Ok, we know the basic history: at-large districts effectively prevented minority communities from ever getting to elect a candidate of choice. Historically, the fix for this is single-member districts, which rely on residential segregation patterns and fair line-drawing to work.
It is not obvious that this has, in fact, "worked", if you look at the mix of representatives vs the mix of the general population. Congress is 75% non-hispanic white, but the US is only 59% non-hispanic white.
By contrast, the House of Commons, which does not draw its boundaries to produce majority-minority seats (this would be very difficult due to a lack of segregation anyway) represents an 89% white population with an 86% white parliament.
At the local level for city councils, both single-member districts (as opposed to at-large) and ranked-choice voting (as opposed to FPTP) are associated statistically with more POC representation.
Single member districts also seem better for less money in politics and more grassroots candidates simply because, being smaller, you can typically walk a large chunk of the district and get your message out to enough people to win without as much money.
They are also associated with more NIMBYism because so local and influenceable by neighborhood associations (indeed the candidates often come up from those), but that seems a lesser concern to the first two.
At the state or national level, this may be too different to be comparable. The alternatives also differ widely - do you compare single-member to PR? Mixed PR/single-district? Single-district RCV? Multi-member districts? It's a little easier to analyze with US cities just because their options have been relatively limited for a lot of history since roughly the Progressives, who had very specific ideas of what good governance looked like at the city charter level.
A progressive councilmember in Heebieville made the case that at the state legislature level, single-member districts mean that legislators are continuously pitting the good of the whole against the good of their district, and saying "my district doesn't want to pay taxes on that if it's not located here, so no."
And so, presumably, you have one big multi-member constituency instead.
But if that's your model of politics, why have more than one legislator anyway? Just elect one guy and give him the power.
Fundamentally, any single-seat district is going to leave whoever is in the minority in that district poorly represented. (Even if a minority constituency forms a strategic alliance with some other constituency to get one of their own or somebody acceptable to them elected, sometimes, there will be cleavages.) Of course, an "at-large" district is just another form of single-member district, just one where the same constituents are part of several overlapping single-member districts who the majority gets to choose all of (leaving minority constituencies **even more** poorly represented).
And to the councilmember's point, it's not **single-member** districts lead to pitting the interests of the whole against the interests of the district -- that comes whenever you have representatives who represent any subset of the population, whether that be a geographic district or some other way of carving up the electorate into sub-electorates each of which gets to fill particular seats.
4.1 is a parade of angels on the head of a pin. The question is how well minorities are represented at the city council level.
I do agree with 4.2, meant to say above. Any geographic district is practically intended to get that area's interests motivating the representative.
Lotta people want to believe some single technical thing, reformable without emotional valence, is going to make politicians good. I put the recent "uncap the House" movement in this category - it's a good idea, but it's not going to reduce dysfunctionality by more than 10% at the absolute most optimistic.
I something along the lines of Scotland and Germany (which are slightly different from each other) is the way to go, where you have individual representatives and also some kind of proportionally allocated seats. The problem with doing this at the local level in the US is that US local politics mostly doesn't have parties, which makes everything a big old mess.
The problem is that you *want* to have a legislature full of representatives of different groups with different interests, in rough proportion to their size in the population, because that's a good way to get robust and acceptable laws passed. But also everyone is a member of several different overlapping groups and you can't represent them all in a unicameral legislature. Historically we do it by geography because that's easy to define and logistically convenient. I have an MP representing me in my capacity as a member of "the group of people who live in my town", but I don't have one representing me in my capacity as, say, a Catholic, or a disabled person, or whatever. But that's fair enough, because I think that "people who live here" really is probably the most important of the several groups of which I am a member.
Funny-shaped districts that include lots of black people are a product of saying "we think that the black guy in North Valley actually has more in common with the black guy in South Hills than he does with his white neighbour in North Valley, and so that's how his interests are going to be represented" and adding a sort of kludge superstructure to an existing geographically-based system.
6.last: One of my beefs, which I blame primarily on the Progressives, btw.
