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Category: Politics

All posts related to politics.

More ‘pure’ independents than we thought?

I have a new paper (open access) with Josh Dyck in Public Opinion Quarterly:

How should we measure “pure” or “true” independents? For years, the respective item required a respondent to volunteer that answer. Recent surveys have moved toward presenting it explicitly. Those that do produce estimates of pure independents that are much larger than in past surveys. We present evidence of this phenomenon across multiple surveys and ask: Are self-administered surveys overcounting independents, or are traditional live-interviewer surveys undercounting independents? We answer that question by comparing live-interview and self-administered samples from the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies, by undertaking tests to rule out mode effects (including an experiment), and by seeing which question wording correlates more strongly with measures of latent ideology, vote choice, and ratings of the parties. Our findings suggest that surveys that include an explicit response option, allowing Americans to self-identify easily as “(pure) independent,” offer a more precise measurement of the concept of party identification. This has implications for the study of independents, as well as for discussions about polarization and party-system dealignment.

Coalition formation in Portland’s first STV election

I have a new report with Kevin Kosar and Jaehun Lee, jointly published by the American Enterprise Institute and Manhattan Institute:

Portland, Oregon, first used its new proportional ranked-choice voting electoral system to elect city council members in November 2024.

A variety of groups endorsed candidates in this nonpartisan election.

Analyses of these groups’ endorsements point to the emergence of four political blocs: national progressivism, pro-business pragmatism, local progressivism, and laborism.

It is not yet clear what style of politics will emerge in future elections. Possibilities include local multi-partism, local bi-partism based on coalition parties, and continued fluidity, including within the blocs themselves.

Portland’s urban politics may prove unstable and feature shifting alliances among these groups in the run-up to subsequent elections.

Read more…

Minority-party representation (MPR) to fix gerrymandering

We recommended open-list proportional representation (OLPR) in the 2023 APSA report because we reasoned that MMP was not viable. MMP stands for “mixed-member PR,” a form of proportional representation that includes single-seat districts (SSD). Here is the rationale behind our recommendation, some potential objections to that advice, and a way to resuscitate something like MMP. I will call it minority-party representation (MPR).

Read more…

List PR to fix cumulative voting

Cumulative voting is an electoral system in which the voter can give more than one vote to one person. Its purpose is to prevent a district’s largest faction from winning every seat. When parties enter this picture, they face three related problems. One is to decide how many candidates to run. Another is to decide which people these will be. The third is to get voters to mark the general-election ballot in a way that gets the slate elected.

Yesterday, I discovered a paper in which two political scientists propose a way to relieve parties of all three tasks: make a vote for a candidate also count for the party slate, allocate seats to parties in proportion to their vote shares, and give those seats to the candidates with the most votes in each party. This is known in the literature as free-list proportional representation (FLPR).

Cumulative voting famously was used to elect the Illinois lower chamber in three-seat districts, 1870-1980. The context for the above reform proposal seems to have been increasing party factionalism. Saywer and MacRae (1962) refer to party committees’ increasing difficulty in deciding how many candidates to run and who they should be. FLPR would have obviated these dilemmas. Sawyer and MacRae also note that it might have obviated primaries as well.

I also found a paper that mentions a potential majority reversal due to voters’ ballot markings at some point in the 1950s. This paper also notes a gripe that the minority party sometimes had a larger share of seats than its apparent share of votes. I say “apparent” because it is not straightforward to compute a party’s vote share with a multiple-vote rule. FLPR might have helped with these issues too, although the small district magnitude of three would have made it hard to get fine-grained proportionality.

On New York City’s unique “top-two” elections proposal

Last week, I wrote an article for City Journal on the proposed “top-two” system of mayoral elections in New York City. Here is how it opens: “As a political scientist, I don’t love the proposal, but it could work—if parties retain control of which candidates use their labels.”

I also spoke with NY1 on Friday afternoon. The bottom line in that conversation was that this proposal is not for an “open primary” as typically understood.

This is a complex issue. As such, it is hard to evaluate separately from what one expects or wants to see in November’s mayoral election.