Remove ads

WI: The United States had Proportional Representation?

The neo-nazis gain significant power earlier as they can effectively play kingmaker on the national stage from basically the 60's onward.
 
ThePoarter said:
In this case for those that don't know here are some examples - Proportional representation - Wikipedia

However I want to specifically consider Webster/Sainte-Laguë method - Wikipedia. If the United states had that what 7-20 parties would make up its political sphere?

Let's say this is after WW2 to make things easier for everyone.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Hmm I am assuming this involves the US house and the state legislatures as it wouldn't make sense for the US Senate given its nature I suppose it would make things hmm interesting. I mean the two main US parties were already big tent coalitions with a weak national party and powerful 50 plus state and territorial parties with multiple wings and would likely put a lot of stress on them.

Beyond that the only third political parties I can think of existing post world war II into the 1950s were the conservative and rather racist constitution party formed in 1952 (unrelated to the current constitution party), the american communist party which literally took its marching orders from the Kremlin and was a soviet puppet party, the far left Socialist Labor which is apparently the world's second oldest socialist party formed in 1876, the leftist american socialist party founded in 1901 and the leftist american progressive party founded in 1948(unrelated to the 1912 progressive party founded by Theodore Roosevelt).
 
Alane1 said:
Hmm I am assuming this involves the US house and the state legislatures as it wouldn't make sense for the US Senate given its nature I suppose it would make things hmm interesting. I mean the two main US parties were already big tent coalitions with a weak national party and powerful 50 plus state and territorial parties with multiple wings and would likely put a lot of stress on them.

Beyond that the only third political parties I can think of existing post world war II into the 1950s were the conservative and rather racist constitution party formed in 1952 (unrelated to the current constitution party), the american communist party which literally took its marching orders from the Kremlin and was a soviet puppet party, the far left Socialist Labor which is apparently the world's second oldest socialist party formed in 1876, the leftist american socialist party founded in 1901 and the leftist american progressive party founded in 1948(unrelated to the 1912 progressive party founded by Theodore Roosevelt).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
What kind of modern day parties would the US have now?
 
Hmm, the republican and democratic parties would almost certainly still be around and major players if not the main players, they have the sort of entrenched establishment that makes them hard to destroy and dislodge.

Socialist labor which still exists would likely be around and the american socialist party would likely be a player as well instead in essence turning into a social club rather than a political party and the american communist party would likely still splinter so there would likely be a number of small Maoist, Leninist and Stalinist communist parties formed from its remains.

There would also likely be various forms of fascist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi parties as well as at least one black supremacist party.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there were a progressive and progressive conservative parties as well and of course the greens, libertarians and fringe palo-conservative constitution party would likely still exist in this alternative election setup.
 
king208 said:
The neo-nazis gain significant power earlier as they can effectively play kingmaker on the national stage from basically the 60's onward.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Only if people vote ATL as they did OTL. But our effective choices are constrained by our system. There are enough PR nations out there in real life to give me some confidence that on the whole, decent people will find decent options and the extremists will, with surges of popularity, discredit themselves. I write as an extremist myself, of course, but I think a reasonable one. Views like mine might gain credibility, or, seeing a real world movement that comes closer to the deep values I grope for, I will change my mind about things and become more pragmatically reasonable.

I firmly believe that von Mises and so forth to the contrary, democracy in its most expressive and fair form is the answer, not arbitrary restrictions to try to force a "moderate middle." We can plainly see how institutions that do that can just as well normalize right wing extremism instead. Better to give everyone the chance to express what they really believe in, and let the process of society sort it out.
 
Shevek23 said:
Only if people vote ATL as they did OTL. But our effective choices are constrained by our system. There are enough PR nations out there in real life to give me some confidence that on the whole, decent people will find decent options and the extremists will, with surges of popularity, discredit themselves. I write as an extremist myself, of course, but I think a reasonable one. Views like mine might gain credibility, or, seeing a real world movement that comes closer to the deep values I grope for, I will change my mind about things and become more pragmatically reasonable.

