Proportional Representation in America?

Full Transcript:

Introduction:

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

The US democracy is at a critical juncture. The two-party system that is a consequence of the single-seat plurality elections doesn’t balance political groups well. The two parties are highly polarized, making political compromise almost impossible and the democratic institutions are captured by the two parties, excluding outsider parties. Extreme gerrymandering has made most electoral districts non-competitive, so that elections become pre-decided and leave voters with even less political choice and power. 

With Jack Santucci I discuss how electoral reform to introduce proportional representation could be an essential solution to the US political gridlock, by making congressional elections more dynamic and leading to better representation. The window of opportunity for reform may be short though. As the Republican party is increasingly controlled by politicians that disregard democratic principles, the perils of hardly contestable political offices become more real by the day. Also concerning is that many reform suggestions would just not make the electoral system proportional enough to disrupt the two-party impasse.

Jack has conducted some of the most comprehensive research on the history of US electoral reform, which is going to be published in his forthcoming book “More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America”, available next year at Oxford University Press. The book lays out a ‘shifting coalitions’ theory of electoral reform, and analyzes a wave of ranked-ballot reforms in American cities during the Progressive Era and the New Deal.

Jack Santucci is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Politics at Drexel University. He got his PhD in Political Science from Georgetown University. During the academic year 2017-8, he was a Research Fellow at the Democracy Fund. Before graduate school, he worked at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, the Campaign Finance Institute, FairVote, Café Bonaparte, and a congressional district office.

If you want to stay up to date with what are the core issues in US electoral reform follow his research and his Twitter discussions. I will link to both in the show notes. I really do admire his work.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the thirteenth episode of my podcast The Rules of the Game. 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 the conversation on my website rulesofthegame.blog. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a review on your preferred podcast platform and share it with friends and colleagues. Now please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Jack Santucci.

Interview: 

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

Jack Santucci: It’s good to be here.

Stephan Kyburz: So as usual and the question I ask all my guests on the podcast: What is your first memory of democracy or maybe of politics in general?

Jack Santucci: Ah, yeah, over here in the United States we have something called kindergarten and for me that would have been in 1988 into 1989 nine and we as kindergartners, a 4 year old at that time, were asked to vote in the presidential election which was between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis. Bush was the Republican, Dukakis was the Democrat and I think that if you wanted to vote for Bush you dipped your right hand in blue paint and if you wanted to vote for Dukakis, you dipped your left hand in red paint. Because at that point the red and the blue had been sort of the colors were used in an opposite manner. And I think the way in which I made my choice had to do with which hand was dominant. So I voted for Bush simply because I was a right-handed person.

Stephan Kyburz: That sounds like a very nice memory and also a very artistic way of voting.

Jack Santucci: Yeah, then when there was a thing up. There was a thing on the wall that had sort of kids’ handprints. Yeah.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, I love that, I love that. That’s very cool and then at what point in your life have you kind of decided to do research on electoral reform and also then at some point write your upcoming book by Oxford University Press “More parties or no parties: the Politics of Electoral Reform in America”? So that book is coming out probably next year I don’t know and you don’t know yet?

Jack Santucci: I don’t I, they, you know, they have everything from me and they’ve had it for a little while now and we’ll see. You’re probably right. You may know more about this than I do but it’s happening. 

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, cool. Yeah, congrats to that anyway and so when you know when did you feel that you needed to contribute to that discussion.

Jack Santucci: Thanks man. Ah, you know I don’t really know how I became interested in electoral systems. I know that I got out of college or university at McGill in 2005 with that interest and I don’t know what planted it in my head. I don’t even think that I had a course on comparative electoral systems at Mcgill. But anyway from there I went into an internship at FairVote which was then still known as the Center for Voting and Democracy. And my job there was basically to promote the idea of proportional representation. And there were these 24 cities – now we know that there were actually 25 – but there were 24 cities that had the single transferable vote at one point and they kind of had a mythical status in the reform movement. You know it was sort of “wow” these great systems they had in these cities that proves that it could happen again. Ah, so that was in the back of my mind and I went off and did a whole bunch of other jobs. But then it came time to sort of pick a dissertation topic and I said well let’s get to the bottom of what really happened there.

