It seems to me that they that they should make it larger. According to the Constitution, a House district should have only 30,000 residents, and yet there now are over 700,000 residents per district. The number of seats has stayed at 435 for about a century even though the population has tripled since then. It must be difficult for Representatives to keep in touch with their constituents when they have so many. I recognize that they can never get it back down to a 30,000:1 ratio, but they could lower it somewhat.
It is a question of balance between "knowing your representative" and "do the Representatives in the House know each other?" Indeed it probably would not make a tremendous difference if the US House were increased in size to say 701 or even 1001 members, in terms of personal relationships formed in the give and take of House politics over two or more years. Clearly it would make some. The bigger the body is, the more bureaucratic it becomes. Also of course the higher the cost of maintaining it--paying not only member salaries and perks but paying for their staff, for the costs of frequent transportation across the nation, junkets overseas and so on and so forth.
If we were to kick it up to say 1001, more than doubling the size, doubling basic administrative costs, and with an imponderable change in the character of House business due to sheer size, at the same time we slash back the size of the districts (recalling that I'm proposing a number of districts just under half the size of the body, in this case 500, or in the case of the current winner take all system, 1001. The latter increase, with the reapportionment of number of districts to each state and the need to draw new smaller districts for all states (except the single district ones, but those will be made far fewer, perhaps just 2 or 3 would be left) will slash, by more than a factor of two, the number of constituents in each district and thus raise the probability of "knowing your legislator."
I'm not sure how important that is though. The major impediment to knowing your Congressman now is lack of will to do so. In my life, I've lived places where the Representative of the district I live in is of a different party than I support, and I have not chosen to regard them as "my friend." Thinking of them as the enemy, I don't even want to get to know them. Vice versa when they happen to be of the party I support, on my own hook I probably would leave them alone to do their work without bothering them. It so happened that the nature of the person I used to live with for 15 years sent us on a course of a certain mode of political activism whereby I did get to meet my Representative--due to post 2000 Census redistricting, suddenly Lynn Woolsey of Marin County, a woman I had admired for some time before the boundary change. Meanwhile another Democrat replaced the Republican Frank Riggs, a particularly despicable individual by the accounts I gave credit to, and the Democrat who took over was also someone I liked--but did not get to meet in person. In fact my charmed life with this lady I lived with got me face to face with US Senator Barbara Boxer whom I had supported for years without meeting.
If it were key to my personal values to "personally know my Representative" the course I know to take would be to get heavily involved as a volunteer in one's party political campaigns, and if it were the Representative alone I cared about, obviously to join and actively support their campaign. Now if everyone wanted to do this in the district it would clearly become impossible, even if the district comprised only 30,000 people. How many people reading this thread can name 30,000 people they know personally? The reason I could get to know my Representative if I wanted to is that relatively few people want to, so it isn't too hard to do them a service such that they will meet with you. Another way is to become involved in some issue with some political electricity in it--then you can, if you are the kind of person who can be friendly with a political enemy, get to know them even while adversaries.
But again, if everyone got politics fever and cared intensely about a personal bond with their representative, even 30,000 is too large a district. In practice, people deal with intermediaries, and if they can trust these to be decent channels as well as filters, with information and power flowing in both directions--then the number of people a single Representative can deal with goes up and up and up, and the size of the legislative body can go down. If one is going to govern a nation of 300 million people, a certain vastness has to enter somehow or other.
Related to the idea of proportional representation, I think the dynamic of communication with "one's own" Representative would change considerably. Right now, the ideal expressed in some civics texts anyway is that once elected, a Representative serves all the residents of their district, regardless of whether they did in fact vote for them or would seem likely to. Therefore if my Representative is a Republican, I still should feel I could go to them if I had some kind of issue or complaint regarding the Federal government.
That might be so if I wanted to resolve an administrative mix-up, or had an issue that I knew was close to the heart of my Representative's interests. But in general I think of it as hogwash. If I have a Representative from a party I don't like, I think of them as the enemy, as the probable source of any problems I feel the government in Washington is giving me, and that taking any help from them would be a betrayal of my own party and its values. What i want is a Representative I can call my own, whose values are aligned with mine, who is fighting for and not against what I think is most important. And a neighbor of mine who is of opposite political views to me ought to be able to have their own Representative, that they trust who is fighting for what they think is important.
