What do you think about proportional representation in the US House of Reps?

Great Debates
21

In a parliamentary system, such as in the UK, Canada or Australia, the way you vote for or against Tony Blair, Paul Martin or John Howard is not directly, but indirectly, by voting for or against a local MP, who either belongs to the same party as the Prime Minister, and so will support the PM in Parliament, or belongs to a different party, and so will vote against the PM in Parliament. In other words, a major role of the lower house is to act as an electoral college, choosing who will serve as PM. Once a general election is held, the monarch (in a constitutional monarchy) or the President (in a republic like Ireland) is constitutionally bound to appoint as PM the person who controls a majority in the lower house of Parliament.

In such a system, it’s no longer so important how good a resprresentative is at looking after constitituents: the most important thing is which party they belong to, and hence who they will support as Prime Minister. So marginal electorates will swing one way or the other depending on the popularity of the poilitcal parties and their leaders, not on the popularity of the local member.

There are two other important differences from the US in those other countries:
(1) Setting of electorate boundaries is done in a much less partisan way, by an independent body not linked to any of the political parties, and so which is much less likely to gerrymander in favour either of a particular political party or in favour of incumbents.
(2) There aren’t the seniority rules that exist in the US Congress, which strongly favour longer serving members by giving them much greater influence. An electorate gets looks of pork barrel stuff from having a long serving member, and will be punished if it replaces that member with someone new. (Pork barrelling in a parliamentary system does happen, but it goes to marginal electorates and to electorates with members supporting the government – so if you want pork barrel stuff for your electorate, you should vote to make your electorate a marginal one on the incoming government’s side, which is fairly hard to calculate exactly.)

22

Individual districts, clair. Each member of the House of Representatives is elected by a specific geographic area. He or she is nominated to run for office in that district by primary elections specific to that party (usually…some jurisdictions allow cross-party primary voting). The winners of all the primaries then run in the general election in that district.

Note that this doesn’t apply to the US Senate where each state elects two Senators via statewide vote and both represent the interests of the entire state as they see fit even if they’re in different parties.

23

Thanks for your answers. But as a result, I still don’t understand why incumbents are so regularily elected again. There’s no particular reason to expect that voters in a particular district will choose to vote again and over again for the same person. People should have issues with the party he’s running for depending on the political climate, or be dissapointed by his votes in the house, or someone new in the field should seem more attractive, or they just could be fed up with him after 12+ years representing them, etc…
The only two explanations I got were

-about the difference with a parliamentary system. But though it’s true that in such a system, people tend to often vote for a party rather than for an individual, so they will give the boot to their PM if they’re unhappy with the government’s policies, still part of them will chose locally on the basis of the appeal a specific individual has.

Also, how comes american people would not associate the current policies of the administration with the representants? After all, they are the ones who accept or reject the president’s proposals. If people are fed up with Bush, for instance, why wouldn’t they want to oust too the representants who supported his policies rather than elect them again?

Finally, logically, a system with local primaries should offer more choices (while in a parliamentary system, you’ll get the candidate chosen by the party, and no alternative choice. So, if you’re a leftist, your choice will be limited). So, once again, how comes that the incumbent is so often chosen again to run for his party? Logically, these primaries should result in more incumbents not being reelected than in european countries, not less, since electors have more choices open.

-The second argument was refering to “seniority rules”. Unfortunately, I’ve no clue about what these rules could be. So, what advantages gets a longstanding representant over a newly elected one? Are these advantages regulated by law or somesuch, or are they just a practical result of him being better known, having more connections, etc…?

Finally, are the 98% figure quoted in a previous post accurate? Though I’ve heard about this issue, I never suspected the reelection rate could be so high (I would have expected, say 75-80% at most) . It sounds “soviet-like” enough to be rather incredible. And if it’s accurate, I must honestly say I would be extremely warry about a system where elected representants keep their job esssentially forever (people merely retiring or leaving politics should make for more than 2%). Really, it appears extremely weird to me.

24

To come back to the OP, by the way, an issue with a proportionnal system is that you must vote for a party, and can’t vote for a particular individual (though the person leading the list, acting as a figurehead, might have an important influence in the elector’s choice. Still, in this case, they want one person to be elected, but in the process actually vote for several other individuals they might not know or not care about.

