Fixing the House with Proportional Representation

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

Hello and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss and compare democratic institutions.

Hands down, I am convinced that electoral reform for the US House of Representatives is one of the most important institutional reforms, not only for the USA, but for the entire world. To have a stable, fair and balanced democracy that equally represents all people of the American society is essential. The world just can’t afford a US political system – with the most powerful army in the world – to be driven by the special interests through corporate lobbying and private wealth. Proportional representation would be one important element of bringing back healthy political competition and disassembling the two party regime that keeps the US population trapped in a rigid, not representative plutocracy – a regime controlled by wealth.

With Lee Drutman I discuss how proportional representation could break that two-party doom-loop, that is spiraling. Lee co-founded the organization “Fix Our House” with Charlotte Hill and Eli Zupnick, that specifically campaigns for a proportional representation electoral system for the U.S. House. Lee is one of the most important voices in the electoral reform movement.

Lee wrote the book “Breaking the Two-party Doom-Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America”, in which he and he explains why he now favors open-list proportional representation, in contrast to a single transferable vote, which is a multi-seat version of ranked choice voting. We spend less time discussing the well-known problems of the outdated first-past-the-post system, but more time on the solutions. We agree that the most important message for the electoral reform movement right now is advocating for multi-seat districts and proportional representation, instead of being bogged down by arguing over the best version of PR.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. Besides “Breaking the Two-Party Doom-Loop”, He is the author of the book “The Business of America is Lobbying “, and the winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association’s Robert A. Dahl Award, given for “scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy.”

He is also the co-host of the podcast Politics in Question, a lecturer at The Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, and writes regularly for FiveThirtyEight. He has also published numerous pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post and Foreign Policy, among many other outlets.

He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Brown University.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the thirty-third episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of this episode on my website rulesofthegame.blog. Please send any feedback to rulesofthegame.ddi@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to do me a favor, please give it a 5-star rating. If you’d like to support my work, consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com and you find the link to it on my website rulesofthegame.blog.

Please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Lee Drutman.

Discussion:

Stephan Kyburz: Lee Drutman, very welcome to the Rules of The Game podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show.

Lee Drutman: Well, I am delighted to be having this conversation.

Stephan Kyburz: And so what is your first memory of democracy?

Lee Drutman: My first memory of democracy. So I was in second grade during the 1984 presidential election in the US and  we did a little straw poll in my class and I remember being the only person who was for Mondale and not Reagan. Which was actually a pretty accurate prediction of how that election was gonna go. But, you know, my parents were liberal democrats, they didn’t like Reagan. So I guess I was the one Mondale supporter in the class.

Stephan Kyburz:  Okay cool. Thanks for sharing this short episode. Actually, my first episode on my podcast, the Rules of the Game was on proportional representation in the US. And I called it “The Dream of a Truly American Democracy”. And it was actually also inspired by your work to some degree, your book “Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop – The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America”. And probably around 2018, when I just thought about like we all saw, you know, the American political system going more extreme, more polarized. And I just realized that in Switzerland, we had this transition from a more majoritarian system to an open list proportional representation system. And it changed politics tremendously. And that kind of brought me to this comparison, you know, between the US and Switzerland. That’s why I also put this first episode on my podcast about proportional representation. When you started writing the book, what was the process? At what point did you realize you wanted to write that book? And what was kind of the evolution of those ideas?

