Is PR the panacea?

Proportional representation isn't reform that would work for Senate and presidential elections, both of which need reforming as much as House of Representatives elections.

[This essay was originally posted on the Election Law Blog.]

The New York Times has a big piece posted this morning by Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman advocating for using proportional representation (PR) to elect members of the federal House of Representatives (and expanding the size of the House to accommodate PR). The piece is definitely worth a read; it has some very snazzy graphics. But to my mind it oversells PR as the solution for our nation’s currently dysfunctional democracy.

If you’d like to read more on PR in the context of an overall discussion of potential electoral reforms that would address the current dire conditions of American democracy, I encourage you to read the new book co-edited by Larry Diamond, Rick Pildes, and me (available at no charge here). There’s a chapter on PR by Lee Drutman, where he makes a more extended case for the argument summarized in The NY Times essay. There is also a chapter by Rick Pildes, making a contrary argument that PR might make conditions even worse. There is even a short note by me that is more neutral on the topic of PR, pointing to the “self-districting” system that I’ve proposed, which would operate as a form of PR in the context of single-member districts with which Americans are familiar–and thus has the advantage of not requiring the elimination of the single-member district requirement for seats in the federal House of Representatives. One of the main points of the Wegman-Drutman NY Times essay is the need to eliminate this federal law in order to adopt their proposal. But that wouldn’t be necessary to pursue the self-districting form of PR.

My main concern about the Wegman-Drutman piece and its emphasis on PR as a cure for the nation’s electoral ills is that it essentially ignores elections for the Senate and the presidency. There is a single sentence in the entire piece, towards the very end, devoted to those two other elected parts of the federal government: “Elections for the Senate and the presidency would remain as they are.” Wegman and Drutman seem to think that wouldn’t be a problem as long as the House is transformed by PR into what they call a “multiparty legislature” (although it would be just a single chamber within the bicameral legislature).

I’m not nearly as optimistic. Even if multiple parties flourished in the House in the way Wegman and Drutman envision, there’s every reason to believe that the same two-party dynamic would dominate elections for the Senate and the presidency as long as the procedures for those elections remain the same: partisan primaries followed by plurality-winner general elections. Indeed, as Wegman and Drutman acknowledge when describing why the current two-party competition exists for House elections, it’s this existing electoral system–which they label “the electoral software”–that inevitably “generates two dominant parties and relegates third parties to playing the role of spoiler and wasting their supporters’ votes.” Changing the procedures for House but not Senate and presidential elections will still leave the nation with the same two-party system for the Senate and presidency.

We need no reminder this week why reforming presidential and Senate elections is every bit as important as reforming House elections. It is the existing electoral system that led to the reelection of Donald Trump, even though he almost certainly would not have prevailed in an electoral system designed to elect the Condorcet Winner among all the candidates in the race. Likewise, it is the existing electoral system that led to the election of the Senate that will vote on, and according to news reports, likely confirm Trump’s controversial nominees. The 53 Republicans in the current Senate include some who, like Trump, would not have won in a Condorcet-based electoral system. A Senate elected with Condorcet-based procedures would be much less likely to have enough votes to confirm Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, for example (because the Republicans who would have won those races would come from the traditional, non-MAGA wing of the party.) Even without Condorcet-based procedures, all of the Republican senators would feel less fearful of being primaried by a Trump-endorsed opponent if the system for Senate elections were modified to eliminate partisan primaries. Accordingly, a Senate elected with different procedures would be much more likely to block some of Trump’s most extreme nominees.

The future of American democracy will be affected at least as much, if not more, by how we continue to elect the president and the Senate as by how we elect the House. So, by all means, let’s consider ways of improving elections to the House, including the possibility of using a form of PR to do so. But let’s not neglect the necessity of pursuing electoral reforms that will enable Americans to have the presidents and senators they prefer, rather than being limited by the choice offered by the existing two-party system. The fate of the nation depends on our capacity repair these elements of our flawed system as well.