The Democratic Piece

Nebraska is one of two states allocating its electoral votes by congressional district, not statewide. In an article on the still disputed status of the electoral vote corresponding to NE-2, the New York Times gets it wrong:

Unlike every other state but Maine, Nebraska allocates its five electoral votes proportionally. The winner does not take all. So even though Mr. McCain won the statewide popular vote, it looks as if Mr. Obama was able to carve out a piece of the state, the Second Congressional District, for himself. The district includes most of metropolitan Omaha. [emphasis mine]

Colorado is the most recent state - if not the only - to have considered and defeated allocating its electors in proportion to candidates’ vote shares. Maine and Nebraska do not. In those states, the statewide winner gets the two electors corresponding to the states’ Senators, and the elector corresponding to each congressional district goes to the candidate winning that district.

The conflation of PR and single-member districts is relatively unique to American political culture. I believe it is a legacy of our founding.

When the Framers met in 1787, the debate over legislative representation was framed in terms of apportionment. Would all states receive equal numbers of seats (New Jersey Plan), or would apportionment be proportional to states’ populations (Virginia Plan)? The Connecticut Compromise, of course, gave us both: equal delegations in the Senate and “proportional” delegations in the House. A search of the Federalist Papers for the string “proportional representation” returns references, but all mean proportional apportionment by population of the seats each state will elect - not proportional allocation by vote share of a state’s seats to parties. To this day, the Wikipedia article for New Jersey Plan cited above still calls proportional apportionment “proportional representation.”

This is not surprising. Proportional representation as framed today, of parties by vote shares, did not exist until two generations later, when Thomas Hare articulated and J.S. Mill popularized the concept. (See also a later essay by Henry Droop.)

Had PR existed, of course, the Framers likely would have opted for it. PR is consistent with the views in Federalist No. 10 on “controlling [faction's] effects.” By multiplying the factions represented, one reduces the likelihood that a tyrannical majority will emerge.

A fundamentally majoritarian system in which seats are allocated to states in proportion to their populations can deliver proportionality of seats to votes more or less by accident, but that is not a proportional representation system.

My op-ed with Rob Richie in today’s Washington Times:

Electoral rules may be boring, but Tuesday’s D.C. Council election saw them fail. While Congress designed the District’s system to let voters in the minority elect a winner, it misfired on Nov. 4. Now that the council is effectively single-party, it’s time to implement a system that guarantees the intended outcome…

Some important results to follow:

Telluride, CO - Instant runoff voting is on the ballot. Results somewhere around here.

Memphis, TN - Instant runoff voting is on the ballot. Results here.

Cincinnati, OH - Will voters bring back proportional representation (by single transferable vote)? Results available here.

Most TDP readers know that Cincinnati will vote on proportional representation (STV/choice voting) in November. This is an historic and crucial reform opportunity.

The Cincinnati Better Ballot Campaign runs a website worth sharing. If someone you know lives in Cincinnati, pass it along.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the probable winner he muscled out of a presidential runoff, Morgan Tsvangirai, concluded a power-sharing agreement Tuesday morning. On one hand, we saw this coming. On the other, there are reasons to doubt the “sharing” part.

Last April, it appeared Mugabe was in a bind. He was losing a presidential election, and the South African judiciary was blocking $1.2 million in Chinese guns from entering his repressive arsenal. There were rumors in state news of a “national unity government.” Later on, Botswana’s Seretse Khama led regional rejection of Mugabe’s “win.” The pressure was on from multiple fronts, and the only thing holding Mugabe in place was his ability to maintain the loyalty of the military.

At first glance, this is a Kenya-style solution: invent a prime ministership, inflate cabinet, split the spoils. While the NY Times is light on details and slightly optimistic, Le Monde spells it out:

1. Tsvangirai gets the new title of Prime Minister;
2. Cabinet is now 31 members large;
3. Mugabe gets to name 15 members;
4. Tsvangirai gets to name 13;
5. a “dissident faction” of the opposition, led by Arthur Mutambara, names the remaining 3 members;
6. and Mugabe gets to keep the National Security Council, which covers the army, police and secret service.

The Financial Times disagrees a bit on that last point, nonetheless offering an insightfully sober analysis:

Who controls the security portfolios will be critical to restoration of confidence. It appears that Mr Mugabe will control the army, and Mr Tsvangirai the police and justice ministry. That might work, but all those institutions are currently controlled by Zanu-PF loyalists. They cannot be purged overnight.

