古村治彦です。
アメリカの中間選挙がいよいよ近づいてきました。今回は、今度の中間選挙のことも入りつつ、アメリカ政治全体について書かれた少し古い記事をご紹介します。
アメリカ政治の特徴は、三権分立(Separation of government
branches)であり、司法、行政。立法の各機関がそれぞれを抑制する、チェック・アンド・バランス(check
and balance)の機能を持っているということです。これはアメリカの建国の父たち(Founding
Fathers)が、独裁者や独裁的な党派がアメリカ政治を支配しないようにするということで設計したものです。
アメリカの場合、面白いのは、選挙制度もいろいろとあるということ、そして、各州が国政選挙においてその選挙方法を決めることが出来るということです。アメリカ連邦下院議員選挙は2年ごとに全議席(435議席)が対象となります。人口に応じて選挙区が区割りされています。ですから、連邦下院議員が多く出る州と少ない州があります。
連邦上院議員(100議席)の場合は、任期は6年、選挙はだいたい3分の1ずつ2年ごとにあります。これは選挙期間でも連邦議員が残るように設計されているもので、日本の参議院と似ています。連邦上院議員は各州2名ずつ、どんなに大きな州でも2名、どんなに人口が少ない州でも2名となっています。
アメリカ大統領は4年ごとの選挙です。特徴としては、各州で割り当てられている選挙人(electors)を取り合うというものです。ある州で選挙人が10名と設定されている場合、A候補が得票率50.1%、B候補が49.9%だった場合、A候補が10名を全て取る、勝利者総取り(winner takes all)方式です。ここ最近起きたことは、全米の総得票数で負けた候補が選挙人数で勝利をするということです。2000年のジョージ・W・ブッシュ、2016年のドナルド・トランプがそれぞれ勝利した大統領選挙でこの現象が起きました。
アメリカ政治の特徴としては、二大政党制(two-party system)もあります。民主、共和両党以外にも、小さな政党や地域政党もありますが、州レヴェル、国レヴェルで大きな勢力になるに至っていません。これは各選挙で選ばれるのが1名の小選挙区(single-member districts)ということも理由として挙げられます。モーリス・デュヴェルジェという政治学者は、選挙区における選ばれる議員数と政党の数には法則性があり、それを「n+1」だと主張しました。これをデュヴェルジェの法則と言います。アメリカは単純な小選挙区制ですから、n=1となり、政党数は2となります。大選挙区制や比例代表制であると、多党制になるということになります。
以下の記事では、まず、現在の選挙制度は、都市部を基盤とする民主党よりも、地方を基盤とする共和党の方に有利になるようになっていると主張しています。確かに現在、民主党が強い地域はアメリカ東海岸と西海岸の大都市がある地域で、農業などが盛んな州は共和党が強いという図式になっています。また、地方レヴェルでは共和党が政治を牛耳っていることが多く、選挙区の区割りで共和党が有利になるように設定しているとしています。
レッドステイト(共和党優勢)とブルーステイト(民主党優勢)
五大湖周辺の工業地帯(ラストベルト)と呼ばれる地域は、これまで労働組合が強く、民主党が強いとされてきましたが、2016年の大統領選挙で、トランプ大統領が軒並み勝利を収めたこと、白人労働者たちがトランプを支持したことは日本でも数多く報道されました。
21世紀に入ってのアメリカ政治の特徴は、民主、共和両党のつばぜり合いが激しくなり、お互いがお互いの主張を完全に拒絶するという、党派争いの色彩が濃くなっているということです。そうした中、人々は、よりどちらかの政党を支持する方向に進むか、どちらも支持しないかということになっています。現在では、「自分はどちらの政党も支持していない(independent)」という有権者が多くなっています。
トランプ大統領になって、この傾向はより強くなっているようですが、トランプ大統領の政策は党派争い自体をあざ笑うかのようなものとなっています。トランプ大統領は共和党所属の大統領ですが、彼の行っている政策、特に経済ナショナリズムに基づいた関税政策といわゆる貿易戦争は、民主党の主張そのものです。「普通の」共和党所属の大統領であれば、行わない政策です。奇妙なねじれ減少をトランプ大統領が生み出しています。
もっと言うと、アメリカ国内では、二大政党制についての懐疑論が出ているようです。二大政党制のために、党派争いが強くなって、建国の父たちが目指した、大きな力を持つ存在が出ないように抑制しながら、合意に基づいて政治を行う、ということが出来ていないという考えです。そのために、大選挙区制(multi-member districts)と選好選挙(ranked-choice
voting)を導入しようという主張も出ています。実現性は低いですが、これが実現すると、多党制が出現することになるでしょう。
簡単に言ってしまえば、合意よりも党派争いに終始する、民主、共和の現在の二大政党に対する不満が出ているということだと思います。イギリスでもそうですが、二大政党制の本家、家元のような国々で二大政党制に対する懐疑論が出ていることは私たち、日本人もよく考えねばならないことだと思います。
