Proportional representation is the principle that parties should be represented in a legislature in proportion to their popularity in the electorate. On The Bob Zadek Show the concept appears chiefly through Lee Drutman’s proposal for multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting, and is contrasted both with Israel’s hyper-proportional system and with the district-based model defended by Nick Seabrook.
The principle and its mechanism
Lee Drutman states the fundamental principle directly: parties should be represented in a legislature in proportion to their popularity in the electorate, so that a party at 15% of the electorate could get 15% of the seats in a state legislature Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020). The mechanism he describes is multi-winner ranked-choice voting, which he distinguishes from the single-winner version used in several Bay Area cities. Under ranked-choice voting a voter ranks candidates in order of preference; if a first-choice candidate is eliminated for lack of support among first preferences, the vote transfers to a backup choice. Drutman’s formulation is that the voter gets to vote their heart and still have the vote matter, which he says would help third parties get a foothold.
The multi-winner version, which Drutman says Ireland has used for almost 200 years, elects legislators from districts of typically about three to five members. In a five-member district, he explains, a candidate can win with 17% rather than a majority or plurality. He calls the plurality single-winner system that most of the world has left behind an antiquated technology, and notes that ranked-choice voting is also used in Australia.
The Israel objection
A caller, Jacob, raises Israel’s parliamentary system as a counterexample, calling it a paralytic nightmare, and asks about foreign financial entanglements in the impeachment proceedings Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020). Bob Zadek asks Drutman whether Israel’s system, which he describes as parliamentary in the mold of the British system, is an example that works.
Drutman answers by separating two dimensions that he says are often conflated: two-party versus multi-party, and parliamentary versus presidential. The UK, he notes, is a two-party parliamentary system with no separately elected president, while most European countries are parliamentary without a separately elected president, France being the major exception. Israel he describes as a parliamentary system with a form of hyper-proportional representation in which the entire country is one electoral district, with 120 seats apportioned at a very low threshold. He attributes the recent impasse substantially to Netanyahu’s stubborn politics rather than to the system itself, and identifies a further problem: Arab parties holding about 20% of the seats in the Knesset are treated as pariah parties that nobody will form a coalition with, which limits coalition formation.
Drutman states that 17 parties is too many and that he would rather have two parties than 17, but that the ideal is four to six. He cites Ireland and New Zealand as examples of thriving healthy democracies with roughly that number, and says political science and experience show the number of parties can be managed through the electoral system. He distinguishes his proposal from a single national proportional election, which he says would create 14 parties in the US, and describes what he recommends as a much more modest version, used in Ireland and Australia, that would probably create about four to six parties.
Routes to reform
Drutman suggests that California’s initiative process could be used to change the state to a proportional system for its state legislature, and that bringing the idea to local municipalities would serve as a proof of concept Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020). He says change is probably not going to come out of Washington, though he notes a bill called the Fair Representation Act, with a few co-sponsors including Ro Khanna, that would create the system for the entire country. He expects reform more likely to start in states like California.
In a later episode, Ned Foley says that if he could wave a magic wand he might replace the American system with the kind of thing Canada or Britain has, but that amending the Constitution is so difficult that the question becomes what can be done within a system that has a presidency, a Congress, and a Senate structured differently from the House Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022). He calls the House the part of the system most like a parliamentary system, and proposes self-districting, which he describes as closer to what other parliamentary systems use for proportional representation but potentially more appealing to Americans nervous about how Europeans structure their politics. Under self-districting, each citizen would choose which district to sign up for rather than having politicians draw the boundaries.
Foley notes that the requirement to have districts is not in the Constitution but an act of Congress first adopted, he believes, in 1842, and that some states in the old days chose statewide or at-large elections for their House seats — New Jersey in the 1830s, he says, may have had six or seven representatives all elected statewide, with no gerrymandering problem. He raises the question whether a legislature is better with a demographic diversity of voices — farmers, workers, people from different regions and age groups — or with every representative mirroring the same statewide majority.
The district alternative
Nick Seabrook frames the choice as between two ways of structuring a representative democracy Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022). In a proportional representation system, voters vote for a political party rather than a specific candidate, and based on the results a certain number of representatives from that party — usually from a list prepared ahead of the election — take seats, with the first names on the list becoming members of the legislature. Seabrook’s stated drawback is that in such a system there is no fundamental connection between the voter and their community and neighborhood and the identity of the person representing their interests in government.
That absence, he says, is why many countries including the United States use districts, dividing the jurisdiction into discrete geographic units of voters with a shared identity and a consensus of interest, so that the elected representative serves constituents and votes accordingly. Gerrymandering, in his account, is the manipulation of those district boundaries by the people responsible for drawing them, to achieve a preferred political outcome — often the re-election of the mapmakers and their allies, or the preservation of a governing party’s majority regardless of how people vote. The anti-democratic effects of gerrymandering, he says, stem from disrupting or severing the link between representatives and the people they are supposed to represent.
Across episodes: no arc, three angles
The topic appears in three episodes and the excerpts show no development from one to the next: Drutman (2020) supplies the definition and the multi-member ranked-choice mechanism, Foley (2022) proposes self-districting as an American-compatible form of proportional representation, and Seabrook (2022) states the party-list version and the district-based alternative. Bob Zadek’s own framing runs through the later two — in the Foley episode he says he has always looked with envy at the parliamentary system and describes Madison’s factions offsetting factions as, in effect, a description of one, and in the Seabrook episode he opens by asking whether districts give a vote more meaning Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022) Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe how seats would be allocated under any specific proportional formula, nor the threshold or district magnitude that would apply to a US state legislature. They do not report the text, status or provisions of the Fair Representation Act beyond Drutman’s description of it as creating the system for the entire country. They do not state the outcome of any election held under proportional rules, and the Foley excerpt ends mid-sentence before he completes his answer to Zadek’s question about diversity of voices.