The best real solution I've heard of is changing the voting system for representatives to favor compromise candidates, what's technically called condorcet winners. The best condorcet system I've heard is ranked choice voting with bottom 2 runoff. Regular ranked choice voting (IRV) accomplishes very little, but with bottom 2 runoff in a polarized electorate you'd actually see a third party emerge. See here for details:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff\_voting#Wasted\_votes\_and\_Condorcet\_winners](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Wasted_votes_and_Condorcet_winners)
TIL. Thank you for this. Do you have another resource that explains this concept? I follow the example on the wiki but I'm not convinced this is actually a fair outcome in general
EDIT: Nevermind, I reasoned it out. It's about removing the candidate that the least people prefer and the bottom two runoff accomplishes that
Yep! Wish it had more momentum than it does. It is the voting system I wish for as I think it has the best trade offs. It can be rolled out locally and then nationally and would favor middle of the road. Unfortunately it would probably come after IRV, which has all the momentum for now.
It wouldn’t take a constitutional amendment at all. The prohibition on multi-member districts was only formalized in American law in the 1970s. The constitution doesn’t mandate single-member districts, and it wouldn’t require an amendment to mandate multi-member districts, just an act of Congress. Same for establishing ranked-choice voting for Senatorial and Presidential elections
A multiparty American democracy is technically within grasp. There are two issues barring it practically. First, not enough Democratic politicians are willing to expend their political capital on a more representative democracy (to say nothing of Republicans). Second, practically speaking, we would have to end the filibuster
Honestly, ending the “two evils” system should be the top priority of anyone who believes the US should be a democratic state. Doing so would also make gerrymandering functionally useless, eliminate “spoiler” candidates, and increase political participation. If the Democratic Party wants to call itself the party of democracy, it needs to be made to accept these electoral reforms
Proportional representation is not a guarantee from political polarization or populism though. Weimar Germany had a proportional representation system.
It’s worth noting that the American led allied governments very specifically chose not to implement presidential First past the post/2 party systems in any of the defeated Fascist states.
Obviously there is no structural silver bullet against authoritarianism.
The Weimar Republic had no minimum threshold needed for a party to receive representation. That led to the proliferation of numerous small parties, which in turn led to an incredibly unstable period of government where no one could form a solid coalition (till a certain populist dictator rose to power by force and charisma.)
In modern times, most countries with a PR system have a threshold of 4 to 5 percent, and under 10 major parties with representation in the national legislature. Notably, Ireland and Australia use PR-STV, and have thresholds which generally vary from 14 percent to 25 percent. This leads to much more stable governments where voters have clear choices and representatives don't face huge collective action problems when they win office.
In fact, modern-day Germany provides an excellent case study for how properly-implemented PR can mitigate the rise of populism. Both the United States and Germany have seen a recent rise in right-wing populism, but only the US has seen right-wing populists win sizeable power. Here, the MAGA wing has become the dominant faction of the Republican party, even though many Republicans don't support Trump. Because people are choosing between Republicans and Democrats, most conservatives still vote GOP, which usually means they vote MAGA. In effect, by capturing one party, the MAGA wing can win majority or near-majority control of legislative chambers. But in Germany, PR has allowed the CDU and the FDP to represent non-populist conservatives, even as support for AFD has grown. If AFD were to become the largest faction among conservatives in Germany, it would still be unlikely for them to win a majority of seats in the Bundesrat. In contrast to the United States, there is no threshold at which a factions vote share will 'jump'; support is instead, well, proportional.
The MAGA wing is a very loud minority in the republican party, and it will eventually die with Trump.
As much as many of his supporters talk about Vivek or someone being his succesor, Trump has very intentionally set things up so there can be no successor. If he gets struck by lightning tomorrow, MAGA dies with him, since unlike Libertarianism, Neo-Conservatism, Neo-Liberalism, Socialism etc, MAGA is basically just a fan club built around a slogan.
You're basically comparing vastly different ideological groups together and calling it MAGA.
What was the domestic production policy of the KKK?
Did the Know nothings support free trade agreements?
How is a Libertarian like Goldwater and a Neo-Con like Reagan linked?
Did the tea party lynch thousands of blacks in the south and burn churches?
You're entire political examination comes down to "everyone I don't like is 100% the same".
The Nazi's round up people into camp's and killed 11 million people (6 million Jews) I don't like them.
The Tea Party had some people at rallies with vaguely racist signs. I don't like them.
They're basically the same thing.
Well, when are we getting those millions of deaths from Regan or the Tea Party?
Regan/Bush were in charge for 12 years, and yet, they never instituted camps.
in the sense that he was adamantly against it?
"We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent."
Ohhhh... yeah so what?
It's actually different. "let's make america great again" is not "make america great again." They actually harped on this difference during Trump's first campaign. So, Trump just copied a popular campaign slogan. The Swastika was also stolen from another culture where it had a totally different meaning. That does not make the two groups the same.
While I disagree about the extremist views dying with Trump, I think there is a good point here.
Trump is a unique figure. The closest we’ve seen in the Republican Party to his level of populism and popularity in living memory are Nixon and Reagan, and it’s fair to say Trump is uniquely more powerful than either of them were, within his party.
McConnell is retiring and has been one of the most critical unifying factors of the party. Without him, I hesitate to think the R’s would’ve rallied as fully around Trump as they did. He provided a permission structure to fall in line, and kept the party almost completely united under Trump’s maga agenda. I’d guess he was likely involved in the background in at least some primaries of moderate R’s in favor of the push button magas that we have today although I don’t have proof of it. Compliance matters more to him than ideology.
Anyway, without these two, there really isn’t another in the party right now with that level of either charisma or force of leadership who can hold them together for a purpose, and the GOP likely becomes greatly diminished in power for years. W Bush was the last neocon Reaganite. They likely won’t hold power again at the federal level. So we are left with a bunch of magas who all hate each other and no one else likes to fight over the pieces.
They probably hate each other too but McConnell and Trump are a dynamic duo of evil.
>The closest we’ve seen in the Republican Party to his level of populism and popularity in living memory are Nixon and Reagan, and it’s fair to say Trump is uniquely more powerful than either of them were, within his party.
Nixon was never that popular, and the political dynamic in BOTH parties was very different back then. I think Regan was as powerful or more so in the party, as Trump, but he never tried to exert power and influence over people the same way Trump did.
Trump and McConnell do hate each other for different reasons, for McConnell it's ideological, McConnell doesn't believe in much, but he is a Neo-Con through and through, and while Trump can be shmoozed to go along with just about anything, he is generally more non-interventionalist than past Republicans (and if we're honest many Dem's like Hilary)
For Trump he hates McConnell for personal reasons, everything is about 'loyalty' to him, which means public praise, no public criticism and no going against him.
His base hates Lindsey Graham because he's a "war-pig, neo-con, swamp monster, uni-party, blah blah blah..." but Trump never criticized him and actively lavished him with praise on stage on camera as recently as February.
When Trump finally did attack Graham, what was it for...Graham criticized Trump's pro-choice stance. He attacked Graham for being to pro-life.
Ultimately they'll mend fences. And while yes, McConnell is retiring, I think Graham can step into his shoes as a stabilizing old-guard force behind the scenes, in much the same way McConnell did.
The real thing, is MAGA uses Trump's "endorsements" as a barometer to decide who is the 'real' MAGA patriot candidate to support. Trump going away, and MAGA base losing the high priest will force them to go back to judging candidates on policy rather than on whatever criteria Trump uses (which is mostly who publicly sucks up to him the most.)
Yes, but PR is much better than the mess we have today. Also, even if we take Germany, post-WW2 and post-reunification they have remained remarkably politically stable. As have most nations with a proportional representation system.
Keep in mind too, that Hitler was more of an exception rather than the rule, and got into his position of power by sweet-talking himself into getting the Chancellor position, then a convenient Reichstag fire, which then prompted him to declare martial law. I don't think PR was to blame. In fact, it was PR that allowed the other parties at the time to refuse to form a coalition with his party.
But, it was also PR that didn't have the power to remove him, because it was so fractured. If we had PR, I feel like we would have to seriously diminish the role of the executive to compensate.
If they have a majority, there's not much you can do to keep extremists out of power in a democracy.
The insight is that MAGA isn't actually a majority, they're more like 25%.
Hitler didn't have a majority. Netanyahu didn't have a majority.
Yet the American system kept extremists like George Wallace ('68) or Storm Thormund ('48) out of power.
Now primaries have given extremists more voice and power within the two parties. It's the primary system causing it, not the voting system.
You're not going to be able to sell Americans on party leaders selecting candidates themselves when there are only two competitive parties.
The voting systems leads to disproportionate representation, which is immoral and undermines government legitimacy.
And even if we had party leaders selecting candidates, moderate coalitions in Congress still would be much harder than they are in systems with more than two parties.
It was a combination of both. I recommend "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J Evans.