1990年代からの政治改革においては、二大政党制の実現が目指されました。しかし、二大政党制が本当に良い制度なのかどうか、についてよくよく考えてみる必要があります。
そもそも二大政党制下のアメリカでは、日本でイメージするような「決められる政治」は行われていません。連邦議会で可決され、大統領が署名することで成立する法律も、法案は、連邦上院、連邦下院のそれぞれの小委員会から始まって様々な過程を経ることで修正が加えられていきます。また、法案は途中で廃案になるものが多く、法律になるものは10%程度に過ぎないとも言われています。
日本で言われているような即断即決、粗雑な多数決主義がデモクラシーではないということを私は認識しておくべきでしょう。
以下に、記事の内容を箇条書きしたものをご紹介します。
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・今年11月の中間選挙の連邦下院議員選挙(全議席改選)に関する世論調査では平均して、民主党が共和党を約7%リードしている。
・しかし、民主党が確実に過半数を制するということではない。民主党が総得票数で過半数を得て議会でも過半数を占める確率は70%、民主党が総得票数で過半数を得ても共和党が議会で過半数を占める確率は30%という結果が出ている。
・この理由は、民主党はより少ない選挙区において大差で勝利し、共和党はより多い選挙区でより少ない票差で勝利するということが挙げられる(平均すると民主党は67%、共和党は63%の得票率で勝利する)。
・選挙区がこのような結果になるように設定されている、民主党支持者は都市部に密集して住んでいるということがこのような結果になる理由である。
・民主党が共和党と五分の議席を獲得するためには53.5%の得票を必要とするシステムになっている。
・過去3回の選挙では、共和党は民主党よりも獲得票数は少なかったが、54%の議席を獲得した。2014年の選挙では、共和党は51%の得票数で55%の議席数を得た。
・連邦上院の場合は100議席のうち、3分の1ずつを2年ごとに選挙している。連邦上院でも共和党が少ない得票数でそれに見合わない数の議席を得ている。これまでの6年間で見てみると、民主党が総得票数で共和党を6%上回ったが、両院において議席数では過半数を得ることが出来なかった。
・アメリカ憲法の起草者たちは、連邦上院に関して人口ではなく場所を代表するように制度設計した。
・アメリカ大統領選挙は「選挙人(electoral college)」制度となっている。これで、全体の得票数で上回った候補者を、小さい州を僅差で勝利した候補者が破るということが可能となる。
・人々が集まって住んでいる場所は民主党、離れて住んでいる場所は共和党が強い。このような傾向は問題だ。それは、アメリカ憲法が反政党的な憲法だからだ。
・アメリカの建国の父たちは権力が集中しないように、牽制されるようにしたいと考えた。党派が格レヴェルの行政機関において党派で一致した行動がとれないように牽制したと考えた。
・初代大統領ジョージ・ワシントン、第二代大統領ジョン・アダムスは、二大政党制が彼らの建設しようとした政府を破壊するかもしれないと考えた。
・連邦上院を例にとると、全ての州が平等に代表を送ることが出来るようになっており、巨大な州が他の州を支配することはできない。しかし、これによって、少ない人口の小さい州が過大な代表を送っているということにもなる。
・このようなねじれた状況はあまり大きなインパクトを与えてこなかった。二大政党は都市部と地方で激しく争ってきた。
・人口密度と政治志向はより強い関係性を持つようになっている。人口の多い上位13州の連邦下院議員数は民主党121に対して、共和党73である。残りの州では共和党163に対して民主党72である。
・人口が少ない州に対して、人口が多い州は隷属しているということになる。これに対して、連邦下院議員では人口において議席数が各州に割り当てられているし、大統領選挙では影響力を持っているという反論もある。
・南北戦争後、人口と連邦上下両院の投票制度と投票数は大きく変化した。しかし、選挙人制度は維持された。人口の少ない州の選挙に与える影響力は維持されている。
・アメリカ合衆国憲法では選挙区の設定は各州の行うべきものとされている。そのためにゲリマンダーということが古くからおこなわれている。
・現在の民主党は都市部を基盤としているが、人口を基にした勝利者総取りの選挙システムは自分たちに不利だと分かっている。選挙区の区割りも自分たちに不利だと分かっている。州レヴェルでは共和党の方が優勢なためにこのようになっている。数が少ない都市部での選挙区で民主党は大差で勝利するが、共和党はそれ以外の選挙区で勝利して多数を占める。2012年の選挙の際の区割りの見直しにおいて、48%の選挙区は共和党によって設定し直され、民主党が行ったのはわずかに10%だった。
・民主党は以前のように都市部以外の地方にもアピールをすべきだ、そうすれば憲法が定める人口が少ない州への過大な代表数ということも問題にならないという反論がある。
