What would it look like for California to use global democracy best practices?
California’s government structure hasn’t changed much since the 1879 state constitution. At that time there were less than a million Californians, compared to almost 40 million today. In the meantime, there have been many new democracies and democratic reforms around the world that have mostly been ignored in the USA. Our current system ends up with a polarized two-party system at the national level and a one-party system in California. Most other democracies don’t have this structure, and they don’t have these problems. So what would it look like for California to use all the best practices from 21st century democracies?
Increase term lengths
The Assembly gets elected every 2 years. No other country in the world has a legislature that gets elected so often. Every other year is an election year and there is too much campaigning and not enough legislating. Let’s bump that up to 4-year terms.
Get rid of the state Senate
While having two legislative chambers is somewhat popular around the world, the Assembly and the Senate don’t represent different constituencies. For example, in the US Congress, the House represents people and the Senate represents states. Since a 1964 Supreme Court case, state legislatures were forced to have equal population districts. Previously in California, each county or group of small counties get its own state senator regardless of population. If the Assembly and the Senate are both representing people, and they both have 4-year terms, let’s simplify and get rid of one of them.
Increase the size of the Assembly
The 1879 state constitution fixed the Assembly to 80 members and the Senate to 40 members. California’s population is now 50 times larger, so we are overdue for a resize. Usually legislatures grow slowly along with the population, and countries that are the size of California have hundreds of members in their legislature. Typical legislature sizes have tended to fall close to a simple formula called the cube root rule. We could have the Assembly adjust after every census according to this rule. Currently that would jump us up to 340 members. That works out to one representative for every 116,000 people, compared to 988,000 for current state senators.
Proportional Representation
Almost every democracy in the world uses some form of proportional representation to elect its representatives. The general idea is that a group’s share of the representatives equals their share of the vote. Every election is competitive and gerrymandering is impossible. Tired of the two-party or one-party system? It’s easy for smaller groups to break off of big parties and get some candidates elected without needing to build up to majority support. Proportionality allows political, ethnic, language, class, religious, or racial minorities to get fair representation.
There are a lot of different proportional electoral systems in use across the democracies of the world. All of them could work, but Americans prefer local representatives and dislike the idea of political parties. Thus, the Irish system seems like it would have the best chance of mass adoption. In Ireland, each district elects multiple representatives. On the ballot voters rank individual candidates. Candidates who get enough votes get elected, and any excessive votes get passed on to that ballots’ next choice. Candidates with too few votes get eliminated and those ballots move on to their next choice as well. Votes don’t get wasted on candidates with too much or too little support.
Get rid of the primary election
The purpose of the primary election is to get the members of a party to rally behind a single candidate for the general election to avoid splitting their votes. In a proportional system, vote splitting has no effect on the overall outcome, so public primaries generally don’t exist in other democracies. Parties choose their own candidates, and if you don’t like them, then there are multiple other parties or independents to choose from without throwing your vote away.
Get rid of the governor
Even if the Assembly is proportionally represented, there are still eight statewide races for executive offices, notably including the governor. A large single-winner prize will keep the same incentives that lead to our current two-party system. Only large coalitions of interest groups can reliably get majority support, and large parties will remain necessary. Since the Assembly is already a proportionally diverse coalition of interest groups, why not have them pick the statewide officers?
This is what many other democracies do: the legislature picks the executive, who can also be fired by them at any time. Some countries that do directly elect a president don’t give them nearly as much power, and they are mostly a figurehead role. For the countries that have a strong separately-elected executive, it is common for party polarization to lead to gridlock, demagogues, and constitutional crisis.
There is no company that elects a board of directors and then separately elects a CEO so that they may obstruct each other. The board finds a CEO and fires them if they don’t do a good job. An efficient government can work this way too.
Fewer propositions
Every election has a ballot stuffed with too many propositions about basic stuff that the legislature should be able handle by itself. The bar to adding something to the ballot should be raised, and we should repeal current laws that require many things to be litigated through statewide ballot initiatives.
Conclusion
Currently filling out the ballot in California is a daunting task. With the above reforms, elections would be less frequent, with fewer things on each ballot. However, the remaining decisions would have a larger variety of options.
Enacting these changes would likely require multiple constitutional revisions, which would each require the legislature’s support and a statewide vote. In the end, diverse political ideas throughout the state would all get represented in the legislature. They would be empowered to negotiate and compromise among many different groups to solve problems.
Most source material came from A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective.