Steven, we disagree on the *fundamental* undesirability of plurality seat allocation. This shapes other features of our perspectives. One might be how we view a "wasted vote." Another might be the value of "winner-take-all" as a descriptor. I think this disagreement is producing the debate you want to have on this blog.
As for "vote leakage," I hypothesized and concluded from evidence that this was a proximate cause of STV repeal in three key U.S. cases. I say "key" because those cases shaped the thinking of the national PR lobby. In other cases, we find people making arguments about STV that suggest frustration with "leakage." Leakage may present other problems, but it was central to my answer to the research question: "Why did STV get repealed after having been adopted in U.S. cities?"
Hi Jack, thanks for your thoughts. I don’t understand your first paragraph, so I’ll focus on the second. I have finally had the time to read your book – thanks for your nudging – as well as several of your articles in which you explain your theory behind “vote leakage.” And more broadly, in which you gamely and quite reasonably tackle a difficult historical question, “Why STV was repealed in two dozen cities in the middle of the 20th century?” And “What relevance does that have for reform efforts today?”
I think your “vote leakage” conclusion is an interesting thesis, but ultimately unconvincing. I know from personal experience – being in the trenches of reform for three decades – that the reason a reform wins or loses is a matter of a number of factors. There is never one reason. Your “vote leakage” addition to previously identified factors – mainstream intolerance of elected minority perspectives, complexities of counting ballots by hand, defeated anti-reformers waiting for the right political moment to repeal, insufficient time for the public to get use to STV (I note that in your table 5.1, of the couple dozen STV cities, nine of them used STV for five years or less, and five more for 12 years or less) – all of these explanations are credible to me, especially in combination with each other in a variety of mixes, depending on the city. And of course not so easy to quantify, as you have resolutely tried to do regarding vote leakage.
I am still in the process of assessing issues raised in your book such as vote leakage, but I think a weakness in your argument is that you have tried to tie this to the behavior of political parties in each city. And yet in all of these cities, with the exception of New York City, they were nonpartisan elections. Certainly in nonpartisan elections political parties still attempt to exert their influence (in San Francisco where I live, which is a heavily Democratic city, the Democratic Party endorsement and slate card mailer is a significant force). But when the voter walked into the voting booth in these STV cities, they did not see party labels on the ballot, they saw only candidate names. Yet you have drawn a conclusion that the political parties became opposed to STV because they did not see it serving their interests.
I’m certain that is to some degree true, but not for the reason that is implied in your argument. The answer is far simpler: the anti-reformers wait for their chance to repeal. Full stop. And it’s not just political parties that have that attitude, BTW, but also certain business leaders, oftentimes newspaper editors and media personalities, stubborn election officials, and a whole host of American curmudgeons who are against change (“That’s not what the Founders intended!”). This attitude has repealed not just STV, but also campaign finance reform, in recent years vote by mail reform, early voting, voter ID and more. Because of this attitude, the U.S. House is still stuck at 1910 levels. And that’s just political reform, the anti-reformers also have repealed reforms targeted at economic insecurity, or gender parity and much more. There is nothing mysterious or hidden about this dynamic, the anti-reformer attitude has always been with us. It does not only emanate from political parties and their disaffections. And it did not just manifest with STV and a handful of cities.
Certainly, in my experience, the dominant political parties are inherently conservative organizations. They generally like the rules that elected them, especially true of the individual incumbent legislators, who of course their votes you need to pass (or protect) your reform.
In short, you have taken some rather interesting research that you have conducted, admirably churning thru old election records and such, and have shoehorned this data into a questionable thesis in which you (and others, such as Lee Drutman) have used to graft this very interesting and even provocative information onto a defense of the importance of political parties in the modern day. I don’t see the connection as strongly as you and Drutman do, I don’t think you have sufficiently made your case. It seems to me these are apples and oranges. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing” kind of thing.
In short 2X, I don’t see that your vote leakage theory has much relevance to today’s reform efforts. It would take me too long right now to discuss why I think your thesis falls short in several crucial ways. I will save that for another time. I hope to have time to write more about your thesis, and I look forward to a spirited discussion about it. Certainly your book has found its audience among some enthusiasts, and as a fellow author I congratulate you on that. And I wish you all the best, Jack.
Amenability to my argument depends first on how one conceives of a party, then on how one understands party behavior in STV. The repeal chapter is 2-3x longer than the others because I expected the reaction to its conclusions. I tried several other arguments from 2015-20. The one I wrote down is the one that best explained patterns in the data and case history. It also jives with STV experience in other countries.
The first paragraph is about what gets called Duverger’s Law.
Thanks Jack. Regarding your first sentence, I get your meaning. But if you are redefining "political party" from the traditional definition, then doesn't that make it less applicable for today, when looking at the behavior of traditional parties? At what point is a party not a party?
"Patterns in the data" – but your data was limited. No one knows what the leaders of repeal thought in the various cities, why they thought it was so urgent to repeal. There are no interviews with these leaders, though there are a few observations and comments from various quarters. But nothing definitive. We have no polls or focus groups from that time period asking the public of its views, teasing out subtleties of opinion – was STV just too complicated? Were the long hand counts a downer? If so, that undermines your exclusive thesis about STV being repealed because of dissatisfaction among party leaders over inability to control their voters' votes. If the voters had been greatly satisfied with STV, it would not have mattered what the party leaders thought or did. I think you have to be careful not to draw too strong of a conclusion from such a limited data perspective that you present in your book.
