Reformers' dilemma: which Pro Rep method for US democracy?

As electoral reformers plot out “next steps,” the devil will be in the details. Here are some thoughts

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Last week I laid out a blueprint for how to pass proportional representation for electing legislatures in the United States. But that begs the question: which proportional representation method would work best? What should reformers aim toward?

As different groups and funders start lining up behind one PR method or another, this question becomes more important to figure out. Recently a report from the Data and Democracy Lab used elections for the Massachusetts state legislature to try and model different electoral methods to determine highest favorability between single-seat district plurality elections, instant runoff voting (single-winner ranked choice voting), single transferable vote (STV, or proportional ranked choice voting) or a Party List proportional method. I would recommend checking out this report. While I’m not a big fan of the type of computational simulations used by this study, since they are based on voting data that is derived from non-PR elections (in which voters picked candidates or parties based on their understanding of “winner-take-all” rules instead of PR rules), nevertheless the study gets the juices flowing in terms of thinking about variations among different electoral methods.

As more leaders, organizations and funders start tuning into the reform possibilities, I thought I would fashion an outline of some of the key details that will need to be addressed as these discussions unfold. It will be particularly important to take into account the uniquely American culture, traditions and history, especially as these vary from state to state. In particular, I am going to focus on the PR methods of Party List vs Proportional Ranked Choice Voting vs Mixed Member Proportional. What are their distinguishing characteristics that make them better or worse suited for the demands of political representation in modern society? Is one of them better than the others?

For this discussion, I’m also going to make the following assumption. At the federal level, the number of US House members elected per state is so small in a number of states that PR elections will be difficult to configure. For example, seven states have one House member: Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Delaware. And seven more states have only two House members: Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and West Virginia. For those 14 states, proportionality of representation is not possible to achieve without greatly expanding the number of seats in each state by at least a factor of three. That in turn would require an expansion of House seats in all remaining states.

While a moderate expansion of the current 435 House members is certainly long overdue, it doesn’t seem likely that the famously “big government”-averse sentiments of most Americans would accept a reform touting a federal legislature of 1300 or more members. So the best immediate target for PR reform would likely be state legislatures, which often have anywhere from dozens to hundreds of elected legislators. The states, which historically have served as the laboratories for new ideas that then spread to the federal level, allow a better drawing board for thinking through this discussion and its finer points.

The “operating system” of representative democracy

Broadly speaking, proportional representation (PR), which is used by most of the established democracies in the world, refers to a category of electoral systems in which political parties (or in non-partisan elections, groupings of like-minded voters, i.e. liberals, conservatives, progressives) win representation in proportion to their share of the votes. Elections take place, not in single-seat districts, but in multi-seat “super districts” where, in a district with 10 seats (for example), if a party or grouping wins 20% of the popular vote it wins 20% – two – of the seats; if it wins 60% it is awarded 60% – six – of the seats.

But in the US, where we mostly use different variants of a “winner-take-all” electoral system (also referred to as “first past the post”), in which the highest vote-getters in individual races win, that same 20% of the vote usually wins no representation, and 60% wins 100% of the representation. That’s because legislative offices are elected one district seat at a time and result in a single legislative winner instead of multiple winners (there are exceptions, but that is the basic rule, especially in major elections).

So proportional representation tends to lead to multi-party legislatures in which a number of parties are able to compete and win legislative seats, including major and minor parties. Meanwhile, winner-take-all elections tend to result in a two-party system.

But even that is a misnomer since most winner-take-all districts, indeed most states, are little more than noncompetitive one-party fiefdoms due to partisan regional demographics, i.e. Democrats dominating in urban areas, Republicans in rural areas and many suburbs (important to note: the lack of competition in most districts and states is not due to gerrymandering the district lines but due to these partisan regional demographics, i.e. where people live). The real “choice” for voters is to ratify the candidate of the party that dominates their district or state.

PR systems generally result in more choice for voters, higher voter turnout, broader representation and – with more points of view at the legislative table – it leads to more “policy congruence,” which is the political science way of saying that the policies passed by the legislatures are more in keeping with what the majority of the society generally desires. Most of the established democracies in the world use some type of proportional voting system, with just a handful of democracies – primarily the UK and its former colonies, such as the US, India and Canada – that continue to use the antiquated winner-take-all system.

Different types of PR – which is best?

Within the category of PR electoral systems, there are different methods. For this discussion, three subcategories of proportional voting methods are proposed as most relevant: a Party List PR system; a hybrid method known as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP); and a ranked ballot method, known as Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV) (and by political scientists as “single transferable vote”). In my view, all of these PR methods are superior to the current winner-take-all method used in the US. Let’s look at each of them in turn, pros and cons.