Therefore I don't want to share my Representative with that neighbor. Because I don't want their success to result in my going without any champion in my state capital or in Washington at all, I can't morally wish that fate on my neighbor, wrong-headed though I think they are. We should both be able to support someone we like, and let these elected champions of ours do the negotiating and fighting in the halls of government.
Therefore I don't think it is important that "my Representative" be someone who lives within an easy drive of where I do, or that I can drop in on and hang out with. Indeed not; I need them in Carson City or Washington DC, working for me! I don't care if my federal Representative even is from the state I live in now, or any other state in particular; I can easily see my causes being better championed by someone who lives in a different state than someone who lives in the same town with me.
The dynamic of "knowing my Representative" would come about, on a low level, through media reports of what they do and my scrutiny, as much as I care to, of what they've accomplished for me. If I feel moved to help, getting involved in campaigning would be the way to strengthen the bond. With proportional representation, this activity is less likely to be a gamble risking complete failure and more likely to result in a bond to an ongoing, working organization. If I am a well informed member of an open and responsible political organization, I can be well represented by someone I share with a million or more of my fellow citizens--as long as we are a group all on the same side!
Or so I think. It is refreshing and thought provoking to see a response from someone who lives with a real PR system. Apparently the grass is indeed always greener on the other side of the fence!
Well, the solution can be a simple two round race, take the first and second most voted and make a second election two weeks after the first, the winner take the seat, if any candidate win 50%+1 of the votes in the first election you cancel the second poll.
Yes, this could be done. This is a "runoff election." We have them here, in some places, for some offices. I believe it is up to the state to decide whether to require actual majorities as opposed to pluralities. It is I believe never ever done in any state for the US Presidential race. I don't know if any states require it for Congressional district races. I've never voted in a runoff election myself however, not that I recall. If I ever did I took it in stride as normal. But in my experience, which has been only in California from 1984 to 2002, and Nevada from 2004 to now, they are rare. It might be quite different in other states.
We can go one better. The idea of an instant runoff election, aka ranked preference voting, seems pretty good to me. If we had that here in Nevada, I suppose I would either be voting for a third party first, or the Democrats to start with. And here's what I would expect to happen in my own Congressional District:
1) I, and perhaps a fair number of other people, but not near majorities, vote for some third party as my first preference. Neither the Republican nor the Democrat wins with a majority.
2) the way preference voting works is, I cast a ballot with all the choices listed in order. Perhaps I have the option of refusing to vote for some choices at all, which would mean if my preferences were exhausted before the vote is settled, my vote vanishes as though I did not vote at all. Given what the Republican party has mutated into in my lifetime, I can't see myself casting a vote for them, even at the bottom of the list. For state Governor, a lot of people say our current guy Sandoval is a moderate and deserves some support--but I guess I am an extremist; on that race I would never vote for him or anyone else with an R behind their name.
Since I'd be voting for some wacky extreme leftist third party first, one no one expects to come close to 50 percent support, my candidate would presumably be low down on the list of first choices. Besides the Republicans, there are a bunch of other parties I deem just as toxically right wing as the Rs and would never list on my ballot if I had the choice, or anyway would push down below the Democrats.
3)One party, or probably some random write-ins (there is no way to write in votes on Nevada electronic ballots though; if they don't appear on the ballot one can't vote for them though one can vote for "none of the above") will be smallest. It will be eliminated first, and its voter's second choices revealed and moved to their designated candidate. In my case, perhaps there are 2 or 3 other leftist minor parties I list ahead of the Democrats. If, when the sweep of elimination of small candidates reaches mine, my second and third choices are already eliminated, the machinery tosses them aside and moves on to the first one I list that is not eliminated. Let's say that's some 4th leftist party I didn't like much but preferred to the Democrats this year. My vote gets moved to them. If the process has not yet pushed one candidate past the 50 percent plus one line, that left party is probably going to be eliminated in its turn, and my vote at long last lands in favor of the Democrat.
