> Isn't gerrymandering a much more complex problem than that makes it out to be?
No, its vastly simpler: the problem with gerrymandering is that there is no good way to draw single-member winner-take-all districts, and the solution is just don't do that. Multimember districts with a system that provides proportional representation within each district (e.g., five-member districts with STV) solve the problem pretty much completely.
Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts, but without anyone being able to control how and where they are bad (well, except that there are quite a lot of algorithms that can be chosen, so the political choice of which to choose will be influenced by the effect the particular algorithm would have on the particular jurisdiction adopting it.)
> Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts
A) The status quo is massive Gerrymandering, so something like the Shortest Splitline Algorithm would be a massive improvement.
B) The point is not to make quasi-proportional-representation with districts. The point is to make a legislature whose laws are representative. To that end, it does not matter if the constituents of a given district happen to have a lot in common.
No line drawing method on single member districts does that, and the best way to get laws which represents e people effectively is by assuring better proportionality. This had, in fact, been studied quite a bit, see, e.g., Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy. Mucking around with variations on how our by whom lines are drawn for single-member, plurality or majority runoff districts and thinking that that had some how of meaningful improvement is self-delusion. It doesn't work, it can't work, we know why it can't work, and we know what does work, all from actual experience in real representative democracies.
Playing around with how district lives are drawn isn't democratic reform, it's democracy theater, a means of diverting attention without changing anything meaningful.
"Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing.
Gerrymandering can add ~30% of representatives for the party controlling it, so changing it to a party method does improve things a lot, even if it is arguably very far from perfect.
> "Perfect enemy of the good" fallacy, if that's a thing.
Its only a thing when the "perfect" is not a real alternative.
Systems that produce more proportional representation than any means of line drawing in single-member winner-take-all districts are real alternatives that are well-established in the real world.
Well, proportional representation is mathematically and theoretically possible in the US, but culturally and politically as likely as adopting Chinese as official language. That won't change for decades at least.
But changing how districts are drawn actually does happen in this country. California degerrymanderified their process a few years ago.
Which optimization criteria and algorithm to use is also a political decision, and the people making that decision are the same as the ones responsible for massive gerrymandering. It's actually easier to defend perverse results[1] if they're the consequence of a redistricting from scratch by the "fair" algorithm you've chosen rather than arbitrarily switching parts of cities from one countryside district to another in a way which looks suspiciously like you've been paying attention to their demographics.
[1]like the Olson criterion, which when optimised by a computer program results in district boundaries apparently likely to return mostly Republicans in California...
Its worth noting that almost any party-blind algorithm for drawing district lives is going to overrepresent Republicans, because Democratic support is very concentrated in large cities, resulting in most party-blind algorithms creating few super majority Democratic districts and many bare majority Republican districts. (Few and many both being in relation to the proportion of each party in the populace.)
In the rural US, any district outside an urban area is NOT a 'bare majority republican district'; they're all large majority republican districts. Rural America is devoutly republican, outside recently formed border districts (formed since 1980) that are largely immigrant.
Most gerrymandering doesn't bias rural districts; it biases suburban districts that are marginal majorities (usu republican) only after redrawing the lines. Any automatic line redrawing algorithm will defeat this, since it takes a lot of perverse effort to draw boundaries that are sufficiently biased to serve Machiavellian pols.
The Mixed-Member Proportional system proposes to keep the advantages of FPTP and PR by electing most members FPTP and adding a few PR seats in the same body so that gerrymandering is ineffective.
You just lay out about 75-80% of your districts with traditional geographic community lines so each area gets a representative for its local interests responsible to local voters. Then voters vote for their local rep and also for a preferred party. You count the reps elected from districts by party and the remaining PR reps are allocated to fill in the discrepancy between that result and the party preference votes.
New Zealand, Mexico, and Germany use some variation of MMP for their legislatures, so it's working in prosperous stable first world countries already.
But even when the USA sees the light on proportional representation, there will continue to be winner takes all elections. Executive positions (president, governor, mayor), senators, judges, ballot issues, etc.
In those cases, approval voting is the correct answer. Easy to explain, easy to tabulate, most mathematically fair, hardest to game.
Per Duvenger's Law, approval voting would probably also help replace the current two party system with more choices.
North and South Dakota are two states instead of one so that Republicans could have an extra two senators. Hawai'i and Alaska were admitted to the Union together so that neither party would gain an advantage in the Senate from the addition.
So yes, you can gerrymander Senate seats. It's just harder and less reliable than House seats.
There is no question about it. Same with the District of Columbia and various other places that should arguably already be states. They'd be likely to provide Democratic Senators, so there is a gigantic roadblock to keep this from happening.