Party List PR. Of all the PR methods, the most widely used around the world is the Party List system. It is simple to use, including for low-information voters, because all the voter has to do is to pick a single party and its pre-selected list of candidates that she/he wants as their representative agent. The votes are added up, and parties are awarded seats in proportion to their share of the popular vote. The party’s candidates ranked highest on the list fill the elected seats. Simple. Parties are elected from multi-seat “super districts” which tend to be large – often dozens of seats per district. Some countries, like the Netherlands and Israel, have a single nationwide electoral district with 120 or 150 seats.

In many countries, the party lists often are used to present a diverse slate of candidates to attract more voters. More parties have started using their lists to nominate a lot more female candidates, even rotating male-female slots, which in various countries has elected a higher percentage of women than any other method. Other represented diversities include younger candidates, ethnic minorities, certain sectors like labor, a party’s ideological wings, and regional diversity. The head of the list, called the “puller,” is usually the most popular personality who appears in debates and on campaign literature.

However party list systems are known for having weaker links between elected representatives and local constituents. Voters in this form of representative democracy are winning representation based more on what they think, instead of where they live. With “closed lists,” which usually result in party leaders selecting the candidates, voters have no opportunity to determine the identity of the individuals who will represent them; voters may not end up with an identifiable representative for their town or city. Nor can they easily reject an individual representative if they feel that he or she has performed poorly in office. In fact, the ballot paper (see link) contains only the party names and symbols, and a photograph of the party leader (the puller), but no names of individual candidates.

Open List variant. For this reason, some countries use an “open list” PR system in which voters are permitted to vote for an individual candidate, and that vote then doubles as a vote for that candidate’s party in figuring out the proportion of legislative seats won by each party. Candidates that receive the most individual votes are pushed higher up the party’s candidate list. In some open list countries, that determines which of the party’s candidates will get elected, but in other countries not always. The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) based in Stockholm observes that Open List “is notable for the large number of variations in the way it is implemented rather than for a set of rules common to all OLPR frameworks.”

Hence, at least in theory with open lists, individual voters can influence which candidates ultimately take the seats in the legislature. In reality, according to IDEA and the experts at ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, depending on the country most voters still mark their ballots only for parties rather than candidates, and in many countries the open choice option has limited effect. Canadian political scientist Henry Milner says in Sweden’s open list system most voters do not in fact vote for individual candidates, instead they follow the recommendations of influential party chiefs, which to Milner means that “party supporters tend to have confidence in their party’s leaders.”

So in some countries, even in a number of open-ish list systems, a candidate’s position on the list, and therefore his or her likelihood of election, may well depend on finding favor with party leaders. Political scientist Lee Drutman and Professor Aziz Huq have written in favor of an open-list system with super districts of 5 to 7 seats; political scientist Jack Santucci has spoken in favor of a similar system. This would be an interesting experiment to try in the US. A number of smaller nations, such as Denmark, Luxembourg and Slovenia, elect seat magnitudes of anywhere from 4 to 11 by open lists. The smaller district magnitude would preserve a sense of regional or geographic representation.

But there is a tradeoff for districts even of moderate size, since in a five-seat district, any voter casting a ballot for a party with less than the “victory threshold” of 16.67% of the vote would waste their vote on an unelected party; in a seven-seat district 12.5% would be the “wasted vote” cutoff. This could potentially hurt the electoral opportunities for smaller, i.e. third parties and potentially various minorities, whether racial or geographic, as well as independent candidates, without some kind of ability for several minor parties to co-aggregate their vote, either through a fusion capability or transferable cross-ranked ballots. In some PR democracies, small parties are allowed to group together for an election but are listed separately on the ballot paper, and the votes gained by each are totaled together for the joint list, increasing the chances their combined grouping will finish above the victory threshold (a practice called apparentement). The right design also would allow the inclusion of independent voters and candidates, which in a number of states today is the largest bloc of voters, larger than either Democrats or Republicans.

Mixed Member Proportional (MMP). This hybrid method might be an easier sell in the US than either a pure open or closed list system because it combines US-style “winner-take-all” district representation with a Party List system. So it combines something familiar with something new. The voter actually has two votes, one for their district representative and a second vote for the political party and its candidate list they most prefer. Overall, the number of seats won by parties will be proportional to the List vote, but some of the seats will be filled by representatives from districts.

So MMP has many of the advantages of the List system, and combines that with local, geographic representation. It delivers representation based on both where you live and what you think, which are both legitimate democratic values on which to base representation. However, given the two different types of representatives, it may require larger legislatures than Americans are likely to tolerate. Germany uses MMP and in recent years its Bundestag swelled to 736 members, the largest democratically elected legislature in the world. This recently prompted Germany to cap the number of seats at 630, which is still enormous by US standards at 435 seats, given Germany’s much smaller population of 83 million compared to the US at 340 million.