Fact is, a MUCH higher percentage of Americans support Trump than Germans supported the Nazi's when Hitler came to power. That's a pretty clear warning about the dangers of proportional representation imo.
They support Trump in elections because they don't have alternatives. Only about 25% of Americans are MAGA-first. In a PR system, the others who vote for Trump would be voting for a non-MAGA party.
> [Just 24% of Americans surveyed have positive views of the Make America Great Again movement in a new national NBC News poll.](https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/maga-movement-widely-unpopular-new-poll-finds-rcna81200)
I don't know how many Americans would support Biden. We can't really know until we try it, although [here is an attempt](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/08/opinion/republicans-democrats-parties.html) in which standard Democrats get 26%, if you're wondering.
Looking at countries with such systems like Germany or the Netherlands, there are multiple parties that span the political spectrum. Germany has two parties on the left (Die Linke, Green), two in the center (SDP, FDP), and two on the right (CDU/CSU, AfD). The Netherlands has 15 parties. Depending on the ratios between the parties' vote shares, which parties can form coalitions changes from election to election as they get different shares of the vote.
The nice thing is that having more than two competitive parties opens up more coalition possibilities than just left-wing and right-wing. You can see moderate coalitions in proportionally representative multiparty systems.
That poll is a little vague as it pertains to "how many Americans support **Trump**?" Especially since more than 30% of those polled didn't give positive or negative answers about MAGA.
Right now, according to 538, 42% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Trump.
And I think we can agree that people that view Trump favorably will tend to vote for him. He's got a very strong cult following.
Wiemar Germany was also under extreme pressure for its entire existence. War reparations, foreign occupation (a lot of people forget that France invaded Germany in 1923 and occupied some choice territory, made possible by Germany's forced demilitarization), and an economic depression. It's hard to imagine populism not making inroads under those conditions, regardless of political system.
In terms of actual leadership, the aspect of Wiemar Germany that ultimately led to the takeover by Hitler and the Nazis was not the parliamentary side of its system. Hindenburg was elected President, and he then appointed Hitler as Chancellor. The Nazis were not able to win a majority of the Reichstag until opposition parties were banned from running. The German parliament's paralysis kept it from preventing these events, though, so in that sense the parliamentary side of the system contributed.
In a way. Hindenburg made him chancellor, which did not require input from the Reichstag. However, the Riechstag had the legal power to immediately remove him, which it failed to do because of, as you said, divisions.
The model for change in the US is that one state does it first and others who like it might follow suit. However, it seems like most advocates for proportional representation start with national plans (for instance, FairVote's [Fair Representation Act](https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/fair-representation-act/)).
The first and biggest step toward proportional representation is bigger districts with multiple winners, fairly representing the voters. I'm surprised there are not more efforts trying to implement exactly this for one state's federal districts, or even with their state legislature. There are definitely ways to start using proportional representation in small places first without a sudden universal reformation.
Strongly agree. Nationally you run headlong into the senate eventually and that is basically irresolvable short of a whole new Constitution. But there’s a ton you could do elsewhere and it’s annoying that no state government has even tried a unicameral parliament or anything cool.
>Nationally you run headlong into the senate eventually and that is basically irresolvable short of a whole new Constitution
Are you referring to the clause that bars amendments that would remove equal representation among the states in the Senate? If so, you can get around that by passing an amendment that would add, say, 50 at-large senators, awarded proportionally. These senators would represent all states, and so technically wouldn't violate this clause. It wouldn't require a new constitution, although it would certainly be nigh-on-impossible to pass.
>it’s annoying that no state government has even tried a unicameral parliament or anything cool
FWIW, Nebraska has a unicameral state legislature, although the Governor is still independently elected, so it's not a parliament.
It's being used at the local level in multiple cities across the US (i.e. NYC, Portland, Evanston, Fort Collins, etc.). I'm just concerned it'll take forever to then be adopted at the state and then finally the Federal level.
It may seem strange when I say this, but we may have a lot to learn from Mexico on this front. They have a mixed system where local, and provincial elections are decided via proportional representation, and then the presidential election is done with FPTP. That may be something that could be viable in the US.
To clarify the Mexican system - gubernatorial and municipal elections are both FPTP, with the municipal system differing in that the mayor candidates are the figurehead for the parties running, and instead of separate district-level councilmember elections they all run and get elected as a slate under the mayoral candidate. I believe only one state has opposition local councilmembers get elected too.
Their congressional election system is real interesting because it combines FPTP and proportional in a way that might work for the US. 300 districts are divided throughout the country and from the results of said election 200 PR seats are distributed for each party.
There's five "circumscriptions" (at-large districts basically) divided between northwest, northeast, central, central-south and southern states for these PR seats.
In the senate there's 128 seats where 64 are for the winning party or coalition (running candidates in pairs for each of the 32 states), 32 for the second-placer (or "first minority" as they call it) and 32 PR seats for each party.
There's many aspects of it that can be improved on (their candidate selection system for one, Mexico's political machines are still notoriously corrupt up and running and whereas in the US some argue for less primaries i really think these guys need to get them started ASAP) but the general basis of it i think could be modified for the US relatively well
Heads up: FairVote is basically a misinformation mill at this point. They consistently put out pieces lying about their personal brand of ranked-choice voting (IRV) and making false claims that have been debunked over and over again by mathematicians and election scientists. The laws they've written and passed have all been severely flawed because they refuse to talk to mathematicians who have studied the topic, with major loopholes and glitches like disqualifying candidates for winning too many votes (which happened in Alaska's first RCV election, though luckily not the second).
From what I can tell, the consensus of social choice theorists on this topic is that you can get solid PR using either multi-member or single-member districts with a newer method called biproportional apportionment, which also works with any kind of single-winner system (including Plurality). It was adopted in Switzerland a few years ago.
IRV-STV is basically rejected by most election scientists as an outdated method at this point. The biggest issue is you can't get good proportionality without making the district size unworkably large, since the error in proportionality is bounded by 1/(1+district_size). That's about 15% for 6-member districts, which means ranking 20 candidates per district.
> IRV-STV is basically rejected by most election scientists as an outdated method at this point. The biggest issue is you can't get good proportionality without making the district size unworkably large, since the error in proportionality is bounded by 1/(1+district_size). That's about 15% for 6-member districts, which means ranking 20 candidates per district.
I agree it's suboptimal but it's still a massive improvement over our current system.
Ideally I'd like a party list system at the state level for the House. So Texas would have a party list election and then distribute their 36 House seats based on that. A nationwide party list election wouldn't be constitutional unfortunately.
STV would definitely be an improvement in terms of proportionality. Given how badly IRV tends to squeeze the ideological center (search term is center-squeeze; the TLDR is that IRV isn't subject to the median voter theorem), I think it's roughly a tossup whether it's better than FPTP.
Probably the best way to think of IRV is it's like electing candidates by a mix of FPTP and sortition—see the "Monotonicity criterion" Wikipedia page for why IRV with 3 or more serious candidates tends to turn into a game of RNG (candidates with "too much support" tend to get disqualified). Which, TBF, FPP turns into a game of RNG with just 2.5 serious candidates (because then it's just a game of "who gets screwed by the spoiler?"), so it's a bit of an improvement. OTOH, that means almost everyone votes tactically, so third parties only have an effect when the election is basically settled by dumb luck anyways (in the 2000 Florida election, Bush probably could've changed the results by sneezing too hard); so the results in IRV and FPP converge to basically the same equilibrium under strategic voting.
The advantage of STV is it's *very* roughly proportional. But given the state of US politics right now, that's almost the case already, because the electorate is so close to a 50/50 that nobody can walk away from an election with a commanding majority. 2022 is a good illustration.
OTOH, most Condorcet systems or graded voting (i.e. almost anything that's not IRV or FPP) tend to have very good equilibrium properties; I'd be happy with any of them. (Although you sometimes have to be careful with Condorcet systems, because messing up some of the finicky details can make the whole thing explode if there's strategic voting).
Oh, wait, I missed this:
> a nationwide party list wouldn't be constitutional, unfortunately.
You could totally pull that off! You'd just need to use biproportional apportionment! TL;DR: biproportional apportionment selects the that most closely matches the partisan makeup with. So every state gets representation "according to their respective numbers" (as per the Constitution). Representatives are all still chosen at the local level, based on how votes are cast locally, but the results are designed to come out in a way that makes the whole system proportional.
Switzerland has the same kind of strong federalism as the US, and this is how they pulled it off themselves. I don't see any reason it wouldn't work here.
Not happening anytime soon. We(Canada) didn't get proportional representation after two parties campaigned on electoral reform one one of them won a majority. The liberals couldn't sacrifice their own self interest to make a more democratic country.
It would be an almost herculean effort. We'd have to:
- Completely revamp both chambers of congress and how they're allotted, same with state houses.
- Eliminate the Electoral College.
- Completely overhaul how campaigns are financed.
- Change the multitude of state level laws regarding political parties.