Likewise, the promise of 2 Democratic senators is the main reason that Democrats are pushing for DC statehood rather than the more logical outcome, which would be retrocession of the city of Washington to Maryland.
It's more difficult to make an argument against Puerto Rican statehood, but DC is expressly not a state, and should either remain a federal district with no voting representation or be part of Maryland (as stated elsewhere).
Unlike the House, which represents the people, the Senate represents the states. That's why each state has 2 senators regardless of its size and population: I think the idea was to prevent oppression by large states.
The Senate representing the states was abolished a century ago when the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted. Today senators are chosen by popular election the same as congressmen, they just have wildly disproportionate electorates with some elected by half a million and some by tens of millions.
The intent of the Senate was to preserve the independence and influence of the states. If you splitline-partition the country, you are eliminating the means of achieving this goal, and it would be simpler to abolish the Senate. It can be argued that the current system of directly electing Senators has already made the institution unrepresentative of the interests of the state governments, but your proposal would further alienate Senators from their home states.
Screw the states. Most of them only exist by historical coincidence anyway, rather than genuine cultural commonality.
I mean, hell, at this point, a lot of "state lines" are either way too far in (resulting in close-by cities within the same broad metro-area having no common government in the Northeast) or way too far out (resulting in close-by cities in the Bay Area having no common government that doesn't also serve rural Central California).
The point of drawing constituency lines is to unite people who have common interests while giving mutual autonomy to people with competing interests. The current states in the USA do none of that: they basically just systematize the shapes of former colonial land-holdings.
There is no constitutional provision that would ever allow abolishing the Senate. The Constitution of the USA prohibits any amendment that could change the disproportionality of the Senate.
An amendment can alter the text of any portion(s) of the constitution. While I agree that abolishing the Senate would be a radical change, I do not know of any restrictions which would bar it.[1] Even if this were not possible, a constitutional convention could be held to make the change.
Technically it says that "no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate" so the Senate could presumably be abolished by constitutional amendment if all states agreed. (I wonder about replacing the Senate with another legislative house and giving the existing Senate largely ceremonial responsibilities without formally abolishing it -- would that count as depriving the states of equal suffrage in the Senate?)
Presumably any amendment that would abolish or sufficiently alter the Senate would simply remove that article as well.
The phrase "the Constitution prohibits this amendment" doesn't make any sense because an amendment to the Constitution cannot by definition be unconstitutional.
I'm actually really intensely curious how one would design a voting system for people to choose what subentities to belong to. How would you populate the ballot? Would you run a clustering algorithm on the votes?
What if New Jersey and Michigan just decide they want to be as they are, but excluding Camden and Detroit respectively?
Or would you do something whimsical like draw lines based on football/baseball teams and cleave states like CT in half?
> But even when the USA sees the light on proportional representation, there will continue to be winner takes all elections. Executive positions (president, governor, mayor), senators, judges, ballot issues, etc.
Maybe, maybe not. Most of those don't fundamentally have to be single-winner elected things, e.g., executive positions don't have to be single-winner systems; multiseat executives do exist, after all -- even many US states have multiseat executives, but do those by single-winner election with seats allocated by portfolio (see, e.g., California's "Constitutional officers".)
> In those cases, approval voting is the correct answer.
Approval voting is, IMO, generally a poor choice for most elections (its good for elections in groups where disapproval or approval is tied to some substantive commitment -- e.g., if you are voting on where to go to for lunch, and "approve" on an option means "I will go if this option is chosen".) It doesn't make a lot of sense for most other purposes (because "approval" doesn't mean the same thing across different ballots -- this is actually true, though to a far lesser degree, of systems that require a forced ranking ballot, which is why I prefer ranked voting systems that can use unforced rankings) -- for ballot props that potentially might conflict, a system that merges features of majority and approval makes some sense (that is, it takes a majority to pass, but in the case of conflict the larger majority trumps the smaller one) and is, in fact, already used in some places (e.g., its what California already uses for ballot props.)
> Easy to explain, easy to tabulate, most mathematically fair, hardest to game.
IRV isn't much worse on any of those, and is if anything more familiar (and if you are using STV for multiseat elections, IRV is identical, so even though its a little harder to explain on its own, if you are using STV elsewhere, IRV for single-seat elections is pretty much free in terms of complexity, either of explanation or administration.)
I was an active IRV proponent. Then I figured out they require computerized tabulation (for non trivial elections, such as my jurisdiction) and are infeasible to audit.
I kind of like approval voting but there's one big problem.
How to we enact it?
I also see a small problem.