I firmly believe that von Mises and so forth to the contrary, democracy in its most expressive and fair form is the answer, not arbitrary restrictions to try to force a "moderate middle." We can plainly see how institutions that do that can just as well normalize right wing extremism instead. Better to give everyone the chance to express what they really believe in, and let the process of society sort it out.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I legitimately don't trust Americans that much. We're a bunch of racists who litetally only overturned Jim Crow at gun point.

The racists have been the overwhelming majority of the country for almost it's entire history and that's only if you believe we've actually turned the corner. The will of the common man means Jim Crow lasts another twenty years, and gays are still in the closet.
 
Not really PR is better for keeping up with the public mood so it would be better in the long run.
 
If you look at who made up both parties' coalitions in the post-war years and the conflicts within the parties you can sort of figure out for yourself who might split off.

The Republicans could see a split over the Conservative wing and the more Liberal wing, but that's less likely. Really the big issue that could create a split would be over Civil Rights.

The Democrats might see a split sometime in the 50's or late 40's (if not 60's) over Civil Rights. By 1948 is was clear that the Democratic party was moving much more in favor of Civil Rights and the segregationist Democrats were not happy with that. Regardless of how successful this breakaway party is the Solid South is heavily damaged if not dead. I figure such an even would be a pandora's box of sorts as it's seriously unlikely the Democrats walk back on Civil Rights. The Democrats could moderate on Civil Rights by selecting a "moderate" like Estes Kefauver who didn't sign the Southern Manifesto but wasn't a liberal on the issue - but it's unlikely that the hardcore segregationists are brought back into the fold with a compromise, they wanted a total win on the issue.

I think over time you'd see the more minor parties gain ground on the Democrats and the GOP. 2018 would likely be a very different set of parties in terms of policies at the very least.

In terms of third parties from OTL, the Libertarians might be more popular and more successful. Depends how Civil Rights and how the GOP's conservatives go. CPUSA and the Progressive Party likely both go (even more) belly up once the Cold War starts to get more tense as they did historically.

In general the US is probably more electorally chaotic.
 
Being curious about how PR might work, I've taken a lot of real world data and applied PR to it in many instances.

As I have said, "real world data" means people are voting in different circumstances and we don't really get a picture of what they would do if they had a real PR option instead. But it indicates a few things anyway.

A major lesson is that FPTP strongly tends to exaggerate the support the leading parties get. Even granting that people only vote for them (not at all true generally, but very true in the USA) the leading party tends to get extra seats that turn small majorities into large ones and manufacture fake majorities out of whole cloth.

US elections, if people did not change their voting patterns as they surely would, make for subtle but still significant differences.

Take the most recent, 2016 US Congress. Currently, the outcome of the 2016 election is that the Republicans hold 241 seats, 23 more than the 218 needed for a majority out of 435, and the Democrats hold every single other remaining seat with 194. The Republicans thus hold 55.54 percent of the House. But in fact, of all votes cast they won only 49.1 percent! The Republicans hold almost 25 percent more seats than the Democrats do, but in the popular vote, their margin of victory over the Democrats' 48 percent is just over 2 percent--thus their advantage is multiplied by over a factor of ten!

Among PR methods, I feel the Hamilton method of greatest remainders is the most appropriate for a legislature or any deliberative body of any scale or scope. It is most inclusive, resulting in the most voters getting the result of having at least one representative in the body, leaving the least with no direct representation. Other methods tend to transfer seats from some rag tag small parties to the leading one or two. I think the importance of including the outliers ought to outweigh a very small increment in direct power of the leading parties, and I think the often expressed fear this will lead to chaos is quite mythical.

