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In America, Why Does Proportional Voting Have to Attack Political Parties?

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In America, Why Does Proportional Voting Have to Attack Political Parties? In America, why does proportional voting have to attack political parties? Jack Santucci⇤ April 5, 2018 Abstract This chapter traces the early history of proportional-representation advocacy in the United States, asking why reformers embraced the single transferable vote (STV). This “ranked-choice” bargain was not easy to strike. Arriving at it appears to have involved resolving several disagreements: over the appropriateness of direct-democracy reforms, faddish interest in majority-preferential voting around the election of 1912, how much weight should be given to administrative factors (e.g., propensity for voter error), and whether proportional voting ought to permit parties to present themselves on ballots. Most of these issues came to a head in Los Angeles, where, in 1913, the United States’ first-ever referendum on proportional voting failed. The reform coalition fractured along class lines. By 1915, these issues were e↵ectively resolved, with STV’s first passage and enshrinement in the Model City Charter. Note to readers: subsequent chapters cover (a) the adoption of STV in 23 more cities, (b) how parties adapted to it, (c) and why it was repealed in all but one by 1962. ⇤I write here as an independent scholar. Contact: [email protected]. 1 Writing in 1939 for the American Political Science Review, Harold Gosnell had a sensible idea. Cities with proportional representation (PR), he argued, would be better o↵under his “list system with single candidate preference.” The ballot would contain party-written lists of candidates. The voter would vote by marking an “X” next to their favorite candidate. The sums of votes for parties would determine their shares of seats, and the sum of votes for each candidate would determine whether they got one of their party’s seats. According to Gosnell, this system would be easy on voters and election officials. No less important, by allowing party labels to appear on the ballot, it would acknowledge the reality of party organization. Today, many social scientists might approve of the Gosnell proposal (Masket 2016). What we got instead was cognitively challenging, difficult to tabulate, and completely blind to parties: the single transferable vote (STV), otherwise known as “multi-winner ranked-choice voting.” Voters rank candidates in order of preference. The number of seats in a district determines the number of votes needed to win (the quota). First, count up the first-choice votes. Award one seat to the person with a quota, then distribute that winner’s surplus votes1 to next-ranked candidates on ballots for that person. If no one has a quota, eliminate the last-placed candidate, and redistribute their ballots. Repeat this process until all seats are filled. Several cities used this rule at the time of Gosnell’s writing: Boulder, Cincinnati, Hamilton (OH), Toledo, Wheeling (WV), New York City, and Norris (TN). Five had just repealed it, and twelve more would adopt it. Why did STV become the preferred PR method in America? Gosnell’s proposal was not 1. Which ballots are surplus? One can randomly draw a subset from the winner’s pile. Or one can transfer every ballot in that pile at a fraction of its full value. 2 unknown to reformers. Between 1893, with the founding of the PR League, and 1915, with the first STV adoption for public elections in America, there was vigorous debate over types of PR voting and how they might combine with other institutional reforms. Then, around 1912, a large part of the reform community became enthralled with single-winner, majority systems – “ranked-choice voting” in today’s language. This conversation appears to have stopped in 1914, with the National Municipal League’s endorsement of STV, via its inclusion in the Model City Charter (Frederickson, Johnson, and Wood 2004). A reform victory in 1915 vindicated that new charter. This chapter tells the story of the early PR movement in America. The decision to promote STV was closely linked to developments in Los Angeles, where, in March 1913, PR voting faced its first referendum test. That referendum exposed a major cleavage in the movement: between Progressivism’s own left and right wings. STV resolved the cleavage by punting on the parties question. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I attempt to characterize the actors in the reform movement, 1893-1914, and their stances on parties’ role in government. Section 2 sketches the PR movement’s most popular reform options. Section 3 turns to Los Angeles, noting its importance to the movement, and exploring patterns in the referendum outcome. These new data, which are precinct-level results from 19 simultaneous ballot measures, o↵er one glaring case of the cleavage in Progressivism. Section 3 reflects on the STV compromise as it played out in Ashtabula (OH), which introduced that system in 1915. 