Also, just like in the US currently, the winner-take-all districts tend to elect fewer women, and so MMP has not always been as beneficial for women’s representation as straight up Party List PR.

Proportional Ranked Choice Voting. Also known as Single Transferable Vote, PRCV is a ranked ballot proportional voting method, and the advantages claimed for List PR systems generally – broader representation, more diversity, higher turnout -- apply to PRCV systems as well. Voters rank individual candidates, 1, 2, 3, instead of picking a single party, and it can be used either in partisan or nonpartisan elections (with a single-winner variant – instant runoff voting – that can be used to elect presidents, governors, mayors and other executive branch offices). For nonpartisan elections, like those used to elect city councils in most cities, it is the best method for achieving proportional representation (compared to other methods like cumulative or limited voting), but it also has been used in partisan elections in Ireland, Australia and elsewhere for many decades. So this is a very flexible method for practical use in a variety of electoral situations, including partisan, nonpartisan, city councils, state and federal legislatures, as well as executive offices like governor and mayor.

In places like the Republic of Ireland and Australia, the multi-seat “super districts” used in PRCV tend to be on the smaller side, anywhere from 3 to 7 seats per district, so it retains a flavor of geographic, i.e. local representation and a link between voters and their representatives. But like List PR, it also facilitates voters being able to vote for candidates who represent what they think, so it allows the best of both worlds. Furthermore, the system provides an opportunity for the election of popular independent candidates, since voters are choosing candidates rather than parties directly. With the ranked ballots, it also provides incentives for coalition-building through the reciprocal exchange of preferences between parties, which can help reduce partisan polarization.

A voter can decide to rank a candidate from a particular party first, a candidate from another party second, an independent candidate third, and so on, which provides maximum choice for voters (also, a Party List option can be added to a PRCV election; this is done for the Australian Senate, in which the voter has the option of checking a box for a single political party, which automatically ranks all of that party’s candidates). Voters’ rankings are used to reallocate votes cast for losing candidates and their parties to remaining candidates/parties, using the transferable ballots efficiently. The transferable ballots maximize the number of voters who actually cast a vote that helps elect a candidate or party. In the most recent Irish elections, only one percent of votes were cast for losing parties and therefore wasted.

Like a Party List system’s ability to allow parties to diversify candidates on their list, PRCV also incentivizes the political parties to use the endorsed rankings to diversify their pool of candidates and represent more of their “big tent” of supporters. The ability among parties to swap ranked preferences allows major parties to harness minor party enthusiasm, while still enabling minor parties to have their own identity and hold the major parties accountable.

Two criticisms of PRCV, and of ranked ballot methods in general, is that the act of ranking multiple candidates is more complicated and challenging for some voters, and the administration of these election is more challenging for elections officials. But we have decades of experience, as well as research documenting and analyzing that experience, of the use of ranked ballots in the US, Ireland, Australia, UK and elsewhere, and we see little evidence that, with proper public education, voters cannot successfully use this electoral method. Or that with practical preparation, election officials can’t administer such elections. After all, the rules for professional football, basketball and baseball are far more complicated than the act of ranking your ballot, and tens of millions of Americans master not only their understanding of those sports games but also the strategies behind them.

In addition, the single winner form of RCV (i.e. instant runoff voting) would be sensible to use for elections for president, governor and other executive offices, and having a uniformity of ballot styles across all types of races would simplify the role for voters, as well as election administrators. Its seems telling that a comparative assessment of the potential impact of 37 structural reforms by 14 political scientists — including redistricting reform, open primaries and other possible reforms — found that proportional ranked choice voting was found to have the greatest positive impact on US democracy. MMP also was rated highly.

How do we pick the best PR method?

Since all of these methods are defined as proportional representation, and all benefit from the virtues of PR systems in general, this question really hinges around whichever state or city is considering a change to its electoral system, and which of these different methods is a better fit for the politics, traditions and culture of that state or city.

The fundamental dilemmas of modern representative democracy do not always lend themselves to easy solutions, or to simple assessments of which electoral system design will work best. Nevertheless, at some point an electoral system designer must propose a real plan. After nearly three decades of doing just that in my reformer career, I can say with certainty that the devil is in the details. It is incumbent upon reform advocates to do the hard work of drafting their electoral plan(s) with enough concrete specificity that addresses the known problems of US democracy within the well-known, path-dependent constraints of local, state and national traditions, culture and history, as well as the pros and cons of each PR method.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776