December 10 Event on New Book
“Electoral Reform in the United States: Proposals for Combating Polarization and Extremism”
Common Ground Democracy readers will be interested to know of a new book co-edited by Larry Diamond, Rick Pildes, and me. The book, Electoral Reform in the United States: Proposals for Combating Polarization and Extremism, is the product of a task force of about thirty scholars organized in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The premise of the task force, and thus the book, was that existing electoral institutions magnify the degree of polarization and extremism that exists among the preferences of voters and therefore cause more extreme candidates to be elected to office to a greater extent than what the voters actually want. The task force’s goal was to study this issue based on available social science evidence and recommend institutional reforms to ameliorate the problem.
One of the task force members, AEI scholar John Fortier, is hosting an event on December 10 to discuss the book, its findings, and recommendations. The event is both in person, at AEI in DC, and online. I hope that interested Common Ground Democracy readers will be able to attend one way or the other. You can RSVP for either method of attending on the AEI webpage for the event.
The event is structured so that there will be panel discussions on each chapter in the book, with the chapter’s authors and other task force members. Here’s the schedule:
8:30 – 9:30 AM | Introduction and Overview
Speakers: John Fortier and Richard H. Pildes
9:00 - 10:30 AM | Panel One: Electoral Systems
9:00 - 9:15 AM | Ballot Structures – Edward B. Foley
9:15 - 9:30 AM | Proportional Representation I - Lee Drutman
9:30 - 9:45 AM | Proportional Representation II – Richard H. Pildes
9:45 - 10:00 AM | Primary Elections - Rob Boatright
10:00 - 10:30 AM | General Discussion of Electoral Systems
10:30 - 10:45 AM | Break
10:45 - 11:15 AM | Presidential Nominations
Speakers: Richard H. Pildes & John Fortier
11:15 - 11:45 AM | Campaign Finance
Speakers: Ray La Raja & Brandice Canes-Wrone
11:45 - 12:15 PM | Concluding Observations & Prospects for Implementation of Reforms
Speaker: Larry Diamond
Each discussion will include time for Q&A with attendees.
There is a lot of content to the book, and hopefully it will be helpful to public understanding and deliberation on how to improve American democracy.
Also, related to the book—or at least the chapter I wrote on “Ballot Structures”—are two law review articles that have just been published. One is co-authored by Nate Atkinson, Scott Ganz, and me, and involves a comparison of two different electoral methods based on computer simulations applied to profiles of the electorates in all 50 states. The two electoral methods are (1) the new Alaska system, which uses Instant Runoff Voting; and (2) a variation on the Alaska system that uses Convergence (Condorcet) Voting instead. The Ballot Structures chapter of the new book extends the analysis of this co-authored article by developing a metric called “Centripetal Force” or “C-Force” to quantify, and thus compare, the degree to which an electoral system tends to produce who are closer to the electorate’s median voter. An electoral system with a negative C-Force tends to produce winners more polarized than the voters themselves—the exact problem the task force was created to address.
The other article, The Nomination and Election of Statewide Candidates, is one that I wrote in an effort to analyze systematically all phases of the electoral process, starting with signature gathering by candidates to qualify for the primary ballot. The goal there was to develop a more rational procedure for electing a single candidate from a large field of contenders at the outset. This work provided a valuable foundation for the “Ballot Structures” chapter of the book.