One-winner-per-district elections:
- Each council member represents a neighborhood he/she knows well
- Each council member represents diverse residents with opposing views and interests.
- Most citizens cannot get a representative who speaks for their needs and concerns
- Most citizens don’t see a good reason to vote, and they don’t
- Most voters don’t scrutinize candidates or evaluate their representative
- Candidates and elected officials tend to reduce hard issues to slogans
- Council members often have more incentive to make political opponents look bad than to work together developing intelligent solutions to community problems.
At-large plurality elections:
- Council members tend to focus on the whole community, not just their own neighborhood
- Minorities cannot obtain representation
- Voters do not get a specific representative to hold to account for policy decisions
Proportional representation:
- Each group of constituents obtains power proportional to its numbers
- Voters do not get a specific representative to hold to account for policy decisions
- Council members often have more incentive to make ideological opponents look bad than to work together developing intelligent solutions to community problems.
Personally accountable representation:
- Each voter gets a specific representative who shares the voter’s outlook
- Each citizen has a strong incentive to scrutinize candidates, to vote, and then hold their representative to account for his or her actions.
- Each council member faces multiple competitors at each election
- Each council member therefore has a strong incentive to reach constructive agreements with opponents.
- Each council member can explain difficult decisions to constituents in term they can relate to
- Each group of constituents receives power proportional to its numbers
- Council likely to deliberate longer and harder — likely to be less decisive — than councils elected by other methods.