Using Hamilton's method, if the nation voted exactly as it did in 2016 we would have a Congress that looks like this:

Republican 214
Democratic 209
Libertarian 6
Green 2
Constitution party, Legal Marijuana Now Party, Reform and Conservative parties, 1 each
Four independents:
David Walker, Oregon district 3
Alan LaPolice, Kansas district 1
Frederick O. Maycock, Massachusetts district 1
Preston Picus, California district 12

In terms of power, the Republicans fall 4 seats short of a majority, and would need to gain some allies. Fortunately for them, it was a right wing vote all over, and allying with the Libertarians alone could do the trick. Alternatively, if the Libertarians demand too high a price, I would think between the likelihood at least half those Independents are pretty conservative and the certainty that 3 of the 4 one-seat parties are, they would have many options to close the gap to their liking. Democrats would need to pick up 9 allies, and the numbers just aren't there without massive compromise.

If one looks at the 2016 vote more closely, it often happened--not a high percentage, but in a dozen cases or so--that a candidate would run unopposed in their district. It makes sense in the context of FPTP but this is unlikely to happen in PR, even a PR system (such as one I have thought up and recommend) that uses districts as part of its basic machinery.

Britain is perhaps a more interesting case study. In the USA, third party or independent victories in Congress races are historically very rare, at least when a given party system has evolved and stabilized. When they win at all, they tend to be very few in number, literal handfulls. Not so in Britain; there too each seat is won FPTP, but nevertheless significant numbers of candidates contest and a fair number of third party seats are routinely won. But their numbers tend to be way out of whack, with party delegations often having only a passing semblance to the support they actually got.

Out of 650 seats in the Westminister Parliament, one is exceptional in that the office of Speaker of the House has a special procedural role, and is customarily exempted from partisan challenges in their district--turnout for their elections is thus remarkably low! Setting that seat aside there are 649 in play, and a party needs 325 seats to rule as a majority in it its own right.

The election of May 7, 2015 returned the following results in terms of seats in Parliament:
Conservative 330
Labour 232
UK Independence (behind Brexit) 1
Liberal Democrat 8
Scottish Nationalist 56
Green 1
DUP (N. Ireland) 8
Plaid Cymru 3
Sinn Fein 4
UUP (N.I) 2
SDLP 3
One independent

Thus, eleven parties and an independent emerge. If you wonder why the parties are listed in this strange order and not in terms of seats, the table I took them from here is in order of number of total popular votes cast, not seat outcomes. That is, the Liberal Democrats got more votes, by a lot, than the Scottish Nationalists did, and the Greens with one seat got more than the conservative Democratic Union Party of Ulster which got 8 seats.

A proportional outcome using the Hamilton method would look like this:

Conservative 239
Labour 197
UK Independence (behind Brexit) 82
Liberal Democrat 51
Scottish Nationalist 30
Green 24
DUP (N. Ireland) 3
Plaid Cymru 3
Sinn Fein 2
UUP (N.I) 2
SDLP 2
Alliance party 1

In truth, the Conservatives only won less than 37 percent of the popular vote in Britain in 2015, yet somehow wound up dominating Parliament single handed with a margin of 5 members!

In truth, based on the proportional outcomes, the UKIP movement would have become a kingmaker, being absolutely necessary for forming a majority with the Tories, and even so they would be scrambling to scrape up another crucial vote even if the conservative DUP had joined them as well. But Labour would have an even harder struggle to rule.

But this was not good enough for them, and they called a snap election for June 8th of last year, hoping to pick up more seats. Ironically, they lost seats and wound up needing to scrounge for some third party to ally with them to form a Government. They lost 13 seats, Labour gained 30.

Conservative 317
Labour 232
Liberal Democrat 12
Scottish Nationalist 35
UKIP 0
Green 1
DUP (N. Ireland) 10
Sinn Fein 7
Plaid Cymru 4
Independent 1
SDLP 0
UUP (N.I) 0

But the proportional results would look like this:
Conservative 275
Labour 260
Liberal Democrat 48
Scottish Nationalist 20
UKIP 12
Green 11
DUP (N. Ireland) 6
Sinn Fein 5
Plaid Cymru 4
Independent 1
SDLP 2
UUP (N.I) 2
Alliance party 1

Irony on irony--the Tories did in fact gain some voting support--but lost seats by FPTP anyway. Analyzing this, we see that UKIP is just a shadow of its former self, and now it is the moderate Liberal Democrats who are the kingmakers. Whichever of the top two parties that party aligns with can rule in coalition, picking up a few more votes from fourth parties. Labour is in a better position to do this actually.