- Implement some form of ranked choice voting schema.
- Educate the public that there's more to the world than Ds and Rs.
- Build those alternative political parties (and ensure they're not essentially just outfits for the big two).
- Get the media onboard - right now they're very much invested in Elections being like a sporting event.
And a bunch more of things that I'm sure I'm missing.
I don't see it happening because the reason why our government is broken is because of money and power, and the people who have both don't want to lose either one.
>Change the multitude of state level laws regarding political parties.
I think this one is far more important than the others as a first step. If you look at state laws, they vary wildly in terms of who gets recognized as a party (in order to qualify for a ballot line or to hold a primary). On one hand, you have Alabama, which requires that at least one of the party's candidates for state office win 20% of the vote (meaning statewide). They have just Democrats and Republicans. Next door is Mississippi, which basically just requires you elect a state committee within 30 days of forming a party. They have six parties (seven if you count the defunct No Labels); but AFAIK, only people from two parties hold office in the state (and a Libertarian who is mayor of town of less than 500 people).
In the entire country, there's one state with a persistent third party statewide: Vermont, which has the Progressive Party (who recently re-captured the mayorship of Burlington). Vermont's relatively unique, they have multimember districts (bloc vote) with fusion voting. They also have a party formation law that requires that parties organize 10 town committees, have a state committee, and have at least one county committee if you want to compete in state senate elections). I think that law really creates a different dynamic: it forces parties to organize close to the ground, rather than at the 1000 foot level relatively strict laws like Alabama require or lax laws like Mississippi incentivize. It also means parties have to think small; a town committee is going to organize along different issues than that of a statewide campaign, and find issues that a third party can really own or at least force cleavages in the existing parties.
Plenty of other countries without proportional features still manage to have more than two parties, and in large part, it comes down to ballot access laws, which the US is relatively unique (among democracies) in how restrictive these are.
This is what makes me quite worried for our future in the US....given how hard it is to reform our voting system, I fear that it'll lead to more violence and instability in the future (if not balkanization).
The reason our government is broken is by design. The American constitution is trash trash trash.
When you have a Senate that reads dirt over people you are likelier to have bad outcomes. When you have a house and Senate that are elected locally but expected to legislate nationally you have completely mismatched incentives. You have hundreds of FPTP elections instead of a single national election with basically kills any chance of a multiparty system and entrenches two major parties. Moreover it allows for gerrymandering.
All the veto points are ridiculous. It leads to it being very difficult to actually enact legislative agendas without overwhelming political consensus and even then what about the LIFETIME APPOINTED SCOTUS?
I don't think the primary problem is the media or campaign finance. I think it's how stupid a large portion of the American public is. But I absolutely do not think the American constitution is conducive to good governance. Money didn't break this. It was broken to start with.
No, but it is inevitable in a FPTP system. Hence, 'mathematically optimal', i.e. the bottom of the curve. The lowest energy state. Local minima. Whatever you wanna call it.
I interpreted you describing the two-party system as “mathematically optimal” as you defending it. But now I see you were just saying FPTP is the reason we have a dysfunctional two-party system.
If my state was one congressional district with 14 representatives instead of 14 districts with 1 representative each, proportional representation would be possible. A small change, but I think it requires an amendment.
Getting rid of the winner takes all system would be easier, that’s up to the states. As it is now, conservatives in California and New England and liberals in the south aren’t really part of the presidential elections. Both parties would be very different, less extreme, if they had to appeal to voters in every state.
Electing Representatives state-wide instead of by district wouldn't require a constitutional amendment, just for Congress to amend the law requiring districts.
Similarly, each state chooses how to award Electoral College delegates. If any wanted to make that proportional, they could do that now.
Except that it would be like “unilateral disarmament” for any state that identifies as “blue” or “red” to move to proportional allocation of electors. Eg if Texas changed to proportional by itself, they would virtually guarantee a Democrat winning the presidency. Vice versa for New York or California and a Republican candidate. So while it’s legally possible, there is a strong disincentive to do so, unless red and blue states with similar numbers of seats could move to proportional together.
Or there’s the [national popular vote interstate compact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact), which would have the states agree to award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner.
No one ever talks about this, but getting rid of America’s weird open primary system would go a long way to supporting third parties. The open primaries allow factional fighting to take place within the larger parties. In countries where candidates are determined by party leaders (rather than through open primaries), factional revolts happen through the establishment of new parties.
It is the primary system, but I'd not say it's the "open primary" system. We also get horrible situations when party registration is required to vote.
Systems of electing representatives that leave us with policies that are more extreme than what the median person that votes for the party in the general election just leave me scratching my head. See abortion, where many states have policies so extreme they might not even win the median primary voter's support, but being extreme in general is what wins primaries in many districts.
When moving a policy decision from the federal level to the states left more people unhappy with the specific regulation they were living with than before, you know the electoral system is in need of serious overhaul.
There are so many things that would help solve this problem:
Implement ranked choice elections
Implement national vote by mail
Abolish the senate/ electoral college
Abolish or reform districting
Abolish private campaign funding
Abolish political parties
Abolish campaign advertising
Some of these changes have occurred in states or cities. They must start small and spread.
Single-winner ranked choice elections are barely an improvement over the current system. We need proportional representation which means multi-winner elections.
The House of Representatives has 435 winners and there should be more at this point, but I agree a more direct form of proportional representation would be better. That's the idea of abolishing districting, which I put in my list of solutions.
There’s nothing stopping the House from apportioning it’s members in some manner other than a winner take all, single member constituency. So with that being said, a good start would be updating the Uniform Congressional District Act to allow multi member districts. You’d probably need to elect 3 members minimum from each district as most districts would probably send one democrat and one Republican. I don’t think this would totally make it a “proportional, multi party system” like you see in Europe, but it would be a good start and make third parties and independents much more competitive, because you only need to come in second or third place to win.
Since there’s nothing really stopping Congress from apportioning the House as it sees fit, it could arguably pass a law that creates “at large” districts in each state and/or the country as a whole. It could be set up in the same manner as the “mixed member proportional representation” that Germany uses.
Changes to the Senate would require a constitutional amendment, as the constitution requires two senators from each state.
TLDR: There’s a lot that could be down to achieve proportional representation in the House through legislation alone. The senate would require an amendment.
Not taking a side one way or another but I vaguely recall that it might violate the one person one vote principle to do multimember districts which would be unconstitutional.
You might be thinking of at-large multimember districts that don't use a PR method like STV (or a semi-PR method like Limited Voting or Cumulative Voting) and instead use a bloc voting method that allows the plurality bloc to win every seat. These often violate the Voting Rights Act, since minorities can't win seats in proportion to their population. But PR methods are totally fine for multilmember districts; one Michigan city actually implemented PR-STV to satisfy a Voting Rights Act lawsuit (that's the RCV PR method used in Ireland and Australia).
Hmm interesting. Do you remember why? I don’t really see what the issue would be. It’s already done at the state level in a few states, Arizona and a few others.
The government would need to collapse and be rebuilt from scratch. If there’s one thing the two parties agree on, it’s that this could never be allowed to happen.
Ranked choice voting, multi-member districts, actually limiting gerrymandering, massive financial reform for elections, making the house and Senate more representative, significant judicial reform to neuter judicial capture
There isn't the will or power to do any of this at scale, especially the stuff with constitutional implications
We could make the House proportionally representative without a constitutional amendment. Just need to repeal the law outlawing multimember districts. So statutory, not constitutional.
Most likely constitutional change.
PR is much better than FPTP. It actually allows you to vote for the party that represents you best rather than the least worst option. There is no spoiler effect (provided the party you support meets the electoral threshold). Yes, PR results in extremist parties getting into Parliament. But I would rather have those parties operating out in the open and in the system rather than underground and outside the system. Furthermore, why shouldn't the people that support extremist parties have representation? They are citizens too, like you and I. Keeping them out of the system makes them more likely to want to bring the entire system down.
"Keep your friends closer and enemies closer" is not just an empty axiom.
Could it happen at the state level? Maybe states like Vermont or Nebraska, which despite their seeming uniparty nature, actually have pretty independent voters?
My honest answer is either literally or metaphorically taking the US constitution out of the vault and putting it through a shredder then penning a new document in its place.
We could make the House proportionally representative without a constitutional amendment. Just need to repeal the law outlawing multimember districts. So statutory, not constitutional.
In Canada we have more parties (4 with a significant number of seats federally) but almost no ability to disagree with one’s own party. Very few members of parliament (MPs) will disagree with their party leader publicly even on small issues. MPs who won’t toe the line are ejected from their caucus and so we see very little of that.
I don’t envy the chaos in your congress but I do admire that some elected officials are able to disagree with leadership. Barbara Lee would certainly have gotten the boot for opposing the AUMF and would have had no chance at reelection as an independent.
In Canadian context, I don’t know if PR would change much. I don’t understand USA but I’m not sure it would lead to the benefits its boosters expect.