25

Actually, clair, “party-list” voting, where you vote for a party and not for any individual, is not only form of proportional representation (or “full representation,”) as it is sometimes called. There are other forms, some of which can be used in nonpartisan races (in the U.S., most municipal elections are nonpartisan), and some forms which can be used in a partisan election but where the voter still has the option of endorsing an independent, nonpartisan candidate.

From the CV&D website (www.fairvote.org):

1. Choice voting:

2. Cumulative voting:

3. Limited voting:

Now, this thread is about PR elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, and the form usually suggested for that is the multi-member district system. In essence, instead of each district electing one representative, a number of districts – say, ten – are merged into one big district electing a ten-member delegation. The members of the delegation are (in most such proposals) are elected by choice voting or single-transferable voting (see #1 above). Note that this is a form in which the voters do vote for individual candidates, and in principle a candidate could be on the ballot without being the nominee of any political party. Note also that this retains the linkage between a representative and a given geographical area. In a “party-list” system, such as they use in Ireland or Israel, all the candidates are “national” candidates, chosen for their national political prominence or their prominence or seniority within their party, and do not represent any particular “district” or “constituency”. In a country as large as the United States, some form of geographical representation is essential (the more so as nobody really wants to give up the “pork-barrel” system in which a district’s congressman uses his or her influence to get federal money spent in that district). In The Next American Nation (Free Press, 1995), Michael Lind proposed a system in which the House of Representatives would be elected by multi-member district PR, and the Senate would be elected by party-list PR – in other words, senators would no longer represent states at all, they would represent parties. I think this deserves serious consideration.

Another way to get proportional representation, while still preserving geographical representation, is the **mixed-member ** system. They use this in Germany and New Zealand. Essentially, two sets of legislators are elected: A certain number, say, half, are elected from single-member districts, and the rest by party-list PR. But they all sit in the same house as equal members.

26

It works like this, clair. Voter demographics are very well known – down to the precinct, one can find out how many registered Republicans and how many registered Democrats live there. Every ten years we have a national census, and following the census, the districts for electing the House of Representatives are reapportioned to reflect shifts in population. But the reapportionment process is controlled by each state’s legislature. (This is meaningless, of course, in states such as Vermont or Alaska, whose populationis so small that they only get to elect one statewide representative._ That means that whichever party happens to control the legislature at that time, gets to dominate the reapportionment process, and they typically do so by “gerrymandering,” by drawing the district lines so as to maximize their own party’s chances and minimize the other party’s. They do this in two ways:

  1. Fragmentation: If party A is in power, and they see a clustering of party B voters at a given area on the map, they will draw the lines right through that cluster, breaking up the party B voters so that all of them find themselves in a district where party A has a majority. This produces “safe-seat” districts for party A.

  2. Clustering: Where fragmentation is not possible, party A will try to concentrate all the party B voters into their own all-B districts – leaving all the adjoining districts as all-A districts. This also produces “safe seats” – for both parties, but party A gets more safe seats than party B.

Both approaches tend to eliminate “competitive” or “swing” districts, where roughly half the voters support each party, in which either party might have a real chance of electing a representative in any given year.

The results (from the CV&D website, www.fairvote.org):

Now, as for incumbency . . . what you have to remember is that in the U.S. we have very limited public financing for elections, getting on television is essential if you want to win and TV time costs money, and in consequence running for public office is very expensive. Furthermore, in most races the parties, as organizations, do not help out with campaign financing; each candidate is personally responsible for the fundraising, and each runs as an “individual entrepeneur” whose party label might be a matter of mere convenience. This means that a candidate must win what is called a “wealth primary” to even begin to be seriously considered as a contender: The candidate, unless he or she is independently wealthy enough to fund a campaign out-of-pocket, must have an array of donors and potential donors ready to put up the money. And incumbents have an enormous advantage here. Nobody wants to spend money electing a loser, so the incumbents are first in line to get the donations. A challenger to an established representative, even one of the same party, will have a hard time even scraping up enough money to run a serious campaign for the party primary.

(Actually it’s not quite true that nobody wants to spend money on a loser – in fact, in some races, corporations will give money to both sides so that whoever wins will owe them a favor – but what I said above is broadly true.)