・アメリカの人口分布と構成は大きく変化している。アメリカ人はこれまでの歴史の中で最も多い割合で都市部に住んでいる。都市部を基盤にし、都市部の人々の希望を叶えることが長期で有効な戦略である。もちろん健全な民主政治体制にとって良いことではないかもしれない。
・有権者の得票数によって大統領を選ぶこと、連邦上院のシステムを変えることには憲法の変更が必要となる。連邦上下両院で3分の2の賛成が必要なので現実的ではない。
・全州の3分の2の発議で憲法会議(constitutional convention)を開くことで憲法の変更が行える。
・選挙人制度の廃止については裁判所を通じてのやり方がある。勝利者総取りで選挙人が全て商社に取られるのは憲法違反だという訴訟が起こされている。
・2007年にメリーランド州において、「メリーランド州の選挙人は大統領選挙において全米の総得票数で多かった候補者に投票する」という州法(NPVIC)が可決成立した。それ以降11の州で同様の州法が成立した。現在、172名の選挙人がこの州法の制限下にある。選挙人数の過半数270の過半数を大きく超える数字だ。
・このような州法が成立したのは民主党が州の立法を握っている州だ。共和党の中にはこれは共和党にとってもメリットがあると考える人たちがいる。2004年から2012年にかけての大統領選挙では、北部と沿岸の州には「青い壁」があり、民主党に有利だと言われていた、2016年の大統領選挙で、トランプは北部州において総得票数では負けながら、選挙人を獲得できた。トランプが北部州に穴をあけたということになる。
・連邦下院の選挙区割りにおいてゲリマンダーが出来ないようにしている州が増えている。
・連邦下院議員ドン・ベイヤーは、連邦下院議員選挙に大選挙区と選好投票(複数の候補者に支持する順番に1、2、3・・・とつけていく)制度の導入を訴えている。これで有権者の意向がより反映されると主張している。
・ベイヤーは現在の議会でこの法案を通すことは不可能としている。しかし、全米各州や各都市で選好投票が導入されている。
・アメリカ政治における党派の衝突を選好投票は緩和すると考えられている。アメリカの建国の父たちは二大政党制を警戒していたが、憲法などで定められたルールによって二大政党制が確立された。
・アメリカの建国の父たちは法律が幅広い合意によってつくられることを望んでいた。強力な二院を持つ連邦議会と大統領が法律に合意する、連邦最高裁判所がそれらの法律の合憲性を担保するというものだ。二大政党制では合意に必ずしも高い価値は置かれない。政府が2つの政党によって分裂させられていると、建国の父たちが権力の抑制のために与えていた力をお互いの提案を拒絶するために使う。もし一つの党が統一的なコントロールの力を手に入れたら、権力の抑制を無視し、無力な野党に自分たちの意思を強制できる。
・19世紀、民主党とウィッグ党はそれぞれ奴隷制度廃止に賛成と反対の派閥に分かれた。これによって超党派の連合がより形成しやすくなった。
・南北戦争後、南部諸州の白人たちはエイブラハム・リンカーン率いる共和党を、南部を破壊したとして非難した。それから共和党への投票を拒絶して1世紀経った。これによって、民主党の連邦議員には人種分離主義者と保守的な南部出身者が入り、民主党と共和党はイデオロギー的に重なる部分があった。
・1960年代、民主党は人種的平等を主張するようになった。これによって共和党は南部諸州に浸透していった。2010年代までに南部諸州で白人が多い選挙区は一様に共和党が勝つようになった。
・支持基盤が再構成された民主、共和両党はイデオロギー上でますます離れるようになった。
・可決する法律の数が、1975年から1994年までの時期と1994年以降の時期で比べると40%も下がっている。
・改革は難しい状況にある。民主、共和両党は強力であり続けようとし、党派性の強い政治を維持しようとする。
・アメリカ社会はこれまでになく分裂している。党派争いの激しい政治はアメリカ社会の分裂の原因でもあり、結果でもある。
(貼り付けはじめ)
The minority majority
America’s electoral system gives the Republicans
advantages over Democrats
The constitution was not designed for the
two-party politics it unwittingly encouraged
Print edition | Briefing
Jul 12th 2018 | WASHINGTON, DC
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/07/12/americas-electoral-system-gives-the-republicans-advantages-over-democrats?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/americaselectoralsystemgivestherepublicansadvantagesoverdemocratstheminoritymajority