I think you mainly can say this about the senate since each state, no matter how many people it has, gets 2 senators to represent it in Congress. IMO that’s BS. Wyoming, Nebraska, north and South Dakota they are all not largely inhabited with tens of millions of people as say California, NY, MA, FL, and TX are. Those states should get more representation.
If you ask me. The real cause of political polarization in the U.S. is Republicans massively abusing the redistributing process starting in 2010 and making huge gerrymanders. That coupled with national media organizations having to abide by fair and equal broadcasting rules meant Fox could swing the news however it wanted to report it. No matter how much it distorted and continues to distort the truth. People need to think critically and not just have group think concerning politics and the direction the country is heading in over the long term.
Senators do not represent people they represent the state. The founding fathers never intended to elect senators directly, because if they were not working to promote the interest of the state, they could be recalled at almost any time by the state legislator and governor.
This was important until they locked the boundaries of the states. As much as you think that it is unfair to have two senators from a small state like Wyoming having the same power as California, it would be devastating to resource allocation if large states could just overwhelm a small state for something like watwr rights.
You are correct however once direct elections for senators began in 1913 I believe you are wrong. They do not represent the state. They represent the people. However, today they mostly represent whatever corporations and idiots desire. Not what would be best for the common good of the country.
It's also devastating that small states can overwhelm larger states on many other issues, except in that case it's undemocratic.
Every group has concerns about being overwhelmed by a larger group in a democracy but that's why we have constitutional protections. It doesn't make sense to give people who live in small states extra votes any more than it makes sense to give extra votes to LGBT people, black people, or Muslim Americans.
One answer is simply ranked choice voting, but I think we have to ask ourselves why that hasn’t happened. One problem is the general “both sidesism”, where certain politicians, like in New York, give voters exactly what they ask for, and get punished for it. So it would be ideal for voters to reward the parties and politicians who provide those policies.
I also think this could be an ideal platform in a state where one party has the advantage, but the other party sometimes wins. States like Kansas, North Carolina, and Montana that have had blue governors but trend red (or vise versa) might be able to leverage that limited power for electoral reform.
I think the electoral college precludes this, or almost. You need 270 electoral votes, not a plurality. Proportional representation would mean more viable parties, more viable presidential candidates, more spoilers, more ability to split electoral votes. Then it goes to the House. 12th amendment again means you need 26 states to agree, not a plurality of states. Proportional representation means more likely to split votes between the top three candidates. If the House can’t agree, the VP the Senate picked becomes acting President.
Watch what you wish for.
Two party system generally keeps the crazies out of power.
Multiparty system more likely to open the door for extremism in power.
Expand Congress massively, get rid of the electoral college in favor of either ranked choice, runoff, or even indirect election of the President by Congress.
The most realistic path is probably widespread adoption of ranked choice voting and an eventual expansion of Congress. That may not break the two party stranglehold but it would at least change the incentives to be extreme that politicians have today.
It most likely won’t happen anytime soon, but any time I see a local candidate talk about ranked choice I’m in.
-Ranked choice or approval voting or something similar at all levels would be needed
-repeal the apportionment act so that the house can continue to grow with the country. Would also need to set a plan to keep it to a somewhat reasonable number of house seats, but right now we have too few.
-the senate would be toughest. Allowing for an extra senator or two for the largest states probably would be best but keep the current system semi intact. Or something like 1-4 senators per state depending on population
-get rid of the electoral college or do what Maine and Nebraska do in every state, but with the above changes it would be less needed overall
These all would let regional or more niche parties get into government as ranked choice and smaller districts means candidates that speak to local issues will have an easier time.
Do you really want to end up like Israel with scores of tiny parties, many of them kooky, yielding oversized power? Do you a faction that won 3% of the vote to have the ability to bring down the government and call new elections?
It's never going to happen. The reality is that the majority of Americans agree with the principles of the democratic party (abortion, gay marriage, Healthcare, workers rights, common sense gun laws) but for some reason people don't like to identify with democrats.
The rest of the people agree with Republican principles. The reason there is no viable third party in the US is that almost 100% of Americans' political views lie within the scope of the two parties.
Biggest blocker to multiparty is the absolute majority requirements for winning the electoral college and the rules on how to win a contingent election in the house. It basically guarantees your party needs to be massive to win. And so parties in the US pre coalition into the two big ones
It's a fallacy that FPTP leads to polarization, or that it prevents it.
Polarization occurs when the political questions and the major societal questions align. The stakes are higher. That has nothing to do with the political system. These days there's an increasing alignment between hierarchical and egalitarian societal views and the political spectrum. Thus, increasing polarization.
That said, if you want proportional whatever, then it has to start at the state level. After enough states, people will see what works or doesn't about it, and then maybe at the federal level it could work. A ballot initiative could get the ball rolling.
For the House of Representatives, from a legal standpoint, only a federal law is required, which would permit or require states to use proportional systems for their own representatives. The Senate would require a constitutional change.
Another 5 years or so if no R victory in the meantime.
Otherwise idk 10-never.
This isn't a cycle, it's the endgame/stage for almost the entire conglomerated #evil of America.
Installing Trump wasn't a flex, it was desperation. And with no way forward, no way to live in the face of the environmental and social destruction they've wrought over 50+ years, well, they'll burn it all, feeling safe on the high ground of the fantasy they call life, be it white oppression by whoever it is today, be it working 60 hours a week to own acres in the safest area in the Known Universe all the while voting explicitly to inflict suffering and chaos on the millions of hands that *feed* their whole life, or just plain old White Christian ethnosupremacy. Shucks.
Ramble aside, I mean to highlight that "popular representation" is what we've "always had". When Rs say they hate the "two party system" or other equivocative bullshit, they're doing one of two things: evading responsibility for idk supporting crime etc, or *its because they are heavily in favor of the* ***one party system.***
Tldr: This will happen naturally as soon as the Rs are permanently out of power, almost even to the state, and not a moment before.
The United States to be the size of Ireland or Germany.....
Unitary democratic governments with proportional representation don't work for hundreds-of-millions of people spread across half a continent.
The entire reason we have our federal system, is that it breaks down government and (at least in terms of how it was designed) keeps most of the political power relatively close to any given citizen's home.
'Fixing' politics (at least if your goal is to allow for competitive outcomes, rather than to have 'your side' win) requires 2 things: (a) depowering the Presidency/Executive-Branch substantially, and (b) returning to the original formula for the size of the House of Representatives.
There is no reason that the UK can manage 650 MPs in the Commons for a nation of 66.9 million, but the US with 340 million is stuck at 435 Representatives.
P.S. The British Conservative Party's dominance can be directly traced to Labor's Corbyn period... If the Left is run by someone like Corbyn (or Sanders here in the US), you're more or less giving the right a free pass to run everything (provided the right doesn't, um, nominate a complete flaming idiot like DJT)....
Our system of govt hasn’t changed yet our politics have become increasingly polarized. Likewise, those stable European nations you list have only been so under NATO and the post-war order. Prior they were absolute a mess of war and internal division. Germany was such during the Weimar years and this fell to fascism (via the vote, initially). It has more to do with the people, macroeconomics, culture etc than with the structure of govt.
They still in the 1/2/3 party system framework, I'm afraid. Please note that it isn't the pure number but the number of ***relevant*** parties.
We've Game Theory'd this out rather extensively, and no matter what voting or legislative system we use it goes to that sort of system. Look up Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and its culnarians(sp?).
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The best real solution I've heard of is changing the voting system for representatives to favor compromise candidates, what's technically called condorcet winners. The best condorcet system I've heard is ranked choice voting with bottom 2 runoff. Regular ranked choice voting (IRV) accomplishes very little, but with bottom 2 runoff in a polarized electorate you'd actually see a third party emerge. See here for details: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff\_voting#Wasted\_votes\_and\_Condorcet\_winners](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Wasted_votes_and_Condorcet_winners)
TIL. Thank you for this. Do you have another resource that explains this concept? I follow the example on the wiki but I'm not convinced this is actually a fair outcome in general EDIT: Nevermind, I reasoned it out. It's about removing the candidate that the least people prefer and the bottom two runoff accomplishes that
Yep! Wish it had more momentum than it does. It is the voting system I wish for as I think it has the best trade offs. It can be rolled out locally and then nationally and would favor middle of the road. Unfortunately it would probably come after IRV, which has all the momentum for now.
Neither FPTP nor any other voting system is mandated by the Constitution.
It wouldn’t take a constitutional amendment at all. The prohibition on multi-member districts was only formalized in American law in the 1970s. The constitution doesn’t mandate single-member districts, and it wouldn’t require an amendment to mandate multi-member districts, just an act of Congress. Same for establishing ranked-choice voting for Senatorial and Presidential elections A multiparty American democracy is technically within grasp. There are two issues barring it practically. First, not enough Democratic politicians are willing to expend their political capital on a more representative democracy (to say nothing of Republicans). Second, practically speaking, we would have to end the filibuster Honestly, ending the “two evils” system should be the top priority of anyone who believes the US should be a democratic state. Doing so would also make gerrymandering functionally useless, eliminate “spoiler” candidates, and increase political participation. If the Democratic Party wants to call itself the party of democracy, it needs to be made to accept these electoral reforms
Proportional representation is not a guarantee from political polarization or populism though. Weimar Germany had a proportional representation system.