Certainly there's some interesting and suggestive evidence in your data, and some amusing anecdotal observations. I would love to have read more stories from those eras in your book, honestly. Such a colorful time and cast of characters. More of the "who said/did what" type of history would have been fascinating, as well as I suspect illuminating. But none of your evidence seems conclusive to me. There are too many alternative reasons for repeal that you would have to eliminate as influential, one by one, in order to raise the profile of your "vote leakage" theory.
Look at the list that I mentioned in my first post here. You didn't really address any of those other possible reasons for repeal in your book. Which is fine, that wasn't your focus. But it does illustrate the narrowness of your focus as a limitation. As I wrote previously, there is never ONE reason for repeal (unless there is some scandal that happened, like in San Francisco when Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated and in a bizarre narrative twist, the assassinations were blamed on district elections!)
I was surprised at how little you addressed Kathy Barber's thesis, which in my reading of her book was quite strong. So you have added something interesting to the discourse of "what happened" so many years ago. But at least in my view, your research and data does not settle this question of why all these repeals happened. If I have time, I will go through this with more details and explain more of my view.
Also, to the extent that I accept vote leakage as a real phenomenon, I don't see its relevance to the election system reform movement today. Yes, the political parties are often opposed to this kind of structural change. No one knows that better than Rob Richie and I. We knew that before your book was published, because we have been fighting Democrat and Republican obstructionism for decades.
Also, not sure what you mean by "jives with STV experience in other countries." Which countries? Countries that repealed STV? Or are you saying other countries in which there is "vote leakage"? If the latter, that doesn't prove anything. Of course there is going to be vote leakage, as you define it, in STV elections. That's SUPPOSED to happen. That's a feature, not a bug! That's what others call "voter choice" and "coalition building." To you, these apparently are negatives. To me and many others, these are positives.
Your substantive questions above are addressed in the book. I replied in the hopes of being constructive. Consumers of this blog can come to their own conclusions. Hopefully they will read what I wrote with an open mind before they do.
OK Jack, thanks for hanging out for a bit at the DemocracySOS tavern and sharing your thoughts and insights. Oh, one other possible explanation for the repeal of STV that I don't think your book adequately dealt with: according to Barber and others, STV broke up political machines in most of these cities. And that led to unremitting hostility from the old guard. I sort of mentioned this in a roundabout way when I wrote "defeated anti-reformers waiting for the right political moment to repeal," but I meant to be more explicit about who those anti-reformers were -- the old political guard that lost their dominance.
Under this thesis, it's not just a matter of "vote leakage" in which party leaders saw some voters give their lower rankings to candidates not to their liking. It's more that these political leaders lost real political power, and they waited for their chance to repeal, and fanned other factors -- racial intolerance, Red Scare, perceived complexity of hand counts, etc. -- to push a repeal. Compared to those very real dynamics that involve very human factors and motivations, i.e. craving for (return to) power, "vote leakage" feels like a pretty thin reed upon which to rest the case for all those repeals.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. More to come.
This is an interesting defense of (P)RCV in comparison to Party List PR. Your piece offers a lot to think about regarding applications of Party List PR.
What gives me pause is that even in the Australian Senate which basically uses PRCV, there’s still a dominant two-party system even though it is less stark than in the Australian House which uses IRV. In both chambers, I’m not seeing the sheer diversity of parties that I see in countries with Party List or MMPR countries. If applied feature for feature for legislatures in a presidential republic like ours, how would third parties like the Greens and Libertarians perform in terms of winning seats?
Plus, in Australia, they’ve mostly done away with group ticket voting, the RCV equivalent of the straight ticket device (IMO), and have switched to allowing voters to cast less than the full number of rankings on the ballot, allowing for voters to exhaust their ballots early if their candidate doesn’t make it to the next round of counting. I don’t know if you addressed this in the post, but doesn’t that also count as wasted votes? Not to mention, again, the minimal third-party candidate success in single-winner IRV.
Also, If it’s ok, I’d also like to see the wasted vote figures in presidential republics which use Party List PR for legislative elections like Brazil and most of Central and South America. They also have a history of a broad range of parties being elected to the same chambers, as well as negotiations for building pro-government and opposition coalitions, except to support the president rather than a prime minister. Since there are no presidential republics which use RCV at the national level to elect all members of a lower or unicameral chamber, I think it would help to compare elections in other presidential republics’ legislatures to ours as well.
But your post is one of the few times I’ve seen anyone go to bat in favor of RCV vis-a-vis Party List PR, so I do appreciate the perspective.
Hi Harry, thanks for your thoughts and comments. Here are some quick responses:
1) I don’t think your characterization is correct that all or even most List PR democracies have more elected parties than Australia. As my article mentions, nine parties won seats in the Australian Senate, and I think if you look around at other List PR democracies you will see that nine parties is at the upper end of the number of parties that tend to get elected. Germany, for example, with its MMP system has six elected parties, Sweden has eight, Italy has eight (in the PR part of their election), Norway nine and so on. And in most of these PR democracies, yes there are often two major parties, that is true in List PR as well.
2) you write about the “the minimal third-party candidate success in single-winner IRV", I think you mean in Australia, yes? If so, again that’s not exactly an accurate statement, in the Senate elections you have 5 third parties winning seats, plus an independent, that’s about as many as you see in many List PR democracies.