It appears that the MDC will get the most important economic jobs in the cabinet, although that could be a poisoned chalice if swift action proves impossible to stabilise the economy and revive the vital farm sector. The task would be daunting for a united government: it could prove overwhelming for one divided by years of intimidation and rivalry.

The important question is whether Mugabe will use the army to repress opposition activity. On that, the Times offers this bit of inconclusive insight:

Talking about the negotiations that led to the agreement, Mr. Mugabe also said there were “lots of things in the agreement that I don’t like, and still don’t like.”

However, he said, “we are all Zimbabweans and is there any other road, any other route to follow? History makes us walk the same route.”

From Philadelphia comes more news that proportional representation (and its cousins) isn’t just for progressives and minor parties.

While a coalition of the Cincinnati NAACP and local Republicans backs that city’s return to PR-STV, a Philly Democrat wants to boot the only two Republicans from city council by eliminating two at-large seats elected under limited voting.

Of 17 council seats, 10 are elected in single-member districts. Limited voting (here, two-vote MNTV) helps prevent Democratic electoral majorities from sweeping the remaining seven at-large seats.

The Democratic member’s apparent plan is to reduce district magnitude in the non-majoritarian tier, making it more difficult for the city’s few Republicans to win representation.

This is a very clear discussion of the Cincy PR campaign. It looks like a radio broadcast.

In the battleground state of Ohio, it should be an especially high turnout year. Do you think this coalition can tip the balance?

Former City Councilman Chris Smitherman says he expects Republicans, independents, Libertarians and Greens will vote in favor of proportional representation, because PR could break up Democratic control of the council.

The conflict in Georgia returns us to the familiar topic of democracy losing out to security considerations. It is argued that Western powers—most especially the United States—lacked the will and means to defend Georgia’s fledgling democracy in its moment of peril.

The debate is not new; in a much different context, Jeane Kirkpatrick famously argued that the Carter administration erred in its focus on “human rights” at the expense of national security.

Does the democracy/security distinction remain appropriate? Robert Kagan does not think so. Kagan contends that the division between democracy promotion and national security has been erased by the shift in foreign policy demanded by the attacks of 9/11.
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The Hamilton County, OH Board of Elections yesterday certified a petition by the Cincinnati NAACP to put proportional representation on the November ballot.

If the measure passes, voters will use the single transferable vote to elect a nine-member city council, renewing a 30-year good government experiment that ended in a vitriolic 1957 repeal effort:

The single transferable vote had allowed African Americans to be elected for the first time, with two blacks being elected to the city council in the 1950s. The nation was also seeing the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement and racial tensions were running high. PR opponents shrewdly decided to make race an explicit factor in their repeal campaign. They warned whites that PR was helping to increase black power in the city and asked them whether they wanted a “Negro mayor.” Their appeal to white anxieties succeeded, with whites supporting repeal by a two to one margin.

I have tried recently to focus on international democracy assistance, but this could be a major development in the history of American democracy and world of electoral systems.

Today only Ireland, Northern Ireland, Australia, Malta, New Zealand, Scotland (h/t to James) and Cambridge, Mass. use STV (of the multimember variety) for governmental elections, so Cincinnati would add a case to that family.

Cincinnati is the next page in a long and underexposed history of election reform in America. From the Progressive Era through the Civil Rights movement, 22 US cities (or 24 depending on definitions) used PR-STV for local elections, many of which were in Ohio. The second to last experiment ended in 2002 with the disbanding of New York City’s school board.

While system performance varied by city and indicator, STV’s overall record was positive:

On the whole, from the available evidence, proportional representation seemed to have a beneficial effect on the cities that adopted it. It clearly produced more representative government and, where voters wanted it, a more diverse party system. Large increases in the number of effective votes were also enjoyed in these cities. It may not have resulted in the substantial increases in voter turnout that proponents predicted, but neither did it produce the increases in voter alienation that critics feared. And finally, even though PR city councils were often more diverse politically, this did not seem to impair their political efficiency or effectiveness.

Good sources for more specifics are Doug Amy’s site linked above and Robert Kolesar in Proportional Representation and Election Reform in Ohio, Kathleen Barber ed., OSU Press 1995.

