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.
