strategic coordination

List PR to fix cumulative voting

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.

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.

Coordination failure

Here is a simple explanation of what I mean by “coordination failure.” If you are reading this, you may have heard the term come up in discussions of certain electoral reforms. Here is some of I what I’ve written about the problem. I will give a simpler explanation below.

Two repeal cases have been subject to ballot-level analysis, and results are consistent with a predictability story. In Pierce County, Alvarez et al. (2018) found a two-dimensional structure in rankings from the CFB [come-from-behind] race. One dimension was partisanship, and they term the other “preference for independence.” Because there was only one independent in the race, the orthogonal dimension suggests a candidate whose ballots did not flow reliably to either side. Similarly, in Burlington, AV critics have long argued that “the system failed” to elect a Condorcet winner. This suggests lack of coordination along the dimension that was salient to most voters (cf. Nagel 2006). Hence critics conclude that Burlington’s repeal was due to “the surprise outcome of the election.”
Santucci (2022, pp. 178-180)

Let’s say we are asking voters to rank, approve of, or assign scores to candidates. Let’s assume that elites/activists are not urging bullet voting. And let’s say those voters populate a two-dimensional space that looks like this. It represents the 2016 electorate.

The first dimension captures liberal-conservative policy views. I prefer to think of it as a major-party dimension. Note how Trump (red R) and Clinton voters (blue D) appear on the right and left, respectively.

The second most strongly captures measures of political discontent. Charles Franklin recently called this dimension (in Congress) institutional/anti-institutional. I like that.

There is no problem as long as candidates differentiate themselves along one or the other dimension. Voters can (in theory) rank/score candidates according to how far away they perceive those candidates to be. (I am less confident about this under an approval ballot, as that ballot cannot capture preference intensity.)

The problem arises when both dimensions are active at once — as in the figure. What does an anti-institutional liberal do when the only anti-institutional candidate is on the right side of the major-party dimension? What does an institutional conservative do when the only institutional candidate is on the left side of the major-party dimension?

This is where we could get into scenarios, questions about distance, questions about not voting, questions about the quality of the information environment, the idea of cross-pressure, and so on.

The simple answer to both questions above is “it depends.” That’s the point.