CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR GRIDLOCK.

The decennial census leads to a reapportionment of the House of Representatives which leads to state legislatures creating new Congressional districts each of which contains roughly equal numbers of the residents so enumerated.  Legislatures, though, are political bodies and they draw district boundaries in such a way as to ... best serve their idea of governance.  Which brings us to this summer's political spectacle, minority-party members of the Texas legislature fleeing to the friendly confines of Illinois in order to delay a reapportionment that, like World War II, will not turn out to their party's advantage.  Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor, a student of comparative politics, looks on the follies and despairs.  A political power play?  Yes.  Mid-reapportionment cyclical chaos as a consequence?  Yes.  Every legislature does it?  Two wrongs do not make a right.

Perhaps, the drawing of new districts has become so fraught because there are too few districts.  More districts, more opportunities to pack your voters into something resembling polygons rather than gerrymanders, more opportunities to create majority-minority districts, no matter what the voting rights laws are dictating, more opportunities for Members of Congress to get to know, oh, their constituents, rather than the party bundlers and money-raisers.  There is a risk, though: smaller districts with more opportunities for voters to meet their representatives in compact bundles of like-minded voters might mean more Lauren Boeberts and Ilhan Omars.

Today, though, let us contemplate something Professor Taylor offers as a different way of allocating seats.  "I have noted for years (decades?), there are deeply problematic issues with single-seat districts, especially in the US."  As the Texas spat evolved, he wrote, "The Core Problem is Single-Seat Districts."  That core problem comes close to the status of a theorem in politics.

I cannot stress enough: there is no such thing as truly fair maps that are also democratically competitive. For example, while the new maps in Alabama are fairer and more representative, they are mostly utterly uncompetitive. That is, the ratio of Rs to Ds (now 5:2 instead of 6:1) is better than it was and closer mirrors the state’s overall ratio of Rs to Ds, but almost all the seats are uncontested.

And that is treating party registration or estimated party alignment as a decent proxy for a voter's preferred policy bundle.  I used to do regional economics, nonexistent equilibrium or multiple equilibria don't bother me.

Darren of Right on the Left Coast reminds us, "Our governmental system is designed to ensure that passions are moderated."  That might be a good way to start a fight with political scientists.  Over the years I have had a few frank and open exchanges of views with political science types about things like voting efficiency and representation.  I've not yet figured out where positive political science leaves off and normative policy prescriptions begin.  Nevertheless, I maintain that political bundles are too big, and disequilibrium the most likely outcome.

That noted, let us turn to Professor Taylor's alternative.

Let me be clear: the solution to all of this is to elect the US House of Representatives in multi-member districts using some version of proportional representation.

More to come, no doubt.

BTW, I used the original gerrymandering political cartoon because it fits, but I would stress the issue is not primarily gerrymandering (although, yes, the Texas case is blatant partisan gerrymandering), but rather it is using single-seat districts full stop. Rank choice voting does not solve this problem, by the way, as long as it is used in single-seat districts.

That post concludes with references.

We'll continue with that alternative.  Matthew "Fruits and Votes" Shugart offered a case for proportional representation as a way of saving the sanity of both major parties.  "The country needs functioning pro-democratic parties on both the center-left and the center-right. At the moment, it has such a party only on the center-left, and even that is a temporary ceasefire amidst a deepening internal division."  That was the state of play as of January 2021, and the Democrats enacting as much legislation as they could at the margin of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema with a figurehead president did not head off the internal divisions.  Nor could they have helped it.

I would identify three key cleavages in American politics at the moment. (Note: issue positions and cleavages are very much not my academic speciality at all. I admit I am simplifying, but the divisions I identify should be reasonably accurate as a broad summary.) There is the Republican–Democratic cleavage. This one is almost evenly divided, which explains a lot of the current partisan polarization. Hold together just enough–avoid the proverbial circular firing squad–and you can win. Then there is the democratic–authoritarian cleavage. On this one, the pro-democratic segment extends all the way from the leftmost large-d Democrats to somewhere near the middle of the Republican Party. The pro-Trump, white-supremacist, election-denying wing of the Republican Party has shown itself to be completely willing to set aside democracy, and even to promote/tolerate political violence, in order to advance its political agenda. This wing is a cancer that must be removed from the right-wing bloc that currently consists solely of the Republican Party. Then there is, for lack of a better term, the capitalist–socialist cleavage. This one obviously divides the Democratic Party. On one side are Democrats who generally take a more gradualist view of the need for economic policy change, plus nearly all of the right, in being free-market oriented. On the other, left or “progressive” side are Democrats who emphasize various proposals to remake the economic model (including less commitment to free trade), whether or not “socialist” is the correct term or even the term they favor. Think Bernie Sanders and his supporters, as well as some of the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. Basically, the point is that there are (at least) two “rights” and two “lefts” but currently only one party on the right and one on the left. And the emergency is that one of the “rights” has abandoned democracy and shown a willingness to accept political violence.