27

I’ve started another GD thread: “Instant-runoff voting: avoiding the third-party “spoiler” problem” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=261969 IRV is not the same thing as PR. PR is used to elect multimember policymaking bodies. IRV is used to avoid the “spoiler” problem when you’re having an election to fill just one office, such as president or governor or mayor. In an IRV election, if there are more than two candidates running for the post, instead of picking just one, you the voter get to rank-order your choices by preference. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the least first-choice votes is elminated; the votes are retallied – if your first-choice vote was for the eliminated candidate, your second-choice vote now is counted towards your second-choice candidate; and the process is repeated until a majority winner emerges.

E.g., in 2000, Nader was accused of being a “spoiler” and helping Bush get elected by "“splitting the opposition.” If we had had an IRV system in place then, a Nader supporter could have voted as follows:

1st choice: Nader (Green)
2nd choice: Gore (Democrat)
3rd choice: Browne (Libertarian)
4th choice: Bush (Republican)
5th choice: Buchanan (Reform)

(At least, that’s how I would have voted.) Since most Nader supporters probably would have picked Gore as their second choice, Gore probably would have won. If not, at least nobody could have blamed Nader for that. In fact, Nader’s campaign would have increased Gore’s vote total, by turning out voters who otherwise might not have gone to the polls at all.

There is also a simplified version of IRV called “approval voting” – instead of rank-ordering your choices, you simply check the names you find acceptable and leave the rest blank. Less sophisticated result, but easier to tally the ballots. When I say “less sophisticated,” I mean that with IRV, the losing candidates can look at their place in the preference-ranking to precisely gauge their level of public support – e.g., Nader could point to the fact that he got more first-choice votes than Browne or Buchanan (if, in fact, he did).

Note that IRV also could be used to elect members of multimember policymaking bodies. E.g., we could retain the current single-member-district system for election the H of R, but we could replace the current plurality system (whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, even if that’s less than 50%) with IRV. Third parties would have at least a chance to contest House seats – without being spoilers.

Note also that the IRV system does not require the use of any party labels and can be used for nonpartisan elections.

One thing I’ve noticed so far: On this thread, some posters have raised objections to PR on principle – the principle, I guess, that losing is losing and if your party can’t muster enough votes to win representation in a single-member-district plurality system, it’s just a fringe group anyway. (I’ve already responded to that as best I can.) But in the IRV thread, nobody has objected on principle. One poster objected that IRV might be too confusing for the voters, and another mentioned the “Arrow paradox” – i.e., political scientists have proven that no voting scheme, however sophisticated, can perfectly translate the voters’ preferences into reality. But nobody has called the idea unfair, or disruptive, or in any way a fundamentally bad idea. I attribute this difference in reactions to two factors:

  1. IRV is much simpler and easier to understand than PR.

  2. IRV is much less likely than PR to upset the status quo, and if it does upset it, the process will take a long time. If we had had IRV in 2000, I’m sure Nader still would not have won. Minor parties have a better chance under IRV, and a new incentive to organize, but they still would remain mostly shut out of government for some time to come.

My thinking is, if these movements go anywhere, we will have IRV (or AV) before we have PR. That is, if we adopt the far less controversial reform of IRV, and a few third-party candidates do get elected to a few offices, they will be in a position to call for further reforms, including PR. Which will at least spread the word about the idea, which is more important than anything else. As I’ve said before, the main obstacle to PR in the United States is not that the people are against it but that most people have never heard of it, and explaining takes more words than you can fit on a bumper sticker.

28

I believe that figure only includes incumbents running for re-election. So incumbents that retire aren’t included. Very few incumbents running for reelection are defeated.

29

clair, I’m curious. How does everything we’re discussing – much of which apparently surprises you – compare to the political scene in France? For instance, I know France has several major political parties (for historical reasons) but I don’t think it has proportional representation – does it? Also, how much turnover is there in the seats in the National Assembly? Is incumbency less of a factor there than it is in the United States? Is district gerrymandering a factor? And how does campaign financing work in France? Does the state contribute to candidates’ campaigns? Do their parties?

30

Here’s an advantage to PR I haven’t heard anyone on this thread mention yet: Stability.

That might sound counterintuitive – won’t PR lead to the two big parties breaking up, new ones forming, shifting alliances, massive political instability and unpredictability?