4) But, in my district, before the Democrat could be pushed over the line, I expect the Republican to win. Or perhaps there will be an upset and it is the Libertarian (one of those right wing parties I won't vote for) who crosses the line.
You see, by districting, all but one of Nevada's districts are alloted to subdivisions of Clark County, where Las Vegas is. That's where most of the people of this state live after all! All of Northern Nevada, which is to say the vast majority of the area of the state, is one Congressional District. It includes Washoe County where I live, which has Reno and Sparks, and Carson City which is the state capitol--Democrats are quite competitive in these districts. But it also includes nearly every bit of every other County in Nevada outside Clark/Las Vegas, and the majorities in the small rural counties are strongly conservative. No Democrat has ever won this Congressional District in Nevada history.
So when push comes to shove, the majority of people in my CD are going to vote Republican, or conceivably some other right wing alternative party, but never Democratic or farther left. That is, a whole lot of us will so vote, but we will lose, even if majorities are required and a mechanism exists to allow us to rank our preferences to consolidate our votes onto a leading candidate. Our votes vanish into the ether, in that race, and so it is hard for a Democratic candidate for Congress in our district to get any support. I've met several of the unsuccessful candidates over the years.
Runoffs and the requirement of a majority are good ideas if we accept winner take all. If we have proportional representation they are unnecessary.
In the case of enabling my proposal for a largely and in principle perfectly proportional system based on districts half the total seats to be won in number, I would indeed want to insist on some sort of runoff or ranked voting system (ideally the latter) to determine who is deemed the individual winner of each district. It creates at least the illusion that the single winner enjoys a solid majority mandate of their district, and helps individuals who want to regard their geographical Representative as being "theirs" have confidence the winner of the instant runoff (or regular runoff held some weeks later) will listen to them.
But it has nothing to do with "proportional outcomes!"
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In Brazil we have the proportional system, and there are problems with the system, the two biggest are that candidates with very few votes are elected because other candidates have many more than needed, and the second problem is that the cost of the campaigns skyrocket.
Well, indeed it seems you see the grass greener on our winner take all side of the fence than we do here! Just as I envy you the proportional vote opportunity you have there, though it seems a mess to you. Obviously at least one us has some nasty lessons to learn, and I suspect it might be me alone.
Still, having taken a glance at the form of the elections for your
Chamber of Deputies, and an article
mentioning the outcomes of the latest election, you don't have "the" proportional system, you have
a proportional system, one similar to the one the OP suggested for the USA--better in some ways, perhaps worse in others. For instance every state in Brazil is guaranteed to have at least 8 Deputies, and the maximum for the biggest state is capped at 70. We in the USA have no upper limit, and the lower limit is 1. Brazil is a smaller nation than the USA, but has a larger Chamber than our Congress--512 Deputies versus our 435 Representatives. We'd have to expand our House to about 768 Reps to match your average ratio of population to Deputy. If we did that, California would have roughly 27 more House seats, or 80, which would exceed your cap by 10. Meanwhile if we apportioned 768 Reps the way we currently do, the smallest states would still only have 1 Representative each; there would be no way to guarantee a large enough number per state to make proportional voting within the small states really meaningful unless we were to multiply the political power of the residents of small states even more than our current system already does. Meanwhile if we applied the cap on largest delegation your system has, the people of these biggest states would be shortchanged Representatives even more than they already are relative to the small states.
With these considerations in mind, of course you would expect distorted results. I was struck for instance by two parties in the Opposition Coalition "Change Brazil" listed one above the other;
Partido Trabalhista Cristão with 338,117 votes gets 2 Deputies, but
Partido Trabalhista do Brasil with 812,206 votes gets only 1! Farther up,
Partido da Mobilização Nacional has 467,777 votes but gets 3 Deputies, while right below it with only 2 Deputies
Partido Ecologic Nacional got 663,108 votes! These oddly disjoint outcomes happen only at the bottom of the electoral barrel to be sure; the bigger parties seem to be more or less in line with the national vote totals.
I suppose these odd discrepancies among the minor parties happen because the "proportional" votes are cast state by state, and also because of the massive distortion that comes from on one hand capping Sao Paulo at 70 deputies when by proportional population it should have 110, shortchanging its voters by some 40 percent, and the rule of a minimum of 8 deputies per state which in the extreme case of
Roraima, which ought to have just one deputy, multiplying their voting power by a factor of 10 or so.
