by Jack Santucci
Posts related to proportional representation (PR), mostly in the United States.
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.
Read more…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?
Read more…I have a new report with Kevin Kosar and Jaehun Lee, jointly published by the American Enterprise Institute and Manhattan Institute:
Read more…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.
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…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.