A Look at the Particulars of Proportional Representation

Kindergartners memorize the names of the presidents, middle school pupils learn about voting and high school students study the Electoral College in preparation for their initiation to the civic rite of voting. College students, in their political science courses, study the attributes of a political campaign.

The American election system, with its intricacies and peculiarities, has become beloved for the spectacle and media entertainment that is its byproduct as much as for the freely elected leaders that is its putative aim. Seldom is there much consideration about whether the system of American elections is successful in producing legislative and executive branches that are fair, stable, effective, and accountable to and representative of the people who elect them.

In the field of comparative politics, the United States' system for electing its legislature is known as plurality voting and it competes with proportional representation when democratic nations choose a method of elections. Proportional representation is winning; more countries use it for the main chamber of their national legislature than use the plurality system, and the plurality system is largely limited to former members of the British Empire (Great Britain, the United States and Canada are the largest countries to use plurality voting). The vast majority of countries that have formed governments since World War I have chosen a form of proportional representation.

So why is proportional representation so much more popular than plurality systems for electing national legislatures?

The United States uses single-member district plurality voting, which means simply that in each geographic district the person who receives the highest percentage of the vote becomes the representative for that district. This has several drawbacks and it directly conflicts with multiple non-controversial values of democracy. The system all but ensures that the United States is technically neither a democracy nor a democratic republic. Currently, the majority of American voters--50 percent plus one--did not vote for the party in power in the legislature. Another value, majority rule with respect to the rights of the minority, is also shunted aside under the plurality system. Minorities are given representation only when they are concentrated in geographical areas in large enough numbers as to outnumber the majority, which means that in a sense they are no longer minorities. Another flaw with the current system is the futility of voting. In 1994, the year Republicans won the House of Representatives from the Democrats, only one in three congressional elections finished within 20 points and only about 10 percent finished within five points (Hertzberg 2004: 497). For 90 percent of Americans this means that whether they supported the incumbent was immaterial and their vote was destined to be either superfluous or wasted.

Proportional representation systems solve or meliorate these problems. They are, essentially, a method of electing representatives for every voter, not just the winning voters. PR, as it is called, can be manifested as party list or as single transferable vote. In party list PR, voters choose can choose a party that represents their interests and the party gets representation in proportion to how popular it is. If there are 100 seats in the legislature and the Pro-choice party receives 6 percent of the vote, the party receives six seats in the legislature.

There are two types of party list PR, open and closed. In the closed party list system, the party chooses the ordered slate of candidates. For the Pro-choice party, the top six people on the list would become representatives in the legislature. In the open party list system, voters vote for both candidate and party. They pick one candidate; their vote goes first to the party, to determine the number of the seats the party receives and second to determine the rank of the candidates. The Pro-choice party whose candidates received six percent of the overall vote gets six seats in the legislature. The six most popular Pro-choice candidates fill those seats.

Single transferable vote is a way of voting for candidates directly without the intermediary of parties and it has been met with success in Ireland and New Zealand but is nowhere near as popular as either of the party list methods. It is used to elect multiple candidates at once. Voters number their preferences for the positions.

Then the votes are tallied and the candidates who receive a certain number of No. 1 votes are declared elected. The candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and the votes of the people who voted for him/her are recycled and applied to their second choice for the next round. If a candidate receives more than the minimum number of votes, the excess votes are distributed to other candidates in the next round. This process is repeated in round after round until all the spots are filled. It is one of the more difficult voting systems to grasp mathematically but it is also the fairest in fully realizing voters' desires so that no vote--or fraction of a vote--is wasted. It is unpopular not because of the difficulty in understanding it but because it takes power away from parties (Lijphardt and Grofman 1984: 6).

Regardless of the form, there tend to be more parties under proportional representation than under plurality, on average 4.0 in PR systems compared with 3.1 in plurality systems (Norris 1997: 306). The multiple parties of PR tend to form into two large coalitions--majority and opposition that permits the legislature to govern efficiently. Some critics note that PR legislatures do not always form coalitions swiftly and are consequently less stable than plurality legislatures (Lijphardt and Grofman 1984). However, others note, "a high degree of disparity between vote and seat shares tens to increase turmoil (Blaise 1991: 246) Proportional representation is agreed to be more fair (Norris 1997: 248, Blaise 1991: 243). A major advantage of PR is that it allows all people to be represented based on the interests--political or otherwise--that they want to be represented. It boils down to freedom to choose.

Sources

Amy, Douglas J. 2002. Revitalize American Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.Amy, Douglas J. 2002. Revitalize American Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.

Barber, Kathleen. 2001. A Right to Representation: Proportional Election Systems for the Twenty-first Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Blais, Andre. The Debate over Electoral Systems. 1991. International Political Science Review 12(3): 239-260.

Boix, Carles. 1999. "Setting the Rules of the Game: The Choice of Electoral Systems in Advanced Democracies." American Political Science Review 93(3): 609-624.

"Good Government? Fairness? Or Vice Versa. Or Both."May 1, 1993. The Economist. pp. 9-21.

Hertzberg, Hendrik. 2004. Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004. New York: The Penguin Press.

Lijphardt, Arend and Bernard Grofman, eds. 1984. Choosing an Electoral System: Issues and Alternatives. New York: Praeger.

Norris, Pippa. 1997. Choosing Electoral Systems: Proportional, Majoritarian, and Mixed Systems." International Political Science Review 18(3): 297-312.