Stephan Kyburz: And now you are kind of in the middle of a very important and very, you know, great discussion I think and that somehow I feel in the US is only really now developing and we can discuss still, you know, where it’s going or where it might be going. But maybe for our listeners just to get some of the fundamentals of the systems debate we were having, and the US is especially having now about majoritarian systems and proportional systems. So the US uses a majoritarian system with single-seat districts and simple plurality voting versus a proportional system that allocates seats more according to vote shares that parties win, kind of. What from your perspective you know, like what are kind of the downsides of the US system that you’re currently using and what you know would proportional representation bring to the table. How would it really change the game of elections and representation. I mean it’s a big question I know.

Jack Santucci: Yeah, I think we have, I mean just just focusing on Congress alone, just focusing on the House of Representatives to keep things simple. I think we have a range of the electoral systems in use in the United states and it sort of depends on what variables you bring in to characterizing them. You’re right that they’re all single seat districts. They’re all and it’s interesting that you say majoritarian because they’re all basically 2 round systems really because there’s a nominating stage and at the nominating stage voters, that’s voters making those decisions. You know whether you have to affiliate with a party or not to participate in the making of that decision and then now of course we have the conversation in the United States about getting rid of party nominations all together which would bring us in the direction of a sort of more pure two-round system I guess. Ah, and then we have PR which you’ve described as allocating seats to parties roughly in proportion of their vote shares. Although I’m not sure ranked choice PR works in that way. Ah, but the immediate benefit of any sort of PR system for US House elections would be majority rule and there are a few political scientists who sort of look at PR in this way that it not in the way that say Ferdinand Hermens would have looked at it which is if you have PR you’re going to blow up your party system and have all sorts of fragmentation. Another way to look at this is that well when you have a PR system the party or the coalition with a majority of votes gets a majority of seats. It’s majority rule and I think that’s the key benefit to Americans from PR and that’s sort of not what we’re getting under the current electoral rules for various reasons and at certain times we, you know, the party with fewer votes than its main opponent gets a majority seats which is what happened in 2012.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, right. And some of the problems that the PR, proportional representation, could really solve are like gerrymandering because you would for Pr you kind of need to get rid of the single seat districts, right? You would move to multi-seat districts that just allow for a better representation of different groups in a district and I think this is just one of the fundamental problems that could be actually resolved and that, you know, it takes so much debate space at the moment this whole gerrymandering discussion and from a European perspective. You know most people don’t even really know what this is all about, right?

Jack Santucci: Yeah, there’s no question whatsoever that if you move to a system of multi-seat districts, gerrymandering is gonna get a lot more difficult. No question.

Stephan Kyburz: Exactly yeah, it’s true. It’s not impossible that it’s still depending on the system that you essentially adopt.

Jack Santucci: Yeah, but it’s just because district magnitude increases, gerrymandering just gets objectively more difficult, I mean you’re absolutely right on that point.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. But I actually had this discussion on Twitter recently also and just moving to multi-seat districts doesn’t resolve it entirely. You also need to move to PR to proportional representation.

Jack Santucci: Of course I or you may, well why is that why do you distinguish between PR and multi-seat districts on that front?

Stephan Kyburz: Because if you had like multi-seat districts but still a winner-takes-all-system, you could still gerrymander. You could still adjust the districts in order to, you know, optimize the the winning party essentially. Or the winning, like the party in power could still optimize their number of seats they win. 

Jack Santucci: Yeah, okay, sure.

Stephan Kyburz: So, essentially in your book, you know that is upcoming, you do like a deep dive I think into past experiences in the US of electoral reform, of proportional representation, that was used in some cities. Can you give like a few examples or, also maybe your main insights from that deep dive and I know that, you know, in the book you go quite far, you do a lot of analysis I suppose. But what are kind of your main insights? Also on your website you mentioned the shifting coalitions theory of electoral reform. Can you just give like a brief overview of what you are going to talk about in the book?