3) Australia’s recently new rules for voting allow voters to not rank all candidates, and certainly that has led to more “wasted votes”. But voters still get to rank their candidates, as many candidates as they like, and so they have a number of chances to cast their vote for an eventual winner. Consequently, the number of wasted votes are still less than in most List PR democracies, where voters only have a SINGLE CHANCE to cast a vote for a winner, either for a winning party in a closed list system, or a winning candidate in an open list system.
Frankly, ranked ballots are one of the wonders of modern representative democracy, and List PR democracies would be wise to include them in their own elections. For example, in Germany where as my article mentioned there was a recent election in which nearly 16% of voters wasted their votes by voting for a losing political party, Germany could have allowed those voters to rank their political parties. As my article makes clear, if authorities had allowed ranked ballots in the previous Israeli election, the terrible Netanyahu party would not have been able to form a right-wing religious government.
Ranked ballots are an unequivocal improvement in representative democracy, and it's puzzling to me why political scientists like Drutman, Santucci and a handful of others trash them. Some people believe ranked ballots are complicated, or make the voting process more complicated, but that’s just an unjustifiable disparagement of allegedly "dumb" voters, in my view. Millions of voters in the US, as well as millions more in Australia, Ireland and other places, use ranked ballots and handle the task of ranking candidates as easily as they handle the task of ranking their favorite flavors of ice cream or movies. In exit polls from New York City's first RCV elections, over 90% of Black, Latino, and Asian voters found their RCV ballot "simple to complete."
A few years ago there was a local RCV election in Oakland in which RCV critics complained about the number of “overvotes” but didn’t mention that the number of “overvotes” among Oakland voters was even higher in the election for U.S. Senate and governor. So there’s a lot of shoddy analysis out there among political scientists, in which they pick apart an RCV election but don’t ever compare to see if their criticisms of RCV apply to other methods as well.
So that’s all I have done in my article here, I took the RCV critics own words and showed that their criticisms applied as much as or even more than to the very system they are proposing as the replacement for RCV. Frankly, the failure of some political scientists to do this very basic amount of comparative due diligence is just sloppiness and shows that it’s not really political “science” they are practicing, it’s just cherry picking to justify their political agenda.
1 and 2) I do concede that there are nine parties in the Australian Senate. I guess I was thinking more about how the Labor and Coalition together (75%) *seem to* constitute a much larger chunk of the Senate (and the House) than their PLPR or MMPR equivalents, like SDP and CDU/CSU in Germany (just over 50%), and that the latter have a more even distribution of seats between each other which ensures that they have to negotiate with each other to form a majority government more often than not. But that's probably depending on whether one prefers government by coalition bloc over one of two parties winning a stable solo majority which lasts until the next election. I may have seen too many election seating charts haha!
Also, based on your reply, I just looked up whether there's any documentation of *ranked* PLPR and apparently there is a Wikipedia article about it (the "spare vote" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spare_vote ) which also links to other articles about modified d'Hondt PR and mixed ballot transferable vote, but apparently neither has been used yet in any election. I'm now fascinated by the idea, because that would definitely solve the wasted votes/democratic deficit issue that you mentioned for PLPR legislative elections, it would probably work more efficiently than the group voting ticket, and I can easily visualize how a spare vote ballot would look, as well as how it would be tallied. It looks so simple, I'm surprised that it hasn't been adopted yet. Thank you!
Wow, interesting about the Spare Vote, combining ranked ballots in a Closed List PR system. I had not heard about it before, thanks Harry for citing that piece of info.
While I respect that there are some issues with OLPR, I can't help but feel this is a bit of a strawman. Many of the issues being alleged here apply equally well to other proportional systems. Let me go through some of these claims.
> This feature unleashes a second level of competition – a high degree of intra-party competition, because within each party the candidates that win seats are those that garner the most personal votes from voters.
True, but in STV elections there is also intraparty competition where only the most popular candidates from each party will win seats. The only way to avoid candidates competing against those in their party while maintaining proportionality is to use a closed-list system, but that just moves the competition to behind closed doors. In other words, this is an unavoidable problem.
The competition takes on different flavors in these systems. In STV, voters choose where their vote transfers while in OLPR votes pool with everyone from the same party. Which of these makes the intraparty competition worse? I honestly don't know.
> Because candidates within the same political party are running against each other, that means they can spoil each other’s chance of election. Spoiler candidates within a political party can undermine the intra-party solidarity between those candidates.
This is true. But there are many ways to set up a List system, some of which deal with this problem better than others. In fact, I would argue the Finnish system isn't ideal. Most of the [open list systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_list) being used have some kind of threshold vote that must be met for a candidate to "jump the line" -- otherwise candidates are elected in party list order. A moderate threshold like 5% assures that candidates voters want are elected, but that candidates with a "marginal share of the vote" don't get a free ride to office like you described. Another popular solution is [panachage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage), where voters can vote for as many candidates as there are seats, which also avoids the popular candidate problem. In fact, voters can even split their votes between different parties. Arguably, OLPR and STV don't have to be exclusive, and you could use STV to determine party winners while allocating party seats proportionally.
> Or imagine a scenario in which, within a political party, there are two factions, one more conservative than the other.
