A Vote for Change : Some Insiders Say Proportional Representation Could Lead Us Out of Legislative Gridlock

As epiphanies go, it wasn’t exactly in the “blinding flash of light” category. It was more a slow accumulation of facts pointing to an interesting pattern.

Two years before anyone thought a billionaire from Texas would run for President, Matthew Cossolotto was working on a book with a title only Beltway insiders could love: “The Almanac of Transatlantic Politics.” It’s a reference guide to the political scene in 21 European and North American countries.

Among the many factoids he found in researching the book, a few seemed to stick out:

* American voter turnout was much lower than European turnout.

* The number of European legislators who are women was substantially higher than in the United States.

* The number of voters per legislator is much higher here than in Europe.

Cossolotto’s synapses began processing these anomalies, which seemed to point toward a political process that was more open and democratic than the one in the United States. Then the pattern began to make sense.

Cossolotto realized that these countries were governed by proportional representation, or PR, where legislative seats are awarded based on the percentage of votes received by each party.

In Germany, for example, everyone gets two votes--one for your local legislator, the other for a specific political party. (Translated into U.S. politics, half of the 100 Senate seats would be chosen by the first vote. The other half would be proportional to the final tally of the second vote; so, for example, if the Libertarians received 10% of that vote, 10% of the other 50 Senate seats would be Libertarian.)

“There is a sense the system we’ve had for two centuries is somehow the best,” says Cossolotto, who heads Citizens for Proportional Representation (CPR), a nonprofit organization advocating the PR cause based in Alexandria, Va.

“But this year in particular, gridlock has become the norm, and it seems like we’re coming up against what I think is the end of making this (two-party) system work. It now seems to me that in a diverse country of 250 million people, the only workable voting system would be one that reflects that diversity.”

Cossolotto is no wild-eyed radical. He’s a 38-year-old Bay Area native and graduate of UC Berkeley who has worked as an assistant to Rep. Leon Panetta (D-Monterey) and as a speech writer for former Speaker of the House Jim Wright. But in the so-called Year of the Angry Voter, he believes PR is, if nothing else, an option deserving of discussion.

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The two-party system, Cossolotto says, “seems to go against every other instinct in the American lifestyle. Go to an American supermarket and see how many different kinds of cereal there are. Do people say, ‘I can’t deal with this; there are too many choices’? They’re happy to have choices. Why is it impossible to have choices in an election?”

Throughout most of the democratic world, the two-party, winner-take-all system is viewed as some sort of relic, used only by a handful of former British colonies--such as Canada and the United States.

In contrast, PR, which has been in use since the mid-19th Century, has been adopted by every country in the European Community--except Britain and France--as well as by the majority of the emerging democracies in the former Soviet Bloc.

And on Sept. 19, New Zealanders voted overwhelmingly to switch to a proportional form of government.

With this kind of consensus, how come the inside-the-Beltway types view PR as some sort of alien life form?

“A multi-member PR system would allow for more representation, but it would be a little less stable,” says James A. Thurber, professor of government at American University in Washington. “When it comes to building coalitions, it would be more difficult with a multi-party system.”

Adds John Barnes, who has criticized PR in the pages of the National Review: “The basic problem with PR is that it transfers the ability to form a government from the people who get the most votes to those who get the least. It puts small parties in a vastly disproportional position, and that is a perversion of democracy.”

Critics of PR point their fingers at two countries: Italy, with its comic opera succession of ineffectual coalition governments, and Israel, where electoral gridlock between the country’s two major parties has given a handful of extremist religious parties the ability to wring concessions in exchange for their participation in a governing coalition.

But PR’s supporters point right back at Germany and Scandinavia with their PR governments, considered the most stable in the world. They also claim that if a country sets some sort of minimum vote percentage for winning seats (in Germany it’s 5% of the total vote), the extreme fringe elements are kept out of the government.

Besides, Cossolotto and his CPR group (whose T-shirts bear the catchy slogan “Resuscitating Democracy”) are not advocating an overhaul of the system. Their goals are more modest: to see at least part of the House of Representatives elected by PR, leaving the Senate and presidential races the way they are.

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In an article in the August issue of Atlantic Monthly, writer Michael Lind speculated on what the House of Representatives would look like under a PR system. Claiming both major parties are unwieldy coalitions of disparate interests, Lind envisioned a shake-up in which the Republicans would lose their right wing to a new conservative party, and the Democrats would break up into several constituencies, the largest of which, composed of moderates and “Reagan Democrats,” might call itself the Populist Party.

Based on his reading of American political subcultures, Lind pictured a House composed of: Republicans (40%), Populists (30%), Social Democrats (unions, farmers, public sector employees, 15%), Greens (5%), Conservatives (5%), Multiculturalists and Libertarians (5% between them).

It’s possible many Americans will react to this lineup with undisguised horror, viewing it as the revenge of the politically correct. But PR advocates say that rather than forcing every belief system under the “big tent” of the two parties, this type of system encourages creativity of thinking and a diversity of viewpoints.

“People can easily deal with technological change,” says Cossolotto, “but the reality is we’re using a democracy that was designed in an age when we had horses and buggies. The electorate was composed only of white male landed gentry when we started the country. We’ve expanded beyond that, but we’ve kept the voting system, and it’s a relic of an earlier age.”

Cossolotto doesn’t think the PR concept is ready to bowl Americans over, which is why he’s in it for the long haul. He’s hoping to perform an educational function in the future, and he’s optimistic because he believes the voting public is a lot smarter than the Beltway insiders believe. When the anti-PR forces raise questions about the difficulty of some PR systems (and a few of them involve mathematical vote counting formulas made a lot easier by computer), you can almost hear Cossolotto snorting with glee.

“When you talk about how complicated PR is,” he says, “ask them to explain redistricting to you. Besides, what kind of argument is that: ‘Let’s keep plurality, it’s a good system for dumb people’?”