Jack Santucci: Yeah, so the core of the book and the book begins with this desire to understand what really happened with these single transferable vote or proportional rank choice systems in American cities. We can talk about what can and can’t be learned from cities in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s if you want. We are going to leave that aside for a minute but it takes those cases and puts them into the context of a larger conversation about the causes of electoral system change. So I draw on a lot of very painstaking research by other people into electoral reform episodes in comparative cases, sort of the iconic cases Belgium, Switzerland so on and so forth, New Zealand, Australia and I would say the key sort of theoretical points are the key insights general points one would make. But that I make is that electoral system change itself becomes common when you’re in a period of shifting coalitions. So in the United States we might talk about realignment or de-alignment. In Western Europe you might talk about dealignment or the departure of voters from traditional establishment parties to new parties, something like that. The point is that the sort of larger coalition structure of the polity is changing. And that gets people sort of scampering for solutions correct. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, and that’s what you mean with realignment or dealignment? Kind of realignment of new coalitions, right?

Jack Santucci: Yeah, so realignment might mean in the US context. Ah, you know what policies opposing sides stand for. And the sorts of voters and interest groups that tend to support either side and it’s when those coalitions are shifting that people start to scamper and look for solutions at the level of electoral reform. That’s one key insight. The other big key insight I think is that the reform coalition is often more important than the reform itself. So there are a lot of people out there who think that PR or RCV is just a good idea and they don’t really care how they get there. I would push back on that.

Stephan Kyburz: So the way of how to get there is really an important part right of it.

Jack Santucci: Yeah, somebody needs to design the respective RCV system or the respective PR system. So a very sort of concrete example of how and I know I think you’re going to ask me later about the political economy of what was going on in some of these cities. But you know it’s not, these movements are not motivated by a desire to expand democratic participation. They’re motivated by a desire to make the government run like a business and you know that’s one part of the reform coalition. Arguably It’s a group of people who hate the entire idea of political parties. And then the other part of the reform coalition is a group of people who arguably are obsessed with proportional representation and so yeah, you have proportional representation all over the place. But so what if it comes with a massive reduction in the size of the local legislature is why the reform coalition is crucially important, arguably more important than the reform itself, because it shapes the reform is the point.

Stephan Kyburz: Um, yeah, okay, so in terms of political economy, and so what are kind of the patterns that you observed in your research and why did those um you know, kind of reforms or these implementations of new systems. Why did they also in the end not survive. Because compared to like let’s say in Europe right? Most European countries introduced a proportional representation system usually first at the subnational level but then also at the national level. But obviously the political landscape was probably quite different in Europe at that time. Still the discussion was present about, you know, proportional representation on both sides of the Atlantic essentially but in Europe most countries adopted a new system while in the US it didn’t happen only at these very local levels.

Jack Santucci: Yeah, the other thing that’s rare about what happened in the United States is that PR gets repealed. That just simply doesn’t happen anywhere else except for I think in France in 1958, and then again in the 1980s but it’s a fairly rare outcome. So the, you know, the basic argument, so in addition to shifting coalitions being important in sort of getting people thinking about reform the underlying number of parties matters. The number of parties that you go into a reform process with is important. The United States is unique I think in having tried to put proportional representation in front of a multi-party system. As you know I think most other countries had multi-party politics before they adopted PR systems and I think this is in part why the…

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly.

Jack Santucci: …quote unquote PR systems we get here in the United States are so anti-party in their design for example, nonpartisan ballots. I would argue that undersized legislatures are themselves anti-party. Nomination by petition I think is an anti-party device. We can go on about what was anti-party here. But ah, you know when you don’t have a multi-party system. You don’t have the sort of organizations needed to process a subsequent realignment. So the adoption of these systems sort of itself results from shifting coalitions but coalitions continue to shift and when, you know, so what happens is you get these reforms the new resulting political system is really polarized on a reform anti-reform dimension. Does that make sense? You know there’s the reformers and then the old machine in quotes, right? But when that coalition structure shifts again people again start thinking about reform. Now if you’re in a multi-party system with a single transferable vote, parties kind of negotiate with what the new coalition structure is going to look like. Here, that’s not what happened here. People started using rankings in strange ways. Legislative behavior starts to become chaotic. City councils have hard times getting things done and everybody says that’s enough, we’re tired of this and sort of blames the system then they start to say STV is unpredictable. It generates lottery style outcomes, voters are confused by it and so on and so forth. So the argument, right, is that this is what you get when you try to use reform to induce a multi-party system rather than use reform to channel one that already exists. The reforms themselves really don’t survive subsequent realignments. Does that make sense? That was a lot that I just said but….

