nonpartisan elections

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.

FPTP is not an “antiquated voting system”

When seeking to persuade people to go along with an electoral reform, it is common to suggest that first-past-the-post is old. Common variations on this theme include “antiquated voting system” and “18th-century voting technology.” This trope is anachronistic.

Single-seat districts with plurality allocation and a single round in which each party nominates one candidate (i.e., FPTP) is relatively new. So is proportional representation (PR) based on party lists.

What was old in the countries these replaced is some combination of the following: multi-seat districts (including in Britain), two-round runoff elections, and virtually no party control of nominations. Some cases even had voice voting, as I learned this week. The single transferable vote (STV), which we hear is new technology, reflects the old order.

Scholars have been converging on a theory of electoral reform that runs roughly as follows: nomination control is the way to contain ‘populism,’ and this can be mixed with PR, plurality, or runoff.

This point starts to emerge from a 2010 article in Comparative Political Studies by Amel Ahmed, later expanded into a book. The point is that both PR and “single-member plurality (SMP)” — note the terminological difference from FPTP — were responses to a perceived threat of mass (socialist) mobilization in the late 19th century. Belgium turned to PR, and the United Kingdom went with SMP. Later work extends this explanation to other continental democracies. It also starts to emphasize the role of list PR in boosting control of nominations, had any existed at all. As for Britain, Ahmed documents a range of other practices (like gerrymandering) that came with SMP, all meant to contain what would become the Labour Party. Later work suggests that incumbents did not need control of nominations because it already had existed since the 1830s.

A 2×2 table may help with the jargon I am starting to introduce. It is oversimplified but helps to make my point.

Seat allocation → Nomination control ↓	Proportional	Not proportional
Low	STV	SMP*
High	List PR	FPTP

*I am using “SMP” to keep things simple. It may make sense to use “SSD” (single-seat district) instead.

How might we think about the United States? Congress first mandated single-seat districts in 1842. That law is now seen as a way to prevent Jacksonian Democrats from maximizing seat share by switching to the ‘general ticket’ (multi-seat districts) in states under their control. Note that this did not enhance control of nominations. That possibility would not exist until introduction of the secret ballot. Thus it was not FPTP, and the major parties have remained ‘big tent’ (i.e., hospitable to ‘populism’).

STV enters the conversation in the 1850s as a way to “protect minorities” in multi-seat districts, along with cumulative voting and other non-list approaches to holding down majority seat share. Its popularity is mostly limited to the United Kingdom and its colonies. I have toyed with the idea that this popularity was due to a pre-existing tradition of party government, with associated levers of nomination control. STV might have ‘protected minorities’ without resort to SMP, at the same time rolling back control of nominations. That never happened.

FPTP and list PR are thus ‘new technology,’ whereas STV and nonpartisan runoffs are old.

Since this post is getting long, I will set aside Australia, except to note three things about STV: (1) its single-seat cousin (‘RCV’) came with compulsory ranking, (2) continued mass mobilization led to the addition of compulsory voting, and (3) STV came much later to the Senate for reasons other than a need to contain ‘populism.’

Legislative implications of current anti-party reforms

Following up on yesterday’s post, here is a brief statement of the legislative reason for the repeal of the single transferable vote in US history. I have no reason think it would not apply to instant runoff as well. Both are fundamentally STV, and both are being promoted as a way to break up parties.

I have written elsewhere that STV opened the possibility of ‘vote leakage.’ Leakage usually refers to votes cast for one party but that help a different one win seats, via the transfer process.

Connecting this phenomenon to STV repeal required tracking leakage between coalitions, not among parties. New York City illustrates the logic. There, votes were expected to leak among a series of anti-Tammany parties.

Apportionment diagram of New York City’s first STV-elected council, November 1937. Source: LSE USAPP, December 2016.

In other cases, local parties were formed to keep votes away from the rumps of parties displaced by the reforms. This was a direct response to problems organizing STV-elected legislatures.

Slate mailer from Worcester, Mass., early 1950s. Source: author’s archival research.

It didn’t work in the long run. Below is my go-to image for introducing people to the problem. It gives the percentage of roll-call votes in each legislative term on which some portion of said local party (Citizens’ Plan E Association or CEA in this case) teamed up with the opposition and thus defeated its own party’s position. This is known as a majority roll when we focus on the majority coalition, which the figure does. The link between the roll rate and STV repeal is clear. Chapter 7 here gives a detailed account of this and other such episodes, linking them to vote leakage as well.

Source: chapter 7 of *More Parties or No Parties*.

Here’s why this is an issue for advocates. Let’s say the point of current reforms is to bring Republican moderates into coalition with Democrats. That would be analogous to the reason for the CEA above. What the graph shows is the reform failing to bind that coalition. It shows the reform eventually doing the opposite of what it was supposed to do.

This is one reason why I recommended party-list systems and maybe ‘fusion voting’ instead of STV and its derivatives. (Others have been equity and ease of implementation.)