David and Caledon: Enjoyed your discussion of advancing democracy with proportional representation. As David knows, I've been advocating and educating about PR for decades, and I'm thrilled to see the movement growing with your organizing work. It's not easy to talk abut PR and voting systems in a way that doesn't make your audience's eyes or ears gloss over, so I wanted to share a couple approaches that I think are effective and I'd be happy to discuss in greater detail directly.
First, when someone says, "What is PR?", you don't want to educate them on what a voting system is, how the most widely used system is winner-take-all, and how PR is better than that. You can put that in an article, but in an interview, you want to say something like, "PR is the very simple and nearly universally accepted idea that groups of voters should win representation in proportion to their size. So 20% of the vote should win 20% of the seats."
Second, when someone says, "It's that just a parliamentary system?", you really have an opportunity to enlighten them, because they, like many people who should know better, such as American political scientists, are actually totally confused about the difference between the structure of government (who picks the chief executive, whether you call that person a president or a prime minister) and the method of picking the members of congress or parliament. So I'd say something like, "No, PR does not mean a parliamentary system. A parliament system is one in which parliament (congress) chooses the executive (prime minister). It has nothing to do with how a parliament is elected. In fact, there are parliamentary systems that use winner take all elections and there are parliamentary systems that use PR. And same with presidential systems: some use PR, some don't." It'd be good to have a few examples of of, say, a parliamentary system with WTA elections (Great Britain?) and a presidential system with PR (Brazil?) to show that the structure of government is separate from the method of representation.
Next, if the goal is to make the idea of PR accessible to the public, it's not a good idea to say that you need a degree in political science to understand the varieties of PR that exist. Instead, you can make the point that there are lots of "flavors" of PR that are in use, and they vary in terms of how big a group has to be to win representation and how candidate or party-centered the system is. The point is that any country, state or city can find a PR system that works well for their particular situation, but that *all* PR systems have the many benefits of making the elected body, whether city council, state legislature or national parliament, as representative of the electorate as possible.
Finally, lest listeners think that PR is some foreign idea, it's helpful to be able to speak about the use of a PR system in the Illinois legislature from 1870 to 1980, which led to both Democrats and Republicans representing Chicago and both Democrats and Republicans representing downstate areas, something that hasn't happened since the PR was repealed in 1980 to shrink the size of the legislature. It's also good to talk about New York City's use of PR for city council from 1938 to 1948 (along with 20 other cities such as Cincinnati and Kalamazoo). Let’s just say that those city councils were dramatically more representative of the voters than anything before or since.
Keep up the good work and feel free to reach out anytime if you’d like to discuss further,
Thank you for this astute comment, Caleb. I will make sure to forward this to Caledon directly, and appreciate that you made it on this public forum so others can see it as well...
David and Caledon: Enjoyed your discussion of advancing democracy with proportional representation. As David knows, I've been advocating and educating about PR for decades, and I'm thrilled to see the movement growing with your organizing work. It's not easy to talk abut PR and voting systems in a way that doesn't make your audience's eyes or ears gloss over, so I wanted to share a couple approaches that I think are effective and I'd be happy to discuss in greater detail directly.
First, when someone says, "What is PR?", you don't want to educate them on what a voting system is, how the most widely used system is winner-take-all, and how PR is better than that. You can put that in an article, but in an interview, you want to say something like, "PR is the very simple and nearly universally accepted idea that groups of voters should win representation in proportion to their size. So 20% of the vote should win 20% of the seats."
Second, when someone says, "It's that just a parliamentary system?", you really have an opportunity to enlighten them, because they, like many people who should know better, such as American political scientists, are actually totally confused about the difference between the structure of government (who picks the chief executive, whether you call that person a president or a prime minister) and the method of picking the members of congress or parliament. So I'd say something like, "No, PR does not mean a parliamentary system. A parliament system is one in which parliament (congress) chooses the executive (prime minister). It has nothing to do with how a parliament is elected. In fact, there are parliamentary systems that use winner take all elections and there are parliamentary systems that use PR. And same with presidential systems: some use PR, some don't." It'd be good to have a few examples of of, say, a parliamentary system with WTA elections (Great Britain?) and a presidential system with PR (Brazil?) to show that the structure of government is separate from the method of representation.
Next, if the goal is to make the idea of PR accessible to the public, it's not a good idea to say that you need a degree in political science to understand the varieties of PR that exist. Instead, you can make the point that there are lots of "flavors" of PR that are in use, and they vary in terms of how big a group has to be to win representation and how candidate or party-centered the system is. The point is that any country, state or city can find a PR system that works well for their particular situation, but that *all* PR systems have the many benefits of making the elected body, whether city council, state legislature or national parliament, as representative of the electorate as possible.
Finally, lest listeners think that PR is some foreign idea, it's helpful to be able to speak about the use of a PR system in the Illinois legislature from 1870 to 1980, which led to both Democrats and Republicans representing Chicago and both Democrats and Republicans representing downstate areas, something that hasn't happened since the PR was repealed in 1980 to shrink the size of the legislature. It's also good to talk about New York City's use of PR for city council from 1938 to 1948 (along with 20 other cities such as Cincinnati and Kalamazoo). Let’s just say that those city councils were dramatically more representative of the voters than anything before or since.
Keep up the good work and feel free to reach out anytime if you’d like to discuss further,
Caleb Kleppner ( ck@fairvote.org )
Thank you for this astute comment, Caleb. I will make sure to forward this to Caledon directly, and appreciate that you made it on this public forum so others can see it as well...