BENEFITS OF PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

2023 Economist Democracy Index:

Highest Performing Countries & Their Electoral Systems

PR = Better Democracy

The evidence is in: countries using proportional representation (PR) perform better than countries using winner-take-all elections (WTA). According to the Economist Democracy Index, of the 15 highest-ranked democracies, all but two use some form of proportional representation. Read more below to learn why PR produces a more representative democracy than winner-take-all elections.

Highest Performing Countries & Their Electoral Systems

There are a variety of reasons why countries using proportional representation have higher functioning democracies.

We’ve broken down PR’s key benefits into four categories.

SELECT A TAB TO LEARN MORE

PR Increases and Improves Representation

for Women and Communities of Color

Although the United States was founded under the belief that all people are created equal, the reality is our country has oppressed women and communities of color for most of our history. While that's no longer the case, at least according to the law, both groups continue to face systemic disadvantages across a variety of settings. When it comes to our representative institutions, those disadvantages make running for office especially challenging. Thus, the racial and gender composition of American lawmakers is not reflective of the racial and gender composition of our people. Proportional Representation can help.

Women's Representation

Countries that use proportional representation elect more women to their national legislatures (29% average) than countries that use winner-take-all elections (22.4% average). In addition, counties that have switched from winner-take-all elections to proportional representation have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of women elected. For example, in New Zealand’s last WTA election in 1990, only 13% of elected representatives were women. But in 2020, a few decades after PR was introduced in 1993, 51% of elected representatives were women.

While the primary mechanism that typically increases women's representation is the use of gender quotas rather than the specific type of electoral system used, even PR systems without quotas do a better job of electing women to office than WTA.

Source: Electoral Reform Society, Pursuing Parity: Examining Gender Quotas Across Electoral Systems

To learn more about the relationship between electoral reform and women's representation, visit our coalition member, RepresentWomen.

Multiracial Representation

In their report on proportional representation, the American Bar Association’s Task Force for American Democracy summarizes how PR increases minority voting power as follows:

Studies show that winner-take-all systems tend to systematically underrepresent racial minorities, and that proportional systems are more likely to provide for both greater descriptive and substantive minority representation. Under winner-take-all, the dominant voter-group “takes all” in a district; and so unless a racial group can garner support from a majority (either by being the majority themselves or by convincing enough non-minority voters to support their preferred candidates), they remain barred from representation. Such is the case for many Black, Latino, Asian, and Native voters, particularly those who are geographically dispersed outside of minority opportunity districts. In Nevada, for example, Latino voters comprise nearly 20 percent of the electorate, but there are no Latino representatives in the House delegation.

A majority of Black voters in southern states with a history of racially polarized voting live in majority-white (often safe Republican) districts. Modeling exercises find that if these states were to utilize proportional multi-member districts in the place of the single-member districts, the share of Black voters able to elect at least one candidate of their choice increases to 98 percent. Comparative research consistently finds better representation for ethnic minorities in countries that use proportional representation.

More people of color would be able to elect a candidate of their choice because proportional representation would translate votes to seats proportionally, liberating the power of any given group of votes from the need for a favorable district map to secure representation. For example, in a proportional multi-member district with three seats in which Black voters constitute one third of the population, they can be expected to elect their preferred candidate to at least one seat if they vote cohesively (and more seats if they garner support from non-Black voters for additional candidates of choice).

If this same region is divided into three single-member districts, however, the ability of Black voters to elect their preferred candidate becomes dependent on their geographic distribution and on the choice of district map. To meet the needs of its diverse population, the United States should consider an electoral design which utilizes district magnitudes of five or more to minimize the potential for racial vote dilution and to enable representation of those members of the electorate who do not constitute a majority in their district. Such a design would make the Voting Rights Act’s guarantee of an equal opportunity to elect harder to violate through vote dilution.

To learn more about the relationship between electoral reform and racial justice, visit our coalition member, More Equitable Democracy.

Parties are vehicles for political representation. We need more than two.

There isn’t a single advanced democracy in the world today that doesn’t rely on political parties… and the vast majority have more than two. But in the United States – and our 50 state legislatures – we have a rigid, fully polarized two-party system that has produced and reinforced a crisis of democratic representation. Political parties are tools that enable voters to organize themselves within our democracy. When there’s only two and both refuse to cooperate with one another, representation for one group comes at the expense of another. In doing so, complex policies are oversimplified and reduced to an us vs. them binary. This leaves voters with only two ways to express their preferences in any given election. But in multiparty democracies with proportional representation, voters have multiple choices, don’t need to resort to selecting the lesser of two evils, and can vote for a party they more honestly align with. More choices for the people brings more power to the people.