Hmm, why not form separate parties in this case? Heck, with an alliance system they could still pool their votes together like they were one party so this wouldn't cost them any seats. In fact, this is arguably the point. OLPR proponent Shugart [claims](https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2021/01/19/emergency-electoral-reform-olpr-for-the-us-house/) "the overriding objective is to let different wings of current parties compete separately."
> In the one district of Uusimaa, the total number of fielded candidates in one election amounted to 395, and each voter was required to pick a single candidate.
[Uusimaa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uusimaa_(parliamentary_electoral_district)) elects 37 candidates to parliament, the largest in Finland. If there were just two parties we would already expect 74 names on the ballot. But larger districts also increases the number of political parties that can potentially win, so the number of running candidates increases superlinearly, leading to a crazy high number like 395. We would expect this result in both STV and OLPR. In Australia, the New South Wales election for Senate seats had 75 candidates competing for just six seats. The difference between the systems is that in OLPR you have to pick one candidate that is your favorite, while in STV you need to rank all 75 candidates (or fewer and risk wasting your vote). Since ranking necessarily involves picking your favorite, STV requires strictly more work from the voters when it comes to managing the election of large magnitude districts.
> What’s the best way for a candidate to cultivate their personal vote? The same way you do in the US-style plurality system – name recognition.
The same is true for candidates to try to win votes in STV. Again, this isn't the fault of OLPR here.
> The “wasted vote” problem in proportional methods
This I mostly agree with. For some context though, the 2016 Australian election had 7.52% of votes exhaust and 49.39% of ballots ([source](https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/research/files/sbps-exhaustion.pdf). The reason the number of ballots exhausted is so much higher is because many of the ballots are being exhausted after using some of their vote to elect a candidate. So far more ballots end up wasting a small amount of their vote under STV, but in OLPR a smaller amount of ballots waste all of their vote.
> Benjamin Netanyahu, achieved only 23 percent of the popular vote.
Overall I probably lean on your side in terms of STV v OLPR. But I think you undersell OLPR here, and that the system works a bit better than how you describe it.
Hi Ryan, thanks for your thoughts. I agree with much of what you have written, though you seem to have missed one of the major points of my article, which was to point out that much of the criticisms leveled by OLPR advocates against RCV/PRCV (STV) apply just as much if not more so to OLPR. So yes, as you write, “in STV elections there is also intraparty competition,” but that was never in dispute, most experts, including myself, already acknowledge that. It’s the OLPR advocates that don’t seem to be aware of how their preferred reform also must figure out strategies to deal with that feature.
And the Finnish system is often the one that is cited by OLPR advocates as the gold standard for open list PR systems, so that’s why I spent so much time analyzing and quoting from a Finnish political scientist who has studied it extensively. I chose not to discuss other types of OLPR methods because OLPR advocates are mostly focused on the Finnish system. Matthew Shugart captured some of the sentiment of my article when he wrote: "Many supporters of proportional representation in the US, Canada, and elsewhere speak as if PR means no need for strategic electoral behavior." I think this quote pretty aptly applies to OLPR advocates.
I certainly do agree with you though, that “you could use STV to determine party winners while allocating party seats proportionally.” In my view, ranked ballots are one of the wonders of modern democratic methods, and all proportional methods should include ranked ballots, including closed or open PR systems, as a way of greatly decreasing wasted votes.
I don’t think my analysis of the Israeli election was misleading, but your selective quote from my article sure was. The entire quote said, very clearly, “The front runner party Likud…achieved only 23 percent of the popular vote.” Yet from that you drew the conclusion that I claimed that the entire coalition only had 23% of the vote, despite my saying in the next sentence that “his BLOC was able to barely squeak out a MAJORITY of legislative seats for his rightwing, quasi-religious COALITION government.” Perhaps I implied too much instead of stating it explicitly. I acknowledge that you found this confusing, and I have changed the wording to try and clarify that point. Thanks for pointing it out.
It must feel like you have jumped in mid-conversation to an ongoing debate between PR advocates of different stripes, and as a result perhaps missed some of the nuances of what I wrote and why I wrote it. But you passed on much valuable information that will be of interest to those who are learning about these different types of electoral methods, and so I do thank you for your thoughts. All the best
I didn't intend to selectively quote you regarding the Israel election, I found it confusing and misleading. I read the new wording and I think the new version clears it up, so thank you.
It doesn't feel like I jumped in mid-conversation. I found Undercurrent Events (Drutman's Substack) through this blog and have been reading you both for the same amount of time, and I was already following Shugart (Fruits and Votes, which you cite in this article) since I read his book Votes from Seats. So while I haven't read all the sources (I avoid Twitter and Stanucci was a new name to me), I feel like I knew the gist of the arguments going in. I guess to me the title "The future of US democracy: OLPR vs RCV" made me think the article would be a comparison of the systems, and so I read a lot of your criticisms that stated "OLPR has problem X" implicitly as "compared to STV, OLPR has problem X." I understand now that this wasn't your intent, I guess it was mostly a framing issue to me. Apologies if you felt I wasn't being charitable.
It's all good Ryan, I really do appreciate your comments and observations. You added much to the conversation. Thanks for participating, I hope you will continue to chime in. And consider becoming a subscriber, here is the link. https://democracysos.substack.com/subscribe
Steven, we disagree on the *fundamental* undesirability of plurality seat allocation. This shapes other features of our perspectives. One might be how we view a "wasted vote." Another might be the value of "winner-take-all" as a descriptor. I think this disagreement is producing the debate you want to have on this blog.