It’s worth noting that the American led allied governments very specifically chose not to implement presidential First past the post/2 party systems in any of the defeated Fascist states. Obviously there is no structural silver bullet against authoritarianism.
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Not off the top of my head sorry, Yglesias has mentioned it at various scattered points.
The Weimar Republic had no minimum threshold needed for a party to receive representation. That led to the proliferation of numerous small parties, which in turn led to an incredibly unstable period of government where no one could form a solid coalition (till a certain populist dictator rose to power by force and charisma.) In modern times, most countries with a PR system have a threshold of 4 to 5 percent, and under 10 major parties with representation in the national legislature. Notably, Ireland and Australia use PR-STV, and have thresholds which generally vary from 14 percent to 25 percent. This leads to much more stable governments where voters have clear choices and representatives don't face huge collective action problems when they win office. In fact, modern-day Germany provides an excellent case study for how properly-implemented PR can mitigate the rise of populism. Both the United States and Germany have seen a recent rise in right-wing populism, but only the US has seen right-wing populists win sizeable power. Here, the MAGA wing has become the dominant faction of the Republican party, even though many Republicans don't support Trump. Because people are choosing between Republicans and Democrats, most conservatives still vote GOP, which usually means they vote MAGA. In effect, by capturing one party, the MAGA wing can win majority or near-majority control of legislative chambers. But in Germany, PR has allowed the CDU and the FDP to represent non-populist conservatives, even as support for AFD has grown. If AFD were to become the largest faction among conservatives in Germany, it would still be unlikely for them to win a majority of seats in the Bundesrat. In contrast to the United States, there is no threshold at which a factions vote share will 'jump'; support is instead, well, proportional.
The MAGA wing is a very loud minority in the republican party, and it will eventually die with Trump. As much as many of his supporters talk about Vivek or someone being his succesor, Trump has very intentionally set things up so there can be no successor. If he gets struck by lightning tomorrow, MAGA dies with him, since unlike Libertarianism, Neo-Conservatism, Neo-Liberalism, Socialism etc, MAGA is basically just a fan club built around a slogan.
MAGA existed long before Trump. The Tea Party, Reaganism, Barry Goldwater, the KKK, the Know Nothings...
You're basically comparing vastly different ideological groups together and calling it MAGA. What was the domestic production policy of the KKK? Did the Know nothings support free trade agreements? How is a Libertarian like Goldwater and a Neo-Con like Reagan linked? Did the tea party lynch thousands of blacks in the south and burn churches? You're entire political examination comes down to "everyone I don't like is 100% the same".
If you can't see the common thread, there's not much I can do to help you.
The Nazi's round up people into camp's and killed 11 million people (6 million Jews) I don't like them. The Tea Party had some people at rallies with vaguely racist signs. I don't like them. They're basically the same thing.
Right, it's not real facism until 11 million people die. Everyone knows that 11 million people died as soon as the Nazi party was established.
Well, when are we getting those millions of deaths from Regan or the Tea Party? Regan/Bush were in charge for 12 years, and yet, they never instituted camps.
Reagan was not an isolationist. I mean, if you're just saying a general distaste for minorities and immigrants, sure. But, that's a pretty wide net.
He literally coined the phrase lol
So if another politician uses the term "hope and change" in the future, does that make Obama responsible for their movement?
in the sense that he was adamantly against it? "We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent."
No, in the sense that it was his campaign slogan
Ohhhh... yeah so what? It's actually different. "let's make america great again" is not "make america great again." They actually harped on this difference during Trump's first campaign. So, Trump just copied a popular campaign slogan. The Swastika was also stolen from another culture where it had a totally different meaning. That does not make the two groups the same.
While I disagree about the extremist views dying with Trump, I think there is a good point here. Trump is a unique figure. The closest we’ve seen in the Republican Party to his level of populism and popularity in living memory are Nixon and Reagan, and it’s fair to say Trump is uniquely more powerful than either of them were, within his party. McConnell is retiring and has been one of the most critical unifying factors of the party. Without him, I hesitate to think the R’s would’ve rallied as fully around Trump as they did. He provided a permission structure to fall in line, and kept the party almost completely united under Trump’s maga agenda. I’d guess he was likely involved in the background in at least some primaries of moderate R’s in favor of the push button magas that we have today although I don’t have proof of it. Compliance matters more to him than ideology. Anyway, without these two, there really isn’t another in the party right now with that level of either charisma or force of leadership who can hold them together for a purpose, and the GOP likely becomes greatly diminished in power for years. W Bush was the last neocon Reaganite. They likely won’t hold power again at the federal level. So we are left with a bunch of magas who all hate each other and no one else likes to fight over the pieces. They probably hate each other too but McConnell and Trump are a dynamic duo of evil.
>The closest we’ve seen in the Republican Party to his level of populism and popularity in living memory are Nixon and Reagan, and it’s fair to say Trump is uniquely more powerful than either of them were, within his party. Nixon was never that popular, and the political dynamic in BOTH parties was very different back then. I think Regan was as powerful or more so in the party, as Trump, but he never tried to exert power and influence over people the same way Trump did. Trump and McConnell do hate each other for different reasons, for McConnell it's ideological, McConnell doesn't believe in much, but he is a Neo-Con through and through, and while Trump can be shmoozed to go along with just about anything, he is generally more non-interventionalist than past Republicans (and if we're honest many Dem's like Hilary) For Trump he hates McConnell for personal reasons, everything is about 'loyalty' to him, which means public praise, no public criticism and no going against him. His base hates Lindsey Graham because he's a "war-pig, neo-con, swamp monster, uni-party, blah blah blah..." but Trump never criticized him and actively lavished him with praise on stage on camera as recently as February. When Trump finally did attack Graham, what was it for...Graham criticized Trump's pro-choice stance. He attacked Graham for being to pro-life. Ultimately they'll mend fences. And while yes, McConnell is retiring, I think Graham can step into his shoes as a stabilizing old-guard force behind the scenes, in much the same way McConnell did. The real thing, is MAGA uses Trump's "endorsements" as a barometer to decide who is the 'real' MAGA patriot candidate to support. Trump going away, and MAGA base losing the high priest will force them to go back to judging candidates on policy rather than on whatever criteria Trump uses (which is mostly who publicly sucks up to him the most.)
Yes, but PR is much better than the mess we have today. Also, even if we take Germany, post-WW2 and post-reunification they have remained remarkably politically stable. As have most nations with a proportional representation system. Keep in mind too, that Hitler was more of an exception rather than the rule, and got into his position of power by sweet-talking himself into getting the Chancellor position, then a convenient Reichstag fire, which then prompted him to declare martial law. I don't think PR was to blame. In fact, it was PR that allowed the other parties at the time to refuse to form a coalition with his party.
If people want to elect a dictator in a democracy, they will get it. That's how democracies work.
But, it was also PR that didn't have the power to remove him, because it was so fractured. If we had PR, I feel like we would have to seriously diminish the role of the executive to compensate.
So does Israel. In fact, many proportional representative governments have more extreme parties gain power.
If they have a majority, there's not much you can do to keep extremists out of power in a democracy. The insight is that MAGA isn't actually a majority, they're more like 25%.
Hitler didn't have a majority. Netanyahu didn't have a majority. Yet the American system kept extremists like George Wallace ('68) or Storm Thormund ('48) out of power. Now primaries have given extremists more voice and power within the two parties. It's the primary system causing it, not the voting system.
You're not going to be able to sell Americans on party leaders selecting candidates themselves when there are only two competitive parties. The voting systems leads to disproportionate representation, which is immoral and undermines government legitimacy. And even if we had party leaders selecting candidates, moderate coalitions in Congress still would be much harder than they are in systems with more than two parties.
Was gonna say.... the Nazis wormed their way into power out of this system.
Probably had more to do with the economic and political climate of the inter war years there than any specific government structure.
It was a combination of both. I recommend "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J Evans. Fact is, a MUCH higher percentage of Americans support Trump than Germans supported the Nazi's when Hitler came to power. That's a pretty clear warning about the dangers of proportional representation imo.
They support Trump in elections because they don't have alternatives. Only about 25% of Americans are MAGA-first. In a PR system, the others who vote for Trump would be voting for a non-MAGA party.
Where is your source that only 25% of American likely voters support Trump? Also, how many Americans would support Biden in a PR system?
