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Category: proportional representation

Posts related to proportional representation (PR), mostly in the United States.

Report: “Understanding How Proportional Representation Might Work in New York City”

John Ketcham and I have a new report out today with the Manhattan Institute. In it, we show that the effective number of electoral parties at the last New York City council election was 3.3. We defend this computation by reference to the seat-product model. Then we simulate two forms of proportional representation: open-list at the borough level, mixed-member PR with a citywide compensation tier of 20 seats.

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Trojan Horse or distraction?

At the Election Law Blog, Rick Pildes describes two rationales for adopting proportional representation (PR) nationally. One of these is anti-gerrymandering. He describes the other as the effort to induce a system of 5-6 political parties. On both, he writes:

There’s another issue to flag about the relationship between these two versions of PR in the rhetoric around reform. I’m concerned that advocates for the second version of PR will draw on the intuitions behind the first version of PR to gain support for the second version. In other words, support for the first version of PR will become a Trojan Horse for the second version.

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Descriptive racial representation and anti-gerrymandering at once

This post follows up on my earlier advice to consider minority-party representation (MPR) as an anti-gerrymandering measure. Its basics are described here and reproduced at the bottom of the post.

This week’s news has been about the potential for new Republican district maps to reduce the number of Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives. MPR can be designed to address that problem too.

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Teaching comparative electoral systems with a U.S. example

Would you like a more engaging way to teach students about electoral systems? The answer might be “yes” if you’ve been doing it with lecture slides. Compensation seats? Here’s a table of results from New Zealand. D’Hondt versus Sainte-Laguë divisors? Here’s the Belgian Parliament with either.

What if the lesson used an example students cared about? What if it were interactive?

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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.

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