Yes, in the short term. But consider: Each political grouping has a limited “target market,” a limited number of voters who sympathize with it and might be persuaded to support it. After a few years under PR, each party will have achieved total “market saturation,” recruited pretty much all of its potential support base. And after that point, there will be no more “electoral revolutions” --change will be slow and incremental. Elections will be a matter of a given party gaining or losing just a few percentage points of support. In each party, there will be a solid core of committed supporters, and a fringe of not-so-commited supporters who might go one way or another – e.g., if there is a large Libertarian Party, distinct from a purely business-oriented Republican Party, then there will be a few “swing voters” between them who might, in any given election, go Libertarian or Republican – but never, ever, Green or Socialist.

By contrast, in our present system the only “swing voters” are those hovering about the country’s ideological center-of-gravity. And they have influence far out of proportion to their numbers – which leads to instability. In 1994 we had an electoral “revolution,” putting Republicans in control of both houses of Congress --even though the aggregate national Republican vote exceeded the Democratic vote by less than one-half of one percent. That makes the balance of power unstable and unpredictable.

31

If you’re interested in this thread, you might want to check out another thread I just started: “Yet another electoral-system reform: “ballot fusion,” or “cross-endorsement”” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=262650

“Fusion” means running one candidate as the nominee of more than one party. Simple idea, but you might be surprised to learn that this is illegal in most American states, and has been since the 1890s, when the practice was banned for the express (and successful) purpose of smothering the third parties that existed at the time.

32

Here’s another thought: Some people are leery of PR because they look at the experience of Israel and Italy, where the multiplicity of parties always makes it necessary, and difficult, to form a stable “coalition government.”

But the “coalition governments” problem only arises in countries that have a parliamentary system, where the legislators must put together a majority to “form a government.” We don’t have that, we have a separation-of-powers system where the president or governor is elected separately and makes his or her own cabinet appointments.

If we had a multiparty political system, I expect legislative “coalitions” would form, but they would be momentary and issue-specific.

E.g., suppose a scenario where the parties represented in Congress are the following:

1. Republican Party – a remnant left after the religious-social conservatives, the libertarians, and the nativistist-isolationist-populists all split off and go their own way. This party would be more purely (and more obviously) the party of established business interests and of agressive foreign-policy neoconservatism. Pro-choice on abortion.

2. America First Party – Pat Buchanan’s new party. It already exists, but if we moved to PR it might find itself augmented by a mass exodus from the Republican Party. Nativist-isolationist-populist, with a solid base in working-class religious people, especially Roman Catholics like Buchanan himself. Socially conservative, against immigration, but also hostile to big business, economic globalization, NAFTA, WTO, and American military adventures abroad. Hostile to the Iraq War, hostile to American support of Israel.

3. Constitution Party – the party of the Religious Right. Already exists, might get bigger. Rooted in Southern Evangelical Protestantism. Agenda would be as it is now – ban abortion, revive school prayer, support vouchers and home schooling, etc. Also would be supportive, for religious reasons, of American support of Israel and military intervention in the Middle East.

4. Libertarian Party – again, still exists, would get bigger. Different from the Republican Party in being pro-market, not pro-business – would deregulate businesses, but also would refuse to bail out foundering corporations or award sweetheart porkbarrel contracts. Also hostile to the national-security state, the military-industrial complex, and foreign military adventuring.

5. Democratic Party – again, a remnant, after several groupings now under the Dem “big tent” go their own way. This party would represent “neoliberalism,” economic globalization, the politics of Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. Socially liberal but inclined to ally with the Republicans on business-related issues.

6. Labor Party – a party rooted in working-class people who are more liberal than the America Firsters, but still pretty socially conservative. Centered on the labor unions and devoted to fighting for working-class interests. Would be pro-choice on abortion but with reservations.

7. Green Party – environmentalist, tinged with a concern for “social justice” that differs from most models of socialism in being highly decentralist.

8. Progressive Party – a party for all the real “leftists” in American politics, other than the Greens – communists, socialists, social democrats, radical feminists. Similar to the Labor Party, but different in being more socially liberal. Similar to the Greens, but different in being open to national-level government solutions to problems, and in emphasizing social equality over environmental protection.

9. Independence Party – again, already exists – this and the America First Party are one of two groups that emerged when the Reform Party split. This is the party of John Anderson – and Jesse Ventura, in Minnesota. As with some others, might get bigger if we adopted IRV and PR. It would be “Progressive” in the older, early-20th-century sense of the term – devoted to good government, honest, transparent, vigorous and effective government, but also fiscal responsibility with no deficit spending. Devoted to a technocratic, professional vision of government that purports to transcend ideology, class interests and partisanship – an old Progressive slogan was, “There is no Democratic or Republican way to pave a street.” Would agree with the Libertarians on most social issues.