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, yeah, I know that that makes sense. I think it’s probably not always easy to follow. You know, like because, there’s so much going on right in terms of what is the structure, of the existing party structure. But are the outside forces in politics that push for electoral reform and how much are the parties in power actually interested in bringing about reform, right? and the US system is really exceptional in the sense that you only have 2 parties and the primaries also, they play quite an important role. So. There’s a few characteristics I think that just make the US case like, the 2 parties make the system, kind of, they try to fend off change in a way, right? Because the 2 parties, usually they have at least every few years, they are back in power, right? So far and that’s why probably they’re not interested in changing the system. Would you agree?

Jack Santucci: So far. Yeah, I think that’s that’s right. You know the famous story about Western Europe which is that PR adoption or single member plurality adoption for that matter is a sort of reaction to rising working class mobilization. Switzerland and the US I think are unique though on this because in Switzerland the adoption of PR is not, at least at the federal level, is not a story of incumbent elites trying to save their own skin, right? It’s a bottom up. So what Georg Lutz calls reform from below and that’s what the US cases were. Although I don’t want to overstate the extent to which these are from below because it’s really a pro business lobby that was in a lot of cases pushing this stuff.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. I mean that’s also what I talk about in one of my podcast episodes, how direct democracy the initiative to actually change the constitution to introduce proportional representation was crucial in Switzerland to get that reform because otherwise who knows, you know we might still stick with the old system. But obviously you know there were different parties already existing and so that was a bit different so we had several parties like the Catholic-Conservatives but also the Social Democrats and on the right side the farmers and kind of entrepreneurial party, and so they were, you know, pushing for change. But even the Catholic-Conservatives that were, you know, very powerful in some cantons, they were like divided on the issue because essentially they had a lot of power in some regions but not quite enough I think at the national level. And so in the end you know the parliament that was dominated by the Radical Democratic party, they always rejected, you know, any reform because they were in power and that’s what usually we can observe, right? All around the world. But so that the initiative was really the tool in Switzerland that allowed for the reform to happen.

Jack Santucci: Sure.

Stephan Kyburz: In one of your blog posts, you make a very concrete suggestion for the introduction of an open list proportional representation system in districts of 3 to 5 seats. And you call it a modest and timely proposal. And you wrote it like I think last year just before the two senate elections in Georgia were like deciding whether the Democrats would have you know a majority in the senate and you said this is kind of a window of opportunity. Can you quickly elaborate on this proposal because I think it’s very powerful and it’s because of its simplicity in a way so it could also be interesting for a lot of other countries that are using a more US style system at the moment.

Jack Santucci: Yeah, there’s a lot to say about it and there’s a sort of immediate reason for it and then there’s a sort of deeper reason for it. But broadly what the proposal says is take the Fair Representation Act, which FairVote has put a lot of hard thought into. And in particular I think they’ve put a lot of hard thought into what kind of PR bill would get through Congress if any could get through Congress. As you know the only problem in the immediate term with that Fair Representation Act is the single transferable vote. Because it is objectively harder for voters to use, objectively harder for election officials to administer, and there’s all sorts of setup costs, right? And you know you don’t have time to deal with setup cost when a term in the House of Representatives is two years. So I said you know, just go with what I’m now calling the one-vote system. So from the perspective of an election administrator this is indistinguishable from what we now have. You just count up the votes. From the perspective of a voter, it’s largely indistinguishable from what we now have, you just pick your favorite person. And from the perspective of a candidate I think it can be made to work in a way that’s not too radically different from what we have now. So we have this multi-seat district, let’s just carve it up. And make each candidate respond so each, let’s say we have a five-seat district, a party is running five candidates in that district. It divides up responsibility for parts of the districts among those candidates and you might even use the current, these single seat districts as bailiwicks basically. Are you familiar with the term bailiwick? 

Stephan Kyburz: Um, not really.

Jack Santucci: Okay, it’s it’s It’s a subset of a mut. It’s a portion of a larger geographic district that a candidate campaigns in and is responsible for constituent service in.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, I see so that is kind of almost for the primaries is that right?

