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Tag: Bucklin voting

The election that killed interest in majoritarian ranked voting?

Tyler Cowan’s piece on RCV for Bloomberg is making the rounds this weekend. It elides some taxonomic differences, but I’ll assume most people mean the laissez-faire version now promoted for single-seat elections. The gist of Cowan’s piece is that candidates, in pursuit of voters’ lower rankings, will “moderate their positions and their behavior.”

Below are some excerpts from a 1922 article in the National Municipal Review (NMR). They illustrate a form of coordination failure about which I wrote earlier this week — voters not ranking choices because elites didn’t urge them to, leading to an unexpected winner without a final-round majority.

I just discovered the article, which appears to be a popular-consumption version of points made in the APSR (Maxey 1922). The APSR version describes “the Cleveland election” as one that “will likely go down in history as one of the most notable in American annals” — possibly because it coincided with adoption of a city charter based on single transferable vote, but also because the coordination failure below seems to have helped end advocacy of nonpartisan, single-seat reforms based on ordinal ballots. My guess is that the NMR published its version to signal to readers that the associated League’s priorities had changed.

I do not recommend structuring a paragraph as the one that follows, unless the goal is to hide something from all but attentive readers.

The Republican organization decided to back the incumbent, Mr. FitzGerald; the Democratic organization backed E. B. Haserodt; and Kohler with four others stood as independents. The Cleveland charter with nominations by petition and the preferential ballot was intended to favor the independent candidate, but no candidate without the support of one or the other of the party machines had ever been elected. With the field divided among seven candidates, it looked like a sure thing for one organization or the other. Two things, however, were overlooked in this reckoning: (1) that the people of Cleveland were disgusted with machine politics, and (2) the unique campaign conducted by Mr. Kohler. Mr. Kohler absolutely refused throughout the campaign to make a speech or public address; he announced no program or platform; he did not deny past misconduct or seek to extenuate it; he simply insisted that his record for efficiency and integrity was above reproach, adorned himself with his Rooseveltian decoration, and promised to give Cleveland “the best administration it has ever had.” To get into contact with the voters he used a method that was completely baffling to the opposition. Having developed unusual powers as a pedestrian during the years that he served on the police force as a patrolman, Kohler undertook to make a house-to-house canvass of the city. Exactly how many homes he visited in his solicitation of votes is known only to Kohler himself, but it is certain that he managed to get over practically all of the ground that he deemed important. This type of campaign was especially disconcerting to the other candidates because they had no means of measuring its success, and the inroads he was making upon their strength were not apparent until straw votes near the end of the campaign showed unmistakably that it was a case of Kohler against the field. The election returns showed Kohler leading from the start, and although he did not secure the majority of first choice votes, nor the majority of first and second choice votes necessary to election under the “Mary Ann” ballot, neither did any other candidate. Then under the charter it was necessary to count all choices, and Kohler was found to have a clear plurality of all-choice votes, and was therefore elected.

It should be noted that the electoral system above appears to be based on Bucklin allocation (adding votes), not Hare (transferring them).

Please cite this chapter if you find the above useful in your own research.

Some key points from “More Parties or No Parties”

Photo by Phil Howe. Book available for purchase and in Oxford Scholarship Online.

The space of politics is multidimensional. What we call “left” and “right” are negotiated positions.

Interest groups (broadly understood) do the negotiating. They are assumed to want control of government. They form coalitions to get it.

Every democracy has some coalition structure, even if it does not track party division.

‘Shifting coalitions’ lead to electoral reform: incumbent groups seeking insulation, out-of-power groups seeking realignment, or opposing groups seeking to discipline noncommittal players (a polarizing mode).

Electoral reform is change in any of five electoral-system components: assembly size, district magnitude, ballot type, allocation rules, and rules about nominations.

Two-party politics makes it tempting to cater to factions, not parties, when proposing and designing reforms. Witness the current emphasis on ballot type and nominations (ranked-choice, approval voting, nonpartisan primaries). Witness the unpopularity (outside political science) of allocation rules that presume party grouping (such as party-list proportional representation, including mixed-member).

In the past, reformers promoted single transferable vote (STV) and ranking generally in order to cater to factions, not parties.

In other countries, multiparty politics facilitates use of ranked-choice: giving voters understandable entities to rank, instructing voters on how to rank (vote management), regulating candidate entry (vote management), and generating political will to administer a complex system.

In the United States, ranked-choice reforms tended to last as long as the coalitions that imposed them.

Vote management was imperfect and slow to emerge. It usually involved a bipartisan coalition that sold itself in “good government” terms.

Due to vote management, STV produces winners who usually would be the same under open-list proportional representation (OLPR).

An exception is when the coalition structure shifts, such that some voters do not rank candidates in the way that party (or interest-group) leaders might want. Said voters are part of a coalition structure that is different from the prevailing one.

If the alternative coalition deprives “left” and “right” of control of government, they may join in blaming the electoral system. This can lead to a polarizing repeal episode.

Reasons for abandonment of majoritarian ranked-ballot rules are not yet well-understood. One theme in the literature is ranking truncation. Another is the production of surprise results. These may have reinforced each other: many voters not ranking very many choices, determined candidates capitalizing on this.

The repeal of early ranked-choice systems left in place features that had been needed to pass ranked-choice. These include nonpartisan ballots, numbered-post elections, and single-digit assemblies.

This post also appeared at on Medium.

Does the Alternative Vote lead to STV?

I don’t think so. The logics of adoption are different. Yet the story of Cleveland (just below) suggests that it is possible… while rare.

AV finds favor where the majority can’t agree on the candidate it wants — but can agree on the one it doesn’t. AV is an agreement to passively form coalitions in elections. I say “passively” because the vote-transfer process does the work, likely with help from elite cues.

STV finds favor where the coalition is to be worked out actively, in a legislature. STV also preserves freedom to break the coalition between elections.

Read more…