is certainly true that most European countries have parliamentary systems and most also have proportional representation. But the two, as concepts, have nothing to do with each other, and one can exist in a political system without the other. The UK is parliamentary, but uses plurality in single-seat districts, just like California and most US jurisdictions. France is semi-presidential–and the cabinet depends on the parliamentary majority, not on the president–and uses two-round majority in single-seat districts (like many larger local jurisdictions in California). And then there are presidential systems–like the US and all its states–that do not use single-seat district winner-take-all elections like we do, but instead elect their legislators by PR– examples include Costa Rica and most other Latin American democracies. While I think it would be great if a citizens assembly would also be allowed to at least consider a parliamentary government model for California, let’s not conflate parliamentary systems with proportional systems! David Lesher of the New America Foundation in Sacramento, also quoted in the Bee, notes:
Exactly. And this is how any dicussion of proportional representation in California or elsewhere in the US should be framed. Too often the focus in discussions of PR is on allegedly “foreign” models and the European parliamentary context, and on opening the gates to fringe parties rather than by focusing on the benefits to the great chunk of voters who are not committed to any party, major or minor. Consider each of these in turn. PR is not foreign. Almost every US voter who has ever voted in a presidential primary has voted in a PR election, as both parties (Democrats in all states and Republicans in most) use PR to allocate convention delegates to presidential candidates (though with very high thresholds, often 15%). Two common PR formulas are known by very “foreign” names (d’Hondt and Ste.-Laguë), but the exact same formulas are also known as Jefferson and Webster in their use, at various times throughout US history, for apportioning seats to states in the House. PR is not just for parliamentary systems. I already began to address this issue above, but it is worth noting that the claims (which are themselves much over-stated, but that’s a different debate) that PR breeds government “instability” are hardly relevant to the fixed-term executive of the US and California. Now, there is a lot of literature in comaprative politics that claims PR and presidentialism are unworkable, but I find this literature unconvincing.** The compatibility of our executive type with PR is a debate worth having, as any PR system has to be designed with the separate executive in mind (and thus not simnply imported from those foreign contexts) and I would like to have that debate here at F&V and elsewhere. But if the question is instability, defined (albeit not properly) as short-duration cabinets brought down by small parties or shifting coalitions in the legislature, this is not relevant to California or US separation of powers. PR is not just for the fringe. Too often in debates about PR, the assumption is that the only voters who would benefit from it are those who favor fringe parties and ideas. Obviously, such voters indeed have a stake in PR, for it lowers the effective share of votes needed to obtain legislative representation. But I do not expect any PR system that could ever be adopted in California or elsewhere in the USA to have an effective threshold lower than around 5% (and it might well be higher). If Greens and American Independent and other very small parties are to clear such a threshold, even they would have to moderate their views. In doing so, they would no longer be the fringe parties that go by those labels today, and they would be appealing to voters located much closer to the center than their current “true believer” fringe electorate. That brings me to my last point about the benefits to nonpartisan voters. PR is good for centrist and nonpartisan voters. The rationale for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s failed ballot measure to create a panel of judges to re-draw congressional and state-legislative districts was that our current districts are too “safe” for one party or the other and that elminating partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering would elect more moderates from competitive districts. The goal of electing more moderates was also behind the push for the blanket primary (which the US Supreme Court invalidated) and occasional calls for Louisiana-style nonpartisan two-round majority elections (as though Louisiana were a beacon of political reform ideas!). The problem with all these propsals is that they remain within the single-seat district paradigm. And the winners of those districts will still be Republicans or Democrats, and because of the geographic distribution of party supporters, only a handful of districts would become genuinely more competitive and friendly to moderates than current districts under current electoral rules. Moreover, any supposed moderates who are elected under these various within-the-pardigm “reform” ideas would still go to Sacramento (or Washington) and caucus with the legions of more committed partisan members sharing their party label and who are elected in fully safe districts.*** At a time when the fastest growing choice on the portion of the voter-registration form that asks for party affiliation is “decline to state,” what is needed to represent these moderate voters was best stated by Henry Droop (in continuation of the quote at the top of the left sidebar):
