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Proportional Representation, the Single Transferable Vote, and Electoral Pragmatism

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Proportional Representation, the Single Transferable Vote, and Electoral Pragmatism r Chapter 7 Proportional Representation, the Single Transferable Vote, and Electoral Pragmatism Richard Nunan lfwe're able to stop Obama on {health care reform}, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him. -Jim DeMint (Smith 2009) The single most important thing we want 10 achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. -Mitch McConnell (Garren 2010) Abstract An exploration of competing electoral systems-single-member district plurality systems (predominant in the U.S.) versus proportional representation systems (STV in particular)-and competing theories of participatory democracy: J.S. Mill's optimistic deliberative democracy model, and Richard Posner's more pessimistic elite democracy model. Mill assumes voters are politically educable, capable of making informed contributions to legislative processes through electoral action. Posner assumes voters are too narrowly self-interested to be substantively educable. Elections, consequently, serve merely as a crude form of quality control and smooth succession of political authority. It is argued that the latter theory is plausible only under single-member district plurality electoral systems like ours, so that the electoral system grounds the theory, not the other way around. Under a single transferable vote system (Mill's preferred system), in which voters' ordinal preferences among candidates govern the outcomes in multi-member districts, Mill's deliberative dempcracy model has a realistic prospect of success. R. Nunan (18) Philosophy Department, College of Charleston, 66 Charles St., 29424 Charleston, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] A.E. Cudd and SJ. Scholz (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Democracy 87 in the 2ist Century, AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice 5. DOl 10.10071978-3-319-02312-0_7, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 88 R. Nunan 7 Proportional Representation, the Single Transferable Vote ... 89 l When federal legislators openly recommend obstructionism for its own sake as a secure a seat in the multi-member district ) are transferred to the next-ranked candi­ partisan strategy, as was certainly the case with DeMint's call to arms (since the bill date on each of the "surplus" ballots. The net effect of the proportionate vote trans­ he wished to repudiate was originally a Republican health care initiative, before fers is to elect the candidates who enjoy the highest collective rank orderings among 2 suffering the misfortune of being endorsed by a Democratic President), we know the voters, across all political parties. that American political institutions have become seriously dysfunctional. Indeed, This was the system advocated in 1861 by John Stuart Mill in Considerations the rhetoric and the visceral hostility continued unabated even after President on Representative Government, after first being introduced in England 4 years Obama's reelection. Why? Vestigial racism is one hypothesis that has been offered earlier in Thomas Hare's The Machinery ofRepresentation, and 2 years before 3 to explain this phenomenon in the context of the Obama Presidency. But while the that in Denmark by Carl Andrae. There is a natural intuitive link between STV symptoms have been more dramatic in recent years, they did not suddenly emerge and Mill's deliberative conception of representative democracy, in which the in the wake of President Obama's first election. full expression of voter sentiment possesses inherent value. For STY is a more Kurt Vonnegut, referring to some of the principal players during the G.W. Bush nuanced reflection of voter convictions than most other electoral systems. But Presidency, once suggested that our governmental dysfunctionality might be a matter whether STV more accurately reflects voter sentiment in an appropriate way, of the sort of personality types attracted to higher office in political systems like and whether Mill's conception of deliberative democracy is normatively ours: President Bush's collection of "upper-crust C-students who know no history superior to other justifications that we might offer for representative democracy. or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists. aka Christians. and plus, are both contentious claiI!ls·. most frighteningly. psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, Comprehensive arguments on both points are beyond the scope of this chapter. personable people who have no consciences." The explanation is doubtless more I propose instead to offer an intuitive account of how STV compares with standard complicated, not simply a case ofVonnegut's assertion that our Constitution harbors U.S. electoral