Party representatives stand outside of polling places and present voters with lists of party endorsed candidates. People who currently vote solely on the basis of party will just approve only candidates who are on the party provided list.
The two major parties control virtually every legislative body in the country and the current system serves them best.
Knee-jerk answers like "Vote the bums out" isn't realistic. I'm thinking back to when the people of Washington DC voted back into office as their mayor, a man who was videotaped smoking crack cocaine. Even when it should be a simple matter, party politics trumps common sense.
(And this applies to any electoral reform that there is resistance to by incumbents, not just approval voting, which I don't particular prefer.)
In states with citizen initiative processes that bypass incumbent office holders, by that method. Elsewhere, by building support in the electorate and then running candidates on a platform of doing that, and keeping organized in the electorate to hold those candidates accountable.
"But even when the USA sees the light on proportional representation"
"Sees the light"? Proportional representation is far from a panacea. It tends to lead to a fragmented government (which is usually bad). It also privileges party over individual candidates (which can be good or bad, but those who dislike partisanship would certainly disapprove). There are other factors at play as well.
Most (in)famously, the Weimar Republic used PR. That didn't end well.
> Proportional representation is far from a panacea.
Among modern, established democracies, proportionality of representation is pretty closely linked to public satisfaction with government, and public participation with government. Its as close to a panacea for effective democracy as you could have -- which isn't surprising, proportionality of representation is a pretty direct measure of the extent to which a government is democratic.
> It tends to lead to a fragmented government (which is usually bad).
Any government in a system with a diversity of viewpoints is either going to be minoritarian or coalition based; winner take all tends to majority-of-a-majority -- which can be minoritarian -- and, whether it is that or not, tends also to involve non-overt coalition building in structuring big-tent parties. PR systems tend to be more likely to be actually majoritarian, and tend to feature explicit -- and thus more accountable -- coalition building. It doesn't lead to "fragmented" government by any meaningful measures.
Itssometimes portrayed as leading to less stable government, because in parliamentary systems its associated with more rapid turnover of government administrations/cabinets, but by another measure, it leads to more stable government, as while there is more frequent turnover of cabinets, there is more continuity between successive governments/cabinets, and more continuity in governments/cabinets over time.
> It also privileges party over individual candidates (which can be good or bad, but those who dislike partisanship would certainly disapprove).
Certain methods of achieving proportionality (e.g., party list systems) may do so; candidate-centered election methods with rules that produce proportional results (like single transferrable vote in small multimember districts) do not. In fact, such systems would do the opposite compared to the status quo system in the US, emphasizing individual candidates over party by offering more competition, even in general elections, between individual candidates even in districts with a clear majority for a single party.
> Most (in)famously, the Weimar Republic used PR. That didn't end well.
Constitutional provisions for Presidential rule-by-decree had a lot to do with that, PR -- or even the particular form of PR used by the Weimar Republic -- well, if you want to argue that that was responsible for something, then go ahead and make that argument.
"Among modern, established democracies, proportionality of representation is pretty closely linked to public satisfaction with government"
When one of these "modern, established democracies" manages to maintain a stable government (or even survive) for as long as the United States has, perhaps that statement could be made.
Other than perhaps the Scandinavian countries, that's not exactly a list that makes one optimistic about stability.
Edit: "Constitutional provisions for Presidential rule-by-decree had a lot to do with that, PR -- or even the particular form of PR used by the Weimar Republic -- well, if you want to argue that that was responsible for something, then go ahead and make that argument."
See my response to the other poster below. The PR system (and the myriad of squabbling parties produced by it) led to there being no effective government for two subsequent parliamentary elections.
Of the top twenty most developed countries in the world (ranked by HDI), over half (13) have some form of proportional representation. They aren't all Scandinavian countries, though predictably many are. Which of them would you not consider a stable government?
Y Norway
Y Australia
Y Switzerland
Y Netherlands
United States
Y Germany
Y New Zealand
Canada
Singapore
Y Denmark
Y Ireland
Y Sweden
Y Iceland
United Kingdom
Y Hong Kong
South Korea
Japan
Y Liechtenstein
Y Israel
France
Correlation isn't causation. The best conclusion you can draw from your list is that neither PR or FPTP inherently hampers development.
> Which of them would you not consider a stable government?
Whoa, that's some strawman. The standard we're looking to prove is "proportionality of representation is pretty closely linked to public satisfaction with government".
>When one of these "modern, established democracies" manages to maintain a stable government (or even survive) for as long as the United States has
"Has" up to what date? Is there some set length of time they have to surpass? Or are you suggesting the US can't learn anything from other countries until after it collapses and is outlived? Seems like a moot point by then.