The need for PR is to let the free-market small-d democrats in the currently existing parties act independently of their more extreme wings. This is precisely what PR systems permit–each side’s extreme can be its own party rather than a wing of one majority-seeking party, without raising concerns over “spoilers” that arise under plurality elections.

As I already conceded, I am oversimplifying a complex political scene for the sake of argument. I also am not going to go into the details of how actual coalitions would work under this stylized latent four-party system that PR would allow to break forth.

Even with those simplifications, the three cleavages Professor Shugart specifies do not establish an orthogonal basis for a three-dimensional policy space, and even if we could limit the policy space to those three dimensions (it's not hard to contemplate religious-secular as distinct from democratic-authoritarian and capitalist-socialist) and further find a compact center of mass among the voters, we're not going to get an equilibrium outcome.  How messy can that get?  Consider that the popular "political compass" test treats "left-right" and "authoritarian-libertarian" as an orthogonal basis for placing everyone in one of the four resulting quadrants.  Easy to implement on a website, and less than instructive.  Finding an electoral equilibrium even in that simpler space?  Won't happen.  We don't even have to bring in the Pajamas Medias types noting one of the "lefts" showing that willingness to accept political violence to continue the story.

There's more than one way to introduce proportional representation into the House of Representatives: that is the bulk of his post.  To do so, though, might offer people who are in each of the two factions of the two major parties an outcome other than frustration, particularly at the hands of the True Believers.

We must find a way to prevent a new House majority from being elected in 2022 that is under the effective control of an anti-democratic wing. The voters who prefer a center-right party are not going to vote for the existing Democratic Party as long as they fear (rightly or wrongly) that that party is coming under the control of its own extreme “socialist” wing. Voters need choices that are more moderate, as well as parties that can represent voters with grievances that lead them to reject mainstream politics. What we need to avoid is a mainstream party winning a majority of seats while under the control of its grievance-based authoritarian extreme.

I am under no illusions that this will be easy. I certainly accept that any PR proposal is less likely to pass than likely. It requires more institutionally oriented Republicans to see a clear and present danger from continuing to work within a party that has a strong and undeniable anti-democratic tendency, as well as to believe that tendency is too large to be contained within. It also is not going to be immediately embraced by the Democratic establishment that just won all three elected components of the federal government, and so requires them to realize just how fragile and transient their control is.

Maybe, compared with all the other choices, gridlock is good.  "[W]here you risk a true majority voting for awful things (for arbitrary values of awful) mightn't that good governance be minimal governance?"  As far as the Democrats figuring out how "fragile and transient" their control is?  The best they can do is gridlock state legislatures, when they're not gridlocking Congress.

That noted, another Steven Taylor post from early 2021 offers two ways in which voters might select their Members of Congress.  In one, each party submits a ranked list of its candidates, and each voter has one vote to cast for a party.  In the trade, that's a closed list.  Presumably the voters have enough information about the party manifesto to pick the party with the policy bundle closest to their preferred policy bundle (the complications are left to the reader as an exercise).  In the other, each party submits a list of its candidates, and each voter has one vote to cast for one candidate of one party.  That's an open list.  Then comes some interesting arithmetic to determine how many candidates from each party represent that district.  And the gridlock might take a different form: if no one party secures enough seats to elect the Speaker of the House (in my jaded view, the real head of government) the sausage-making begins.  Look no further than Canada to see what might go wrong.  What earthly value is the Parti Quebecois when the Crowsnest coal rates or the Athabasca tar sands come up?

Perhaps, for all the complications, the Framers got it right.  All they had to work with was local voting, whether in a Quaker meeting or at the town hall, and creating geographically-based, single delegate districts for state legislatures and the House of Representatives was straightforward.  They also enumerated and limited the Federal powers, which left more local decisions to the people who would be affected most by the outcome.  National standards?  Only as enumerated, and the national 55 mph speed limit of half a century ago ought still stand as a warning to people whose response to anything troubling is to seek an Act of Congress.  That's not to say that considering the way the House is apportioned or how many seats there are in the House isn't serious business: a previous spat over apportioning seats led to a civil war.