WHEN pollsters ask Americans which party
they plan to vote for in the elections for the House of Representatives this
November, those preferring the Democrats lead those preferring the Republicans
by around seven percentage points. But this does not mean the Democrats are a
shoo-in to win the House. The Economist’s statistical model of the race for
control of the House of Representatives—which uses this sort of “generic
ballot” polling, along with other data—currently says that, although the
likelihood of a Democratic majority in the popular vote is a remarkable 69.9%,
the Republicans still have a 30% chance of holding on to the House (see chart
1).
The source of this discrepancy is that Democrats will win their seats with big majorities in fewer
districts, whereas Republicans will prevail by narrower margins in a larger
number of districts. In 2016 Democrats who beat Republican opponents won an
average of 67.4% of the two-party vote in their districts, whereas Republicans
who defeated Democrats received an average of 63.8%. This imbalance is partly
due to deliberate attempts to create districts that provide such results, and
partly just down to the fact that Democrats tend to live more tightly bunched
together in cities. Together, these two factors put up quite an obstacle.
According to our model, the Democrats need to win 53.5% of all votes cast for
the two major parties just to have a 50/50 chance of winning a majority in the
House.
If this imbalance were limited to a single
chamber of the legislature, or a single election cycle, the Democrats’ frequent
carping about a stacked electoral deck might sound like sour grapes. All
electoral systems have their oddities. But changes in where Americans live and
contradictions in their constitution—a document designed to work with many weak
factions that has instead encouraged and entrenched an increasingly polarised
two-party system—have opened gaps between what the voters choose and the
representation they get in every arm of the federal government. In recent
decades these disparities have consistently favoured the Republicans, and there
is no reason to think that trend is going to change on its own.
