Rob Richie and Steve Hill make a good case for the virtues of proportional representation as a cure to the ills of an American electoral system driven by the evil of two lessers (Democrats/Republicans). But they stop short of identifying and addressing the problems associated with the politics of electoral reform.
The fundamental difficulty for a PR movement today in the United States is not its ideological content but the form in which its message is delivered. To succeed, the movement must build a bridge from the language of democratic theory to the pragmatic language of political change. Though Americans often view change as necessary, it also makes us nervous. So a campaign designed to shift from a “winner-take-all” system to an improved, “state-of-the-art” brand of democracy will require the work of skilled communicators–those who can present their message concisely and give the appearance that they are David fighting Goliath. Organizers of the daring 1996 San Francisco ballot initiative campaign (“Proposition H”), which sought to institute a PR-type system of preferential voting, managed to win support from all sectors of the populace prior to receiving the perfunctory blessing of our one-party, one-machine town. That was a major achievement, with important lessons for other campaigns. But while “H” came close, it did not win–partly because of the difficulty proponents had in distilling its message. (The lack of resources didn’t help.)
A key ingredient in the message of the PR movement should be increased voter turnout. As the struggle for democracy in Europe and throughout the rest of the world has reached its most inspiring level since 1848, large numbers of citizens in the world’s oldest democracy do not vote. In 1988, only 50.1 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. In 1992, Ross Perot’s careening appeal to people who felt themselves cut off from politics as usual helped bring 104 million citizens (55 percent of the voting-age population) to the polls. This figure was encouraging, but it hardly represented a sudden return to civic engagement after three decades of voter indifference.
Perot fizzled. Clinton and the “new” Democrats have been busy trying to look like the Republicans, while the Republicans are not sure what they look like. Meanwhile, on the third-party front, the Greens and the New Party struggle to stay out of the 3 percent club, while the Christian Right unleashes its stealth technology of grassroots conviction. These new political groups want to expand the pool of voters. By allying themselves with these forces in a campaign to revitalize citizen participation, PR advocates could find a home in partisan politics, especially third-party efforts that range from left to right. By putting partisan energies behind reform efforts designed to increase turnout, reformers increase the chances of political success.
But voter turnout is not just about numbers. Turnout has dropped in part because of the disappearance of the old party-machine and ward system, whose last vestige was Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Whatever their abuses, machines got people–street by street, household by household–to the voting booth, and the patronage system helped tie Americans, especially blue-collar and lower-middle-class people, to the belief that citizens have a role to play in running their municipalities and their country–from the bottom up, district by district. It reinforced the sense of participatory democracy. PR advocates know that the less the poor vote, the more the party of the rich will benefit. So increasing voter turnout will help to overcome the rule of the rich. If PR campaigns learn how to connect their message of electoral reform to the message of economic exclusion, they stand a fair chance of winning.
For political theorists, the more reasons for PR the better. For political campaigns, a simple but compelling message will suffice.