All of that would be solved if the nation were to adopt full proportional elections on a national level, every citizen voting the same ballot; then the party allocations ought to closely correspond to actual percentages of votes received. My hybrid district/national allocation system would have a similar result, leveling the votes of all citizens to one level and giving each citizen the same power no matter where they lived. Unless of course the results were distorted by parties that do well in either gaining majorities or winning in instant runoffs or later runoff elections for the district Deputy position, shortchanging other parties that tend not to win majorities district by district. With Brazil's nearly 30 vote-getting parties I don't think there is much danger of that happening though!
However, the remaining discrepancies due to Brazil's system being of only compromised proportionality don't seem to be what bothers you.
Perhaps I don't understand your first big issue at all. How is it that some candidates have "too many" votes and this results in Deputies winning with very few, if this is not simply the result of parties that do well in the overrepresented states?
It is in the nature of any proportional system that some candidates are elevated to win a seat or two with very low votes cast for them. In my proposed system for the USA, parties are alloted a certain number of House seats based on overall national vote numbers, but every candidate (assuming no party gets over 50 percent, which would be a change in the USA though one I would expect with PR opening the door for small parties) who is placed in office is someone who ran for Congress in one of the districts. They would be placed, in the simplest and most proportional system, in their seats based on ranking by number of votes they individually got. This means pretty much by definition that some party candidates will get an excessive glut of votes, and these superstar winners will take the first seats, while enhancing the total numbers of seats their partner party members can take. Pretty much by definition the last Party member to take a seat will be coming in on the coattails of some big winners in their party, and will themselves have won rather few votes. I don't see anything improper about that; they are supposed to be a team and their total numbers, rounded out by the small vote winners, give their faction the weight the voters assigned it in the Legislature. Of course there is the possibility that having won office, some of these might defect; the ultimate remedy of that is the voters who judge the composition of the party/alliances that form for the next election and those after by the past behavior of their members. The law might possibly provide some alternative shorter term remedies too, with legally binding pledges by the candidates to some rules of discipline.
From what I read at the Wikipedia page, the Brazilian system is based on party lists; in a state with say 29 Deputies each party optimistically presents the voters with a list of who they would put in of up to 29 chosen party members in good standing with good histories, if the voters were all, 100 percent, to vote for them. Since there are close to 30 parties I suppose it is rare for any party in any state to get even a third of their chosen members seated, and less than that nationally. But in Brazil, how do you know which persons got too many votes, whatever that means, and which got too few? Are the people in each state voting for individuals as well as party lists? That's pretty much exactly what my proposal would have happen, in that in voting for one individual in one's own district one is also voting for their party.
So perhaps if you gave an example of what you mean, your objection would be clearer. As it stands, it sounds to me like the way a proportional system might be expected to work and that would be good.
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As for campaign finance...well, that is a surprise to me, especially in view of the fact that there doesn't appear to be any superstar frontrunner party getting even close to half the votes, let alone more than half. Looking at the results of the 2016 election it seems the Worker's party, with 13 1/2 million votes and 70 Deputies, is the largest, and that is only 14 percent of the total! I would not be shocked or frightened if the US system evolved that way, with our biggest party being somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of the vote and a few dozen parties circling around to make shifting coalitions. One would think that if money buying votes, by various means from 19th century type machine politics (Boss Tweed and so on) to the power of advertising, were a big thing, that just a few big dominant parties commanding between them well over 60 percent of the vote would tend to result. The outcome I see, with well over two dozen parties scrapping it out, looks to me like what i'd expect if the voters are not voting for large nebulous coalitions of broad and vague ideas masking very focused lobbying efforts, but rather they are picking people who pledge detailed platforms that several dozen categories of voters approve of in detail. They are voting in the people they want, and letting them do the negotiating--exactly what I hope for here.
Now clearly if there are a couple dozen parties vying for seats, the accumulated total of all their campaign budgets would tend to add up to a pretty penny I guess. But consider how expensive campaigns are here in the USA where there are only two parties to speak of. We've cut the number of competing factions by an order of magnitude, but in the age of TV, campaigning has become very expensive for each candidate.