Expressing Policy Preferences in Two-Party vs. Multiparty Democracy

Two-Party Political Spectrum:

Hypothetical Multiparty Political Spectrum

This multiparty spectrum and it's six parties are fictional and intended to illustrate what political diversity typically looks like in multiparty systems.

Multiparty spectrum and party descriptions from Lee Drutman & The New York Times.

Hypothetical Multiparty Polical Spectrum

Patriot Party: The party of Donald Trump’s 2016 primary campaign: the coalition of the small town, white working-class Americans who feel left behind by globalism and condescended to by cosmopolitanism. It is economically populist and strongly anti-immigration. Its strongest support among lower-income conservatives comes from exurban America.

Christian Conservative Party: Focused centrally on issues of religious liberty and morality, with very limited government. Finds strongest support among the most politically engaged and affluent, especially men.

American Labor Party: Focused on economic populism, with an appeal to working-class Democrats who don’t have college degrees and don’t follow politics closely. It is more moderate on social and cultural issues compared with the Progressive Party, but also more diverse, appealing to many working-class Hispanics.

New Liberal Party: The professional-class establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Members are cosmopolitan in their social and racial views but more pro-business and more likely to see the wealthy as innovators.

Growth and Opportunity Party: The socially moderate, pro-business wing of the Republican Party. It is the heir to the old moderate “Rockefeller Republican, ” the East Coast wing of the G.O.P.

Progressive Party: Focused on equity and racial justice, with a strong vision of inclusive social democracy. Its strongest support comes from politically engaged, highly educated younger people, especially women.

Our system incentivizes partisan division and conflict.

Proportional representation incentivizes compromise and cooperation.

Believe it or not, at one point in American history our two parties actually got along. Legislators frequently crossed party lines to work with the other side and enacted policies that were supported by a clear majority. However, due the zero-sum, binary nature of our winner-take-all elections, over time the two parties grew increasingly polarized and combative. Today, they refuse to cooperate and strictly vote along party lines, leaving complete partisan domination as the most effective path to enacting policy.

Political scientist Lee Drutman has referred to these extreme levels of polarization as the “two-party doom loop;” a vicious cycle where polarization breeds dysfunction, breeding more polarization and more dysfunction. As the stakes of each election feel higher, us-vs.-them thinking feels increasingly justified, people wall themselves off from each other in information silos and echo chambers, and demonization of the other side becomes a more common campaign strategy than promoting actual policy solutions.

Doom Loop visual courtesy of Fix Our House.

Proportional Representation fosters dynamic coalition-building across issues.

Since proportional representation results in multiparty legislatures, single party majorities are rare. Instead, multiple parties are compelled to work together and must form coalitions in order to build the majorities necessary to create and pass legislation. Within their coalitions, parties with diverging policy preferences are required to collaborate and make compromises in order to make progress.

When policies are created with the broad support of multiple parties, they’re viewed as more legitimate in the eyes of voters, and also less likely to be repealed when the partisan makeup of the coalition changes. This creates a more stable political ecosystem for governing, and produces fewer dramatic shifts in policy than our polarized two-party system where power transfers with every election.

More Competition = Better Policies

Although Democrats and Republicans disagree on the vast majority of policy solutions, most voters find common ground on our shared problems, like housing affordability, inflation, protecting social security and, interestingly, the two-party system itself: 28% of Americans hold negative views of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Part of the source of voter dissatisfaction is the lack of policy responsiveness the two parties generate. Policy responsiveness refers to the ability of the government to create legislation that addresses voters’ critical needs and diverse preferences. Responsiveness stems from a combination of electoral competition and legislative collaboration.

In our current system, electoral competition is restricted to two parties. With only two parties to choose from, a recent report found that only 10% of House Districts are competitive – they could go to either party in any given election. That means 90% of House districts are either solidly Democratic or solidly Republican. Without the threat of competition, incumbent Democrats and Republicans have little incentive to respond to the needs of their voters and can ensure their own reelection by stoking fear of the other side.

With proportional representation, because every individual vote contributes to the makeup of the legislature, multiple parties are incentivized to campaign on broad, inclusive platforms that align with voters' needs. Once they're actually elected, that incentive to align continues into policymaking: parties need to keep the campaign promises they've made. And with a multiparty legislature that requires coalition building, legislation is only pushed through when there's broad consensus across parties, which ensures that all voices are heard across the political spectrum in the act of legislating.

BENEFITS OF PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

PR = Better Democracy

There are a variety of reasons why countries using proportional representation have higher functioning democracies. We’ve broken down PR’s key benefits into four categories. SELECT A TAB TO LEARN MORE

There are a variety of reasons why countries using proportional representation have higher functioning democracies.

We’ve broken down PR’s key benefits into four categories.

SELECT A TAB TO LEARN MORE