Yes, a mixed system like the vast majority of those in the British Isles seems the most stable and productive. Also, you know, parliamentary government.
The problem with doing this at the local level in the US is that US local politics mostly doesn't have parties, which makes everything a big old mess.
I'm not sure this is an insurmountable problem. We have parties at local council level but there are also a lot of independent candidates. Having no parties at all wouldn't be a barrier to running an STV election for multi-member wards, which is how we run local elections.
It would of course stop you using an additional-member system - where you have constituency reps and top up from a party list - but we don't use that for local elections, only for the Scottish Parliament, where there is a much stronger party system.
Hong Kong has this weird system where a bunch of the seats are elected on the basis of what kind of job you have (e.g. what union you're a member of, though I don't think that's always the rule) instead of where you live.
It's not unusual for countries that have substantial ethnic divisions to have some seats that are specifically elected by minority groups. This would have been good for the US at many points in its history (though maybe not now).
In Jordan they have 138 representatives, mostly proportionally elected by party, but with 18 reserved for women, 12 for Christians, 3 for Circassians, and 3 for Chechens. New Zealand has the Maori seats, so everywhere in NZ is part of a smaller "general" district (which they call "electorate") and a larger Maori one. Everyone votes for the general ones, but only self-declared Maori vote for the Maori seats.
I am not sure how STV does in dealing with the minority representation issue. Depends how racist people are, I suppose. If you have a 10% black constituency that elects five members, and none of the white voters will vote for a black guy at all, then he's screwed. But if some of them are prepared to put him as second or third choice, and all the black voters put him first, he should be fine?
Once again, the fairest and best solution remains:
-- A bicameral parliamentary monarchy, composed of:
-- A lower house elected by first-past-the-post voting in geographical constituencies
-- An upper house elected by sortition from elective constituencies (you decide for yourself which constituency you want to join, whether that's "Sikhs" or "Academics" or "Diabetics" or "Hockey Fans") and then we pick someone at random from each of the biggest 300)
-- A constitutional monarchy with strictly ceremonial powers
-- A vigorous process of democratically-governed periodic ostracism
It doesn't do much for 10% black constituencies, but there's a lot of 30% black constituencies and it does something there. To first approximation, Black people live in cities and in the "Black Belt" of the rural south, and in both cases there's often a lot of de facto housing segregation. So you don't have a lot of 10% black areas, you have a lot that are like 1% and then some that are like 30%-100% depending on how big you make the districts.
The canonical example here is Mississippi, which is 40% Black, but where 80% of white people vote Republican. So you'll never ever have a Black (or pro-Black) governor or senator, but with 4 representatives it's super easy to draw the lines to get a 4/0, 3/1, or 2/2 white/black split. Their state house is an 80/40 split, which is some amount of anti-Black gerrymandering but not extreme (partly because it's hard to make it extreme since there's a strong correlation between county and race).
Yeah, the whole thing with minority electoral representation is that what works is very very sensitive to the particular conditions. Drawing up majority-minority districts as a strategy was devised in the US in the era of the civil rights movement, thinking about Black voters who were very residentially segregated so that majority-minority districts could often be made geographically reasonable, and where Black voters were often quite a large minority over broader geographical areas, and where the white population were often implacably racist about voting for Black candidates. Under those circumstances, majority-minority districts are a reasonable solution, but if you change any of those things you need to reconsider.
A vigorous process of democratically-governed periodic ostracism
What is this? Who gets ostracised?
16: whoever a majority of the people want to be ostracised. Every election there's another box on the ballot paper where you write in a name. If 50% of people want someone ostracised, then that person is ostracised; they're not allowed to hold any public office, elected or appointed, for, I dunno, say the next ten years?
Elective constituencies solve the minority representation issue as well. Maybe there are no black-majority geographical districts, so you have an all-white lower house, but the black voters can join elective constituencies called "Black People In The Whole Of Springfield" or whatever, and then one of them gets picked at random.
New Hampshire has both single districts and multi-member districts but for some reason most legislators are still white.
Given that New Hampshire is more than 80% white, that is surely a mystery.
