Skip to content

Tag: New York City

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.

Read more…

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?

Read more…

Potential collision of “voter choice” and “majority rule”

Tomorrow is the in-person primary election in New York City. Polls variously expect Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani to win the Democratic mayoral nomination. In the background, the city’s charter commission is considering an overhaul of the mayoral electoral system. TLDR: one proposal would mandate two-candidate general elections.

We will see what happens in the primary. I wrote about the situation here.

For me, this episode underscores a tension in the world of electoral reform. On the one hand, many of these devices promise “majority rule.” On the other, they promise to make it easier to run for office without expectation of majority support. Some are drawn by the former idea, others by the latter.

If you are looking for a term to describe the form of RCV that the situation might bring forth, one option is “bottoms-up.” I wrote about it in this 2021 journal article.

What happened to Prof. Joseph Kitchin?

Students in one of my courses this semester will be listening to a 1947 WNYC radio broadcast on the repeal of the single transferable vote (STV) in New York City. I need to look back at the associated assignment, but part of it asks them to think about the sorts of arguments used in such campaigns.

The broadcast features a debate between George Hallett of the National Municipal League and state senator Abraham Kaplan (D), incidentally defeated on transfers for a city council seat in one of the final STV elections (possibly 1945).

Moderating the debate is Joseph Kitchin, listed by WNYC as a Professor of Political Science at Queens College. WNYC also refers to him as “Kitchen,” but this college bulletin (1947-8) refers to him as “Kitchin” instead and of Assistant Professor rank with a UMich Ph.D.

Does anyone know what came of Kitchin? I searched Google Scholar for him about a year ago, and I don’t recall much coming up. (Going back reveals a 1942 publication in international relations, possibly his dissertation.) I also looked for records of him during my stint at QC, and the archivist could find nothing — maybe because we were looking for “Kitchen” instead.