> When one of these "modern, established democracies" manages to maintain a stable government (or even survive) for as long as the United States has
That's a lovely artificial requirement you've made there. I assume this means that you think the US system of government is inferior to the UK system of government, since longevity is apparently the only requirement?
And apparently having an extremely bloody secession war counts as 'stability'? Or being at war with your neighbours for most of the first half of your life? The US lost 50% more people fighting itself than when fighting the Axis in WWII a century later.
"That's a lovely artificial requirement you've made there."
Wanting a system of government with proven stability is not a "straw man".
"I assume this means that you think the US system of government is inferior to the UK system of government"
The UK doesn't have PR either. And no, it means nothing of the sort. My argument is that PR tends to be unstable, not that the US system is the only possible stable system.
No, the UK doesn't have PR, but it's a different system to the US. From what you're arguing, the US would be better off switching to their system. If you want to do it properly, you should probably import some Germanic hereditary figurehead - perhaps Schwarzenegger could start the US royal line?
Still, I like you completely sidestepped the question of how 'stability' matches up with having a civil war that was one of the bloodiest in history. You're not actually interested in finding the best form of government; you're only interested in defending your own.
"No, the UK doesn't have PR, but it's a different system to the US."
Nice attempt to shift the goalposts. Not going to work.
Stability isn't the only goal, but it's an important one.
"Still, I like you completely sidestepped the question of how 'stability' matches up with having a civil war that was one of the bloodiest in history.
Britain had a nasty civil war also.
"You're not actually interested in finding the best form of government; "
No, because I don't believe that there is a "best" form of government. Attempting to immanentize the eschaton usually (always) winds up with a few million people dead.
I'm interested in avoiding forms of government that are demonstrably bad, based on past performance.
What the Greens want is completely irrelevant to Merkel's government and has been for as long as she has been Bundeskanzlerin.
Abandoning nuclear energy is a widely accepted move by the majority of the population and across political parties. If anything the people wanting to keep nuclear energy, are in a minority. A minority that is not willing to risk actually advocating for nuclear energy.
The parent's comment is accruate on the only important point here -- Germans don't like nuclear power.
The phase out of nuclear power isn't the result of a coalition trying to appease a radical fringe component. It's broadly reflective of public will in Germany.
The consumer price of electricity has gone up but that's a complex problem with many reasons behind it. Abandoning nuclear energy is not the only reason and probably one of the least important ones.
Even if it were a reason, reversing again on this topic and not abandoning nuclear power would have no impact on prices by itself. New nuclear plants would have to be built which would take decades, even if you could find locations where such a plant would be tolerated.
Breaking the link between the electorate and individual candidates/officeholders is true of party list methods which aren't the only way of achieving PR. STV in small multimember districts is just as candidate centered as FPTP methods (arguably moreso, in that there remains candidate choice within the same path preferences at the general elections.)
> proportionality of representation is pretty closely linked to public satisfaction with government, and public participation with government.
Is the causal relationship really that proportional representation drives political representation and satisfaction?
Democracies with a high level of political participation may be likelier to adopt experiments like proportional representation...and then public satisfaction is driven by the high level and effectiveness of political participation.
Italy and Israel are two countries that have had very proportional systems in recent time frames.
Having lived in Italy, I am not that impressed by the politics there, and think that proportional representation with party lists is part of the problem.
I think STV is pretty interesting, but producing one winner is no bad thing either. Of course, as per Arrow, nothing is perfect.
Having lived in Israel, its politics are often poisoned by those of the United States, but are otherwise much, much healthier than those of the United States.
No, that is not the point. Hitler eating sugar had nothing to do with his government. Proportional representation did. That's how he came to power. Look it up.
"Hindenburg reluctantly agreed to appoint Hitler as chancellor after two further parliamentary elections—in July and November 1932—had not resulted in the formation of a majority government."
They had large number of splinter parties, all of whom hated each other's guts, and which were unable to form an effective government. The Nazis were not a majority (no one was), but were a large, well-disciplined bloc. The rest is, as they say, history.
If one reads about Weimar politics, one striking thing is how basically nobody wanted a democracy. The Communists didn't, the Nazis didn't; Von Papen, Chancellor second before Hitler, of the "Centre" Party tried to get the monarchy re-instated, and ruled Prussia effectively as a dictator. Ending democracy was basically the one thing a majority of Weimar politicians could agree on.
A plurality of German voters voted for the Nazis. If Weimar Germany had the US or UK system of government, that plurality of voters might have given the Nazis an outright majority of seats, just as the UK Tories were recently reelected with only a plurality of the popular vote.
