An out-of-sample test of the ‘shifting coalitions’ view of electoral reform

Portland (OR) journalist Maja Harris has an interesting post about the surfeit of candidates running in the city’s first STV elections. Does the experience so far reflect the perspective I built to understand Progressive Era adoptions of the same?

This is not just an exercise in seeing if I was “right.” One objection I come across is that the experiences of cities in the 1910s-40s tell us little about the present. Another, which is more a reflection of current methodological tastes, is that we don’t have enough “sample size” to comfortably make predictions about how these reforms will work. I am not so sure. I think theory, with knowledge of other countries, provides a decent guide to what might happen.

Let’s start with some propositions. I began by positing three basic types of electoral reform, based on the nature of the reform coalition: one to insulate an incumbent coalition, one to realign a party system, and one to polarize a party system that no longer consistently benefits either of its poles between elections.

From there I speculated that realigning reforms could get “messy” in the sense of lacking post-reform institutions to produce electoral and legislative coordination.

Portland seems to find itself in a “messy” post-reform environment. The ratio of candidates to contested seats is in the neighborhood of seven. The most egregious case I studied had a ratio closer to 16. Here is one of my three pictures of such situations:

Source: Santucci (2022: 196).

Harris’ blog is very much worth reading, which brings me to my second point about “messy” transitions. Where are what local reformers (and the blog) have been calling “slates”? More precisely, where are the pre-election coalitions whose jobs are to:

– solve voters’ information problem,

– limit the number of candidates,

– and organize city council when it eventually meets?

As far as I can tell from the blog, those who might want slates have been trying to do in Portland what was done in Cleveland, 1929: endorse candidates from the set of persons who had declared their candidacies anyway.

That is probably enough for now, except to conclude with this: we can make rough predictions by taking into account the way in which a reform was adopted.

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