STV seeks proportional results and maximizes ‘votes that elect’ by transferring votes in excess of a quota to voters’ next-ranked choices. With nine seats in Cincinnati, it will take 10 percent of votes to win each. There are different ways to transfer surplus, and Cincinnati would use the quasi-random “Cincinnati method.”

Who cares? American reformers, for one, but the ends they are pursuing should not be lost on the international democracy assistance community, which has engaged in electoral engineering from Afghanistan to Nepal over the past few years.

As Donald Horowitz, Ben Reilly and others have noted, STV (and its single-winner cousin) can benefit divided societies through the incentive it presents to campaign for second- and third-choice support outside one’s group. Because it’s a proportional system, STV prevents exclusion of significant minority groups, especially as the number of seats to elect increases. As a candidate-centric system, STV emphasizes entrepreneurial campaigns over party labels. Finally, as a system based on multimember districts, it reduces incentives to gerrymander.

Not all contexts would benefit. Innumeracy can be a barrier to a method based on ranking, and places with highly fragmented party systems probably need stronger incentives for cohesion. These caveats notwithstanding, democracy promoters should embrace the wealth of lessons learned - and to be learned - about the growing number of STV cases at home and abroad.

With Russian troops now within 25 miles of Tbilisi, the U.S. has stepped up its tough talk on Russia.  But regardless of how the military situation plays out, the democracy agenda has been dealt a serious blow.

Press Conference

Today, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice gave a joint press conference with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.  Saakashvili decried looting and what he referred to as “ethnic cleansing” by Russian forces and irregulars.  He also made grim reference to a report released yesterday by Human Rights Watch blaming 11 civilian deaths and several injuries on the Russian use of cluster bombs, which Saakashvili called “an inhuman weapon.”  [In the interest of full disclosure, the United States does not renounce the use of cluster bombs.]

Saakashvili called the Russian invasion an effort “to kill Georgian democracy, and to end the independence of Georgia.”  He defiantly added, “Russia has lots of tanks, but no tank is enough to crush the will of a free people.”

The Response of International Institutions

For her part, Secretary Rice demanded that Russia respect the ceasefire agreement signed today, and withdraw its forces from Georgia.  (At the time, they were a mere 25 miles away.)  She also called on the international community to hurry to provide observers and a peacekeeping force, which would deny Russia an excuse to stay.  The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) began to take steps that would up its current number of observers in Georgia from 200 to 300, but this would require all 56 member-states to sign off.

Meanwhile in Washington, President Bush delivered a strong condemnation of Moscow at the White House.  In it, he said the U.S. would work with members of the G-7 to resolve the crisis, thus seemingly kicking Russia out of the G-8 club with one word.  This would follow on the heels on Monday’s conference call among foreign ministers of the G-8 sans Russia.  This kind of diplomatic response is a sure step in the right direction, but a sign that the West is nowhere near prepared to bare its teeth.  No surprise there – if it were, this would never have happened.

HEY!  Who ate our carrot?

Which leaves one questioning the relevance of NATO.  Before the Russian invasion, Georgia was actively trying to join NATO.  The U.S. was pressing other members on its behalf, without success.  In a world where Russia is expected to keep quietly to itself, the U.S. could offer the prospect of NATO membership as an inducement to states to implement democratic reforms.  Reforms would gradually take place, and the entire eastern European neighborhood would benefit from having more democratically inclined neighbors in it. 

But now the calculus is quite different.  With the real Russia unmasked for all the world to see, joining NATO becomes much more serious business for all parties concerned, for several reasons.  First, with the United States tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, an American promise to come to the aid of aggrieved European allies looks – for the foreseeable future – a lot like an empty threat.  This means that even as countries like Georgia and Ukraine want NATO membership with increasing urgency, it stands to do them less and less good.  They could bend over backwards to implement reforms – right up until the Russians marched in.

Second, even if we had a free hand, our security policy would likely trump our democracy policy, as it has many times before.  In a rush to extend NATO membership, the United States would be willing to overlook democratic gains – or lack thereof.

Third, even if we had a free hand and prospective members suddenly became advanced consolidated democracies, a Russian menace decreases the likelihood that any of our other NATO partners want to risk war with Russia by entering into an alliance.

All of this spells trouble for the democracy agenda.