Many people enter politics to obtain power and status more than to serve the public. Could PAR have any effect on this?
PAR might affect what kind of people had the best chance to win office, but we are not counting on that. Our main point is that a well-designed election system would ensure that each politician was held to account for his or her actions.
On that score, current elections are largely failures. Since a typical voter cannot obtain a representative who shares his or her own political outlook, most voters pay no attention to what their local or state representatives are doing. Incumbents can therefore do a poor job, yet still win reelection.
With PAR, though, each voter could get a representative who shared his or her political priorities. So voters would have far more incentive than now to scrutinize their representative and, if he or she failed to make progress on the major issues, to replace him.
Incumbents have the advantages of name recognition, access to campaign contributors, and a government-paid staff. How would PAR change any of this?
With PAR, each voter would have a preferential ballot and far more candidates to choose from than today. So any voter who thought an incumbent had done a mediocre job would have every reason to rank other candidates ahead of incumbents. Incumbents would thus win far less often than now.
You’re assuming that if voters could more freely choose their representatives that most voters would make sound choices. Is that assumption justified?
Consider other situations in which people have gained more freedom of choice. Take the case of workers at the Ford Motor Company in the early 1980s. They were known to have the lowest morale in their industry and were producing cars with a reputation for poor quality. So managers at one plant did an experiment. They installed a switch at every workstation that let any employee stop the whole assembly line. So if a worker saw a defect on any car, he or she could halt the line to fix the problem. The workers were soon stopping the line over 20 times a day, far more often than managers had expected. But most halts lasted under 30 seconds. Employee morale soared. Car quality climbed as well. So the managers deemed the experiment a big success.
A typical American voter today is like a worker on the old Ford assembly line: Whatever a voter does in the polling booth makes no difference that he or she can see. Whatever a typical voter does, he or she cannot get a representative who shares his strongest beliefs. Understandably, most voters don’t bother to find out where the candidates stand on the issues.
What the Ford experiment shows is that people given a real choice put far more thought into what they’re doing. We need to apply that lesson in the voting booth.
Liberals fight among themselves on issue after issue. So do conservatives, as do moderates. So how could any politician ever satisfy most of his or her voters?
Most newspaper readers have a favorite columnist whom they disagree with on some issues, yet whom they stay loyal to. Why? Because a typical columnist articulates a philosophy or way of thinking that appeals to his or her readers so strongly that they stay loyal, even though they disagree with some of his stands.
A PAR lawmaker would be in a similar position. Nearly all of his or her constituents would share his priorities for the community, so he could work for causes that nearly all of his voters would support. If he did that job well, most of his voters would remain loyal — even if they disagreed with him on some issues.
Wouldn’t some voters prefer a lawmaker who stayed committed to his principles rather than one who was willing to compromise? So couldn’t PAR lead to even more gridlock?
On this website, we have cited many cases in which all sides advanced their principles. It’s our experience that good negotiators stay firmly committed to their principles and forge agreements by creative problem-solving more than by compromising. When they compromise, it’s on the details, not their principles.
Furthermore, surveys show that the vast majority of Americans want opposing political camps to work out their differences. So if American voters could more freely choose their lawmakers, most voters would prefer a good negotiator over a strident ideologue. And voters who preferred stridency would probably grow weary of seeing their camp make no progress while other camps did.
To find the best solutions requires top-notch research and analysis. Will politicians whose main skill is winning votes ever be up to that job?
Lawmakers can turn to staff members and outside experts for quality research and analysis. But to get lawmakers to take full advantage of those resources, they would need strong incentives to seek out first-rate solutions. PAR’s purpose is to give them those incentives.
No matter what their incentives, could any city council ever craft intelligent agreements on all the complex issues it has to deal with?
On this website, we have cited many cases in which representatives from the relevant camps hammered out agreements that benefited all sides. A PAR city council could craft equally intel-ligent agreements by bringing together representatives from the relevant camps. That is, a council could ask each group with a stake in the issue to pick a spokesperson and give them an opportunity to work out a resolution they could all accept. If that effort succeeded, the council would have the option to enact the measure into law.
Alternatively, a city council can assemble representatives from within its own ranks. For instance, to write sensible tax legislation, a council can appoint a committee consisting of one representative from each faction of the council with a particular agenda on taxes.
If a council has many members, to find the appropriate representatives, the council might need to hold its own PAR elections. That is, each lawmaker who wanted a seat on the committee dealing with taxes could publicly post his or her agenda on that issue. Each council member could then fill out a preferential ballot, picking which candidate for the committee was his or her first choice, his second choice, and so on. The lowest-drawing candidates would be eliminated one-by-one until a committee of, say, 10 members remained, a committee that would cover the council’s range of views on taxes.
If the committee forged an agreement, each member could make a case for it to the colleagues he or she was representing. If, on the other hand, the committee failed to reach an agreement, at the next committee election, most council members would likely elect someone else as their spokesperson on taxes. So every committee member would have an incentive to make progress on the issue.
How does PAR compare to other election methods used elsewhere?
PAR has some features in common with the methods of proportional representation used in Europe and the proportional method that 22 American cities tried in the early 1900s. With these other proportional methods, however, each voter is represented by a bloc of lawmakers, not by an individual. So, a voter does not get a specific representative that the voter can hold to account for major policy decisions.
With PAR, by contrast, each voter gets one specific person as their representative, one person who shares their political outlook, one person they have good reasons to listen to, one person they can hold accountable for making sound decisions, one person they can easily replace if he or she fails to make progress on the major issues.
What reason is there to believe that a change as ambitious as PAR can happen in American cities?
Since 2004, several cities — including San Francisco, Oakland and Minneapolis — have adopted “instant run-off voting” (IRV), which combines preferential ballots with single-member districts. So IRV does not have all the benefits of PAR. That is, in legislative elections that produce just one winner, most voters cannot obtain a representa-tive who shares their own political orientation.
For elections that must produce one winner, however, such as for mayoral elections, IRV is clearly superior to current methods. That is, voters who have a preferential ballot feel they have a far greater choice than in current elections in which many voters feel they have to choose between the lesser of two evils. Since San Francisco adopted IRV, voter satisfaction and turnout have climbed. Other cities are therefore considering IRV.
Meanwhile, the success of citizens in San Francisco and other cities in adopting prefe-rential elections shows that the kind of changes we advocate are clearly doable.
Aren’t there simpler ways to fix local governments, such as campaign finance reform, term limits, or redrawing districts to make council races more competitive?
With any of the above reforms, most community residents would still be unable to obtain a representative who shared their own political outlook. Most residents would thus remain uninterested in what their representative was doing. So a typical representative would still have little incentive to engage in the hard work of negotiating intelligent agreements on complex issues.
Furthermore, with any of the above reforms, a typical lawmaker could still stay in office just by making his main election opponent look worse than himself. So most lawmakers would still have stronger incentives to bash political opponents than to work productively with them.
The bottom line is that if we want our town and city councils to grapple sensibly with the complex challenges of these times, we need a reform designed to do that job. We need to subject each lawmaker to intense competition for his or her seat. We need to give each voter a strong incentive to scrutinize the candidates and evaluate his or her representative. We need to give voters the power to replace any lawmaker who fails to make real progress on the major issues.