The Boston Phoenix November 16 - 23, 2000
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Talk about an idea with a bad reputation. Early in the Clinton administration, the president threw Lani Guinier, his nominee as assistant attorney general for civil rights, over the side of the boat because she advocated a voting system known as proportional representation. "Quota queen!" screamed the right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Beyond the Electoral College
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by Dan Kennedy
But it was a good idea then, and it's a good idea now. The theory behind proportional representation (PR) is that a political party -- rather than having to win an election outright -- would be represented in proportion to its support among the electorate. At the federal level, PR advocates have targeted the US House of Representatives. Here's how it would work: if 10 percent of the voters support, say, Green Party candidates, then 10 percent of all House members should be Greens. Since there are 435 House members, 43 or 44 of them would be Greens.
That's the theory; the reality is likely to be quite a bit messier. Still, if done right, PR would be more broadly democratic than the current winner-take-all system.
Before PR could be tried, we'd have to reconfigure the 435 House districts in a fairly radical manner. With each district electing just one representative, it's no surprise that pretty much every House member is a mainstream Republican or Democrat. But what if -- by way of example -- you instead had 145 districts, each represented by three members? As a voter, you'd get three votes, which you could cast any way you wished: one vote for each of three candidates, three votes for one candidate, or some combination. The result would be that some House members could be elected with 20 percent to 30 percent of the vote -- a sizable minority that's shut out entirely under the current system. Greens, Libertarians, and independents would be elected. African-Americans and other minorities would find it easier to win -- and there would be no need for the sort of racially gerrymandered districts that have come under the baleful scrutiny of the courts.
For the past several years Congress has been considering a bill that would reverse a 1967 ban on multi-member districts, the only legal impediment to PR. (Unlike the other reforms discussed in this article, this would require no constitutional amendment.) Among those who support PR are Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia), an African-American who nearly lost her seat after she was redistricted into a mostly white area in 1996; Representative Tom Campbell (R-California); and Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, who says he'd like to see a state try it on an experimental basis to find out whether it works as intended.
John Bonifaz, director of the Boston-based National Voting Rights Institute, thinks PR would not only create a more ideologically diverse House, but improve presidential politics as well. "There would be a whole lot of other voices that would broaden the debate," he says. "And that would have a definite effect on those running for other public offices, including president of the United States."
Sean Cahill, research director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Policy Institute, adds that PR would make it easier for candidates to take "bold stands" in favor of causes such as gay marriage -- although he warns that it would also make it easier for "extreme-right parties, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis" to get elected, too, since candidates would no longer have to aim for 51 percent of the vote.
The theory, however, is that minority voices, no matter how reprehensible, should be heard, not stifled. As advocates like to point out, a notably enthusiastic supporter of PR was the 19th-century British political philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote: "It is an essential part of democracy that minorities should be adequately represented. No real democracy, nothing but a false show of democracy, is possible without it."
If you didn't like divided government before, you're going to hate what arrives in Washington this January: a new president denounced as a fraud by half the country, and a Congress almost evenly split between the Democratic and Republican Parties.Most democratic countries long ago hit upon the solution to divided government: make it constitutionally impossible. Nearly every democratic government in the world is ruled by a parliamentary system -- a legislature, usually consisting of one branch, that is led by the head of the largest party, who is known (in most cases) as the prime minister. Whereas the US Constitution mandated the separation of powers, power would actually be concentrated if the US followed this system. "It would eliminate what Madison tried to do, which was to make ambition work against ambition," says None of the Above author Robert Shogan.
Unlike proportional representation or, to a lesser extent, the instant runoff, reformulating the United States as a parliamentary democracy isn't a matter of public or even private discussion these days. It's ironic, because at one time the shortcomings of the presidential system were regularly debated. In The Imperial Presidency (1973), Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes that Woodrow Wilson, as a young political scientist at Princeton, proposed something like a parliamentary system. At his first inauguration, Schlesinger writes, Wilson said that the presidency was "quite abnormal, and must eventually lead to something very different."
In 1942, political scientist Henry Hazlitt argued in A New Constitution Now that a parliamentary system or something like it was needed so that the government could respond more rapidly to emergencies, such as war. As late as 1980, Lloyd Cutler, the presidential counsel at the Carter White House, wrote a long piece for Foreign Affairs lamenting "the structural inability of our government to propose, legislate and administer a balanced program for governing." "In parliamentary terms," he wrote, "one might say that under the U.S. Constitution it is not now feasible to `form a Government.' "
What people such as Cutler and Shogan advocate is not strictly a parliamentary system. Rather, they propose changes that would more closely link the fates of the president and Congress -- essentially creating a hybrid of the presidential and parliamentary forms of government. Some ideas:
* Electing the president, representatives, and senators to the same four- or six-year term in order to increase the likelihood that one party will capture both the White House and Congress. Shogan notes in his 1998 book The Fate of the Union that more than four out of five voters back the same party for Congress and the presidency, thus belying the myth that voters like divided government.
* Allowing members of Congress to serve as Cabinet secretaries without giving up their elected positions.
* Empowering the president, Congress, or both to call for new elections in the event of a stalemate or governmental crisis. Consider how quickly Richard Nixon could have been gotten rid of during the Watergate era if Congress had approved a "no confidence" resolution.
Or consider how much more satisfying the outcome of the Monica Lewinsky scandal would have been. Bill Clinton could have called for a new presidential and congressional election and -- if polls at the time were accurate -- succeeded in vanquishing his sexual inquisitors. Impeachment under such a system would become an instant anachronism.
Several years ago Lani Guinier, now a Harvard Law School professor, told the New York Times: "A winner-take-all culture rewards winning by any means necessary. There's a great stake in winning, because you get all the power, and the loser gets nothing, so there's an incentive to play sound-bite, attack-dog politics. And I think that's alienating the voters."Does anyone doubt that the voters are alienated? No system is perfect. But instant-runoff elections and proportional representation would reflect the full complexity of the country better than the simplistic I-win/you-lose system we're all so accustomed to. And tying Congress's fate more closely to the president's would unquestionably make it easier to get things done -- such as universal health care, for instance, or Social Security reform.
Such changes are not going to happen overnight. Hell, they're probably not going to happen at all. Let's face it: even after the events of the past 10 days, we'll be lucky if we can get rid of the Electoral College, which has to be the first priority for anyone looking for a fairer, more democratic system. Fun fact: in populous Massachusetts, there is one elector for every 515,000 residents, whereas in North Dakota, every 211,000 people have an elector. Don't you feel good knowing that a North Dakotan's vote is worth two and a half times as much as yours? (Source: a recent dispatch at the Web site "A Curmudgeon Teaches Statistics," http://cuwu.editthispage.com/2000/11/08.)
So the next time you feel like screaming at your TV set or ripping your newspaper to shreds, stop, take a deep breath, and remind yourself: it doesn't have to be this way.
The Center for Voting and Democracy has published an extensive archive of materials on proportional representation, instant-runoff elections, and other voting reforms at www.igc.org/cvd. Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com .