Lee Drutman:  The book came out of the puzzlement that I and I think a lot of other people had at the rise and success of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee and then president. And I think a lot of folks thought, well, something like this couldn’t happen in the US system. So why did it happen? And moreover, why has the Republican Party become so extreme? Why has Congress become so dysfunctional? Why is there just this kind of breakdown in how American democracy operates? And so I tried to answer that question like a lot of people and the way I first answered it was really trying to trace the history and evolution of the US two party system, you know, really since the 1950’s. And I realized that so much of what had gone wrong had to do with the way that our two party system had flattened out into a genuine two party system. And how the single member district, single winner system had exacerbated that polarization and really worked on top of an urban-rural split that was kind of emerging throughout western democracies. But at that time, I was really focused on the US. And then I said, well, ok, that’s interesting, like not every, there, there’s this sort of urban rural problem in western democracies and yet the US and to some extent, the UK seems to be having the hardest time managing it well. Why is that? So I started reading all of the comparative literature on electoral systems. I had gotten a PhD in Political Science in American politics which means that you don’t have to know anything about the rest of the world other than that it exists. And I said, oh, this is really interesting, it seems to be a pretty broad consensus among comparative scholars that proportional systems produce more stability, are better at dealing particularly in ethnically divided societies with the divisions that might emerge. And well, actually, this is quite consistent with what Madison was trying to get at, in particularly federalist number 10, but also his broader work, the idea of overlapping factions leading to democratic legitimacy and flexibility. So after reading a lot and thinking a lot and testing these ideas in various conversations and shorter pieces I said: Oh there’s a book here. And so I wrote it. Originally I had a more banal title. But my publisher, editor at Oxford University Press, Dave McBride said, oh, you’ve got to call it the Two Party Doom Loop and I said, oh, it’s too gimmicky, but he was right. It was gimmicky, but it certainly has, has I think proven to be an apt phrase.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah. Yeah. And following also you on Twitter, you used the Doom Loop quite regularly in describing American politics that it became more extreme, more polarized over time. And I think, you know, in the book you make a great case for how the system evolved, you know, in the, in the 50’s/60’s where there was more kind of a four party system. And then over time, the two parties moved further apart from each other to become like a real two party system with the many problems I think and you mentioned already the zero sum kind of winner take all politics, the gerrymandering. And I don’t want to talk too much about the problems, but rather about the possible ways forward and also your work with your organization Fix Our House. Can you maybe talk a bit about your work and also related to your book, how you know the discussions you try to provoke and whether you are kind of satisfied with the discussions you can create?

Lee Drutman:  Well, In terms of the discussion, I think there has been a definite progress in the conversation around electoral reform in the US. My book came out in January 2020 right before the pandemic and I did the usual book tour and series of podcasts and pieces and people said, oh, that’s an interesting idea. That makes sense. That’ll never happen. And also I got some pushback saying, well, you know, sort of the system is a little off kilter now. But haven’t we always had a two party system and has it, it always managed to work reasonably well and to which my response was, well, we’ve never had a genuine two party system system. And this is part of a process of political development of nationalization, of sorting that has made the two party system unworkable. But I didn’t really have a great answer to: Well, isn’t this just a pipe dream? Because it sort of felt like one? But I think after Trump lost the election but didn’t go away and after January 6th and the Republican Party seemed to coalesce around an election denialist mindset, the conversation really began to change. And I think a lot of folks who had thought that, well, Trump will lose, the Republican Party will go back to normal, the sort of reversion to the norm, to the media and whatever will happen because that’s how things are supposed to work. But I said, no, it’s… This is the doom loop. There’s no going back to normal. Things have changed. This is a self accelerating process. So I guess I was right. And I think a lot of the understanding caught up with that and people who thought, oh, things will just go back to normal and people who had fought really hard to defeat Trump said, oh, wait, this, no, no, there is no normal. We need, we can’t keep fighting the same fights over and over again. We need to work towards the system that will be fully representative and ultimately more stable and doesn’t give nihilist liberal extremists disproportionate power as they have in our current system. So I think the conversation has expanded and more and more people are taking the idea of proportional representation as something that should seriously be on the table. It will require a fair amount of deep and thoughtful conversation and a shift among many elected leaders to a longer term perspective. But I do think that more and more elected leaders realize that the system just can’t work as it is. And so there is a new and growing openness to these kinds of structural changes. So, into that conversation about a little over a year ago who formally launched this organization called Fix Our House, which had co-founded with Eli Zupnick and Charlotte Hill, Eli had been working on the campaign to end the Filibuster, which I was obviously very supportive of as part of the voting rights fight happened around the HR1 for the People Act, which became the Freedom to Vote Act. And we were very engaged on that. And after that did not succeed, we realized that it was time to start to launch a campaign for proportional representation to essentially inject that idea into the conversation and make it an idea that people were willing to take seriously. Serious people were willing to take it seriously.