practices on the question of more accurately reflecting voter senti­ "a tragic flaw," the consequence that "only nut cases want to be president" (Vonnegut ment. I will then turn to a defense of Mill's model ofdeliberative democracy against 2005, 99-102). Federal political office-holders are not all psychopaths. one alternative currently in vogue: the pragmatic elitist theory of representative Nonetheless, recent evidence does suggest that electorates, as currently constructed, democracy offered in the last century by Schumpeter 1962, and defended in this one are demonstrably bad at distinguishing between suitable and psychopathic candidates by Posner 2001,2003.4 for public office. They often reward Vonnegut's "nut cases" for their public campaign behavior. and for misrepresentations of their performances while in office. To some extent, this can be attributed to ideological fervor of the hopelessly I The most commonly used threshold fonnula, known as the Droop Quota, is calculated as follows: unreflective. But that can't explain majoritarian support for psychopathic personali­ [(# of votes)/(#of seats +1») +1. Thus, in a 5-member district in which 12,000 valid ballots were cast, a candidate could secure 2,000 first-preference votes without being guaranteed a seat, because ties, since most voters are not ideologically driven. I suggest that our electoral it is theoretically possible that five other candidates could also secure exactly 2,000 votes each, system is a more pernicious-because more permanent----contributor to the erosion resulting in a six-candidate dead heat, necessitating a run-off. But if one of the candidates secured of effective government. Vestigial racism is (hopefully) more temporary, and the 2,001 votes, that candidate, having met the Droop Quota (barely), would be guaranteed a seat. magnetic attraction of psychopathic personalities to public office merely contingent 2In some STY systems, the surplus ballots are literally paper ballots that happen to be at the top of upon the root problem: their ability to succeed in single-member plurality systems. the pile of first-choice ballots for any candidate who meets or surpasses the Droop Quota: every ballot We voters are, ofcourse, often quite inattentive. We have our own lives to pursue, counted for that candidate after the Droop Quota has been met counts as an "extra" first-choice ballot for that candidate, to be transferred to the various second-choice candidates indicated, during the which makes misleading campaign tactics more effective, as does the escalating second round of ballot-counting. In computerized vote-counting systems, fractional portions of all of reliance on campaign money to fund televised propaganda. But the obfuscation and a winning candi~'s first-choice ballots could easily be used instead. I.e., the # of second-choice irrational voting behavior is significantly magnified, I will argue, by our single­ ballots for candidate y, among all those cast for winning candidate x as first choice, will be added to member district plurality (,first past the post') electoral system for selecting candidates y's first-choice ballots during the second round ofcounting, but discounted by the fraction: for legislative office, whereby all federal and state-level elections involve voting #of candidate x 's ballotsexceeding Droop quota directly on one seat per election. determined by plurality victories, or sometimes by total # of first - choice ballots cast fur candidate x majority vote in two-candidate run-offs. We have, like Vonnegut. forgotten that con­ stitutionally permissible alternatives are available, at least one of which, I contend, For detailed accounts of the mechanics of single transferable vote balloting and ballot counting. might ameliorate our current predicament. see Farrell 2011, Chapter 6, 119-152 or Amy 2000. Chapter 4 (in part), 95-106. For a specific The alternative I have in mind is proportional representation by single transferable historical example, see Sinnott 1999. vote (STV), which invites voters to rank candidates (ordinally) for multi-member 3 Hare's initial approach, the first scholarly publication on STY (Hare 1857), was to treat the entire district seats, and employs a vote-counting mechanism in which the surplus votes of country as a single multi-seat district. This was dropped later as unworkable. each winning candidate (those which exceed the minimum number necessary to 4 Posner acknowledges his debt to Schumpeter in the latter work. 90 R. Nunan 7 Proportional Representation, the Single Transferable Vote ... 91 7.1 STV and Electoral Alternatives: Alternate from voting for a candidate). In the at-large ca'ile voting again fails to reflect relative Voting and At-Large Voting strength ofelectoral sentiment. Representation is still an all-or-nothing affair, as it is in single-member districts. That is why at-large voting has been particularly
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