How to change the channel on House drama

Our elected officials are the product of how we elect them

On Wednesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene announced she plans to force a vote on ousting Speaker Mike Johnson next week. 

It’s the latest development in an ongoing shakeup that began last October, when a House speaker was removed for the first time in congressional history. While her efforts seem likely to fail, the question of how long any speaker will last and how possible it is for the House to function amidst all the circular infighting lingers. 

There’s no way around it: The United States is in the midst of an ongoing governance crisis. Governance — a term for the stuff that happens between elections — has been characterized by gridlock and gamesmanship as of late. Every year another ousting, another budget standoff, another threat of government shut-down, another impeachment inquiry (some bogus, some necessary), another historic low in legislative productivity.

The crisis presents a puzzle for political scientists. 

For decades, the conventional narrative has been that countries that elect their lawmakers the way we do in the United States — with winner-take-all (“WTA”) elections, where each election produces just one winner — are generally more stable and productive, thanks to their simplicity. In contrast, the main alternative — proportional representation (“PR”), where each election results in multiple winners, elected in proportion to the votes they receive — results in better representation through more parties, but at the cost of less decisive and less stable governments. Or so the typical poli sci class at an American university would have you believe. 

Here’s what these two options look like in practice (using the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as an example). For a more detailed explanation, head over here.

The frustrating state of affairs in U.S. politics today calls into question whether that conventional wisdom holds up to scrutiny. Is winner-take-all really the best way to do things?

John Carey, a political scientist at Dartmouth, and Oscar Pocasangre, a senior data analyst at New America, set out to answer this question in a new paper released yesterday by Protect Democracy and New America. They dive deep into electoral system literature and re-examine the scholarship — and their findings upend the longstanding conventional wisdom.

They conclude that in the United States, proportional representation would make our government more responsive, more accountable and more stable over time.

“[T]he country’s WTA system is accentuating societal divisions, often producing outcomes inconsistent with the will of the majority, making it difficult for voters to punish politicians electorally, and increasing the risk of political and democratic instability.” 

-Professor John Carey & Oscar Pocasangre

Winner-take-all is failing on policy and accountability 

In a democracy, a critical measure of effective governance is whether the government enacts policies favored by a majority of its citizens. That’s what political scientists call “congruence” — the core of any representative experiment.

In theory, both winner-take-all and proportional systems can deliver on this metric.

Winner-take-all, when it functions, encourages politicians to compete for the median voter and deliver on campaign promises in order to be re-elected. And though winner-take-all might not be fully representative of the populace, it’s meant to create a strong mandate for winners to get stuff done. 

It doesn’t take a political scientist to see that this is not actually how politics works in the United States these days. At all. 

That’s because in the U.S., gerrymandering and geographic sorting (which is when voters move to communities that share their political views) undermine competition and voter choice, and primaries are decided by highly-mobilized partisans rather than genuine majorities. Extreme levels of polarization also mean voters feel compelled to vote along party lines, regardless of a politician’s accomplishments or integrity. Once someone wins a primary — usually decided by a small slice of the electorate — voters feel compelled to stick with whomever their party nominated, regardless of whether that politician has gotten much done or behaved with integrity. Jumping ship and voting for another party is essentially a non-option for most voters. 

The effect is twofold: representatives have few incentives to fight for policies that are actually popular with the majority of voters, and voters are unable and unwilling to hold them accountable for it. 

In contrast, Carey and Pocasangre conclude that proportional representation would force parties to be responsive to a broader group of voters. Because with PR each additional vote can help parties obtain additional seats, parties would be incentivized to prioritize a wider set of issues. 

“A change to a PR system would dramatically change campaign dynamics, and it could allow historically neglected segments of the electorate to have a stronger voice, bringing policies more in line with the diversity of public opinion in the United States.”

Carey and Pocasangre assess that proportional representation would also facilitate policy-making and accountability in the polarized U.S. by giving voters choices within their own party. Under PR, partisans can continue voting for their party of choice while also voting for an alternative to their current representative. And in the event voters are ready to jump ship, proportional representation has the additional benefit of making it possible for alternatives to the Republican and Democratic parties to successfully compete, which would allow voters to defect from underperforming or extremist parties altogether. 

Contrary to popular belief, proportional representation could improve governing stability 

More choices and more parties might make our system more fair, but would they make it less stable? 

Governing stability, defined by consistency and predictability, is often viewed by experts as a thorn in the side of PR. The concern is that opening the gates to more parties would result in an untenable overflow — one party for every whim — that would fragment the system. How would a president build and maintain coalitions across multiple parties? Wouldn’t more parties just make compromise even less likely and gridlock even worse? 

Carey and Pocasangre argue that a proportional system with a moderate number of winners per district and moderate “assembly size” (the number of representatives overall) would limit how many parties would emerge. In other words, a goldilocks balance between too few parties (our current broken system) and too many (an issue in democracies like Brazil) is more than possible. 

The fact that the U.S. also has a strong presidential figure who can serve as a coalition-builder and deal-maker with the legislative body would also strengthen stability.

“The U.S. has a president with sufficient constitutional authority and resources to act as a central coalition builder; clear formal rules that have developed from long-standing legislative practices and judicial precedents, and institutions for horizontal accountability—but it is lacking multiparty competition.”

The final point made by Carey and Pocasangre — and perhaps the biggest takeaway of all — is a reminder that stability is not just some mechanical outcome. Instead, it has everything to do with popular faith in democracy. 

When voters stop believing in democracy, they're going to vote for extremists like Marjorie Taylor Green who promise to destabilize it.

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The representativeness of Congress, the ability of it to actually deliver the goods for a majority of Americans, the opportunity for voters to have genuine choices — all of these things reinvigorate voters’ faith, and prevent Americans from turning away from democracy altogether. Carey and Pocasangre are crystal clear in their assessment: proportional representation is the best path forward to a more responsive, more stable democracy.

Regardless of your views on proportional representation — or electoral reform in general — this paper is a pretty decisive argument from two top experts in the field. Give it a read, and consider its implications the next time we’re (inevitably) faced with another episode in our ongoing governance crisis.

Read the full paper here.

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What else we’re tracking: 

• Donald Trump spoke with TIME about what his second term would look like, if it comes to be. Throughout, he said in plain words what we predicted might happen in the Authoritarian Playbook for 2025.

• Republicans in Congress are attempting to exclude noncitizens from a special census count in order to reshape election maps. The 14th Amendment, of course, requires such counts to include the "whole number of persons in each state." Hansi Lo Wang has the story in NPR.   

• Brookings has a new report on whether democracy is good for the economy (spoiler alert, yes.)

• Count Every Hero hosted a panel featuring retired four National Guard generals on Monday, where each cautioned against hyper-political abuse of the Guard. 

• It’s been a few days since SCOTUS heard oral arguments on Trump’s immunity case. One potential takeaway: Elie Mystal’s prediction that by normalizing the current state of affairs, the media is setting the stage for the Court to rule that there are some things Trump simply cannot be held criminally liable for. Jack Goldsmith has a different take, pushing back against what he sees as a media far too quick to paint legitimate and necessary Court inquiry as pro-Trump bias. 

• The UnPopulist has a new series on “fireproofing the presidency,” where cross-ideological legal scholars explore “what could reasonably be done to check Trump’s nefarious plans.” Subscribe here.

• Maybe this will surprise you, maybe it won’t. But Harvey Weinstein’s NY conviction for sex crimes (which was just recently overturned) and Trump’s hush-money case have an important legal issue in common; Ronan Farrow explains in the New Yorker.