Once More, Proportional Representation

I wrote about changing representation in the House of Representatives in Constitutional Fixes #2. This time from The Bulwark, Americans Deserve a House of Representatives That Better Represents Them.

The good news is, these rules and incentives can be changed. Instead of electing our representatives through primaries followed by winner-take-all elections, we could instead transition to proportional representation, which avoids the harmful incentives of both.

With primaries and winner-take-all elections, voters choose from candidates who have been selected by a small portion of partisan voters. Each voter is then represented by a single person from a single party in each district. Under proportional representation, we would instead be represented by multiple officials, typically from different parties, who win seats in proportion to their votes. Political groups would secure seats not by winning individual districts outright, but by winning a sufficiently large bloc of support. That is, if a group—say, moderate pro-democracy conservatives—commands a fifth of the vote, it should expect to win roughly a fifth of the seats. Proportional representation therefore tends to create space for more parties, including centrist or moderate groups able to win elections without any allegiance to the extremes.

This shift to proportional representation could happen in a variety of ways, all of which involve expanding congressional districts to elect more than one member each, and allocating those seats under one of a number of different possible proportional formulas. One option can be found in Rep. Don Beyer’s Fair Representation Act, which uses a ranked-choice voting-based system (known to election scholars as “single transferable vote”), although most democracies opt for simpler systems where voters choose from lists of candidates put forward by different parties. Congress could also get out of the way and encourage states to experiment with different options.

This will be far easier to implement than my own ideas. I remain unconvinced that either party will risk losing their power - even though it would actually extend the reach of both parties, in my opinion.

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