Now, if we had all these parties in Congress, they might align in different ways on different issues.

E.g., if you introduce legislation to drastically pare down America’s defense spending, the Progressives, the Greens, the Libertarians, and the America First Party all would support it. The Republicans and the Constitution Party would be against it. The Democrats, the Independence Party and the Labor Party might be split.

If you introduced a bill to recognize gay marriage, the Greens, Progressives, Independence Party and Libertarians would be for it. The Constitution Party and the America Firsters would be against it. The Democrats, Republicans, and Labor Party might be split and might push for a compromise solution like “civil unions.”

If you proposed legalizing marijuana, the Republicans might be open to the idea (as presenting new opportunities for the tobacco industry to branch into a new product). The Progressives would require only that the new marijuana industry be properly regulated and taxed. Libertarians, Greens and Independence would support it. The America First and Constitution parties would be against it. Labor might be split.

If you introduced some strict new environmental-protection legislation, the Greens and Progressives would be for it, the Libertarians and the Republicans would be against it, and everybody else would want to carefully study each element of the proposal before making up their minds. E.g., Labor would be environmentalist in principle but they wouldn’t want to do anything that might eliminate jobs.

And so on.

In each case, nothing actually gets done unless a given proposal can muster support from enough different groupings to make up a voting majority.

And if there’s “logrolling” – e.g., the Libertarians agreeing to support Republican proposal X only if the Republicans support decriminalizing pot – what’s wrong with that? We’ve got logrolling now. This change just adds more logs.

While all this is going on, we still have only one president in the White House – a president who probably won on a “fusion” ticket, being the acceptable choice of several different parties who have agreed more or less to work together, at least for this election cycle. Sometimes the president would be a joint choice of the Democrats and Republicans, and would solidly favor globalization and business interests. Sometimes he might be a Labor-America First nominee and always support the interests of the working class. Sometimes he might be an America First-Constitution choice and fight for social conservatism. Or a Green-Progressive-Labor president who would be socially liberal and fight for the working class and environmental protection. But, at any rate, only one president at a time, steering the ship of state in one direction – which direction would be a vector sum, just like now, but involving more vectors than are in play now.

33

With today’s telecom technology, I don’t see any problem in having a 8,000 member House of Representitives. Limit them to one staffer and have em meet two times a year in a stadium.

While they’re at it, go back to having each State’s Governors appoint Senators. I guarantee it would be the last time we hear anything about this campaign-finance broo-ha-ha.

34

Actually, John, before the 17th Amendment, U.S. senators were appointed by their states’ legislatures, not their governors. We’ve had threads discussing the merits of going back to that system. For my part, I think it would be better to (1) elect the Senate by a national party-list form of proportional representation, completely severing the link between senators and states, or better still, (2) abolish the Senate entirely and devolve all its powers and functions onto the House of Representatives. A unicameral legislature has several advantages over a bicameral one. One advantage is “transparency” – under the present system the House can make itself look righteous by passing bills it doesn’t really want, knowing the Senate will vote them down; I’d like to get rid of that. Another is that the legislative branch originally was divided to weaken it, to make it more difficult for it to take action, for fear the leg branch would abuse its powers. But this fear appears to have been ill-conceived. Since the Constitution was ratified, most abuses of power and encroachments on civil liberties and the rule of law have come from the executive branch, not the legislative. Collapsing the legislative branch into one house would make it more vigorous and responsive, and stronger as against the executive branch. Many Libertarians and other govenrment minimalists are leery of anything which would make it easier for Congress to enact laws – but bear in mind that whatever makes it harder for Congress to enact legislation also makes it harder to Congress to repeal legislation. A one-house Congress might make more mistakes, but it could correct them more easily.

As for the idea of an 8,000 member house – I think that’s going too far. No legisative body in the world has ever been that big. Too unwieldy. Let’s have a one-thousand member House – nice, round number – and divide the country into 100 equal-population districts each electing a ten-member delegation by the single-transferable-vote form of PR. That provides representation of minor parties and viewpoints while still preserving the principle of geographical representation – essential in a country as large and geographically diverse as this one.