The Democracy Journal, in partnership with Protect Democracy and Democracy Fund, has published a symposium making The Case for Proportional Representation. In a series of essays, Didi Kuo, Guy-Uriel Charles, and other leading scholars explore how winner-take-all elections are aggravating some of our democracy’s most pressing challenges, from one-party rule and weakened minority representation, to pervasive gerrymandering and escalating polarization.

Didi Kuo argues that “While structural change is an ambitious goal to pursue, other democracies have successfully implemented major electoral reforms. Their experience shows how the public can be mobilized to care about the electoral system, and how reform-minded leaders can bring electoral reform to the national agenda.” She emphasizes, however, that it will take “a politics of reform” with “some degree” of mobilizable “public support” to put PR reform ideas on the political agenda

Guy Charles and Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer caution that our current electoral structures are on a path that will “increasingly pit communities of color against one another. This is neither desirable nor healthy.” What we need, therefore, is to consider electoral structures that will facilitate “self-government among a group of people with different and sometimes antagonistic histories—some of whom are descendants of enslaved people or of enslavers, some of whom were denied the privilege of American citizenship because of their race, ethnicity, or country of origin, some of whom arrived recently while others predated the founding.”

You can explore the full symposium here.