In the past three House elections,
Republicans’ share of House seats has been 4-5 percentage points greater than
their share of the two-party vote. In 2012 they won a comfortable 54% of the
chamber despite receiving fewer votes than their Democratic opponents; in 2014
they converted a 51% two-party-vote share into 55% of the seats.
Such comparisons are harder for the Senate,
where only a third of the 100 seats are contested in any election. But adding
together all the votes from the most recent election of each senator,
Republicans got only 46% of them, and they hold 51 of the seats. According to
research by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, an electoral-analysis
site, even if Democrats won the national vote by six percentage points over a
six-year cycle, they would probably still be a minority in both houses.
That the Senate should be disproportionate
would not have disappointed the men who wrote America’s constitution. They
wanted it to represent places, not people, and there is a case for that; other
constitutions, such as Germany’s, look to ensure regional representation in
their upper house. But when it comes to its presidency, America stands alone.
In all the world’s other 58 fully
presidential democracies—those in which the president is both head of state and
head of government—the winning candidate gets the most votes in the final, or only,
round of voting. But due to the “electoral college” system that America’s
founders jury-rigged in part to square the needs of democracy with the
demography of slavery, this does not hold true for America. States vote in the
college in proportion to their combined representation in both houses of
Congress. This set-up means that a candidate who wins narrowly in many small
and smallish states can beat one who gets more votes overall, but racks most of
them up in big majorities in a few big states.
During almost all of the 20th century this
did not matter much; the candidate who got the most votes won every election
from 1896 to 1996. But both of the past two Republicans to win the presidency
have received fewer votes when first elected than their Democratic opponents
did. In the contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000, this margin was
a modest 0.5 percentage points. In 2016, however, it was substantial: Hillary
Clinton’s lead of 2.1 percentage points was larger than those enjoyed by the
victorious John F. Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968 and Jimmy Carter in
1976.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?
America’s various disproportional
representations are the result of winner-takes-all voting and a two-party
system where party allegiance and geography have become surprisingly highly
correlated. Places where people live close together vote Democratic, places
where they live farther apart vote Republican (see chart 2). Under some
electoral systems this would not matter very much. Under America’s it has come
to matter a lot, in part because of an anti-party constitution.
America’s founders wanted power to be hard
to concentrate, and for people who held some powers to be structurally at odds
with those who held others. To this end they created a system in which distinct
branches and levels of government provided checks and balances on each other.
They hoped these arrangements would be sufficient to hobble any factions which
sought to co-ordinate their actions across various levels and branches of
government. The first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams, both
warned that a two-party system, in particular, would be anathema to the model
of government they were trying to build.
Aware that they could not solve the problem
of parties altogether, the founders thought the constitution would at least
ensure that they were reasonably numerous and ineffectual. But some of the
features they built into it inadvertently encouraged politicians to concentrate
themselves into just two blocs. And some of the mechanisms they put in place to
guard against other concentrations of power went on to exacerbate the problems
that such a two-party system can cause.
Take the Senate. To make sure the largest
states do not dominate the rest, the constitution provides equal representation
for all the states, large and small alike. This builds in an
over-representation for people in small or sparsely populated places.
For most of the country’s history, that
bias had only a modest impact. The parties the founders feared competed
strongly with each other in both urban and rural areas. Recently, however,
population density has become a strong proxy for political preferences. Today
the 13 most densely populated states have 121 Democratic House members and 73
Republican ones; the remainder have 163 Republicans and 72 Democrats. According
to data compiled by Jonathan Rodden of Stanford, nearly half the variance in
the county-level vote shares in the presidential election of 2016 could be
explained solely by their number of voters per square kilometre. Now that the
rural has a party, a constitution that favours the rural favours that party.