As for "vote leakage," I hypothesized and concluded from evidence that this was a proximate cause of STV repeal in three key U.S. cases. I say "key" because those cases shaped the thinking of the national PR lobby. In other cases, we find people making arguments about STV that suggest frustration with "leakage." Leakage may present other problems, but it was central to my answer to the research question: "Why did STV get repealed after having been adopted in U.S. cities?"
Thank you for sharing the paper by Von Schoultz.
Hi Jack, thanks for your thoughts. I don’t understand your first paragraph, so I’ll focus on the second. I have finally had the time to read your book – thanks for your nudging – as well as several of your articles in which you explain your theory behind “vote leakage.” And more broadly, in which you gamely and quite reasonably tackle a difficult historical question, “Why STV was repealed in two dozen cities in the middle of the 20th century?” And “What relevance does that have for reform efforts today?”
I think your “vote leakage” conclusion is an interesting thesis, but ultimately unconvincing. I know from personal experience – being in the trenches of reform for three decades – that the reason a reform wins or loses is a matter of a number of factors. There is never one reason. Your “vote leakage” addition to previously identified factors – mainstream intolerance of elected minority perspectives, complexities of counting ballots by hand, defeated anti-reformers waiting for the right political moment to repeal, insufficient time for the public to get use to STV (I note that in your table 5.1, of the couple dozen STV cities, nine of them used STV for five years or less, and five more for 12 years or less) – all of these explanations are credible to me, especially in combination with each other in a variety of mixes, depending on the city. And of course not so easy to quantify, as you have resolutely tried to do regarding vote leakage.
I am still in the process of assessing issues raised in your book such as vote leakage, but I think a weakness in your argument is that you have tried to tie this to the behavior of political parties in each city. And yet in all of these cities, with the exception of New York City, they were nonpartisan elections. Certainly in nonpartisan elections political parties still attempt to exert their influence (in San Francisco where I live, which is a heavily Democratic city, the Democratic Party endorsement and slate card mailer is a significant force). But when the voter walked into the voting booth in these STV cities, they did not see party labels on the ballot, they saw only candidate names. Yet you have drawn a conclusion that the political parties became opposed to STV because they did not see it serving their interests.
I’m certain that is to some degree true, but not for the reason that is implied in your argument. The answer is far simpler: the anti-reformers wait for their chance to repeal. Full stop. And it’s not just political parties that have that attitude, BTW, but also certain business leaders, oftentimes newspaper editors and media personalities, stubborn election officials, and a whole host of American curmudgeons who are against change (“That’s not what the Founders intended!”). This attitude has repealed not just STV, but also campaign finance reform, in recent years vote by mail reform, early voting, voter ID and more. Because of this attitude, the U.S. House is still stuck at 1910 levels. And that’s just political reform, the anti-reformers also have repealed reforms targeted at economic insecurity, or gender parity and much more. There is nothing mysterious or hidden about this dynamic, the anti-reformer attitude has always been with us. It does not only emanate from political parties and their disaffections. And it did not just manifest with STV and a handful of cities.
Certainly, in my experience, the dominant political parties are inherently conservative organizations. They generally like the rules that elected them, especially true of the individual incumbent legislators, who of course their votes you need to pass (or protect) your reform.
In short, you have taken some rather interesting research that you have conducted, admirably churning thru old election records and such, and have shoehorned this data into a questionable thesis in which you (and others, such as Lee Drutman) have used to graft this very interesting and even provocative information onto a defense of the importance of political parties in the modern day. I don’t see the connection as strongly as you and Drutman do, I don’t think you have sufficiently made your case. It seems to me these are apples and oranges. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing” kind of thing.
In short 2X, I don’t see that your vote leakage theory has much relevance to today’s reform efforts. It would take me too long right now to discuss why I think your thesis falls short in several crucial ways. I will save that for another time. I hope to have time to write more about your thesis, and I look forward to a spirited discussion about it. Certainly your book has found its audience among some enthusiasts, and as a fellow author I congratulate you on that. And I wish you all the best, Jack.
Amenability to my argument depends first on how one conceives of a party, then on how one understands party behavior in STV. The repeal chapter is 2-3x longer than the others because I expected the reaction to its conclusions. I tried several other arguments from 2015-20. The one I wrote down is the one that best explained patterns in the data and case history. It also jives with STV experience in other countries.
The first paragraph is about what gets called Duverger’s Law.
Thanks Jack. Regarding your first sentence, I get your meaning. But if you are redefining "political party" from the traditional definition, then doesn't that make it less applicable for today, when looking at the behavior of traditional parties? At what point is a party not a party?
"Patterns in the data" – but your data was limited. No one knows what the leaders of repeal thought in the various cities, why they thought it was so urgent to repeal. There are no interviews with these leaders, though there are a few observations and comments from various quarters. But nothing definitive. We have no polls or focus groups from that time period asking the public of its views, teasing out subtleties of opinion – was STV just too complicated? Were the long hand counts a downer? If so, that undermines your exclusive thesis about STV being repealed because of dissatisfaction among party leaders over inability to control their voters' votes. If the voters had been greatly satisfied with STV, it would not have mattered what the party leaders thought or did. I think you have to be careful not to draw too strong of a conclusion from such a limited data perspective that you present in your book.