Jack Santucci: Well we, Matthew Shugart asked me, you know, have you thought about nominations at all in this system and my answer was “no”. And he said well you know why don’t we use nomination districts? And there are I think a couple of those again would be the existing single-seat districts, right? That are now nested in a larger multi-seat district, but I think there are, I think, there are a couple of good reasons to do that. One is compliance with the voting rights act. In other words, one way that we deal with minority representation issues here in the United States is by drawing single-seat districts in certain ways either to create what are called majority-minority districts or minority influenced districts and rightly I think people in this in the voting rights community worry about multi-districts. Undoing that settlement, this is one way to work with both groups I think.

Stephan Kyburz: Because that was initially the idea of introducing the single-seat districts, that minorities would have their own districts in a way, right? And is that the reason why for example, the Civil Rights movement didn’t like to bring up proportional representation. I mean, this maybe goes too far, but you know in a sense I’m surprised that like communities of color, that they don’t advocate more for proportional representation because proportional representation would allow them…

Jack Santucci: No, it doesn’t, I don’t think it goes too far.

Stephan Kyburz: …to be better represented or to even have their own party.

Jack Santucci: Complicated set of issues, sir. So I’m not entirely comfortable speaking for other people on this matter, but I will say that the civil rights movement had a complicated relationship with proportional representation.

Stephan Kyburz: Sure, sure.

Jack Santucci: In the cases I’ve looked at, and it seems to have continued to have had a complicated relationship with proportional representation. So you know Lani Guinier is one scholar who stands out as a sort of real champion of proportional systems. Although some of them aren’t really, like cumulative voting I would not call that proportional representation. But it’s similar, but that’s sort of been a minority position in the voting rights community. What else can I say about that?

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, no I was just wondering you know, which groups are likely to join the coalition for reform. But otherwise like from your proposal, what would you expect? So you would expect you know a larger or outsider parties to be able to get seats in Congress, right? That is kind of the one of the main consequences.

Jack Santucci: Yes, I may be in the minority on this, but I think that my gut tells me that if you dropped open list proportional representation onto Congressional elections tomorrow, you would not see high volumes of new party entry you know I think, you might see the Green Party win a few seats in California because it already exists there organizationally speaking some have told me that there are factions of basically socialists in the Democratic Party who are like desperate to bolt, desperate to get out and form their own party. Maybe they would do that, and maybe they wouldn’t in the first open list PR election, but yeah I don’t, and sorry I don’t see this. So Lee Drutman argues in his book that you know there was a latent four party system in the United States. Are you familiar with the doom-loop book? 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, I’ve read it. 

Jack Santucci: You know, I’m not sure, I don’t think that if we dropped PR onto American Congressional elections we would just blow the party system into four, into four equally sized parties, because there’s more to a party than the electoral system in place. There’s a sociological dimension to this that doesn’t come up sometimes.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think what is important is that you know parties can split or new parties can be founded and win seats and I think that’s really the important issue. I wouldn’t expect that, you know, the Republican and the Democratic parties party would just kind of break up and you would find a completely new structure. But I think it would bring a possibility for a dynamic, right? For new competition.

Jack Santucci: I think that’s a good way to think about it, right? That if you were to drop PR onto US House elections you would be sort of relaxing a constraint, but there are a lot of other things that keep people sticking with the two major parties in this country. One of them being presidential elections.

Stephan Kyburz: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean you also see it for example in South Africa, right, that introduced PR with the new constitution in ‘94 and you know the ANC still has a majority in parliament so things change very slowly if people believe in certain parties.

Jack Santucci: There was a guy named Riker and he came up with something called minimum winning coalition and it turns out to matter I think more than what most people think is Duverger’s law to your point about the ANC. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah I’ll link to that in the show notes if you can give me the reference. Yes, I’ve come across that.

Jack Santucci: To Riker 1967, or whatever it is. (Note: it is Riker 1962, see references above.)

Stephan Kyburz: On the way forward, what do you think are the most likely you know avenues of electoral reform for the US? What are kind of your biggest fears? What are your biggest hopes?