Stephan Kyburz: And I think that the issue, right, is much more fundamental than just avoiding Trump or avoiding an extreme right power structure. It’s much more fundamentally about representation, right? That the people are well represented and that they have choices among many or more different parties. So that’s for me really the issue that often is a bit forgotten because often it’s more about, oh OK, the Democrats are back in power so everything is back to normal or, or whatever, you know, but this is much, much, much more fundamental about representation I think.

Lee Drutman:  It’s ultimately a question of what kind of democracy do we really want to be. And I think it’s certainly easier to speak to people in terms of solving a problem rather than saying, well, couldn’t we be a more representative democracy? Couldn’t we better represent the diversity of this country? Couldn’t we have a system in which a broad diversity of Americans across racial and ethnic and geographic and ideological lines feel that there are folks in elected office who are speaking to them, who represent them? Couldn’t more people feel like they have a voice and couldn’t we have a politics that is focused around building majority compromise rather than finding issues that can constantly be used as divisive wedge issues to win power that nobody can figure out how to keep.

Stephan Kyburz:  Yeah. And I saw that you, before promoting change of electoral system, you worked a lot on lobbying, right? Corporate lobbying. Do you also see there a connection, I suppose, from you know, how more different parties would also change the dynamics in Washington around corporate lobbying?

Lee Drutman:  Well, here it might be interesting to tell you the kind of evolution of how I went from focused on corporate lobbying to being focused on electoral systems. And I wrote a book that came out in 2015 called “The Business of America is Lobbying”. It was the accumulation of my PhD dissertation and subsequent research that I had done. And you know, a lot of thinking about how it was that lobbying, particularly on behalf of corporations, had become so dominant in Washington. And it was a complicated story. But one thing that struck me as a way to counteract some of that was that Congress and particular the committees in Congress should invest in more of their own expertise so they wouldn’t be so much less reliant on lobbyists. Because what you have in Congress is an institution that doesn’t invest in itself, doesn’t invest in its professional knowledge and staff capacity. The political parties don’t really invest in policy that they, you know, they really rely on outside groups to do that. And that disproportionately benefits those with the most money who can afford that research and, and hire all the lobbyists to press their case. Now, it seemed like a somewhat obvious solution. So I said, well, why don’t we try to get Congress to invest more in its own staff and knowledge capacity. So Congress wouldn’t be so reliant on outside experts. And what I realized at some point was that this was a function of hyperpartisan polarization. And that as Congress had become more centralized, the committees had become less relevant as independent sources of policy development. And moreover that as partisan polarization continued to get worse and worse, even investing in policy capacity was not up to dealing with this partisan polarization problem. I began this research in 2006, which was a very different time. And I, like a lot of people, I saw partisan polarization as a thing that was happening but it didn’t seem like the central story. But it quickly became the central story. I think, you know, really, I think I probably should have realized it sooner, but I was so focused on the lobby angle. But by 2016, it was clear that this was the dominant challenge to the governability of the American political system that the two parties had come to see each other as enemies. And the geography of both parties had so little overlap that it really gave credence to the idea that the other party represents a completely different way of life.

