AHC/WI: Proportional Representation in US Congress

I have some ideas for this myself, but I'd like to see what suggestions people have as well.

I'll leave it fairly open - a POD date range of 1890 to 1920 or so (placed in post-1900 due to the range being more on that side) and a preference for MMP, STV, and party-list in that order.

Definitely want to see stronger third parties and havea preference for a more left leaning US.
 
I am going to go with it happening at the same time of the 17th amendment as suggested. The Populist party would probably still exist today because they would be able to get enough congressman elected to start a trend. So right off the bat, we will have in our lifetime three parties populist, republican and democrat. I definitely believe a populist president could win an election in the thirties during the depression.
 
Might produce a greater effort to uphold Black voting rights.

Even if PR only resulted in two Republicans being returned from each Southern state, that's still a couple of dozen all told, which could often decide control of an HoR. So Republican Administrations would have more incentive to push the matter.
 
Might produce a greater effort to uphold Black voting rights.

Even if PR only resulted in two Republicans being returned from each Southern state, that's still a couple of dozen all told, which could often decide control of an HoR. So Republican Administrations would have more incentive to push the matter.

Hmmm... one of the ideas I had for a bit of a timeline was getting the Lodge Bill passed. If there were a connection, that'd be awesome.
 
Yes, but what motivation? Direct election of senators had been an issue for a good long time.

The Populist party pushes the issue into the forefront of discussion of the 17th amendment. It is their way to help them gain more representation in the government. Realistically, it will be impossible to do because the Republican and Democrats don't want to lose their advantage.
 
The Populist party pushes the issue into the forefront of discussion of the 17th amendment. It is their way to help them gain more representation in the government. Realistically, it will be impossible to do because the Republican and Democrats don't want to lose their advantage.

That might actually work with some other things I'm thinking...
 
I'd like to see a more left-leaning United States, too. But I'm not sure proportional representation is the keys to the kingdom.

I'm probably more focused on the seniority system and the fact that Southern Democratic committee chairs seemed to stay on forever.
 
So, basically you're getting rid of congressional districts and having all Representatives represent the entire state?

I can't see that flying.

You can't elect Senators with PR, because you only get 1 at a time. So Representatives are the only possibilities.
 
So, basically you're getting rid of congressional districts and having all Representatives represent the entire state?

I can't see that flying.

You can't elect Senators with PR, because you only get 1 at a time. So Representatives are the only possibilities.

We used to not have congressional districts, representatives were elected by the entire state until the 1830s or 40s. It was changed once, why couldn't it be changed again?
 
The issue will be what will be the minimal percentage required for representation? IMHO you could see a system where the votes needed would be proportional to the representation of a state - that is if a state rates 10 representatives, you need to get 10% to get one representative. The votes for parties that don't make this minimum are subtracted from the total to recalculate percentages for those that go over the threshold.
 
We used to not have congressional districts, representatives were elected by the entire state until the 1830s or 40s. It was changed once, why couldn't it be changed again?

That's not true. Most states used to use districts before the 1840s, it was just that Congress didn't mandate using single-member districts before the 1840 reapportionment. That mandate was also not strictly enforced, so you had some states at various times using general ticket or multi-district elections until Congress mandated single-member districts in 1967, which has obviously stuck.
 
The situation on the left would be pretty simple, because it exists in nearly all first-world PR democracies, and to a large extent existed in the Democratic primary in the last 4 months of 2015, between when Sanders became a serious representative of the left and when the polls started giving him a real shot at winning the primary. There's a mainstream center-left party, which is in a state of constant compromise between various factions - organized labor, educated secular liberals (e.g. the pro-choice movement), blacks, immigrants. There are parties to its left, which attempt to pull it leftward on a host of economic and social issues; in Europe's PR states, there's typically a green party that's completely mainstream and enters social democratic coalitions as a junior partner, and a left-populist or communist party that's not yet mainstream and at best supports the social democrats' coalitions from the outside.

I find it unlikely that there would be real fracturing on the left in the US. Blacks would not form their own party, unless you're changing the entirety of civil rights history - African-American politics is integrationist. They'd be a major part of the Democratic Party, with almost no defections to the Greens or the Socialists. Sanders' own socialism is based on rural populist traditions and is almost entirely white. The Democrats might well still refuse to use the phrase social democracy to describe their platform, and stick to calling it liberalism or progressivism.

The center and right are where all manners of things could happen. This is for two reasons:

1. PR democracies are split between ones with a dominant center-right party, such as Germany's CDU, and ones with two poles, such as Belgium and the Netherlands' Christian Democratic and Liberal parties. The latter kind tend toward tripolarism between social democrats, liberals, and Christian democrats, rather than left-right bipolarism, and coalitions require two out of three.

2. Far-right populism is challenging the system in Europe. The extent to which the center-right considers the far right legitimate strongly depends on the country and the center-right leadership, and the whole system is in flux. In the US, the Dixiecrats have always existed, and would form their own pole, without needing to pretend to be Democrats or Republicans.

The result is that any of several arrangements is plausible:

- There's a Southern racist party, which has the balance of power and plays the Democrats (and allies) and the Republicans (and allies) against each other to maintain white power. This is essentially OTL in the 1950s.
- There's a Southern racist party, which the other parties consider illegitimate, leading to grand coalitions in Congress between Democrats and Republicans. The Greens and Socialists are constant critics of this arrangement from the left, calling the Democrats atrophying elites.
- The center and right consist of two parties - the pro-business Republicans, and the Christian Party taking in Evangelicals and rural populists. They're allies against the Democrats. They both have internal tensions regarding issues of race and immigration.
- The center and right consist of two parties - the Republicans, and the Christian Party. But they're not consistently allies. The Democrats often ally with one of the two, working on anti-poverty legislation together with the Christians and on LGBT rights and civil rights with the Republicans.
 
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