Matthew Shugart has a summary of our contribution, which asks how proportional representation might be made to work for U.S. national elections. Michael Latner is the other co-author. It was an honor to contribute to the essay and to the larger collection, which is excellent.

Our piece also tries to take representation seriously. Those thoughts relate to our ongoing project on U.S. descriptive representation in comparative perspective.

Democrats are fundamentally disadvantaged when it comes to winning U.S. House majorities. This is because their votes concentrate in population-dense areas. Independent redistricting cannot fix this. On all this, read Rodden (2019) and McGann, Smith, Latner, and Keena (2016).

Depending on the outcome of Georgia’s two Senate runoffs, Democrats may be in a unique position to fix their “geography problem.” Unified government would make it possible to adopt a modest form of proportional representation.

If Democrats do not do this, they are likely to lose the House again in 2022. That will mean a return to gridlock — and all that it entails for Democrats’ brand.

Here is one plan going forward:

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