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Proportional Representation and Ethnic Voting

Advocates of proportional representation, as opposed to “winner take all” voting systems like the one used in the United States, say that it would reduce polarization by promoting a broader array of parties. If a party could gain some seats in the House by winning over a solid 25% of the electorate, for example, then there might emerge (say) a liberal pro-life party, or a fiscally conservative party that was dovish in foreign policy. Libertarians and “greens” might win some seats, rather than facing the unlikely prospect of having to convert either the Democratic or Republican Party to their cause. Ron Paul’s bold but ultimately hopeless quest in the most recent Republican Presidential primary demonstrated the long odds confronting such an endeavor.

Among the strongest arguments against proportional representation, however, is that it promotes ethnic factionalism, a particular danger in states with a history of strife. But a new study of the voting patterns in 43 nations finds “the opposite of what is widely assumed”: By various measures, in countries with “P.R.,” the association between political party and ethnicity is looser than in winner-take-all systems.

The study is complex and statistical, but its author, John D. Huber, a political scientist at Columbia, also gives an intuitive explanation for the results:

The argument here is not that the politicization of ethnicity will always be small in PR systems—the cases of Belgium and Macedonia make clear this is not the case. But perhaps the politicization of ethnicity occurs less, on average, in PR systems precisely because it is so easy to make electoral appeals of any sort. If one party attempts to exploit ethnic identity with strong ethnically based appeals under a permissive PR system, then this very electoral permissiveness also allows other parties to make appeals that attract voters on issues other than ethnicity. Given that members of an ethnic group typically have heterogeneous preferences, in PR systems they may often conclude that supporting ethnically oriented parties is not the most effective way of advancing their own interests because they should have attractive options among nonethnic parties. One implication of this argument would bthat if the United States adopted PR, we should expectthe salience of race in electoral politics to recede because multiple parties could form to appeal to the black vote, thereby dividing it. There may be, for example, a party that is socially conservative but supportive of affirmative action and a party that is socially liberal but supportive of affirmative action, with both parties receiving support from blacks.

Source: “Measuring Ethnic Voting: Do Proportional Electoral Laws Politicize Ethnicity,” John D. Huber, American Journal of Political Science (forthcoming)

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    • Strange that none of the fifty states has ever-AFAIK-ever experimented with PR. For example, a state could have one house of the state legislature elected by plurality and the other elected by PR. Eliminates the pointless redundancy of houses with mirror-image electorates.

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