Certainly there's some interesting and suggestive evidence in your data, and some amusing anecdotal observations. I would love to have read more stories from those eras in your book, honestly. Such a colorful time and cast of characters. More of the "who said/did what" type of history would have been fascinating, as well as I suspect illuminating. But none of your evidence seems conclusive to me. There are too many alternative reasons for repeal that you would have to eliminate as influential, one by one, in order to raise the profile of your "vote leakage" theory.
Look at the list that I mentioned in my first post here. You didn't really address any of those other possible reasons for repeal in your book. Which is fine, that wasn't your focus. But it does illustrate the narrowness of your focus as a limitation. As I wrote previously, there is never ONE reason for repeal (unless there is some scandal that happened, like in San Francisco when Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated and in a bizarre narrative twist, the assassinations were blamed on district elections!)
I was surprised at how little you addressed Kathy Barber's thesis, which in my reading of her book was quite strong. So you have added something interesting to the discourse of "what happened" so many years ago. But at least in my view, your research and data does not settle this question of why all these repeals happened. If I have time, I will go through this with more details and explain more of my view.
Also, to the extent that I accept vote leakage as a real phenomenon, I don't see its relevance to the election system reform movement today. Yes, the political parties are often opposed to this kind of structural change. No one knows that better than Rob Richie and I. We knew that before your book was published, because we have been fighting Democrat and Republican obstructionism for decades.
Also, not sure what you mean by "jives with STV experience in other countries." Which countries? Countries that repealed STV? Or are you saying other countries in which there is "vote leakage"? If the latter, that doesn't prove anything. Of course there is going to be vote leakage, as you define it, in STV elections. That's SUPPOSED to happen. That's a feature, not a bug! That's what others call "voter choice" and "coalition building." To you, these apparently are negatives. To me and many others, these are positives.
Your substantive questions above are addressed in the book. I replied in the hopes of being constructive. Consumers of this blog can come to their own conclusions. Hopefully they will read what I wrote with an open mind before they do.
OK Jack, thanks for hanging out for a bit at the DemocracySOS tavern and sharing your thoughts and insights. Oh, one other possible explanation for the repeal of STV that I don't think your book adequately dealt with: according to Barber and others, STV broke up political machines in most of these cities. And that led to unremitting hostility from the old guard. I sort of mentioned this in a roundabout way when I wrote "defeated anti-reformers waiting for the right political moment to repeal," but I meant to be more explicit about who those anti-reformers were -- the old political guard that lost their dominance.
Under this thesis, it's not just a matter of "vote leakage" in which party leaders saw some voters give their lower rankings to candidates not to their liking. It's more that these political leaders lost real political power, and they waited for their chance to repeal, and fanned other factors -- racial intolerance, Red Scare, perceived complexity of hand counts, etc. -- to push a repeal. Compared to those very real dynamics that involve very human factors and motivations, i.e. craving for (return to) power, "vote leakage" feels like a pretty thin reed upon which to rest the case for all those repeals.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. More to come.
This is an interesting defense of (P)RCV in comparison to Party List PR. Your piece offers a lot to think about regarding applications of Party List PR.
What gives me pause is that even in the Australian Senate which basically uses PRCV, there’s still a dominant two-party system even though it is less stark than in the Australian House which uses IRV. In both chambers, I’m not seeing the sheer diversity of parties that I see in countries with Party List or MMPR countries. If applied feature for feature for legislatures in a presidential republic like ours, how would third parties like the Greens and Libertarians perform in terms of winning seats?
Plus, in Australia, they’ve mostly done away with group ticket voting, the RCV equivalent of the straight ticket device (IMO), and have switched to allowing voters to cast less than the full number of rankings on the ballot, allowing for voters to exhaust their ballots early if their candidate doesn’t make it to the next round of counting. I don’t know if you addressed this in the post, but doesn’t that also count as wasted votes? Not to mention, again, the minimal third-party candidate success in single-winner IRV.
Also, If it’s ok, I’d also like to see the wasted vote figures in presidential republics which use Party List PR for legislative elections like Brazil and most of Central and South America. They also have a history of a broad range of parties being elected to the same chambers, as well as negotiations for building pro-government and opposition coalitions, except to support the president rather than a prime minister. Since there are no presidential republics which use RCV at the national level to elect all members of a lower or unicameral chamber, I think it would help to compare elections in other presidential republics’ legislatures to ours as well.
But your post is one of the few times I’ve seen anyone go to bat in favor of RCV vis-a-vis Party List PR, so I do appreciate the perspective.
Hi Harry, thanks for your thoughts and comments. Here are some quick responses:
1) I don’t think your characterization is correct that all or even most List PR democracies have more elected parties than Australia. As my article mentions, nine parties won seats in the Australian Senate, and I think if you look around at other List PR democracies you will see that nine parties is at the upper end of the number of parties that tend to get elected. Germany, for example, with its MMP system has six elected parties, Sweden has eight, Italy has eight (in the PR part of their election), Norway nine and so on. And in most of these PR democracies, yes there are often two major parties, that is true in List PR as well.
2) you write about the “the minimal third-party candidate success in single-winner IRV", I think you mean in Australia, yes? If so, again that’s not exactly an accurate statement, in the Senate elections you have 5 third parties winning seats, plus an independent, that’s about as many as you see in many List PR democracies.