I have no idea what proposal would emerge from the citizens assembly. But I do believe that citizens, educated about alternative electoral systems, are highly unlikely to believe that the status quo should be retained, or that simple tinkering around the edges would deliver the benefits that the vast “moderate non-partisan section of the electors” wants to see from its government. My previous posts on proportional representation in the USA can be viewed together at the PR-USA subdomain. Specifically, please see:
And my F&V mission statement (especially the sub-heading “Towards a poitical re-engineering agenda for the USA). *The Canadian province, not the California city. **Most of this literature is based on the collapse of democracy in several Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s. But there were far greater problems for democracy in those societies than either presidentialism or proportional representation. For one thing, the right wing, often backed by the US, was much more willing to throw its lot in with the military than to accept the difficult compromises of democracy, and the left was far more radical than it is today, dreaming of revolution rather than willing to face the difficult compromises of democracy. Societies like Chile and Brazil were deeply polarized, and PR did not create the polarization, nor would majoritarian electoral systems (with whatever executive type) have kept a lid on it. *** And there is growing political science evidence that parties’ legislative caucuses tend to select leaders closer to the party mode than to the median. In other words, the moderates lose out to the more committed partisans (who tend to be from safe districts). It thus takes a lot of new moderates to make a major dent in the political position of those who direct the party’s legislative business. And, as already noted above, there is little realistic prospect of a large increase in the number of moderates elected, even with a “fair” redrawing of the map of single-seat districts. Propagation: Seeds & scions (1) 25 December 2005
The quote that I recently added to the right sidebar of Fruits and Votes comes from Henry Droop’s essay, “On the Political and Social Effects of Different Methods of Electing Representatives,” published originally in 1869. The essay includes some rather remarkable and still-timely insights into the functioning of two-party politics and how various forms of proportional representation would improve representation and governance. Unlike most contemporary advocates of electoral reform, Droop emphasized not the representation of minority views from outside the mainstream (think Greens, Libertarians, etc.) but the enhanced representation of moderate and nonpartisan voters that proportional representation would bring about. The full paragraph from which the sidebar quote is drawn reads as follows:
As an American voter, frustrated by the current polarization of our two parties–the “win at all costs model” decried in an excellent post on December 23 by James Joyner about the “Kosification” of party politics–Droop’s words ring true. Moderate, or swing voters, indeed are faced with giving a lease on power to an “out” party that they do not fully trust and that does not really represent them, or else seeing the incumbents continuing to push their advantage too far. Joyner notes that one of his own core premises is “that policy matters and that honest debate over policy is essential to good governance,” and decries the focus of blogosphere activists like Kos for their almost total focus on tactics, rather than policy. As he also notes, it is not just Kos and Democrats; it is a bipartisan phenomenon, but Democrats are currently the party needing to win before they can get serious about policy. Nonetheless, the “win at all costs” polarization is corrosive. Joyner again:
What the “Droopian” logic quoted here highlights is the extent to which the climate Joyner decries is a product precisely of a politics that creates no room for other parties to gain access to the policy-making processes–other parties that might care more about ideas than about “win at all costs,” precisely because in a multiparty context, “winning” is not being the sole party responsible for governing. Rather, winning is a complex process of building alliances in a context in which power is not so starkly defined as winners vs. losers. Prior to some time in the last two decades–some time before the 1992 election, as I have argued before–the two US parties were not so sharply differentiated, and so there were many more openings in the center for cross-party policy coalitions. Obviously, the prominence of politicians willing to reach across the partisan divided before 1992 was helped by the fact that it was an era usually characterized by divided govenrment, and when power was not divided, the Democrats were such a “big tent” that even the Carter (and to a lesser extent, Johnson) years often looked like divided government. There is at present no break in the sharp differentiation of partisan lines foreseeable. But, despite appearances, this nation manifestly does not consist of “only these two parties.” Most voters care more about good governance, and not about the conflicts between party leaders increasingly beholden to their sharply differentiated activist cores. Only with multiple parties can the real diversty of interests that exists in society check and balance each other in our representative institutions, and thereby depolarize the increasingly ugly bipartisan climate that turns off more and more “ordinary voters.” It is for this reason that I consider Droop’s ideas to be an expansion of James Madison’s famous treatise on “factions” in Federalist 10. (This post is a variant of my overview of Droop and representation that is linked at the sidebar quote; I also develop some of these ideas in the page I recently linked to the blog’s banner.) Propagation: Seeds & scions (5)
06 November 2005
Planted by MSS
