POLITICAL EQUITY
Racial representation and electoral-system reform in U.S. cities
Points worth sharing from some work-in-progress
Next month, Portland (OR) will announce the winners of its first elections under the single transferable vote (STV), AKA proportional ranked-choice voting. The effort to adopt this reform was, in part, an effort to make city council as diverse as the population it serves.
Will it? Or are other reforms the way to go? Time will tell, but here are some observations in the interim.
I’ve been working on two papers that might help us get perspective on how these reforms compare to other possibilities.
One paper, whose first draft was completed in late 2021, explicitly models the effects of electoral systems on descriptive representation in a convenience sample of U.S. and other cities. We show that the important factors are assembly size and the number of seats per district. The logic here is straightforward: as the product of these factors rises, so does the ability of a local assembly to include diverse voices.
The other working paper looks at differences between sets of winners under STV and simulated party-list proportional representation. Data come from two historic cases, Cincinnati (1925–55) and New York City (1937–45), famous partly for having produced a belief that ‘proportional RCV’ was a boon to representation — and got repealed for that reason. To simulate list PR, I follow Gosnell (1939) in treating first-choice votes as single votes in “a list system with single candidate preference” — AKA open-list PR (OLPR).
How do candidates of color fare in the simulations?
So far, I’ve collected data on candidate race for Cincinnati. Some of this is available in books and journal articles. The rest comes from reading the Cincinnati Enquirer from the few weeks in advance of each of its 16 elections.
The table below shows that candidates of color do slightly better under list PR. The top row gives the number of such candidates at each election. The second says how many were party-endorsed. This is important for gauging the relative merits of STV (which is widely thought to benefit independents) and OLPR (which is thought to do the opposite). The next two rows give the numbers of winners under STV and simulated OLPR, respectively.
Here is what to note.
First, neither major party in this city slated candidates of color until 1931. (No party did, in fact.) Second, no such independent candidate wins (including in 1947, when the famed Ted Berry entered electoral politics as such). Second, two elections saw one or the other party do so and see these people lose under STV but not OLPR. (This resulted in two all-white councils in the middle of the Great Depression.) Third, a string of elections from 1949–53 saw both parties run Black candidates, and the electoral system does not change how many win.
The patterns above are consistent with recent experimental work in American politics on voters’ penalization of diverse candidates, when those voters are asked to make choices within a party. With STV, the voter must rank such candidates for a vote to flow their way. This is not so in OLPR, due to a property known as “pooling” (your vote counts for the list as a whole whether you want it to or not). The patterns also are consistent with a widely held view in comparative politics that party-list systems do better on this metric. Finally, they speak to recent experimental work, brought about by a referendum on STV in British Columbia, on women’s representation under proportional systems (like STV and OLPR) that let voters vote for candidates, not parties.
Portland’s STV adoption is the second in recent years to have been framed as a way to improve descriptive racial representation on a city council. The first was in Eastpointe (MI), and readers interested in this topic also might care to follow developments there.
I want to stress that both pieces of research discussed above are still in progress. But so is the search for the 21st century’s urban electoral-reform model.