3) Australia’s recently new rules for voting allow voters to not rank all candidates, and certainly that has led to more “wasted votes”. But voters still get to rank their candidates, as many candidates as they like, and so they have a number of chances to cast their vote for an eventual winner. Consequently, the number of wasted votes are still less than in most List PR democracies, where voters only have a SINGLE CHANCE to cast a vote for a winner, either for a winning party in a closed list system, or a winning candidate in an open list system.
Frankly, ranked ballots are one of the wonders of modern representative democracy, and List PR democracies would be wise to include them in their own elections. For example, in Germany where as my article mentioned there was a recent election in which nearly 16% of voters wasted their votes by voting for a losing political party, Germany could have allowed those voters to rank their political parties. As my article makes clear, if authorities had allowed ranked ballots in the previous Israeli election, the terrible Netanyahu party would not have been able to form a right-wing religious government.
Ranked ballots are an unequivocal improvement in representative democracy, and it's puzzling to me why political scientists like Drutman, Santucci and a handful of others trash them. Some people believe ranked ballots are complicated, or make the voting process more complicated, but that’s just an unjustifiable disparagement of allegedly "dumb" voters, in my view. Millions of voters in the US, as well as millions more in Australia, Ireland and other places, use ranked ballots and handle the task of ranking candidates as easily as they handle the task of ranking their favorite flavors of ice cream or movies. In exit polls from New York City's first RCV elections, over 90% of Black, Latino, and Asian voters found their RCV ballot "simple to complete."
A few years ago there was a local RCV election in Oakland in which RCV critics complained about the number of “overvotes” but didn’t mention that the number of “overvotes” among Oakland voters was even higher in the election for U.S. Senate and governor. So there’s a lot of shoddy analysis out there among political scientists, in which they pick apart an RCV election but don’t ever compare to see if their criticisms of RCV apply to other methods as well.
So that’s all I have done in my article here, I took the RCV critics own words and showed that their criticisms applied as much as or even more than to the very system they are proposing as the replacement for RCV. Frankly, the failure of some political scientists to do this very basic amount of comparative due diligence is just sloppiness and shows that it’s not really political “science” they are practicing, it’s just cherry picking to justify their political agenda.
1 and 2) I do concede that there are nine parties in the Australian Senate. I guess I was thinking more about how the Labor and Coalition together (75%) *seem to* constitute a much larger chunk of the Senate (and the House) than their PLPR or MMPR equivalents, like SDP and CDU/CSU in Germany (just over 50%), and that the latter have a more even distribution of seats between each other which ensures that they have to negotiate with each other to form a majority government more often than not. But that's probably depending on whether one prefers government by coalition bloc over one of two parties winning a stable solo majority which lasts until the next election. I may have seen too many election seating charts haha!
Also, based on your reply, I just looked up whether there's any documentation of *ranked* PLPR and apparently there is a Wikipedia article about it (the "spare vote" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spare_vote ) which also links to other articles about modified d'Hondt PR and mixed ballot transferable vote, but apparently neither has been used yet in any election. I'm now fascinated by the idea, because that would definitely solve the wasted votes/democratic deficit issue that you mentioned for PLPR legislative elections, it would probably work more efficiently than the group voting ticket, and I can easily visualize how a spare vote ballot would look, as well as how it would be tallied. It looks so simple, I'm surprised that it hasn't been adopted yet. Thank you!
Wow, interesting about the Spare Vote, combining ranked ballots in a Closed List PR system. I had not heard about it before, thanks Harry for citing that piece of info.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spare_vote
While I respect that there are some issues with OLPR, I can't help but feel this is a bit of a strawman. Many of the issues being alleged here apply equally well to other proportional systems. Let me go through some of these claims.
> This feature unleashes a second level of competition – a high degree of intra-party competition, because within each party the candidates that win seats are those that garner the most personal votes from voters.
True, but in STV elections there is also intraparty competition where only the most popular candidates from each party will win seats. The only way to avoid candidates competing against those in their party while maintaining proportionality is to use a closed-list system, but that just moves the competition to behind closed doors. In other words, this is an unavoidable problem.
The competition takes on different flavors in these systems. In STV, voters choose where their vote transfers while in OLPR votes pool with everyone from the same party. Which of these makes the intraparty competition worse? I honestly don't know.
> Because candidates within the same political party are running against each other, that means they can spoil each other’s chance of election. Spoiler candidates within a political party can undermine the intra-party solidarity between those candidates.
This is true. But there are many ways to set up a List system, some of which deal with this problem better than others. In fact, I would argue the Finnish system isn't ideal. Most of the [open list systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_list) being used have some kind of threshold vote that must be met for a candidate to "jump the line" -- otherwise candidates are elected in party list order. A moderate threshold like 5% assures that candidates voters want are elected, but that candidates with a "marginal share of the vote" don't get a free ride to office like you described. Another popular solution is [panachage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage), where voters can vote for as many candidates as there are seats, which also avoids the popular candidate problem. In fact, voters can even split their votes between different parties. Arguably, OLPR and STV don't have to be exclusive, and you could use STV to determine party winners while allocating party seats proportionally.
> Or imagine a scenario in which, within a political party, there are two factions, one more conservative than the other.
Hmm, why not form separate parties in this case? Heck, with an alliance system they could still pool their votes together like they were one party so this wouldn't cost them any seats. In fact, this is arguably the point. OLPR proponent Shugart [claims](https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2021/01/19/emergency-electoral-reform-olpr-for-the-us-house/) "the overriding objective is to let different wings of current parties compete separately."