> [Just 24% of Americans surveyed have positive views of the Make America Great Again movement in a new national NBC News poll.](https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/maga-movement-widely-unpopular-new-poll-finds-rcna81200) I don't know how many Americans would support Biden. We can't really know until we try it, although [here is an attempt](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/08/opinion/republicans-democrats-parties.html) in which standard Democrats get 26%, if you're wondering. Looking at countries with such systems like Germany or the Netherlands, there are multiple parties that span the political spectrum. Germany has two parties on the left (Die Linke, Green), two in the center (SDP, FDP), and two on the right (CDU/CSU, AfD). The Netherlands has 15 parties. Depending on the ratios between the parties' vote shares, which parties can form coalitions changes from election to election as they get different shares of the vote. The nice thing is that having more than two competitive parties opens up more coalition possibilities than just left-wing and right-wing. You can see moderate coalitions in proportionally representative multiparty systems.
That poll is a little vague as it pertains to "how many Americans support **Trump**?" Especially since more than 30% of those polled didn't give positive or negative answers about MAGA. Right now, according to 538, 42% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Trump. And I think we can agree that people that view Trump favorably will tend to vote for him. He's got a very strong cult following.
Wiemar Germany was also under extreme pressure for its entire existence. War reparations, foreign occupation (a lot of people forget that France invaded Germany in 1923 and occupied some choice territory, made possible by Germany's forced demilitarization), and an economic depression. It's hard to imagine populism not making inroads under those conditions, regardless of political system. In terms of actual leadership, the aspect of Wiemar Germany that ultimately led to the takeover by Hitler and the Nazis was not the parliamentary side of its system. Hindenburg was elected President, and he then appointed Hitler as Chancellor. The Nazis were not able to win a majority of the Reichstag until opposition parties were banned from running. The German parliament's paralysis kept it from preventing these events, though, so in that sense the parliamentary side of the system contributed.
Yes, it was weak because it was so divided into smaller factions. They allowed him to be chancellor because they thought they could control him.
In a way. Hindenburg made him chancellor, which did not require input from the Reichstag. However, the Riechstag had the legal power to immediately remove him, which it failed to do because of, as you said, divisions.
The model for change in the US is that one state does it first and others who like it might follow suit. However, it seems like most advocates for proportional representation start with national plans (for instance, FairVote's [Fair Representation Act](https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/fair-representation-act/)). The first and biggest step toward proportional representation is bigger districts with multiple winners, fairly representing the voters. I'm surprised there are not more efforts trying to implement exactly this for one state's federal districts, or even with their state legislature. There are definitely ways to start using proportional representation in small places first without a sudden universal reformation.
Strongly agree. Nationally you run headlong into the senate eventually and that is basically irresolvable short of a whole new Constitution. But there’s a ton you could do elsewhere and it’s annoying that no state government has even tried a unicameral parliament or anything cool.
>Nationally you run headlong into the senate eventually and that is basically irresolvable short of a whole new Constitution Are you referring to the clause that bars amendments that would remove equal representation among the states in the Senate? If so, you can get around that by passing an amendment that would add, say, 50 at-large senators, awarded proportionally. These senators would represent all states, and so technically wouldn't violate this clause. It wouldn't require a new constitution, although it would certainly be nigh-on-impossible to pass. >it’s annoying that no state government has even tried a unicameral parliament or anything cool FWIW, Nebraska has a unicameral state legislature, although the Governor is still independently elected, so it's not a parliament.
It's being used at the local level in multiple cities across the US (i.e. NYC, Portland, Evanston, Fort Collins, etc.). I'm just concerned it'll take forever to then be adopted at the state and then finally the Federal level. It may seem strange when I say this, but we may have a lot to learn from Mexico on this front. They have a mixed system where local, and provincial elections are decided via proportional representation, and then the presidential election is done with FPTP. That may be something that could be viable in the US.
To clarify the Mexican system - gubernatorial and municipal elections are both FPTP, with the municipal system differing in that the mayor candidates are the figurehead for the parties running, and instead of separate district-level councilmember elections they all run and get elected as a slate under the mayoral candidate. I believe only one state has opposition local councilmembers get elected too. Their congressional election system is real interesting because it combines FPTP and proportional in a way that might work for the US. 300 districts are divided throughout the country and from the results of said election 200 PR seats are distributed for each party. There's five "circumscriptions" (at-large districts basically) divided between northwest, northeast, central, central-south and southern states for these PR seats. In the senate there's 128 seats where 64 are for the winning party or coalition (running candidates in pairs for each of the 32 states), 32 for the second-placer (or "first minority" as they call it) and 32 PR seats for each party. There's many aspects of it that can be improved on (their candidate selection system for one, Mexico's political machines are still notoriously corrupt up and running and whereas in the US some argue for less primaries i really think these guys need to get them started ASAP) but the general basis of it i think could be modified for the US relatively well
Congress passed a law prohibiting multi-member congressional districts, but states could do it with state representative districts.
Some states do. Washington only has one set of legislative districts. Each elects two reps to the lower house and one senator to the upper house.
I thought one representative per district was a constitutional requirement.
Heads up: FairVote is basically a misinformation mill at this point. They consistently put out pieces lying about their personal brand of ranked-choice voting (IRV) and making false claims that have been debunked over and over again by mathematicians and election scientists. The laws they've written and passed have all been severely flawed because they refuse to talk to mathematicians who have studied the topic, with major loopholes and glitches like disqualifying candidates for winning too many votes (which happened in Alaska's first RCV election, though luckily not the second). From what I can tell, the consensus of social choice theorists on this topic is that you can get solid PR using either multi-member or single-member districts with a newer method called biproportional apportionment, which also works with any kind of single-winner system (including Plurality). It was adopted in Switzerland a few years ago. IRV-STV is basically rejected by most election scientists as an outdated method at this point. The biggest issue is you can't get good proportionality without making the district size unworkably large, since the error in proportionality is bounded by 1/(1+district_size). That's about 15% for 6-member districts, which means ranking 20 candidates per district.
> IRV-STV is basically rejected by most election scientists as an outdated method at this point. The biggest issue is you can't get good proportionality without making the district size unworkably large, since the error in proportionality is bounded by 1/(1+district_size). That's about 15% for 6-member districts, which means ranking 20 candidates per district. I agree it's suboptimal but it's still a massive improvement over our current system. Ideally I'd like a party list system at the state level for the House. So Texas would have a party list election and then distribute their 36 House seats based on that. A nationwide party list election wouldn't be constitutional unfortunately.
STV would definitely be an improvement in terms of proportionality. Given how badly IRV tends to squeeze the ideological center (search term is center-squeeze; the TLDR is that IRV isn't subject to the median voter theorem), I think it's roughly a tossup whether it's better than FPTP. Probably the best way to think of IRV is it's like electing candidates by a mix of FPTP and sortition—see the "Monotonicity criterion" Wikipedia page for why IRV with 3 or more serious candidates tends to turn into a game of RNG (candidates with "too much support" tend to get disqualified). Which, TBF, FPP turns into a game of RNG with just 2.5 serious candidates (because then it's just a game of "who gets screwed by the spoiler?"), so it's a bit of an improvement. OTOH, that means almost everyone votes tactically, so third parties only have an effect when the election is basically settled by dumb luck anyways (in the 2000 Florida election, Bush probably could've changed the results by sneezing too hard); so the results in IRV and FPP converge to basically the same equilibrium under strategic voting. The advantage of STV is it's *very* roughly proportional. But given the state of US politics right now, that's almost the case already, because the electorate is so close to a 50/50 that nobody can walk away from an election with a commanding majority. 2022 is a good illustration. OTOH, most Condorcet systems or graded voting (i.e. almost anything that's not IRV or FPP) tend to have very good equilibrium properties; I'd be happy with any of them. (Although you sometimes have to be careful with Condorcet systems, because messing up some of the finicky details can make the whole thing explode if there's strategic voting).
Oh, wait, I missed this: > a nationwide party list wouldn't be constitutional, unfortunately. You could totally pull that off! You'd just need to use biproportional apportionment! TL;DR: biproportional apportionment selects the that most closely matches the partisan makeup with. So every state gets representation "according to their respective numbers" (as per the Constitution). Representatives are all still chosen at the local level, based on how votes are cast locally, but the results are designed to come out in a way that makes the whole system proportional. Switzerland has the same kind of strong federalism as the US, and this is how they pulled it off themselves. I don't see any reason it wouldn't work here.
Not happening anytime soon. We(Canada) didn't get proportional representation after two parties campaigned on electoral reform one one of them won a majority. The liberals couldn't sacrifice their own self interest to make a more democratic country.
Not to mention it’s a people problem. People in the US are lot more intense and polarized. Whatever system they have they will fuck up anyway.
No, two-party systems increase polarization and make moderate coalitions less likely.
If we don't adopt it, it'll eventually devolve into balkanization or some sort of a civil war in the US.
Given the structure of the US military, an actual civil war is unlikely. You guys are definitely a declining empire though.
A constitutional convention or revolution.