To get a place in the current US Congress, it is necessary to pass the bar of a winner-take-all election, and to keep it, to do that again and again every 2 years. Assuming the population actually eligible to vote (or who would be were it not for peculiar local restrictions) to be say 220,000,000 (out of 300 million) or about 73 percent, that is just over half a million per average district, and even with fantastically high turnout rates, the actual votes cast per election will be somewhat less. It would seem . under current political conditions it can be a lot less; recall only about half the theoretical electorate actually voted for US congress last year!
Something to remember about US Congress races though is that only some of them are very competitive! Typically, if someone is elected once, first of all their own party does not typically contest their re-nomination to run again on their own ticket. Even in a district that is pretty evenly divided, once a Congress member has gotten that seat they tend to be pretty difficult to dislodge. Add to this that the outcome of the political tug of war around drawing district boundaries tends to create "safe" districts for both parties, so that only a minority of them are evenly divided to begin with, and the typical reality is that being re-elected, once elected the first time, is much less of a struggle. In turn this tends to depress turnout since the race is not exciting and the parties tend not to want to spend money on energizing an electorate to no purpose.
Thus, a 50 percent average turnout probably reflects an even lower level of turnout in many nominal "races" offset by pretty high (by US standards which are scandalously low) rates in the competitive races. Note that this past year was one of major and volatile change, in which both major parties' Presidential primaries were characterized by a really drastic restlessness involving bitter accusations by leading candidates against the "swamp" and other charges of inertia and corruption. In these conditions the Democrats were pushing hard to regain control of the House in anticipation of Clinton winning the Presidency, while the Republicans were insurgent and aggressive on the ground too. In other words, 50 percent average turnout with even lower depths of apathy in "safe" races perhaps falling as low as 1/4 voting in Congressional races was a "good" year for US citizen participation!
Under these circumstances, it is necessary, in a highly competitive House race, to galvanize a partisan contingent of perhaps 100,000 hardcore reliable voters to augment themselves enough to neutralize and, by slim margins (for large margins would indicate spending too much money on that race!) just barely overcome the opposition to win one seat.
Now supposing we had some kind of proportional system--would I expect costs to go up or go down?
Up on the whole, I suppose. One of my hopes for a proportional system would be to galvanize interest in the outcomes so that most people allowed to vote would choose to do so, and of course to remove all obstacles that should not be there so that everyone could vote. This probably means that at a stroke the number of people involved is doubled! That in turn doubles the margin of victory needed...or does it?
After all current races are all winner-take all. No matter how we do it, something close to half of those who do gear themselves up to vote at all wake up disappointed with nothing concrete in hand the next morning. With a proportional system however I think one must choose a very marginal long-shot lost cause indeed in order to emerge from the process with nothing at all! The electoral fight is not so much about being in the legislature at all, but about gaining margin, or staving off losing it.
Secondly, much of the energy of US campaigns goes into vilifying the other side. This obviously also makes politics a toxic subject. Either one is blindly and narrowly partisan and tries to structure one's whole life around associating with one's fellow partisans, or else the division is uncomfortable when dealing with people who may or may not be on your side, or whom you know are against it.
Perhaps you can comment on the balance of negativity versus positive advocacy of specific platform items in Brazil's somewhat proportional system. i would think that with 20+ parties there is little to no point in trying to attack and tarnish the brand of a dozen or so that are close to one's own party position. To an extent I guess maybe there might be more petty bickering since it is easy to split, and then necessary to justify the split to the voting public. But in terms of deep values, there would be little to gain even by attacking parties diametrically opposed to one's own on policy issues. With the voters having so many choices, presumably the ones who are likely to vote for something that opposes every important platform of one's own have zero interest in your party, nor do your own voters seem likely to migrate over to it--they'll go sideways, to the most similar one to yours that differs on some subtle issue or other.
Rather than attacking others, it would seem necessary to identify oneself and stress what one's own party is for. There might not have to be a goal to grow membership and votes; it could be that a particular faction judges it has reached all the people who are interested in its core interests and they merely want those people to show up, vote, so they can retain their minor but potentially influential place. Or, a party that is interested in growing must put out feelers to learn what it is that voters are most likely to care about and frame itself as addressing those issues creatively, and somehow or other offset any impression of insincerity this causes.