16. Ostracism* was a feature of the Athenian constitution in the 5th century BCE, whereby the electorate (free adult males born in the polis) were periodically invited to vote in a write-in election for the person they would most like to see banished and disenfranchised. The winner or loser was obliged to leave Athens until recalled. Such a crude system would be unacceptable today, I hope ajay agrees, but there's something to be for some method of shutting up political nuisance actors.
*From Greek "ostrakon", a potshard, which is what you wrote the name of your candidate for banishment on.
20: the latest figures I could find were for 2015, when New Hampshire had a 91% white legislature representing an 89% white population, so it's not perfect but it's hardly old time Pretoria.
Our city council is two reps from each of 6 wards, elected to staggered terms. They're non-partisan, but we kind of know each other, and candidates can seek endorsements, which a great many do.
Our 3 county commissioners come from different districts but all are elected at large. These are partisan positions, as is sheriff, clerk of court, treasurer, auditor, and county attorney.
School boards are non-partisan.
We periodically have to decide whether to have a commission make recommendations about changing city or county structures.
We're not significantly racially diverse here: there are some Native voters, but not enough in any particular place to be electorally significant. My state senator is a Native man, and his cousin, also a senator, represents a neighboring district that includes some of the city. Neither of their districts was designed to be won by a Native person; both will be won by Democrats until the next redistricting.
Some very smart people tried to introduce top-4 and RDV by ballot measure, but we voted it down. It was complicated, and had to be to meet technical constitutional requirements, and also the proponents had to be somewhat cagey about the goal of the system: to make it easier for moderate Rs to beat hard right Rs in red districts.
At the local level for city councils, both single-member districts (as opposed to at-large) and ranked-choice voting (as opposed to FPTP) are associated statistically with more POC representation.
Do you have a link for RCV? I was trying to find one recently that showed this and came up with mixed results.
Single trans voter. You only need one voter because they've been two genders.
Single Transferable Vote. Each voter ranks some or all of the candidates in order of preference. Then you work out the quota for getting elected - either total voters/total seats, or total voters/total seats plus one, plus one. So in a district with 10,000 voters and four candidates, the quota is either 2,500, or 2,001.
Then you count up all the first preference votes. Anyone with more than the quota gets a seat. If no one's over the quota, you take out the least favoured candidate, and redistribute all his votes to the second-preference candidate. If someone is over the quota, they get a seat, and you take their "extra" votes over the quota and redistribute those as well. You keep iterating until all the seats are filled.
So in a district with 10,000 voters and four candidates, the quota is either 2,500, or 2,001
Sorry, wrong. Should be " So in a district with 10,000 voters and four seats, the quota is either 2,500, or 2,001".
28: How do you determine which votes are "extra"? The voters for someone over the quota may well rank candidates differently, so depending on which ones are called "extra", the "extra" votes will be differently.
28: oh right, I just didn't recognize the acronym. I mostly hear it called ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting.
30: you reallocate them in proportion to the second preferences in the total vote stack.
So if heebie gets 15 first preference votes and the quota is ten, you say "OK, we need to reallocate five votes. To whom shall we reallocate them? Of the 15 people who put heebie first, nine put Moby second and six put Charley second. We shall therefore allocate three votes - (9/15)*5 - to Moby, and two - (6/15)*5 - to Charley."
31: very similar, but instant-runoff voting is designed to produce one winner only, so it doesn't have a quota or a redistribution system. You just keep eliminating the least successful candidate until you're left with one winner. Makes it simpler.
Full, exhausting description here https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research/publications/how-to-conduct-an-election-by-the-single-transferable-vote-3rd-edition/
Figure this one out. New Jersey is 52% white non-Hispanic, and has a strong tradition of ethnic political blocs. The 12 representatives, elected by district, are 75% white non-Hispanic. the two Senators, elected at-large, are 0% white non-Hispanic. The six most recent Senate elections, going back to 2012, elected 50% African-American, 16.67% Asian-American, 33.33% Hispanic convicted criminal, and 0% white non-Hispanic..