Planted in: AMERICAN POLITICAL REFORM; California; Plurality; POLITICAL PARTIES; PR-USA; USA I was drafting a rather lengthy comment in response to a comment left at my post on the 2004 election. But it makes sense to bring it to the front page, because while the comment by “B” is directed at a point I had made about the 1992 presidential election, the general point is relevant to current California politics as well as to next year’s congressional midterm election. The thread that ties all these issues together is the unrepresentativeness of the two-party system and the electoral rules that maintain it. That is, absent proportional representation and multiparty politics, our policy-making process lacks a means to institutionalize reformist sentiment arising from the nonpartisan segment of the electorate. What happens instead is periodic explosions of “radical middle” or “populist” sentiment against the usual way of doing political business. Usually this happens in executive elections, but the 1994 midterm showed it can happen in legislative elections, too. It could happen in 2006. But every time it happens, the existing institutions normalize the situation, and the responsiveness to centrist reformist impulses whithers. We have sporadic breakthroughs by third-party candidates (e.g. Perot with his 20% showing in 1992, or the election of Jesse Ventura in Minnesota). Other times we have unusual circumstances that bring about a nominee of one of the major parties who has nonpartisan appeal (as when the distinctive rules of the California recall alllowed Schwarzenegger to bypass the normal partisan nomination process). And in 1994, we had the extraodinary Contract with America, in which Republicans seized upon the seething resentment at politics as usual and took control of the House for the first time in 50 years. The problem is that there is no good vehicle for institutionalizing this sentiment. Our winner-take-all institutions for both executive and legislative posts mean that coalition-building and expression of alternative views is almost entirely a pre-election affair. There is no good mechanism to continue the expression of alternative views post-election, because the two parties have every incentive to co-opt what they can to avoid defeat at the next election, but, more importantly, to ignore what they can get away with ignoring to protect their and their core constituencies’ prerogatives. Thus between periodic eruptions of reform sentiment, things return more or less to normal until they erput again at some later point. The normalization of the two-party system, rather than the institutionalization of a more responsive alternative, is reflected well in the J.C. Watts quote that I referred to before:
The normalization of the two-party system, rather than the institutionalization of a more responsive alternative, is reflected in the stunning way in which Schwarzenegger, two years since being elected on a wave of cross-party support for shaking up California politics, is now seen (corretly, in my view) as just another Republican—just as out of touch with his state’s electorate as was Gray Davis before him and as were and are the Democratic majorities in the state legisalture. But the first of these episodic bursts of non-Democratic, non-Republican radical-middle sentiments in recent times was Perot. So, let’s go back to the Perot example. In my post about the 2004 election, I reflected back on the Clinton presidency:
B’s comment says, in part:
Of course, only the budget balancing bill was pre-1994; the welfare overhaul took place only after Republicans were in charge of Congress, notwithstanding that it was something Clinton had promised in his campaign to tackle early in his presidency and was an issue that probably kept the Perot vote from eating farther into Clinton’s own vote in 1992. My response to B’s main point would be that this is not a matter of “warming to Clinton.” It is a matter of building coalitions. And, in the specific case of the Perot constituency, the Republicans proved more adept at it (again, temporarily) than did Clinton and the Democrats. The Perot constituency thus ended up going pretty decisively to the Republicans in 1994. I think there were ways for Clinton and the Democrats to prevent that. Clinton had campaigned in a way that emphasized how different he was from a mainstream Democrat. He was clearly speaking to a segment of the electorate that was ready to swing away from G.H.W. Bush, and was deciding between Perot and the Democratic challenger. It was an opportunity for a center-left reformist agenda, yet in office, it was squandered. Clinton mostly governed initially at the behest of congressional Democrats. The few cases where he did not do so were on issues that were sure to alienate the Perot constituency (the gun bill, which the House leadership wanted to avoid, and which passed only because some northern Republicans favored it). It would have been hard for Clinton to reach out to this constituency more systematically in the context of entrenched Democratic majorities in Congress and in the absence of an institutionalized voice for the Perot voters. That is precisely my point. But by failing to make a serious effort at doing so, it opened the way for another pre-election coalition between an established party and a reformist constituency—in this case, by the Republicans under the nimble leadership of Newt Gingrich. So, it is clear that the underlying problem with forging post-election coalitions is an institutional context in which it is possible for the third force to have 20% of the presidential vote yet ZERO representation in congress. (In virtually no other democracy could something like this happen!) This demonstrates the problem with the absence of institutionalization of alternatives to the normal way of doing politics. These sentiments can be expressed in elections (usually executive elections, 1994 notwithstanding), but do not obtain direct representation with which to hold the