The constitution’s tipping of the scales
towards small states was not limited to those with small populations in
absolute terms. It also applied to those with a small number of voters compared
with the size of their population: that is, states in which much of the
population was enslaved. These states argued that their slave populations
should count towards their allocation of seats in the House and the weight
given to their preferences when choosing a president; the other states
resisted. A compromise was struck whereby, when it came to the assignment of
political power, a slave counted for three-fifths of a free man or woman.
This odious arithmetic required the
creation of an electoral college for the presidency, since it divorced the
power of a state’s votes from the number of people actually casting them. And
the founders required an absolute majority in the college to elect a president—if
no candidate received over 50% of electoral votes, the choice fell to the
House. This created an incentive for the formation of nationwide parties whose
candidates could win the necessary majority, thus encouraging the development
of a two-party system.
The constitution does not specify how
states must allocate their electors—conceivably, states could have split their
votes according to the proportion of the vote cast in that state for each
candidate. But in order to maximise their influence over the final result, all
but two of the states wound up casting their electoral votes on a
winner-takes-all basis. As a result smaller parties could not amass any
electoral votes at all, which locked in the two-party model.
The hard edge that you’re settling for
After the civil war, population and voting
were, in principle if not in Jim Crow practice, aligned. But the electoral
college persisted, and with it a second formal bias towards low-population
states, though not as marked as the one in the Senate. As of the census of
2010, the five most rural states wielded about 50% more electoral votes, and
three times as many senators, per resident as the five most urban ones did.
True to the ideal that power should be
dispersed, the constitution makes the drawing of districts for House elections
a matter for the states. But once there were national parties that competed for
state office, too, governors and state legislatures lost little time in drawing
up districts specifically designed to improve their party’s chances on the
national stage. This gerrymandering is not a new phenomenon; it got its name in
1812.
In the run-up to an election held in 1841,
the Democrats running Alabama chose to use a voting system in which all five
representatives would be elected statewide, ensuring an all-Democrat
delegation. Fearful of similar setbacks elsewhere, the Whig majorities in both
houses of Congress passed a law requiring all states to use winner-takes-all,
single-member districts. In 1932 a Supreme Court ruling enabled states to
reinstate statewide elections for House members, and many did. But in order to
prevent southern states from denying representation to black voters Congress
restored the single-member-district requirement in 1967.
As a party of the cities, today’s Democrats
would find themselves at a disadvantage in any geographically based
winner-takes-all electoral system in which receiving 99% of the vote is no
better than getting 51%. But gerrymandering adds to the disadvantage.
Republicans run more state governments than Democrats do, in part because in
state legislatures, too, the Democrats concentrated in cities tend to win
bigger majorities in fewer districts. That gives the Republicans more
opportunities to game the system: in the 2012 redistricting cycle, the boundaries
of 48% of House districts were drawn entirely by Republican officials, compared
with just 10% by Democratic ones.
One response to all this is to say that the
problem is the Democrats’ to solve. They used to appeal outside the cities,
towns and denser suburbs; if they were to do so again the constitutional bias
towards less populated places would no longer trouble them. But although this
may seem like sound politics, it is more to wish away, or paper over, the
problem than to solve it. The distribution and make-up of America’s population
really has changed. More people live in cities than have ever done so before,
and they want, and believe in, different things from those who don’t. Adapting
policies to appeal to an ever-shrinking share of the population—just 19% of
Americans lived in rural areas in 2016, down from 25% in 1990 and 36% in
1950—against the wishes of the party’s urban base cannot be a stable long-term
strategy. Nor is it a recipe for a healthy democracy.
An alternative would be to try to make the
system equitable given today’s aligned ideological and geographical
polarisation. This is not easy. Creating a directly elected presidency or
restructuring representation in the Senate would require changing the
constitution, and just now the idea of an amendment aimed at either of these
goals receiving assent from two-thirds of both houses of Congress is
implausible. That said, there is another mechanism for tabling an amendment: a
constitutional convention called by two-thirds of the states. This route has
never been used, but activists for a balanced-budget amendment have signed up
28 of the 34 states they need for such a convention. If it were ever to be
held, other amendments might possibly be tabled there, too, including perhaps
some that reform the voting system.