3 1 The evolving PR movement The PR League was born over the weekend of August 10-12, in the waning days of the Gilded- Age party system, amidst the economic Panic of 1893. Held alongside the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Proportional Representation Congress brought political scientists, social reformers, and international dignitaries together to share ideas and set direction. Today’s foundation officers would call it a “convening.” Professor John R. Commons shared his theory of representation. The journalist William D. McCrackan spoke of Ticino, a Swiss canton, where labor unrest had led to the adoption of list PR in 1890. Traveling from South Australia, Miss Catherine Spense of Adelaide introduced the single transferable vote. On Saturday morning, just before a resolution on the League’s formation, McCrackan again took the podium, this time to make the case for initiative and referendum (Cooley 1893). One month later, abridged versions of the speeches appeared in the inaugural issue of the Proportional Representation Review. Also in that issue were two pieces of model legislation. Each would have imposed a form of list PR for elections to the House of Representatives. Figure 1 reproduces a sample ballot from the second issue of the Review,publishedinDe- cember (Foulke 1893: 50). In this version, the voter gets ten votes. If they choose only a party, the party gets all ten votes. Or they can vote for up to ten candidates. If they vote for fewer than ten candidates, and they choose a party, that party gets whatever votes they did not use. Votes would help candidates achieve quotas, a full one of which would be needed to win. The early PR League had clearly Populist roots, at least in part. Beginning in January 1896 and continuing through October 1914, the Review was published under the auspices 4 Figure 1: Example ballot, “free list” system, 1893. of the initiative-and-recall movement. First, this was as a section in Eltweed Pomeroy’s Direct Legislation Record.OneoftheRecord’s repeat columnists was William Simon U’Ren, early advocate of direct presidential primaries, direct election of Senators, and the “single tax.” U’Ren had been Oregon lobbyist for several left-wing groups: the Knights of Labor, Federated Trades, Farmers’ Alliance, and the Grange (U’Ren 1896). In 1914, he would lead an unsuccessful referendum e↵ort to adopt the single non-transferable vote statewide in Oregon.2 Later on, initiative-and-recall would become a sticking point for the PR League. From 1906 to 1914, the PR Review was published under the auspices of Equity,apparentlya catch-all magazine for reformers, not unlike today’s Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. All that ended in October 1914. Here is what Clarence G. Hoag, the Review’s editor, had to say about the divorce: 2. The entire state would have been one legislative district. All candidates would be present on the ballot, and every voter would get just one vote. The top 60 vote-getters – that is, the size of the lower chamber – would have won the seats. Today’s reformers might call this a “semi-proportional system.” 5 The reasons for issuing the Review separately again, as it was issued from its founding in 1893 until 1896, are chiefly two. In the first place those members of the League who do not favor the Initiative, the Referendum, and the Recall, or any one of the three, do not like to have the official organ of the League published in such a way as to suggest that the League as a body, or proportionalists as such, necessarily support also the three political devices mentioned (Hoag 1914b:1). AsimultaneousmovewasgoingonwithrespecttotheLeaguepositiononelectoral reform. Consider its founding mission statement (Cooley 1893: 117): The object of the society is to promote the reform of legislative assemblies by abandoning the present system of electing single representatives from limited ter- ritorial districts by a majority or plurality vote, and by substituting the following: 1. All representatives shall be elected at large, on a general ticket, either with- out district divisions or in districts as large as practicable. 2. The election shall be in such form that the respective parties, or political groups, shall secure representation in proportion to the number of votes cast by them, respectively. That mission statement remained unchanged through late 1913, when the following pro- posal circulated among League members: Its object shall be to secure the adoption of proportional representation for state legislatures, city councils, and other deliberative or policy-determining bodies. The plan of proportional representation to be recommended by either of the 6 League’s secretaries in any particular case shall be that which seems to him most suitable for the case, provided always that it embodies the principle of asinglevoteinamultiple-membereddistrict. This proposal led to immediate protest from one Carl D. Thompson of Chicago: ...the old article is much clearer and more consistent.
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