Protect Democracy link. A new report by John M. Carey and Oscar Pocasangre argues that proportional representation promotes consensus-building, accountability, and political stability without producing excessive fragmentation. Rather than understanding PR and winner-take-all systems as divergent models, the report explains how other institutional design features can influence how each system functions in a particular country. And the authors argue that conditions in the United States, including polarization and presidentialism, would catalyze PR’s virtues and moderate its vices.
We address these concerns by showing how PR can improve governance in the United States. By governance, we mean three things: congruence (policy outcomes that people want); accountability (the ability to course correct by voting out bad politicians); and stability (consistency and predictability of government).
On all three criteria, research suggests a combination of mixed results and reasons to believe that PR could be an improvement for the U.S. compared to winner-take-all (WTA) elections. Particularly in a highly polarized society, PR could help improve congruence and accountability by reducing the impact of gerrymandering; making elections more competitive; giving voters more choices within and across parties; allowing for a greater representation of societal diversity; and promoting more consensus-seeking in the legislative process.
There is little reason to believe PR would create instability or make it difficult to hold politicians accountable. In contrast, there are many reasons to believe the WTA model in the U.S. is failing to ensure good governance. The conditions that allowed WTA to work alongside a presidential system—mainly, significant overlap between Democrats and Republicans—no longer exist.
Today, the combination of presidentialism and WTA in the House of Representatives is proving dangerous and destabilizing, leading to gridlock in times of divided government and to unilateral—even extreme—policymaking in times of unified government (Mainwaring and Drutman 2023). PR is better suited to the country’s conditions and could work well in combination with presidentialism, without sacrificing—and perhaps even enhancing—governance.