There’s a paradox at the core of democratic politics. We use elections to tally up our preferences and to determine the future direction and structure of our government, but existing arrangements powerfully influence our preferences and dramatically limit the choices available to us. The kind of democracy we have, and can imagine, is thus quite path-dependent, like the famous Escher print of a hand drawing itself drawing a hand.
I want to draw out two key points implicit in Rob Richie and Steven Hill’s illuminating discussion of proportional representation. The first is that it’s impossible to talk about any of the critical problems that beset the American electoral system without ultimately having to talk about all of them. Low voter turnout, an incumbent retention rate that rivals the Soviet Union’s at its height, campaign finance scandals, the turmoil over the role of race in the redistricting process, a legislative inability or unwillingness to confront and solve difficult questions of public policy, and so on: they’re all connected, at least in part.
For example, if elections were more competitive, there might not be so much pressure for term limits, which threaten to replace incumbents not with the vaunted citizen-legislators of the eighteenth century but with a herd of amateurs uninterested in considering the long term because they won’t be around to be held accountable. If officials were not squeezed by the need for constant fundraising, they might spend more time responding to the viewpoints of the mainstream of their constituencies. If large numbers of liberal and moderate whites didn’t view the attempt to give minority voters a fair chance to elect the candidates they prefer as a nefarious right-wing plot to benefit the Republican Party, they might ask how to rebuild a New Deal-style coalition, but this time with blacks as full participants.
The second key point is how very contingent the American form of democracy is. Most Americans are woefully ignorant about alternative democratic arrangements, particularly those that involve some form of proportional representation. The movement towards democracy has swept around the world in the past few decades. While the movement has been inspired in large part by American ideals, only a small handful of emerging democracies in Eastern and Central Europe, Asia, or South Africa has adopted our exclusive use of winner-take-all, geographically defined single-member districts to elect their national legislatures.
Indeed, it’s quite possible that we ourselves wouldn’t have chosen the present system if we knew then what we know now. Not many Americans realize that single-member congressional districts are not demanded by the Constitution and weren’t required by statute until the 1840s. Senator Charles Buckalew of Pennsylvania was one of the leading proponents of districting, but he later became a leading advocate of proportional representation. In a speech in Philadelphia in 1867, he described why he would have supported PR instead, had he known about it at the time he campaigned to abandon at-large elections:
What was the idea of [requiring districts]? . . . The idea was to break up the political community, and allow the different political interests which compose it . . . to be represented in the Legislature of the State. Unfortunately, when that arrangement was made . . . this just, equal, almost perfect system of voting [cumulative voting] . . . was unknown; it had not then been announced abroad or considered here, and we did what best we could.
In the nineteenth century, geographic districting made tremendous sense. People’s interests–especially to the extent those interests were relevant to the very limited government of the era–often were primarily defined by where they lived. Transportation and communication were sufficiently rudimentary that political campaigns and voting itself were necessarily based on geography. Today, of course, many citizens’ most pressing interests, particularly at the federal level, are not primarily defined by where they live, and we probably would pick a different system if we were starting from scratch.
But of course we’re not. Thus, we need to take into account the existing political system and the values and attitudes it has produced when we think about reform. Reforming the election system may be a little bit like squeezing a water balloon: if we press at one end, new difficulties may pop out somewhere else in the system, perhaps somewhere unexpected. Given the tangle of interrelated problems, I’m skeptical that the use of winner-take-all, single-member districts is the principal cause of all our woes or that proportional representation is a magic bullet.
At the federal level, for example, pure forms of PR might be treacherous indeed. Imagine, for example, California electing its 52 US Representatives statewide, or Texas electing its 30, or even Virginia electing its 11. The costs of campaigning effectively would be astronomical, and those costs would likely fall especially heavily on candidates seeking their support from less-wealthy constituencies. PR might exacerbate, rather than cure, the campaign finance problems that plague the current system. The ballot might be so long and confusing that voters would “roll off”–leave the voting booth in frustration without casting a full vote. In addition, some regions of a state–particularly the least economically developed, like Southside Virginia or the border area in Texas–might find that none of the elected representatives lived there; given that people’s expectations of representation are at least partially still based on geography, these voters might become more alienated, rather than less. Moreover, although Richie and Hill largely assume that PR benefits progressive causes, I see a substantial danger that far-right and rabid-fringe-left extremists could easily elect candidates if only 2-3 percent of the votes cast were sufficient to elect a candidate: it’s worth remembering that in 1980, a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan won the Democratic nomination for a House seat in the San Diego area in a primary with low turnout.
So we need to be more modest in our goals. Richie and Hill themselves implicity recognize these points when they suggest creating three-member congressional districts. Such districts would essentially require a group to be somewhat more than a quarter of the electorate before it could elect a candidate, and thus may draw an appropriate balance between fairly representing numerical minorities and encouraging voters to build broader coalitions.
Focusing on reforming election structures for local elections–city councils, local school boards, and the like–may be an even more promising tack. Here, the potential problems with PR are far less daunting and the possibility of actually changing the system is far greater, since voter initiatives can require adoption of PR systems without first persuading incumbent legislators to give up the system that got them where they are. Moreover, one of the lessons our history teaches us is that local experimentation often produces national movement. Considering proportional representation may lead us to think more globally–both about the problems of contemporary American politics and about possible alternatives to the current system– but it should probably lead us to act more locally.