Jack Santucci: I don’t really have a lot of hope these days for electoral reform. So coming back to this open list PR thing that we were talking about, one thing I do in the book is differentiate types of electoral reform from each other and I’m just going to talk about two of them for now. One of them is sort of the incumbents insulating themselves doing something to keep themselves in power and another thing is Switzerland in the United States cases, which I call a realigning reform episode but a from below reform episode what I was proposing in the open list PR blog post was an insulating episode and the idea there was to say hey look, there’s a realignment going on in American politics and it’s not good, right? There are reasons to be scared and disoriented and all sorts of things by this realignment. And what the Democrats can do, we know, we’re going into a decennial redistricting and a reapportionment. Large parts of the congressional district maps, from state to state to state to state to state are going to be drawn by the opposing party. The democrats really could stand to insulate themselves. By adopting PR now and they have this brief window in which to do it and if they do it. They are essentially buying themselves another two years in control of the house and that gives them time to maybe work through some of these difficult policy questions that are dividing the party right now. Um, now you’ve seen me make a lot of noise about this, other people have made noise, about the open list PR proposal and like I’m led to believe that it’s just not going to happen. So I think this gets me to my worry. My worry is that the party system is going to keep moving in a not great direction. Certain reformers are going to become more and more desperate. To win what an older reformer in 1914 called demonstration cases. They’re going to become more and more apt to compromise with whoever will work with them and we’re going to see a wave of really not great electoral reform at the state and local level that you know. And what my big worry is how that interacts with a diminished voting rights regime. Does that make sense? So a very concrete example of this was, you know, we look at the cases that I studied.

Stephan Kyburz: And what would be the interaction like?

Jack Santucci: 24 PR cities, those were all part of the council manager movement, which was an effort to again shrink the sizes of local assemblies, move to nonpartisan elections in many cases. Move to off-cycle elections not all and you read the sort of urban history on what enabled the passage of these council manager systems. One factor was all of the voting restriction that sort of came online during the progressive era so we know that in the American South is Jim Crow. But we know it in the north and maybe the midwest as, you know, the requirement that voters re-register on tight deadlines or literacy testings. You know one of my cases was New York City. You know in the same book that has the STV election results are the results of literacy tests. So when you kick a bunch of people out of the electorate you can pass whatever you want and then you know fast forward 50 years, I don’t think like once voting rights start to recover in the United States I don’t think it’s an accident that the residue of these reforms starts to get challenged, right? You know about block vote or multiple non-transferable vote here in the United States we call that at-large elections and conventional wisdom is that that’s bad for minority representation. So um, you know my worry is that in ah in a you know in a regime of restricted suffrage really reformers can kind of pass whatever they want.

Stephan Kyburz: And it looks like they are reforming, right? And improving. But it’s not improving in the end.

Jack Santucci: Precisely. They believe that they’re making things better because you know there’s a sort of messianic faith in a ranked ballot or an approval that ballot or a star voting ballot or a score voting ballot. But there are other things going on in the political system. And I just worry that people sort of become useful idiots really for other goals. I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope I’m wrong about that. But…

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly, let’s really hope that because I you know there are a lot of worries around regarding the US political system and I mean like and it has.

Jack Santucci: Really!?

Stephan Kyburz: It has kind of developed like that at least from the outside. It has gotten a lot worse in some ways like you know some things that were taken for granted are not granted anymore.

Jack Santucci: What’s what’s at the top of your mind?

Stephan Kyburz: Like voting rights or you know that actually, you know, in many areas it’s getting harder again to vote. That’s at least what I’m reading from what you know from what I see from the outside.

Jack Santucci: Yeah, we’ll see how it evolves. We’ll see how it evolves.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. So on the topic I’m, obviously, very much looking forward to reading your book. But also what other articles or books would you recommend on the topic?

Jack Santucci: Oh yeah, if I could recommend one book to any one, every person in the electoral reform community right now, it would be Votes from Seats: Logical Models of Electoral Systems by Matthew Shugart and Rein Taagepera, because they really bring the science to these questions about what would you get or what could you get if you went to this or that electoral system and in particular they put the focus on assembly size, which nobody is talking about.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay.

Jack Santucci: Really in reform circles here in the United States, there’s sort of, there’s a broad acknowledgement that we probably should increase the size of the House of Representatives. Great idea but one big problem I think during the progressive era was that nobody was sort of paying attention; they were so into proportional representation that they weren’t paying attention to assembly size and that’s really what mattered with these reforms. The PR was largely cosmetic.