Stephan Kyburz:  Yeah, I think the lobbying question is also very important related to the electoral system. Also, when I look at how Swiss politics changed over time, because in the 19th century, there was like one party, the radical party today is called the Freedom Democratic Party. And they are kind of moderate right wing, but they had a lot of power and they were very close with a lot of companies. This was a, a really a center of economic and political power and they could hold on to it and they were strongly against electoral reform and only with proportional representation, the other parties became more powerful and the whole system became more balanced. Issues like around workers’ rights, social security, et cetera became kind of more balanced, you know, and I think this was an important check, in a way on corporate lobbying as well, even though back then it probably was in different forms.

Lee Drutman:  Well, I mean, it does certainly seem to be the case that the the democracies that went most strongly in, in a neoliberal direction were the majoritarian democracies. Now, they are also the anglo countries. So it’s not clear whether that’s the sort of Anglo-american liberalism in like classical liberalism tradition. But I do think that within a two party system, voters have many fewer options. So it’s to the extent that they want to vote for something that is not just the party of the corporations. What are they gonna do? Waste their vote if the corporations have taken over both of the two major parties? Whereas it’s a lot easier for other parties to come in and offer an alternative economic vision.

Stephan Kyburz:  Right. And this understanding is present on the right and on the left side, right? There is a lot of questioning how Washington works and a lot of disdain for the two parties. Now with your organization Fix Our House, what is kind of the solution you propose for the listeners to know?

Lee Drutman: What we really hope people will take away is that there is an organization that is committed to expanding the conversation on proportional representation. As an organization, we have not taken a position on the type of proportional representation, just the general concept of proportional multi member districts. And the idea that there ought to be more than two parties to represent the diversity of the American people and also to create a political system in which there are different ways to build coalitions. So the extremists on either side frankly can hold the entire process hostage. But personally, I’ve been convinced by the arguments that open-list balances the different goals of an electoral system most effectively in probably 5 to 7 member districts. I think more than I think around five or six parties is probably the ideal and wouldn’t want to go much beyond that. Too much it creates more confusion for voters, puts too many names on the ballot. It makes things a little bit more fragmented. But you want to have enough space for there to be some fluidity and innovation and responsiveness in the political system. So to the extent that you could do open-list PR with about five seats per district. And also just the advantage that I really like about open-list PR is that you’re essentially combining the primary and the general into one election because voters can choose among candidates within a party. So they get some say on who the representatives are within the party. But there’s also a… puts, gives the parties back the important role of vetting candidates and filtering out the the crazies a little more or, or if they put forward crazies, voters have other choices. Right now if Republicans put forward a crazy and Democrats are the only alternative and there’s a lot of people who will just vote for the Republican even knowing they’re voting for a crazy because the Democrats are worse. So I’ve been convinced by the arguments on behalf of open-list PR. I used to think that the single transferable vote was the better form of proportional representation because it allowed voters to express more preferences. But having seen the initial research  and there’s been quite a bit of it on how ranked ballots are playing in the US, I now having initially been a enthusiast of rank choice voting, I’ve come to see that it, it is most effective in primary elections to the extent that we would still have those and nonpartisan local elections where you can’t implement any of the party based systems like open-list.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, I think actually it’s a smart choice to first of all promote proportional representation before you know, making a choice on different versions of proportional representation. I mean, you know, there’s ranked choice voting, there is MMP (mixed member proportional) and there is open-list or closed-list systems. But I think in general, I mean, what I’ve observed also recently is that as soon as you talk about specific systems, people get kind of caught up in the details, you know. They’re almost like fighting over details that don’t matter as much as proportional representation matters, right?

Lee Drutman: Right. Exactly. I mean, the differences among systems are somewhat small once the idea is that you have multiple parties and you have a broader range of competition and more flexibility in the system and all of the major systems of proportional representation accomplish it. Ultimately, I think if proportional representation is going to become the law in the US for all states to elect their congressional delegations via proportional representation, probably that states should be allowed to choose among methods of proportional representation. So different, depending on how different states decide they could apply different systems of proportional representation to their delegation and see what works, what doesn’t, states could change. It’s a big country. I think the idea that there is one system of PR that should work for every single state. And we know that in advance doesn’t really fit with the spirit of American federalism.