Absent that wild card, though, most efforts
at reform are aimed below the constitutional threshold. On the electoral
college, activists think they have found paths to abolition that not only fit
within the constitution’s constraints, but do not even require action by
Congress.
One of these runs through the courts. A
campaign led by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard, and David Boies,
an eminent trial lawyer, has filed suits in four states arguing that the
winner-takes-all allocation of their electoral-college votes is
unconstitutional. If all a state’s electoral-college votes go to a candidate
supported by just 51% of that state’s voters, they argue, the other 49% have in
effect been disenfranchised. How this argument fares has yet to be seen. But to
achieve its goals it would need to be upheld by the Supreme Court. Invalidating
the voting procedure used for most of American history by the vast majority of
states would be a big step for the court—especially given its current
conservative make-up.
A path that may prove easier makes use of
state legislation. In 2007 Maryland passed the National Popular Vote Interstate
Compact (NPVIC), a law that obliges the state’s presidential electors to vote
for the winner of the nationwide popular vote rather than the victor in their
state—so long as states representing an overall majority of the electoral
college have approved an identical bill. Eleven states have since followed
Maryland’s lead. The NPVIC now has 172 electoral votes committed, over halfway
to the magic number of 270—a majority in the college.
Just cut it loose
So far, the compact has become law only in
states with Democratic legislatures. But some Republicans see its merit, too.
In the presidential elections of 2004, 2008 and 2012, the disposition of states
in play meant that the Democratic candidate would have won the electoral
college had the national popular vote been tied, and a “blue wall” of northern
and coastal states was said to give Democratic candidates an inbuilt advantage.
The holes Donald Trump kicked in the rusty northern bit of that wall, and his
coupling of an electoral-college win with a popular-vote defeat, has
understandably dampened Republican enthusiasm. But John Koza, the leader of the
NPVIC effort, says that as of last year 153 of the 156 Republican state
legislators who sponsored NPVIC bills in 2016 are still on board. Last year
Saul Anuzis and Michael Steele, the former chairmen of the Michigan and
national Republican parties, wrote that the NPVIC was “an idea whose time has
come”.
The House, too, could be reformed without
any constitutional amendment. Again, the legal route looks hard. The Supreme
Court sent challenges to various forms of gerrymandering back down to the lower
courts in its recent term, rather than issuing a firm ruling. Brett Kavanaugh,
Mr Trump’s recently announced nominee to the court, would probably, if
confirmed, be less likely to restrict the practice than the departing Anthony
Kennedy was.
But this has been a banner year for anti-gerrymandering
ballot initiatives which bypass governors and legislatures and their party
allegiances. In May, Ohio voters approved a measure making it harder for the
state legislature to draw up partisan districts. In November voters in Colorado,
Michigan, Missouri and Utah will be able to vote for reforms that either make
redrawing districts a bipartisan business or outsource it to non-partisan
commissions.
A more ambitious initiative, if one that is
less likely to see short-term success, has been introduced in the House. Don
Beyer, a Democratic congressman, has sponsored a bill mandating the nationwide
adoption of multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting (RCV), a system
used in Australia, Ireland and Sri Lanka. Under Mr Beyer’s proposal, voters
would not choose a single candidate, but rank the candidates standing by order
of preference until reaching someone whom they did not want to support under
any circumstances. When the ballots were counted, the contender with the fewest
first-choice votes would be eliminated, and his or her support reallocated to
those voters’ second choices. This would then be repeated until the field was
reduced to the required size—between three and five representatives, depending
on the seat. The system is broadly, though not entirely, proportional. It also
tends to ensure that candidates acceptable to a broad swathe of voters are
rewarded for that breadth.