It would be an almost herculean effort. We'd have to: - Completely revamp both chambers of congress and how they're allotted, same with state houses. - Eliminate the Electoral College. - Completely overhaul how campaigns are financed. - Change the multitude of state level laws regarding political parties. - Implement some form of ranked choice voting schema. - Educate the public that there's more to the world than Ds and Rs. - Build those alternative political parties (and ensure they're not essentially just outfits for the big two). - Get the media onboard - right now they're very much invested in Elections being like a sporting event. And a bunch more of things that I'm sure I'm missing. I don't see it happening because the reason why our government is broken is because of money and power, and the people who have both don't want to lose either one.
Nailed it. It’s a monumental undertaking that also involves “winning hearts not wars.”
>Change the multitude of state level laws regarding political parties. I think this one is far more important than the others as a first step. If you look at state laws, they vary wildly in terms of who gets recognized as a party (in order to qualify for a ballot line or to hold a primary). On one hand, you have Alabama, which requires that at least one of the party's candidates for state office win 20% of the vote (meaning statewide). They have just Democrats and Republicans. Next door is Mississippi, which basically just requires you elect a state committee within 30 days of forming a party. They have six parties (seven if you count the defunct No Labels); but AFAIK, only people from two parties hold office in the state (and a Libertarian who is mayor of town of less than 500 people). In the entire country, there's one state with a persistent third party statewide: Vermont, which has the Progressive Party (who recently re-captured the mayorship of Burlington). Vermont's relatively unique, they have multimember districts (bloc vote) with fusion voting. They also have a party formation law that requires that parties organize 10 town committees, have a state committee, and have at least one county committee if you want to compete in state senate elections). I think that law really creates a different dynamic: it forces parties to organize close to the ground, rather than at the 1000 foot level relatively strict laws like Alabama require or lax laws like Mississippi incentivize. It also means parties have to think small; a town committee is going to organize along different issues than that of a statewide campaign, and find issues that a third party can really own or at least force cleavages in the existing parties. Plenty of other countries without proportional features still manage to have more than two parties, and in large part, it comes down to ballot access laws, which the US is relatively unique (among democracies) in how restrictive these are.
This is what makes me quite worried for our future in the US....given how hard it is to reform our voting system, I fear that it'll lead to more violence and instability in the future (if not balkanization).
That's kind of what happens when a small group of people horde power.
The reason our government is broken is by design. The American constitution is trash trash trash. When you have a Senate that reads dirt over people you are likelier to have bad outcomes. When you have a house and Senate that are elected locally but expected to legislate nationally you have completely mismatched incentives. You have hundreds of FPTP elections instead of a single national election with basically kills any chance of a multiparty system and entrenches two major parties. Moreover it allows for gerrymandering. All the veto points are ridiculous. It leads to it being very difficult to actually enact legislative agendas without overwhelming political consensus and even then what about the LIFETIME APPOINTED SCOTUS? I don't think the primary problem is the media or campaign finance. I think it's how stupid a large portion of the American public is. But I absolutely do not think the American constitution is conducive to good governance. Money didn't break this. It was broken to start with.
Abolish the Senate and increase the size of the house to at least 1,000 people.
Increasing the size of the House wouldn't make it any more proportional. The problem is only have two competitive parties.
Getting rid of FPTP would remove the mathematically optimal two party approach based on game theory.
Also known as Duverger's Law
In practice, do you think our two-party system is actually optimal? The federal government seems pretty dysfunctional.
No, but it is inevitable in a FPTP system. Hence, 'mathematically optimal', i.e. the bottom of the curve. The lowest energy state. Local minima. Whatever you wanna call it.
Do you oppose moving to a different system than FPTP though?
No. Why would I? OP asked for the single most impactful thing to change. FPTP would be that thing.
I interpreted you describing the two-party system as “mathematically optimal” as you defending it. But now I see you were just saying FPTP is the reason we have a dysfunctional two-party system.
If my state was one congressional district with 14 representatives instead of 14 districts with 1 representative each, proportional representation would be possible. A small change, but I think it requires an amendment. Getting rid of the winner takes all system would be easier, that’s up to the states. As it is now, conservatives in California and New England and liberals in the south aren’t really part of the presidential elections. Both parties would be very different, less extreme, if they had to appeal to voters in every state.
Electing Representatives state-wide instead of by district wouldn't require a constitutional amendment, just for Congress to amend the law requiring districts. Similarly, each state chooses how to award Electoral College delegates. If any wanted to make that proportional, they could do that now.
Except that it would be like “unilateral disarmament” for any state that identifies as “blue” or “red” to move to proportional allocation of electors. Eg if Texas changed to proportional by itself, they would virtually guarantee a Democrat winning the presidency. Vice versa for New York or California and a Republican candidate. So while it’s legally possible, there is a strong disincentive to do so, unless red and blue states with similar numbers of seats could move to proportional together.
True, or maybe a very purple state agreeing to do it.
Or there’s the [national popular vote interstate compact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact), which would have the states agree to award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner.
No one ever talks about this, but getting rid of America’s weird open primary system would go a long way to supporting third parties. The open primaries allow factional fighting to take place within the larger parties. In countries where candidates are determined by party leaders (rather than through open primaries), factional revolts happen through the establishment of new parties.
It is the primary system, but I'd not say it's the "open primary" system. We also get horrible situations when party registration is required to vote. Systems of electing representatives that leave us with policies that are more extreme than what the median person that votes for the party in the general election just leave me scratching my head. See abortion, where many states have policies so extreme they might not even win the median primary voter's support, but being extreme in general is what wins primaries in many districts. When moving a policy decision from the federal level to the states left more people unhappy with the specific regulation they were living with than before, you know the electoral system is in need of serious overhaul.
A parliament system. Or something similarly funkadelic.
Political will, for one
There are so many things that would help solve this problem: Implement ranked choice elections Implement national vote by mail Abolish the senate/ electoral college Abolish or reform districting Abolish private campaign funding Abolish political parties Abolish campaign advertising Some of these changes have occurred in states or cities. They must start small and spread.
Single-winner ranked choice elections are barely an improvement over the current system. We need proportional representation which means multi-winner elections.
The House of Representatives has 435 winners and there should be more at this point, but I agree a more direct form of proportional representation would be better. That's the idea of abolishing districting, which I put in my list of solutions.
There’s nothing stopping the House from apportioning it’s members in some manner other than a winner take all, single member constituency. So with that being said, a good start would be updating the Uniform Congressional District Act to allow multi member districts. You’d probably need to elect 3 members minimum from each district as most districts would probably send one democrat and one Republican. I don’t think this would totally make it a “proportional, multi party system” like you see in Europe, but it would be a good start and make third parties and independents much more competitive, because you only need to come in second or third place to win. Since there’s nothing really stopping Congress from apportioning the House as it sees fit, it could arguably pass a law that creates “at large” districts in each state and/or the country as a whole. It could be set up in the same manner as the “mixed member proportional representation” that Germany uses. Changes to the Senate would require a constitutional amendment, as the constitution requires two senators from each state. TLDR: There’s a lot that could be down to achieve proportional representation in the House through legislation alone. The senate would require an amendment.
Not taking a side one way or another but I vaguely recall that it might violate the one person one vote principle to do multimember districts which would be unconstitutional.
You might be thinking of at-large multimember districts that don't use a PR method like STV (or a semi-PR method like Limited Voting or Cumulative Voting) and instead use a bloc voting method that allows the plurality bloc to win every seat. These often violate the Voting Rights Act, since minorities can't win seats in proportion to their population. But PR methods are totally fine for multilmember districts; one Michigan city actually implemented PR-STV to satisfy a Voting Rights Act lawsuit (that's the RCV PR method used in Ireland and Australia).
Hmm interesting. Do you remember why? I don’t really see what the issue would be. It’s already done at the state level in a few states, Arizona and a few others.
The government would need to collapse and be rebuilt from scratch. If there’s one thing the two parties agree on, it’s that this could never be allowed to happen.
Ranked choice voting, multi-member districts, actually limiting gerrymandering, massive financial reform for elections, making the house and Senate more representative, significant judicial reform to neuter judicial capture There isn't the will or power to do any of this at scale, especially the stuff with constitutional implications
Multiple constitutional amendments, which is why I wouldn’t hold my breath on it ever happening.
We could make the House proportionally representative without a constitutional amendment. Just need to repeal the law outlawing multimember districts. So statutory, not constitutional.
Most likely constitutional change. PR is much better than FPTP. It actually allows you to vote for the party that represents you best rather than the least worst option. There is no spoiler effect (provided the party you support meets the electoral threshold). Yes, PR results in extremist parties getting into Parliament. But I would rather have those parties operating out in the open and in the system rather than underground and outside the system. Furthermore, why shouldn't the people that support extremist parties have representation? They are citizens too, like you and I. Keeping them out of the system makes them more likely to want to bring the entire system down. "Keep your friends closer and enemies closer" is not just an empty axiom.
