NYT gets on board with PR

This is good news indeed. The New York Times has published an extended discussion of proportional representation written by Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman: How to Fix America's Two-Party Problem. An excerpt:

In less polarized political times, winner-take-all systems can do a decent job of reflecting public opinion and maintaining democratic stability, but when a nation is deeply divided and large numbers of people fear that they will not be represented at all, the result is an erosion of trust in government and rising extremism and political violence. As the political scientist Barbara F. Walter has observed, a majority of civil wars over the last century appear to have broken out in countries with winner-take-all systems.

No democracy can survive long in the face of this much division and distrust. It’s hardly surprising, then, that more than two-thirds of Americans want to see major changes in our political system. Roughly the same proportion wish they had more than two parties to choose from.

They’re right: Two parties competing in winner-take-all elections cannot reflect the diversity of 335 million Americans.

If the US had proportional representation for congressional elections, the authors speculate that there would be six parties representing the major groupings of public opinion: Progressive, New Liberal, New Populist, Growth & Opportunity, Patriot, and Christian Conservative. No single party could (ever!) claim a majority, which would be an incentive for them to work together in areas where this is possible. It might dampen the culture war rhetoric currently afflicting the American polity.

In Canada, electoral reform has been on the table for some years now, with Fair Vote Canada playing an important role in keeping it in the public consciousness. In fact, last week Justin Trudeau expressed regret that he had not followed through with his decade-old promise to reform our electoral system.

In the United States, however, few people have talked about electoral reform until now. That The New York Times has published this article is a sign that Americans may at last be waking up to what they need to break the constant political deadlocks threatening to paralyze the system.

In my new book, Citizenship Without Illusions, I make a case for electoral reform in chapter 5. I hope that this will encourage readers to take seriously the need for a fairer system that emphasizes just representation rather than winners and losers.