US politics today tends to rely very heavily on media, on creating and placing political advertisements on TV and nowadays on the internet. These ads in turn tend to be attention grabbing as they must be, for everyone tries to filter out ads since they tend to be obnoxious across the board. And this usually involves vicious negative attacks on the other side.
Do Brazilian politicians rely on media? And if they do, are the ads negative or positive? Can the parties invest in presenting themselves in an attractive light while ignoring the competition, or is my guess that proportional elections would tend to discourage negative attack ads incorrect?
If a lot of money is being spent on campaigns in Brazil, because the many parties each are running in a sense against all others, is more of it than in the USA spent on community organizing events? If candidates propose to get out and meet their potential electorate, if they make themselves public and show up at events where people can ask them questions in detail and propose their own concerns and notions, that I think is actual democracy at work! Especially if the race is not competitive in the sense that only one candidate will wind up in power, with all others shut out, and it instead a matter of whose influence grows and whose shrinks, then the time spent meeting with any candidate is probably not wasted from the public view. I would expect such events cost some money--but it is much better spent than money spent on media advertising. To an extent, such contacts are part of the governance process, not in any sense frivolous at all.
Here in the USA, what I would hope for if we adopted some system of Proportional choosing of Congress is that politicians become focused on learning their electorate and supporting it.
The idea that American races should be more competitive, not less, is common to many reformers. Under our current system, it is not just Congress seats that tend to be "safe" and uncompetitive, it is across the board a problem that few races are meaningfully open. In the Presidential races every 4 years, most voters are largely bypassed by expressions of political concern because they live in "safe" states for one side or the other--it is known in advance that these states will cast their Electoral votes on one side or the other. Attention swoops in on the "swing" states and partisans in the safe states are told to simply write checks for financial contributions. If a Senator is up for re-election, they probably enjoy the advantage of incumbency and opposition might give that race a pass. And so on; races are sometimes hotly competitive, other times deemed safe and boring.
Therefore a number of reforms, such as the National Popular Vote Pact, are meant to inject more competitiveness into the races. By guaranteeing whoever wins the popular vote becomes President for instance, the notion is to spread campaigning effort across the whole nation since any vote anywhere in the Union could be the "swing" vote that puts one or the other over the top.
More competitiveness does not necessarily mean multiplying the sorts of expenses that are current in US campaigns, because I think the role that would be played by expensive media campaigns would saturate pretty fast. At the shallow level of mere image, trashing the leading parties' images with innuendo and slime would at best start a revolving door whereby minor parties rise to take the place of yesterday's major ones, only to be slimed to death in their turn. If that is the target audience, the voting public, doesn't simply tune out and dismiss attack ads. I would expect that with multiple parties and positive choices being offered, campaign expenses will take on new forms--budgets for public meetings, door to door canvassing, that sort of thing. These costs I suspect will be less per contested vote per campaign. Because there will be many campaigns competing for the vote of each voter, we need to multiply that. And if all this means that a higher percentage of American voters do vote, that is another multiplier.
Perhaps then, the cost of campaigns in the USA will rise to even higher levels than they are now. But if the outcome of this is much higher engagement of the citizens with governing, stronger democracy in short, then I would think it is money well spent. I think PR done properly can short-circuit much of the power of money in US campaigns as we conduct them now....
......but if Brazilian experience tells you no, I'd be wrong, that PR just makes money able to buy power by other means, and explain with some examples I would like to learn more about that experience. Maybe it will illustrate pitfalls a different electoral system can avoid. Maybe it will seem still a clear improvement over our experience here in the USA anyway. Maybe it will illustrate fundamental limits of democracy, fundamental realities about wealth owning whatever system it operates in.
One thing I notice in glancing at the Brazilian parties--it seems just about every one of them calls itself "socialist" in some form or other. When I encounter the hard-core propertarian guff that is peddled as conventional wisdom in my own country, it seems that a nation of democratic socialists has got to be more on the right track.
Yet another sad illusion of mine?