A country with 270,000,000 people living in it needs more than two center-Right parties dominating the political scene. Propose proportional representation though to the average American and they’ll respond with a blank stare. The phrase itself isn’t even part of the political vocabulary. Those few who know what it is think it’s as foreign as metric measurements and just as unsuitable in an American context. Usually the only example of a country that comes to mind which uses the system is Italy, a country that’s had 50 or so governments since World War II. Italy's hardly a role model for America, snickers the conventional wisdom.
Italy’s governments fall as regularly as the change of to a new year because of the wonderful nature of the Italian personality rather than its use of proportional representation. Some of the most politically stable countries in the world use it in varying forms, such as Switzerland, all of Scandinavia, Germany, Holland, New Zealand and Ireland, to name a few. Even Britain, which first introduced the single constituency, winner-takes-all electoral system (generally called “first past the post” like in a horse-race) is debating a switch, and Scotland already has done so.
The primary advantage of proportional representation is that it allows the full range of the various political opinions that exist in any country to take part in the electoral process(subject to certain minimum requirements, such as excluding parties receiving less than 5% of the vote a la the Ku Klux Klan). The “first past the post” system used in the US almost always excludes everyone except the Democrats and the Republicans from winning, or in many cases from even participating. Is it any wonder that the percentage of voters registered or casting ballots in American elections is so low when for many people the question is: “what’s the point?” Their views are marginalized or ignored.
There’s nothing in the US Constititution about electoral systems, not even any mentions of political parties. The American system is based merely on tradition, self-perpetuating in spite of being inherently unrepresentative and unresponsive, entirely due to the fact that both the Democrats and the Republicans haven’t the slightest desire to change a thing. After all, that would mean one or the other wouldn’t be guaranteed victory in every election, and for any politician in either party, a change like that would risk scooting them right off the stage.
Perhaps the only thing less representative or worse than what we already have is where we often end up. Independents or third-party candidates act as spoilers and one of the candidates wins without a real majority. Perot did that in 1992 and Clinton won with less than 50% of the votes cast. In Congressional and local elections, the 60% or so of voters who picked the losing candidates in three-way races go unrepresented in single-member constituencies.
Once in a while a voice in the wilderness proposes a change. One of the few times the subject was in the national news was the controversy over Lani Guinier’s scholarly proposals for multi-member constituencies to remedy the absurd degree of gerrymandering prevalent in the South. Clinton rather disingenously dumped her as his nominee for a position on the Civil Rights Commission, saying he could not agree with what he “discovered” were her “radical” views.
It would involve radical change to dump the two-party system as unceremoniously as Lani Guinier was, but it could give the kiss of life to the American political system if it were ever seriously considered. The debate itself would bring howls of outrage from the party establishments. People with tremendous PR skills would need to be involved to inform and enlighten more and more people until change could happen because PR (i.e. proportional representation) needs a jazzier name. Unfortunately right now most of the talent is hawking lousy movies or inventing clever dot.com ad campaigns. So, admittedly at the moment, the idea is purely academic in spite of widespread discontent with things as they are by many ordinary citizens. They know something is wrong, but don’t really know what could be done to make things right, and their “leaders” certainly aren’t going to volunteer any changes.
Like the regularly occurring collapsing governments of Italy, the biggest reason for the status quo in America is the American personality. A nation of individualists likes to pick individuals to vote for, and perhaps even more important, American life is often (actually MUCH too often) focused on winning. Proportional rep makes absolute winners less important than providing adequate representation. Such a political structure is difficult for most Americans to comprehend, it’s terra incognita. With an electoral system modeled on a horse race, elections have become more and more like horse races themselves. The issues mean less and less, all the focus is on the horses/candidates and their strategies for winning. Combined with the absurd and hopelessly corrupt campaign finance system, Americans are being cheated in every race. Sadly, they don’t even seem to realize it.
Imagine (and admittedly at the moment it’s quite a fantasy) an American “perestroika”: new ideas and new ways of doing things are openly discussed and considered, with a willingness even to try some of them out. What might be the result? Instead of a Republican party increasingly hijacked by the Christian Right, those radical rightists would leave the GOP(like Buchanan already has), and create a party that in certain parts of the country would do very well, and in other places (hopefully where I would be living), wouldn’t even get 5% of the vote. Liberals would suddenly become Americans again: since the Reagan years they have gone underground (what politician calls himself a liberal nowadays in an American election?)The Greens could come into their own and Grampa Munster could conceivably actually become senator from New York, and Al Gore could stop pretending to be an environmentalist. Libertarians could actually have some influence instead of squirreling themselves away at the Cato Institute. And yes, Democrats and Republicans might still exist, but their duopoly would be demolished, and both parties would be better for it. Then again they might disappear entirely when people realized just how irrelevant they’d become after decades of their mind-numbing “centrism”. In Presidential races, instead of the ridiculous and mean-spirited primary process of demolishing your opponents WITHIN your own party, there could be a series of run-offs, with ultimately the top two candidates competing in a final vote (similar to France).
Like any system, proportional representation has its negatives. Sometimes a small party can hold hostage its coalition partners to get what it wants, but that should teach governments to choose their partners carefully instead of just saying such a system doesn’t work. After all, third party candidates have a negative influence in the current system. Likewise, to form an administration, several parties would have to co-operate to govern, because outright majorities are rare in proportional representation. Such a system encourages compromise. Now we call it “bi-partisanship”, and we know THAT doesn’t work. With proportional representation there would be less gridlock than we have now, because compromise would be an absolutely integral part of forming and running the government.
Well, why not dream? The American ability to take risks and be creative is proven by the internet economy, but politically the US is moribund and incredibly unimaginative, bogged down by the machinery of the two-party system that is becoming as ossified and self-serving as Brezhnev’s Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Still, if proportional representation really catches on, might America actually adopt the metric system? Perhaps that really would be too much to imagine...
(March 20, 2000)
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