Stephan Kyburz: Right. So just for the listeners to recap. So assembly size should essentially increase with population size and it did for a while, right, in the US but then it kind of leveled off. Is is that right?

Jack Santucci: Yeah, 1910 was the last time it happened I believe.

Stephan Kyburz: But that’s also something we don’t, you know, talk much about in Switzerland either for example. Or, I think at the moment it’s still kind of okay but it’s definitely something that you know discussing democratic institutions should include definitely like assembly size, especially at the local level as well.

Stephan Kyburz: Any other articles or that’s really the one book you would recommend the most, right?

Jack Santucci: Yeah, if I have to pick one, I would really recommend that anybody who’s serious about this stuff sit down and work through a highly technical book on electoral system design because like we’re at a point with this conversation where like yeah PR is a cute idea and there’s a thing called Duverger’s law. And if we get rid of the spoiler, a spoiler effect mono will fall from heaven. I think the issue is serious enough now in the United States to call for a serious treatment and I’m not you know I’m not saying that I’m not trying to knock on anybody I’m saying like you know we got a tech up, if we’re going to have a serious or form conversation here.

Stephan Kyburz: Definitely. Yeah, I also obviously, you know, read Drutman’s book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, that has been very influential recently. I kind of wish he would have, you know, called more for really proportional representation then…

Jack Santucci: Very good Book. No question.

Stephan Kyburz: …you know, putting the ranked choice at the center of the book. But obviously, it’s kind of attractive also because for voters you know ranked choice is kind of something they might understand more easily.

Jack Santucci: Well, I think this gets to another, I mean I’m a big fan of the Drutman book and the Drutman book has changed the conversation about electoral reform in the United States, there’s no question about that in my mind. But you know why ranked choice and I think this gets back to the fundamental difficulty of putting broadly multi-party institutions in front of a multi-party system. So if you walk up to an American and say hey here’s list PR what do you think of that? They’re going to say I hate political parties, I want to burn them. Yeah, when that’s where this sort of fascination with approval voting and ranked short ranked ballots and all of this stuff comes from. Yeah, and the conversation in the United States is like if you’re serious about getting things done, the conversation is kind of constrained to anti-party reform solutions in this country and I think that’s partly why he emphasized rank choice. Although he does say that we should do it the way the Australians do it, which ironically works a lot like closed list PR.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, yeah, that’s true. So ah, people should really read your blog post on the modest proposal because then you have like the you know the beauty of both worlds, right? You can choose a candidate. So it’s a personal voting at the same time you get a PR result essentially.

Jack Santucci: Thank you man. And there’s a longer term reason for that thinking and this is something I may be wrong about in the long run. But I don’t think STV can work in a two-party system. I think you know, and then, well Jack, what about Malta. There are other rules in Malta that maybe offset some of the effects that I’m going to talk about but, like when you have a realignment in a multi-party system, you have a coalition change and the parties. Right? There’s structure. There’s partisan structure to the new arrangement. Here in the United States when you have a realignment you get a period of sort of vote switching, ticket splitting, people crossing the aisle. Maybe a centrist faction in the legislature and all of this stuff, I show for three key cases at least, is what got STV repealed. So STV is sort of easy to pass relative to I guess list PR. Not that any of this stuff is easy to pass. But I don’t see it as long term stable in the United States. Now that’s separate from expediency reasons for doing open lists. But thank you for recommending the blog post, I appreciate it.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Yeah no, I really think it’s a very, you know, kind of, clean and beautiful solution to many of the problems that the US has.

Jack Santucci: But hopefully it’s a start. It’s a start.

Stephan Kyburz: Yes, okay, cool, Jack. Thanks a lot for this really interesting conversation. I feel we would have so many things to talk about also in terms of, you know, your research on what you know, kind of these reform movements in the past. There is so much more to uncover. But for now, I think we leave it at that and yeah, hopefully we might have another conversation in the future. 

Jack Santucci: I look forward to that, Stephan. Thank you very much for this. 

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, cool. Thanks a lot for taking your time, Jack.

Jack Santucci: You got it.

Outro:

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