I am not sure what to make of your first point, as it is not clear that we (HN) have a common understanding of what is meant by "fragmented". Is it a government which does not pass laws or spend money on specific programs which different groups oppose for varying reasons, or would that be a unified opposition? Would fragmented government pass a great many laws and spending programs with no unified goal, to appease disparate interest groups, or would this be a coalition?
>Distinction without a difference. Even if the focus is on the candidates, they're all firmly partisan with little variation.
Does it matter whether the politicians are partisans unified in party goals? It seems that in the USA, politicians frequently go against their own parties, relative to other countries. Is partisanship in favour of non-party aligned interest groups part of what you perceive as a problem? Please describe a non-partisan politician, party, or system.
Lastly, I think we can all agree that a single anecdote does not make the case for or against the PR system, though it does show that PR is not a sufficient condition for stable and everlasting democracy.
The rigid party discipline of the Republican party (in Congress) is starting to look like a temporary aberration. It was caused by a period of unusually strong party control over campaign finances. For a couple of decades there, Congressional leaders were able to strongly prevent Congressmen from being re-elected if they bucked the party.
Ironically, I suspect SuperPACs are contributing to the decay of Republican cohesion -- the party has lost its strong control over re-election. At this point the only thing Republicans in Congress can agree upon is that they dislike anything they suspect a Democrat -- especially the President -- of liking.
As for Democrats, Will Roger's famous quote is something like "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
> Most (in)famously, the Weimar Republic used PR. That didn't end well.
Just look at the fixes the German Federal Republic put into place in 1949. That turns out to work quite well, allowing party plurality while still maintaining effective coalitions.
> It tends to lead to a fragmented government (which is usually bad)
The stalemate of the past two terms in the US doesn't say much for winner-takes-all.
> It also privileges party over individual candidates
Only depending on the proportional rep type. But again, in the US, there are only two parties. Very rarely you might glimpse an independent, but they mean nothing in the overall political landscape. There is no functional way for another party to rise in the current political system in the US - so party is inherently privileged over individuals.
> Most (in)famously, the Weimar Republic used PR. That didn't end well.
"The stalemate of the past two terms in the US doesn't say much for winner-takes-all."
You think it's bad with two parties who can't agree on anything? Try twenty parties who can't agree on anything.
"Ah, you're just trolling."
No, I certainly am not trolling. The multitude of parties in the Weimar Republic, which could not form an effective government for two entire election cycles, were directly responsible for Hitler's rise to power.
What, multipolar politics, like modern Germany or Sweden or Australia? Wealthy, socially progressive countries with high standards of living?
You're just spreading FUD. PR was one of a great many factors involved in the rise of Hitler, but keep in mind that the US system also let a president get elected that didn't win the popular vote, who then went on to destroy a foreign country to drum up domestic political support. Literally hundreds of thousands of people died in Iraq to make Bush more popular in the US, despite Iraq having nothing to do with threats to the US. But it would be stupid to say that the US electoral system was directly responsible for the Iraqi bloodbath.
And as I say in the other comment, there are a shitload of countries using PR that aren't fascists.
" PR was one of a great many factors involved in the rise of Hitler, but keep in mind that the US system also let a president get elected that didn't win the popular vote"
The U.S. President has never been elected by popular vote. Again, for good reason. Feature, not bug.
Modern Germany hasPR via a mixed member proportional (MMP) system -- which, IIRC, was a German innovation when introduced; it doesn't have straight party-list PR, but then the more proportional system for the US proposed upthread isn't party-list PR, either. Proportionality is a (really, continuous valued, not binary) outcome, there are a number of systems for achieving it to a greater or lesser extent.
I see no appeal in proportional representation. The idea that I can only vote for a party, and that they get to choose which people actually hold those seats... it is repulsive and sickening.
You aren't describing PR, you are describing party list systems, which are one method of achieving PR. Single Transferrable Vote in multimember districts also achieved proportionality of representation, but involves directly voting for candidates. MMP mixes elements of FPTP and party list proportional. And there are a bunch of other mechanisms for achieving PR.
No, its vastly simpler: the problem with gerrymandering is that there is no good way to draw single-member winner-take-all districts, and the solution is just don't do that. Multimember districts with a system that provides proportional representation within each district (e.g., five-member districts with STV) solve the problem pretty much completely.
Algorithmic line-drawing of single-member winner-take-all district pretty much guarantees poorly-representative districts, but without anyone being able to control how and where they are bad (well, except that there are quite a lot of algorithms that can be chosen, so the political choice of which to choose will be influenced by the effect the particular algorithm would have on the particular jurisdiction adopting it.)