Stephan Kyburz: Also, I mean, we’ve seen different systems work, you know, all these versions I have mentioned. Except I’m not a big fan of closed-list system actually.

Lee Drutman:  Nor am I. And I don’t think, I can’t imagine the US ever adopting a closed-list system because it just puts too much power in the parties.

Stephan Kyburz: I actually agree. Yeah, Switzerland also has an interesting version of the open-list where people can choose a list, but then they can make changes to the list. They can duplicate candidates, they can eradicate candidates or they can even put candidates from other parties. You know, it’s a bit more demanding for the voter. But essentially if you don’t want to do anything, you just put the list, you know, from a party that you like, you know, and you don’t make changes. But if you want, if you really don’t like one person, you just drop it.

Lee Drutman:  And do you know offhand what percentage of voters just choose the party list, versus make recommendations for specific candidates or take advantage of the many opportunities that the system provides?

Stephan Kyburz: I don’t know the numbers actually. I should check but I guess that quite a large number of people would just pick a list and put it in the ballot.

Lee Drutman: Yeah, that seems like what most people would do as well. I mean, people, people are busy and you know, when you pick a party that you feel represents, you, you want them to do the hard work of filling in the details.

Stephan Kyburz: I think that possibility is quite nice because, you know, if you, for example, if you really try to have more women in parliament, you could, you know, essentially put more women on the list. If you, if you want to have more young people in the parliament, you know, you put more young people. That’s a possibility.

Lee Drutman: And that is one thing that has helped among the things that have convinced me of list systems is it’s a lot easier for parties to ensure that they put forward a diverse slate if parties get to control the slate rather than relying on the candidates who are willing to step forward and run on their own which, you know, I mean, men tend to think they’re, especially white men tend to think that they are great candidates disproportionately.

Stephan Kyburz: Is the move for, you know, in your view from rank choice voting to more of a list system, is that also because rank choice voting in single seat districts wouldn’t really bring about the change that you are seeking?

Lee Drutman:  Yeah. So part of that is because rank choice voting that, I mean, over the time that I’ve been thinking and writing on electoral system change, things have deteriorated rapidly. So in 2016, when I first learned about rank choice voting and said, oh, this seems like a really cool idea, there was still a sense that maybe we could stitch back together a sort of political center. And I think applying that in single winner elections, single winner partisan elections just is not really the medicine that the sick patient of American democracy needs right now. It’s just not strong enough medicine. Also, I have been convinced that what we really need to get to proportional multiparty democracy is to start to build new political parties. And rank choice voting is such a candidate oriented reform that it doesn’t encourage parties to form. Now, one thing that does encourage parties to form is fusion voting which I’ve become quite enthusiastic about and interested in which has been used in New York. There’s a Working Families Party and a conservative party there that, I mean, generally they cross endorse Democrats and Republicans but it does create an alternative identity and a way for people to engage in politics. And most interestingly, last year in New Jersey, a group of independents and disaffected Republicans formed the Moderate Party, they tried to endorse Tom Malinowski for the Congress. Now, New Jersey, like many states in the US, outlawed fusion balloting in the early 20th century, fusion balloting used to be widespread in the US. But if there’s a lawsuit now and if the State Supreme Court decides that fusion balloting is legal under the freedom of association clause, that would create an opportunity and potentially a precedent for other state courts to re legalize Fusion and that creates opportunities for new parties to form. They initially would cross endorse Democrats or Republicans, but over time, they can begin to advocate for their own parties and their own candidates and proportional representation. And I think with senate elections, I think that would be particularly powerful. I could even imagine it taking place in presidential elections which might move us towards a more cabinet coalition style of executive branch personnel than what we have right now, which I think would also be more stable.

Stephan Kyburz: Can you briefly just explain the main characteristics of Fusion voting?