Mr Beyer says he knows his bill will not
pass in today’s Congress. But in June Maine became the first state to use RCV
for primaries for Congress and the governor’s race. Various cities—including,
recently, San Francisco—have started to use it. In Utah, one of the most
Republican states in the country, the lower chamber has passed a bill mandating
RCV in elections, though it failed to get out of committee in the state senate.
It is hardly a groundswell of support—but it is more than there was.
And unlike other proposals for making
voting more representational, RCV might go some way to dampening down the dynamics
that have made American politics so partisan. The way in which the voting
system fails in a country where party and geography align is, after all, just
one part of a bigger problem: a constitution that was set up to work with
something other than the two-national-party system that the founders wanted to
avoid but which, due in part to the voting rules they imposed, captured their
country.
The founders wanted to ensure that laws
would command broad consensual approval: two powerful houses of Congress and
the president had to agree on them, the Supreme Court had to underwrite their
constitutionality. In a two-party system consensus is not highly valued, and
ways of thwarting it are easily found. If government is divided between the two
parties, they can use the checks and balances the founders provided to veto
each other’s proposals, preventing policies from being enacted even if they
might, on their merits, draw consensual support. If one party secures unified
control, it can ignore the checks and balances and impose its will on the
temporarily powerless opposition, consensus be damned.
When parties are broad churches, and when
there are causes that, for at least some of their members, matter more than
party unity, these problems are minimised. And that is how it was for much of
American history. In the early 19th century both Democrats and Whigs were
divided into pro- and anti-abolition factions, which made bipartisan alliance
easier. After the civil war white Southerners blamed Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans
for laying waste to their homeland, refusing to vote for them over the
subsequent century. That filled the Democratic Congressional delegation with
segregationist and conservative Southerners, producing two parties with
considerable ideological overlap. According to Sarah Binder of George
Washington University, in the mid-20th century the voting records of over 30%
of federal legislators were closer to the overall centre than they were to the
midpoints of those representatives’ political parties.
But in the 1960s the Democratic Party
embraced racial equality. Over the generation which followed, the Republicans
were able to take the South from it. By 2010 congressional delegations from
white districts in the South were uniformly Republican. The realigned parties
became much more ideologically distinct (see chart 3). The voting record of the
most liberal Republican is now far to the right of that of the most
conservative Democrat. Ms Binder’s numbers show that the “moderates” in
Congress can now be counted on one hand.
The result has been a great deal of
gridlock—aided, in the Senate, by filibusters that used to be rare and are now
the norm. Congress has approved around 40% fewer laws per session since 1994
than it did from 1975-94. The baleful equilibrium is punctuated, when control
of the various branches aligns, by spurts of partisan lawmaking. At present,
the main check on the Republican use of that dominance is their internal
division. Since 2010, majority-party leaders have generally refused to bring
legislation to the floor that does not command a majority of their own party.
As William Connelly of Washington & Lee University writes, “intra-party
factionalism curbs the excesses of inter-party factionalism”—but it exacts a
cost in stasis.
Poking that dog with a stick
This is not a situation open to easy
reform; nor would all want to reform it. Parties try to become strong, and
remain strong, for perfectly understandable political reasons. Strong parties
can be a boon, though the balance of benefit to risk is better in a system
designed with them in mind. And American society is divided in ways it was not
before; its partisan politics are in part a cause of that—but in part, too, a
consequence of it.
An electoral system that has its thumb on
the scales, though, is harder to defend. And measures to redress that electoral
bias through greater proportionality in the voting system might also help with
the broader issues of political division. Systems with elements of proportional
representation, such as that sought by reformers of the electoral college or
House districts, not only provide bulwarks against charges of illegitimacy.
They also have a tendency towards consensus of the sort the founders wanted.
There is a reason why, when choosing their own constitutions, no other country
has for long survived with a replica of the American model—and why when guiding
the design of constitutions for others, as they did in post-war Germany and
Japan, Americans have always suggested solutions quite unlike the one under
which they live.
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