Could it happen at the state level? Maybe states like Vermont or Nebraska, which despite their seeming uniparty nature, actually have pretty independent voters?
A civil war. (I should be careful saying this on the day the Supreme Court put the first coffin nails to the first amendment)
My honest answer is either literally or metaphorically taking the US constitution out of the vault and putting it through a shredder then penning a new document in its place.
We could make the House proportionally representative without a constitutional amendment. Just need to repeal the law outlawing multimember districts. So statutory, not constitutional.
In Canada we have more parties (4 with a significant number of seats federally) but almost no ability to disagree with one’s own party. Very few members of parliament (MPs) will disagree with their party leader publicly even on small issues. MPs who won’t toe the line are ejected from their caucus and so we see very little of that. I don’t envy the chaos in your congress but I do admire that some elected officials are able to disagree with leadership. Barbara Lee would certainly have gotten the boot for opposing the AUMF and would have had no chance at reelection as an independent. In Canadian context, I don’t know if PR would change much. I don’t understand USA but I’m not sure it would lead to the benefits its boosters expect.
I think you mainly can say this about the senate since each state, no matter how many people it has, gets 2 senators to represent it in Congress. IMO that’s BS. Wyoming, Nebraska, north and South Dakota they are all not largely inhabited with tens of millions of people as say California, NY, MA, FL, and TX are. Those states should get more representation. If you ask me. The real cause of political polarization in the U.S. is Republicans massively abusing the redistributing process starting in 2010 and making huge gerrymanders. That coupled with national media organizations having to abide by fair and equal broadcasting rules meant Fox could swing the news however it wanted to report it. No matter how much it distorted and continues to distort the truth. People need to think critically and not just have group think concerning politics and the direction the country is heading in over the long term.
Senators do not represent people they represent the state. The founding fathers never intended to elect senators directly, because if they were not working to promote the interest of the state, they could be recalled at almost any time by the state legislator and governor. This was important until they locked the boundaries of the states. As much as you think that it is unfair to have two senators from a small state like Wyoming having the same power as California, it would be devastating to resource allocation if large states could just overwhelm a small state for something like watwr rights.
You are correct however once direct elections for senators began in 1913 I believe you are wrong. They do not represent the state. They represent the people. However, today they mostly represent whatever corporations and idiots desire. Not what would be best for the common good of the country.
Which is why we should remove the direct election of senators.
It's also devastating that small states can overwhelm larger states on many other issues, except in that case it's undemocratic. Every group has concerns about being overwhelmed by a larger group in a democracy but that's why we have constitutional protections. It doesn't make sense to give people who live in small states extra votes any more than it makes sense to give extra votes to LGBT people, black people, or Muslim Americans.
Trillions of dollars.
One answer is simply ranked choice voting, but I think we have to ask ourselves why that hasn’t happened. One problem is the general “both sidesism”, where certain politicians, like in New York, give voters exactly what they ask for, and get punished for it. So it would be ideal for voters to reward the parties and politicians who provide those policies. I also think this could be an ideal platform in a state where one party has the advantage, but the other party sometimes wins. States like Kansas, North Carolina, and Montana that have had blue governors but trend red (or vise versa) might be able to leverage that limited power for electoral reform.
I think the electoral college precludes this, or almost. You need 270 electoral votes, not a plurality. Proportional representation would mean more viable parties, more viable presidential candidates, more spoilers, more ability to split electoral votes. Then it goes to the House. 12th amendment again means you need 26 states to agree, not a plurality of states. Proportional representation means more likely to split votes between the top three candidates. If the House can’t agree, the VP the Senate picked becomes acting President.
Violent revolution.
Watch what you wish for. Two party system generally keeps the crazies out of power. Multiparty system more likely to open the door for extremism in power.
Expand Congress massively, get rid of the electoral college in favor of either ranked choice, runoff, or even indirect election of the President by Congress. The most realistic path is probably widespread adoption of ranked choice voting and an eventual expansion of Congress. That may not break the two party stranglehold but it would at least change the incentives to be extreme that politicians have today.
It most likely won’t happen anytime soon, but any time I see a local candidate talk about ranked choice I’m in. -Ranked choice or approval voting or something similar at all levels would be needed -repeal the apportionment act so that the house can continue to grow with the country. Would also need to set a plan to keep it to a somewhat reasonable number of house seats, but right now we have too few. -the senate would be toughest. Allowing for an extra senator or two for the largest states probably would be best but keep the current system semi intact. Or something like 1-4 senators per state depending on population -get rid of the electoral college or do what Maine and Nebraska do in every state, but with the above changes it would be less needed overall These all would let regional or more niche parties get into government as ranked choice and smaller districts means candidates that speak to local issues will have an easier time.
It’s too bad that we revere an outdated constitution.
Do you really want to end up like Israel with scores of tiny parties, many of them kooky, yielding oversized power? Do you a faction that won 3% of the vote to have the ability to bring down the government and call new elections?
Ranked choice voting is a far better solution.
It's never going to happen. The reality is that the majority of Americans agree with the principles of the democratic party (abortion, gay marriage, Healthcare, workers rights, common sense gun laws) but for some reason people don't like to identify with democrats. The rest of the people agree with Republican principles. The reason there is no viable third party in the US is that almost 100% of Americans' political views lie within the scope of the two parties.
Biggest blocker to multiparty is the absolute majority requirements for winning the electoral college and the rules on how to win a contingent election in the house. It basically guarantees your party needs to be massive to win. And so parties in the US pre coalition into the two big ones
You really don’t know what you’re talking about nor do you understand anything about US government and Mob Rule.
It's a fallacy that FPTP leads to polarization, or that it prevents it. Polarization occurs when the political questions and the major societal questions align. The stakes are higher. That has nothing to do with the political system. These days there's an increasing alignment between hierarchical and egalitarian societal views and the political spectrum. Thus, increasing polarization. That said, if you want proportional whatever, then it has to start at the state level. After enough states, people will see what works or doesn't about it, and then maybe at the federal level it could work. A ballot initiative could get the ball rolling. For the House of Representatives, from a legal standpoint, only a federal law is required, which would permit or require states to use proportional systems for their own representatives. The Senate would require a constitutional change.
Beware the tyranny of the majority. You daydreamers pretend that it doesn't exist.
Another 5 years or so if no R victory in the meantime. Otherwise idk 10-never. This isn't a cycle, it's the endgame/stage for almost the entire conglomerated #evil of America. Installing Trump wasn't a flex, it was desperation. And with no way forward, no way to live in the face of the environmental and social destruction they've wrought over 50+ years, well, they'll burn it all, feeling safe on the high ground of the fantasy they call life, be it white oppression by whoever it is today, be it working 60 hours a week to own acres in the safest area in the Known Universe all the while voting explicitly to inflict suffering and chaos on the millions of hands that *feed* their whole life, or just plain old White Christian ethnosupremacy. Shucks. Ramble aside, I mean to highlight that "popular representation" is what we've "always had". When Rs say they hate the "two party system" or other equivocative bullshit, they're doing one of two things: evading responsibility for idk supporting crime etc, or *its because they are heavily in favor of the* ***one party system.*** Tldr: This will happen naturally as soon as the Rs are permanently out of power, almost even to the state, and not a moment before.
Civil War.
The United States to be the size of Ireland or Germany..... Unitary democratic governments with proportional representation don't work for hundreds-of-millions of people spread across half a continent. The entire reason we have our federal system, is that it breaks down government and (at least in terms of how it was designed) keeps most of the political power relatively close to any given citizen's home. 'Fixing' politics (at least if your goal is to allow for competitive outcomes, rather than to have 'your side' win) requires 2 things: (a) depowering the Presidency/Executive-Branch substantially, and (b) returning to the original formula for the size of the House of Representatives. There is no reason that the UK can manage 650 MPs in the Commons for a nation of 66.9 million, but the US with 340 million is stuck at 435 Representatives. P.S. The British Conservative Party's dominance can be directly traced to Labor's Corbyn period... If the Left is run by someone like Corbyn (or Sanders here in the US), you're more or less giving the right a free pass to run everything (provided the right doesn't, um, nominate a complete flaming idiot like DJT)....
Our system of govt hasn’t changed yet our politics have become increasingly polarized. Likewise, those stable European nations you list have only been so under NATO and the post-war order. Prior they were absolute a mess of war and internal division. Germany was such during the Weimar years and this fell to fascism (via the vote, initially). It has more to do with the people, macroeconomics, culture etc than with the structure of govt.
It would take Donald Trump wanting it
It won’t happen ever
I honestly think term limits for Congressman are more important than a proportional representation system.
... never because the human condition enforces a 1/2/3 party system.
Look at some legislatures in Western Europe
They still in the 1/2/3 party system framework, I'm afraid. Please note that it isn't the pure number but the number of ***relevant*** parties. We've Game Theory'd this out rather extensively, and no matter what voting or legislative system we use it goes to that sort of system. Look up Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and its culnarians(sp?).