> In the one district of Uusimaa, the total number of fielded candidates in one election amounted to 395, and each voter was required to pick a single candidate.
[Uusimaa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uusimaa_(parliamentary_electoral_district)) elects 37 candidates to parliament, the largest in Finland. If there were just two parties we would already expect 74 names on the ballot. But larger districts also increases the number of political parties that can potentially win, so the number of running candidates increases superlinearly, leading to a crazy high number like 395. We would expect this result in both STV and OLPR. In Australia, the New South Wales election for Senate seats had 75 candidates competing for just six seats. The difference between the systems is that in OLPR you have to pick one candidate that is your favorite, while in STV you need to rank all 75 candidates (or fewer and risk wasting your vote). Since ranking necessarily involves picking your favorite, STV requires strictly more work from the voters when it comes to managing the election of large magnitude districts.
> What’s the best way for a candidate to cultivate their personal vote? The same way you do in the US-style plurality system – name recognition.
The same is true for candidates to try to win votes in STV. Again, this isn't the fault of OLPR here.
> The “wasted vote” problem in proportional methods
This I mostly agree with. For some context though, the 2016 Australian election had 7.52% of votes exhaust and 49.39% of ballots ([source](https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/research/files/sbps-exhaustion.pdf). The reason the number of ballots exhausted is so much higher is because many of the ballots are being exhausted after using some of their vote to elect a candidate. So far more ballots end up wasting a small amount of their vote under STV, but in OLPR a smaller amount of ballots waste all of their vote.
> Benjamin Netanyahu, achieved only 23 percent of the popular vote.
This is misleading. While his party may have only got 23%, his coalition [got 48.1%](https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/coordination-failure-under-nationwide-pr-manufactured-majority-in-israel-2022/). Jumping from 48% to a majority isn't great, but not nearly as bad as going from 23% to a majority like you imply.
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Overall I probably lean on your side in terms of STV v OLPR. But I think you undersell OLPR here, and that the system works a bit better than how you describe it.
Hi Ryan, thanks for your thoughts. I agree with much of what you have written, though you seem to have missed one of the major points of my article, which was to point out that much of the criticisms leveled by OLPR advocates against RCV/PRCV (STV) apply just as much if not more so to OLPR. So yes, as you write, “in STV elections there is also intraparty competition,” but that was never in dispute, most experts, including myself, already acknowledge that. It’s the OLPR advocates that don’t seem to be aware of how their preferred reform also must figure out strategies to deal with that feature.
And the Finnish system is often the one that is cited by OLPR advocates as the gold standard for open list PR systems, so that’s why I spent so much time analyzing and quoting from a Finnish political scientist who has studied it extensively. I chose not to discuss other types of OLPR methods because OLPR advocates are mostly focused on the Finnish system. Matthew Shugart captured some of the sentiment of my article when he wrote: "Many supporters of proportional representation in the US, Canada, and elsewhere speak as if PR means no need for strategic electoral behavior." I think this quote pretty aptly applies to OLPR advocates.
I certainly do agree with you though, that “you could use STV to determine party winners while allocating party seats proportionally.” In my view, ranked ballots are one of the wonders of modern democratic methods, and all proportional methods should include ranked ballots, including closed or open PR systems, as a way of greatly decreasing wasted votes.
I don’t think my analysis of the Israeli election was misleading, but your selective quote from my article sure was. The entire quote said, very clearly, “The front runner party Likud…achieved only 23 percent of the popular vote.” Yet from that you drew the conclusion that I claimed that the entire coalition only had 23% of the vote, despite my saying in the next sentence that “his BLOC was able to barely squeak out a MAJORITY of legislative seats for his rightwing, quasi-religious COALITION government.” Perhaps I implied too much instead of stating it explicitly. I acknowledge that you found this confusing, and I have changed the wording to try and clarify that point. Thanks for pointing it out.
It must feel like you have jumped in mid-conversation to an ongoing debate between PR advocates of different stripes, and as a result perhaps missed some of the nuances of what I wrote and why I wrote it. But you passed on much valuable information that will be of interest to those who are learning about these different types of electoral methods, and so I do thank you for your thoughts. All the best
Thanks for the reply!
I didn't intend to selectively quote you regarding the Israel election, I found it confusing and misleading. I read the new wording and I think the new version clears it up, so thank you.
It doesn't feel like I jumped in mid-conversation. I found Undercurrent Events (Drutman's Substack) through this blog and have been reading you both for the same amount of time, and I was already following Shugart (Fruits and Votes, which you cite in this article) since I read his book Votes from Seats. So while I haven't read all the sources (I avoid Twitter and Stanucci was a new name to me), I feel like I knew the gist of the arguments going in. I guess to me the title "The future of US democracy: OLPR vs RCV" made me think the article would be a comparison of the systems, and so I read a lot of your criticisms that stated "OLPR has problem X" implicitly as "compared to STV, OLPR has problem X." I understand now that this wasn't your intent, I guess it was mostly a framing issue to me. Apologies if you felt I wasn't being charitable.
It's all good Ryan, I really do appreciate your comments and observations. You added much to the conversation. Thanks for participating, I hope you will continue to chime in. And consider becoming a subscriber, here is the link. https://democracysos.substack.com/subscribe
All the best