Lee Drutman: Yeah. So fusion voting is essentially cross endorsement. So, for example, in 2020 if you were a voter in New York, you could have voted for Joe Biden on the Democratic Party line, but you could also vote for him on the Working Families Party line. If you wanted to send a signal that you, that his votes would…That some of his votes would come from the Working Families Party. Now, practically what that means is that the Working Families Party, although it doesn’t, you know, only I think maybe a few times it’s elected its own candidates, but it commands, 10, 5%, you know, 5% of the electorate, 10, 15% in some districts. So it has a little bit of a claim on politicians who are elected under that line. Now, fusion has generally been used as parties on more of the edges when American political parties were more in the middle. Now, the missing space is the political center. So you can imagine a moderate party forming that represents, you know, maybe 10% of the electorate that is kind of in the middle of both parties, particularly the non maga wing of the Republican party that feels homeless. And if they endorsed a Democrat, that Democrat would get elected but would be dependent on that voting block. And that would really shape how that Democrat operated. And it would give that voting block, an identity, political parties are crucial in elements of democracy, crucial institutions because they organize and they build power and they build identities. And I think one of the things that’s evolved in my thinking is just coming to appreciate how central that is and how much we need to build that because right now we have such a strong anti party attitude in the US. And so, you know, one approach is just, well, we just just leave everything up to the voters open this, open that, but somebody is structuring that choice. You know, gender control is the most powerful part of politics. And somebody is gonna be pulling that, pulling the money strings behind the curtain. Now political parties move that out into the open because you have those choices in front of you and you know that somebody’s structuring those choices for you. But it’s clear what those choices are and the most dangerous thing I think is when you have the illusion of choice without power, which is what a move away from party centered democracy actually winds up being.

Stephan Kyburz:  I also had Jackson Tucci, who you probably know, I’ve seen, he wrote also on New America quite a bit. So I mean, he is kind of warning of that case, right? That the reform movement becomes anti party and then you might end up with an anti party rank choice voting. But as he shows in his book and in his research that if there is not a stable coalition, right, that implements, you know, the reform, then RCB for example, has been repealed again in many cases. Right?

Lee Drutman: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, and I think he’s exactly right. And his book is an important book and anybody who is thinking about reform right now, needs to take that very seriously. I think we’ve had a series of reform moments in the US in which the instinct has been to smash open everything and to break up power and just to kind of make everything more direct. But unless you build institutions that channel collective power, which political parties being the institutions that do that best, you wind up with a kind of diffuse and disorganized and ultimately dissipated reform coalition that is not able to sustain the gains and then you wind up in a worse place because what you’ve created is a system in which it’s not clear where power lies because you don’t have political parties organizing. You just have a lot of actors operating entirely behind the scenes. And what has happened time and again is that these attempts to reform the system have created more distrust because well, if power is clearly being wielded, but I don’t see where it is. So that makes me think more conspiratorially. There’s dark money somewhere off stage and there’s these agents of global capital who are shifting the money around to limit my choices. And so I think the effect of that is contrary to what we ought to be working towards, which is to build institutions of collective power that can represent and channel and engage the broad diversity of the American electorate.

Stephan Kyburz:  And the multiparty element, there is so important, right? That there is not two parties, there is more parties, but the parties, they play an important role.

Lee Drutman: : They play a crucial role.

Stephan Kyburz:  A crucial role in any system. When you, you know, with Fix Our House, with the organization, what kind of coalition are you trying to build or where are you most active?

Lee Drutman: Well, we’re trying to build a broad coalition right now that ideologically it goes from the progressive left to the non maga right. And I think important groups that have a, you know, a stake in it are certainly civil rights organizations who realize that the Voting Rights Act isn’t what it used to be and is about to get even more like Swiss Cheese. And, you know, I think certainly business leaders who realize that a highly polarized party system is terrible for innovation and investment because it creates instability, uncertainty, potentially high degree of rent seeking from the parties, flips things from how they used to be. Anybody who cares about climate and sees the seesawing of policy under different administrations as opposed to long term investment, immigration, guns all these issues in which there’s a clear super majority in support of a reasonable compromise position, but we can’t get that position because it requires somebody to make a compromise and to have a solution as opposed to an issue and everybody wants an issue for elections.

