The political system of the United States of America has resulted in, effectively, a
two party system.
This is a natural occurrence in a first passed the post system where each candidate stands
in a single seat constituency and the candidate with the most votes wins the seat outright.
But this can lead to an assembly that doesn’t reflect the voter's overall preferences particularly
well and so had led some to suggest that the system should be changed, to a proportional
system.
So how would American politics look under a proportional system, time for a thought
experiment.
The Dutch offer an example of such a system.
The Netherlands House of Representatives, the Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal,
is elected based on an open list.
Voters give their vote to a candidate on the list; but what’s important first is what
party that candidate represents.
The Tweede Kamer has 150 seats, and under the Dutch system a seat is awarded to a party
for every one hundred and fiftieth of the popular vote.
Inevitably this will not lead to every seat filled, so the remaining seats are awarded
awarded based on the highest remainder.
There is one small caveat in the Dutch system, that we won’t be applying here with our
overview analysis, but its worth mentioning, any individual who gains one quarter of the
threshold in votes in their own right is considered elected, jumping the list put forward by their
party and resulting in the presence of independent members.
Applying this system of proportional representation to American politics will require some assumptions.
The third most popular party in America is Libertarian Party which received just received
just 1.2% of the popular vote for the House of Representatives in 2014; compare this with
the United Kingdom’s 2015 election where their third largest party UKIP received 12.6%
of the popular vote; this isn’t going to be as straightforward as my UK House of Commons
under MMP scenario.
So in our analysis we’re going to have to break up the two big players of American Politics.
However, we still want to take a data driven approach so to break up the Democrat and Republican
votes we’re going to look at the how each of the factions within each party performed
in this year’s presidential primary campaign.
I say ‘we’re’ going to do this because I’ve asked Will the Political Junkie to
come and provide us with some numbers.
For the Democrats; we’ll split off Sanders to form his own party, Bernie Sanders’s
Progressive Coalition, and he’ll take his 12 million primary voters with him, that leaves
Democrats under Clinton with her 15.8 million voters.
On the Republican side; Trump becomes leader of the Make America Great Again Party with
13.3 million votes, Ted Cruz is our banner holder for the Tea Party, bringing in 7.6
million votes; and the establishment Republicans are represented by Kasich and Rubio with just
shy of 4.2 and 3.5 million votes respectively giving us 7.6 Republican voters.
For the minor parties we will bring in the Libertarians and the Greens, however, the
turnout for their Primaries was extremely low and so rather than base their votes on
the primaries we’re going to set their percentages based on the Polling average for each party,
so 8% of the vote will go to the Libertarians and 3.1% of the vote to the Greens.
Those percentages will result in just over 5 million and just under 2 million votes
for the Libertarian’s and the Green’s Respectively; and a new total vote of
63,463,960 votes.
This gives us a threshold of 145,895 to win a seat in the 435 seat United States House
of Representatives.
This threshold results in: - 13 seats for the Greens
- 82 seats for Bernie Sanders’s Progressive Coalition
- 108 seats for the Democratic Party - 34 seats for the Libertarians
- 52 seats for the Republicans - and the same for the Tea Party
- And Trumps Make America Great Again Party will come in with 91 seats
With three seats yet to be allocated, these are allocated to the parties with the largest
remainder, giving an extra seat to the Libertarians, Greens, and Progressives and bringing our
total to 435.
Obviously, no party has gained an outright majority and so a coalition is required.
Furthermore a coalition of either our Republican or Democratic derived party’s falls short
of being able to form a government.
So with this scenario, the Libertarians find themselves in a position of Kingmaker, able
to choose between supporting a right wing Trump lead coalition with the Republicans
and Tea Party or a left leaning Clinton lead coalition including at least the Progressives
and possibility also the Greens in order to keep them friendly for future elections.
The Libertarians could use their position as kingmaker to gain significant concessions
from whoever they form a government with, however, with great power comes great responsibility
and if the nation were to return to the polls they may well punish the kingmakers for their
failure to make a king.
An alternative would be for the now more moderate Republican party to support the Democrats
and Progressives in forming a center based government, but given how quickly house republicans
have come to support Trump I wouldn't hold your breath on this one.
And the Libertarians are historically, an offshoot from the Republican Party.
So perhaps the safe money would be on a Trump Primeministership; leading a coalition of
Make America Great Again Party working with the Rupublicans, the Tea Party, and the Libertarians,
with Hillary Clinton leading the opposition.
One advantage of this type of proportional system is the removal, or at least limiting,
of the spoiler effect.
While under the de facto two party system of first past the post a third party candidate
has the effect of diluting the votes from their ideologically closest major party, thereby
increasing the chance of an ideologically opposing party winning the seat.
Therefor, Voting for a third party candidate can actually work against voters best interests.
The low one seat threshold of the Dutch system applied here minimises these effects, as these
smaller parties gain representation and can, in a coalition use their votes to support
an allied major party.
But, over the longer term, would proportional representation change American politics for
the better?
Well to go deeper into that - I’ll hand back over to the Political Junkie Will …
Have you ever noticed how substanceless our national debate can be?
You have two parties whose task it is to scare you away from the other.
If we had three, four, five legitimate parties, we could expect that while the media would
continue to focus on the dramatic, the shocking, the horse race, the fights - that they would
inevitably be also hooked into exposing their audience to more than two ping-pong parties.
Those other parties would be involved in the fight too.
Heck, in a proportional system, they might even win that fight.
If democracy is about an exchange of ideas, then we should relish in the idea that a multi-party
system could bring more ideological diversity; where smaller parties could form, run on a
level-playing field, participate in coalition- ultimately form governments.
But is this too idealistic?
The major flaw of the American electoral system is that it inevitably leads to two major parties;
new movements are either resigned to obscurity or absorbed under the umbrella of one of the
bigger parties.
But this phenomenon doesn’t just exist in our system.
In almost every country with democracy, you’ll find two major parties, who almost without
exception, hold power in the national government.
Smaller parties aren’t absorbed into the bigger party like in the US; they’re absorbed
into the bigger party’s governing coalition.
Perhaps human beings simple can’t handle more than two choices.
Despite what your civics teacher, your poli sci prof, or your cynical political activist
friend said: is a proportional system really worth fighting for if the outcome is all the
same?
Thanks Will, there are obviously a lot of assumptions in this analysis, so in the comments
below let us know where you think we went wrong, if you think proportional representation
would be good for American Politics, and who you think would win under a proportional system.
And once you’ve answered that make sure to check out Political Junkie, appropriately
his latest video is about the spoiler effect, and its role the year 2000 presidential race
and the delegates from Florida.