established parties accountable for what they do after elections. Things in 1992-94 would have been very different–by necessity–if congressional elections were proportional and thus Perot voters had been represented BETWEEN elections. Perot did talk about political reform, but it was term limits, not PR. And term limits was something Republicans picked up on in 1994 (and then proceded to do little about). Term limits are what I call JUNK REFORM, not the real thing, but they are inspired by the same radical middle sentiment against politics as usual for which PR would be a far more meaningful fix. Republicans used term limits as one of several ways to woo the Perot vote, and they have controlled Congress ever since, even while long since having abandoned most of their “we’re different” credibility that Perot’s movement once gave them. In 2006, there could be an opportunity for Democrats to mobilize a reformist constiutuency. I have doubts that they are capable of doing it, but the kindling is there if they can find the right match to light it. But I am quite certain that, even if they do, they will squander the opportunity once back in power, much as the Republicans before them and Clinton–Gore before that. And very much also like Schwarzenegger today in California. There simply is no means, absent proportional representation and multipartism, to put meaningful checks on the natural tendency of either party to revert to form once a seemingly critical election is over. Propagation: Seeds & scions (4) 03 November 2005
[One in a series on the California special election] Let me say first that I am utterly appalled and, as a democrat (please note: small ‘d’), embarrassed that we still permit politicians to draw electoral-district lines. But is Prop. 77 on California’s Nov. 8 ballot the right fix? (more…) 29 October 2005
[This post is written from the perspective of the left, but a similar case could be made with respect to the Republicans and libertarianism, for example—although there are no current independent congress members of that programmatic bent.] Something has been on my mind off and on ever since I wrote the following in my post asking “what if the USA changed to PR“:
I have been trying to reconcile my own political positions with that statement. (I loathe the idea that there could be anything inconsistent about my world view–and, yes, the words before those dashes are meant to be ironic, because being an intellectual means being able to hold contradictory positions and think them through.) Bernie Sanders, a “socialist” member of the House and likely future Senator, helps point the way towards reconciling my positions and my statement. The ideological political test that Steven Taylor posted a link to some time ago said I was a “socialist.” If we take that to be “social democrat” then it is probably close, though I would note that the “test” left no space for green, which would probably be more accurate. (Like Steven, ideological labels make me “itchy.”) In any event, why would I prefer a Democratic party that no longer had Maxine Waters (the example used by Chris Lawrence in the post I was responding to), Dennis Kucinich, Barney Frank, and other leftists, if I am a social democrat (i.e. on the “left”) myself? This is where Sanders–a socialist, and not a Democrat–comes in. We can see a snapshot of the ideological spectrum in the US party system by looking at the rank ordering of members of the US House from left to right. My colleague Keith Poole’s Voteview Web site (a spectacular resource) presents the data. Bernie Sanders of Vermont actually calls himself an independent and caucuses with the Democrats, but he is labeled a socialist, and not only by his enemies on the right who consider the term a convenient shortcut for nutty, dangerous, subversive, etc. For instance, in a recent Nation magazine profile and in some sympathetic biographies referenced on Sanders’s own Web site, the label “socialist” is used. So, where is Sanders on the spectrum of US politics, according to Keith’s analysis of House voting? In the 109th Congress, he ranks no. 41 (counting from left to right). In the 108th, he ranked 30, and in the 107th, 47. In the last three Congreses, there have been on average 38 members more to the “left” than “socialist” Sanders. In fact, as the Nation article points out, quoting a Vermont Progressive Party activist, “Sometimes, Bernie’s biggest critics are on the left,” the reason being that “some social liberals quietly grumble that Sanders maintains too rigid a focus on economic issues.” [My emphasis] That is, if we had a proportional representation system that fostered multiparty competition, there is no guarantee that the “social liberals” and the “socialists” would be in the same party. Nor, presumably, would social and economic conservatives coexist inside the same party—this is the very faultline within the Republican party that was exposed by the Miers nomination. There is nothing inconsistent* about wanting a more centrist Democratic Party shorn of its “social liberals” while also wanting the opportunity to vote for a social democratic (or green or socialist) party that would actually gain representation and thus have a bargaining weight in Congress vis-a-vis the Democrats (and other parties) that my vote could make a small contribution to enhancing. In the meantime, the best I can do is root from the sidelines of American politics (I live in an utterly safe House district in the grip of the Viper) for Sanders to become one out of 100 instead of just one out of 435: He is likely to win the open US Senate seat from Vermont, exchanging one independent (Republican defector James Jeffords) for another. *Not that there is anything wrong with inconsistency… (Thanks to RAC for inspiring this post) Propagation: Seeds & scions (2) |
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