Stephan Kyburz:  Do you see, like as you mentioned, the civil rights movement and now the Black Lives Matter Movement, you know, like historically, I think the opinions on changing the electoral system, et cetera were quite diverse. I mean, I know the work of Lani Guinier, but the civil rights movement was also achieving the single member districts that kind of were changing the representation of black people.

Lee Drutman:  I think it’s important to appreciate the gains that majority minority districts made in Black and Hispanic representation. At the same time as the, particularly as the Voting Rights Act goes away, it will be harder and harder to bring lawsuits under that statute that guarantee fair representation. I’m assuming certainly to see that with the Alabama case. And, and second, I think the big problem is that that model of representation really relies on segregation. And one thing that has changed is that a lot of black voters have moved out to the suburbs. A lot of white voters have moved into the city cours and Hispanic voters are dispersed. Asian voters are dispersed. I mean that this is a diverse country and what we need to do to represent this diversity is allow voters to choose their candidates of choice regardless of where they live. And the other aspect is just the extent to which the US political system has become so oriented around a racial binary. It’s either the white traditionalist America or the cosmopolitan, you know, multi racial America, which treats black voters as a monolith. You know, Hispanic voters are less of a monolith but are often treated as a monolith. And in reality, black voters would probably be represented better by, you know, two or three different parties that speak to different elements of the African American political spectrum. I think voters are not a monolith. And I mean, the idea that any of these voters are a monolith really essentials the racial element of their voting behavior and that creates a politics that’s much more oriented around zero sum racial issues. I mean, if thinking of your own country, Switzerland, if the Germano speaking parts of the country were in one party and the French speaking parts of the country were in another party, which is sort of what Belgium is, although they’ve managed to, with the French and the Dutch speaking Flemish speaking, I mean, that’s a recipe for political civil war, right?

Stephan Kyburz: And I completely agree like this simplistic views, you know, they have to go, right? I mean, the people are just much more complex and as you say, like the political views, they are so different. Right? You have black people who like to vote Republican, you have whatever combination it can be. Right? Of views.

Lee Drutman: Exactly. And there are generational divides and regional divides and presidential divides. So, I mean, what we, you know, what a system should do is maximally represent the false expression of people’s individual aspirations and hopes for politics while trading off some governability. I mean, everybody can’t be represented perfectly or else we would never agree on anything. But there’s a balance there and a two party system way over corrects on the simplification of political conflict in a way that is ultimately destructive.

Stephan Kyburz:  So looking forward, you know, you’ve been now in the reform movement for quite a while. Kind of what gives you hope or what are the recent events that make you believe in the reform?

Lee Drutman: The main thing that gives me hope is that more and more people are engaging with these questions of electoral system reform. And in the time that I’ve been in this space, it’s gone from a small conversation to a bigger and bigger conversation and that’s really exciting.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, also in Switzerland, it took a long time till you know, this idea really took shape in people’s heads and there were three popular votes actually necessary to finally bring about proportional representation at the national level. For the listeners who want to read up more on the topic are there any books or articles you’d recommend and of course, I will link to your book and your work.

Lee Drutman:  Yeah. So obviously there’s my book. I would suggest people go to Fix Our House (www.fixourhouse.org). You can sign up for newsletters and there’s a bunch of resources there. And so I think that’s a great place for people to start.

Stephan Kyburz:  Okay, cool. I’ll link to that and of course, also to your Twitter account. And yeah, so Lee Rodman, thanks a lot for the conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights and it has been a pleasure.

Lee Drutman:  Well, thank you for having me on. I enjoyed the conversation.