[Note: From time to time, this blog issues a set of
postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous
postings. Of late, the blog has been
looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their
subject. It’s time to post a series of
such summary accounts. The advantage of
such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a
different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments. This and upcoming summary postings will be
preceded by this message.]
The last couple
of postings reviewed how the right of center advocates are facing disadvantages
and how, in turn, many of these citizens’ cherished beliefs or attitudes are
being, at least in their eyes, threatened.
But the right of center community is not the only faction feeling these
disadvantages. The left also finds that its
positions and policy choices are not being given fair hearing. The reasons for this are the topic of this
posting and those reasons further explain what is fueling the polarized
politics of today.
Victimized by these features is the
Democratic Party. That party has
suffered from undemocratic provisions of this nation’s constitutional
arrangement. These features, as a
consequence, favor the Republican Party.
In addition, they undermine what the system claims to be, that is a democracy.
When one questions such a basic
attribute, one needs to define his/her terms.
By democracy this writer means a political system that exhibits two
political qualities. One, it depends
ultimately on the people deciding what direction its governmental policies will
take – usually through the decisions made by the people’s representatives.[1] And two, in choosing those representatives
each citizen has an equal voice or, as the old adage goes, one man/woman, one
vote.
Probably the feature that attracts the
most attention is the reliance on the Electoral College to choose the nation’s
president. It becomes most relevant
every four years when that selection is made.
Under the above standard of equal voice, the people would select the
president in a straight popular winner-take-all voting system. But the Electorate College, for reasons not
necessary to review here (given how much press it gets), does allow for the
vote-getting loser to win the election as was the case in 2000 and 2016.[2]
And since states with the highest urban populations
tend to be of urban character in politics and other social realms, this structurally
hurts liberally biased citizens. But
structural bias does not end with the Electoral College. One political scientist who has looked into
this is Jonathan Rodden. [3]
His research
points out that in his review of US House elections since 2012 to 2019, Democratic
candidates received 1.4 million more votes than their Republican opponents, yet
Democrats only secured 45% of the seats of those various Congresses. And since 2002, this imbalanced result has
happened more often than not. As a
matter of fact, for Democrats to win a Congress majority, they need to win
overwhelmingly at the polls. And this
undemocratic result also happens at the state level where Democrats, on a
regular basis, are underrepresented, compared to how people vote in state
legislature elections.
Why? The usual cited reason is
gerrymandering. That is the conscious
drawing of representation districts so that one party, the Republican Party, is
benefited over the other, the Democratic Party.
Given that Democratic support tends to be concentrated in urban areas,
this factor causes Democratic voters to be “bunched” geographically. This allows for those who control state
legislatures – often Republicans – to draw district lines purposefully to
maintain their advantages. Those lines
are drawn every ten years and they rely on the census data that is collected in
years ending in zero, e.g., 2020.
But
Rodden’s research, while acknowledging the effect of gerrymandering, points out
a surprising finding. It turns out that
this undemocratic result is not unique to the US. When surveying various democratic systems,
this underrepresentation of urban areas – or over representation of rural areas
– affects all British derived systems.
That is, the systems of Great Britain and all of the former colonized areas
of British rule – e.g., Australia, New Zealand, Canada.
All
of these systems have majoritarian, district elections. Those elections select one representative per
district and that person is the candidate who wins the majority of votes in the
respective district. That can be
compared to continental European elections where the selections of representatives
are not winner-take-all affairs.
There,
the districts are larger, and voters elect a slate of representatives
reflecting which of them received the most votes. For example, if a district is to have three
representatives, the top three vote getters each win a seat. The result, therefore, is that winners represent
more than just the majority of voters of a district; they represent the
nation-wide majority.
This writer has thought of another solution. That would be the creation of a fourth branch
of government; one that would be charged with all aspects regarding elections in
the national government – perhaps states could have the same comparable branch
at their level. The members of that
branch would run elections, draw district lines, determine winners, and, to promote
the democratic quality of the system, encourage participation.
How the officials are chosen can be thought out so
as to minimize partisan drives or motivations that those fourth branch officials
might have. Short of that, perhaps these
functions could be assigned to the courts instead of the legislatures. There are several problems, though, with
judges making these decisions.
One, in states, judges are mostly elected and would
probably have motivations to treat these functions in a more partisan way. Two, judges are already busy enough with the
law. And three, these functions deserve their
own expertise, i.e., people handling elections call for specialized knowledge
having little to do with the intricacies of laws, per se. Therefore, this overall function deserves its
own independent branch along with the legislative, executive, and judicial
branches.
[1] This definition is a bit informal. A true democracy doesn’t have representatives
but holds large assemblages in which all citizens are invited to attend and
express their wishes over proposed policies.
Some call that a direct democracy as was the case in ancient
Athens. Once representatives are
instituted, one has a republic or democratic republic. Given the impracticality of having a direct
democracy in a polity the size of nation, like the US, the term democracy is
readily used to describe what the US has.
[2] Okay, a quick review:
The Electoral College, that elects the president, is made up of state delegations
of “electors” that usually allocates all its votes to the candidate who wins
the popular vote in the state from which the delegation emanates. Problem is that the number of each state’s
electors is made up of the total number of representatives that state has in
Congress: that’s two senators (no matter
how large that state’s population is) and the number of House representatives
which is based on population, but each has at least one elector (no matter how
small that state’s population is).
This
provision can distort the national popular vote sufficiently in that the
candidate who does not win the popular vote can win a majority in the Electoral
College and with that, the White House. It’s
rare, but it has happened too often, for some.
[3]
Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide
(New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019). The argument and evidence shared in this posting
on this issue is derived from Rodden’s book.