These examples then give some sense of the different outcomes, and the drastic divergence between actual popular support and the illusion of it refracted through even highly competitive FPTP voting.

And should dispel the illusion that coalition government is a curse of PR FPTP is exempt from. OTL the Tories had to form a coalition despite the FPTP system that had previously handed them government quite out of line with their actual popular support--though counting UKIP's strength before the Brexit vote, clearly Britain was in a conservative mood overall, just as the USA was in 2016.
 
Alane1 said:
Hmm I am assuming this involves the US house and the state legislatures as it wouldn't make sense for the US Senate given its nature ....
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I actually have a plan for that. It would take an Amendment but so would any implementation of PR in any form anyway.

Keeping with the spirit of the current form of the Senate, we must perpetuate the manner in which each state is equal. I would propose doubling the size of the Senate, by having three classes of Senator as we do now. Currently we have I believe two classes where 33 states have someone up for election for Senate, one single statewide vote of course, and in the third class there are 34 Senate seats in each of 34 states up. Raise that to 67 seats for the 33 state classes and 66 for the 34 state one.

Each state runs its own Senate race, but the votes for each party are counted as a percentage of the state total of votes cast for Senate. These percentages are divided by the number of states in the class and added up, and the Hamilton Greatest Remainder method applied relative to the larger number of seats at state, 67 or 66, to determine how many seats each party gets. Then the number of seats actually won by winning a plurality in each state is subtracted, and the roster for each party filled in order of which unsuccessful candidates had the highest percentages. In this way, the power of each state's electorate is equalized, and only residents of those states participating in the class vote--the 1/3 of the nation not holding a Senate election has to sit it out unrepresented by this class. As we do currently.

Thus, the votes across the nation are aggregated, in a weighted way, and third party candidates have a fighting chance to win some seats, and every vote is counted, in a weighted way, toward the victory of their party. The staggering effect of leaving 1/3 of the states out of it every time, and the weighing of the states, presumably distorts the outcome versus straight national proportional vote, so that the two bodies, Senate and House, do not mirror image each other, as intended. The time lag effect of the Senate changing only by 1/3 each election is retained in effect as well.

So yes we can do it; the result is distorted from one person one vote proportional but has many of the advantages PR systems do. Given the basic rule of equality of states instead of people, it is fair, and opens the door for diverse groups to get a hearing in the Senate and gain some real power there.
 
ThePoarter said:
What kind of modern day parties would the US have now?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Honestly the only way I see to directly answer this question is to game it out.

I propose to start like this:
1) I will not even try to finesse the politics of how suitable amendments to achieve this outcome could happen. That takes the POD back maybe decades before the transformation happens. I will just assume it somehow happens by consensus without having to change any of the political realities on the ground OTL yet.
2) The first election it applies to is the Election of 1948
3) I have given an indication in another reply how the Senate could also be caught up in this and somewhat proportionalized, or anyway be somewhat democratized in a parallel fashion. This happens too--from 1948 to 1952 the senate is going to grow from 96 to 192 members, with each successive class of '48, '50 and '52 bringing in a double delegation.
4) I will assume the Hamilton method is used as it is most inclusive and therefore among other things most interesting in an AH sense, in that exotic parties will show up most easily.
5) The USA continues to use Congressional districts, but half as many--217 CD are apportioned by the Huntington method currently in use. People vote for one candidate, but provisions are made to broaden their choices in several ways including the right to vote for someone who is a candidate in another district in the nation. There are reasons for this. Everyone votes for someone, by default running in their own district and whoever wins the plurality in that district, by however small a percentage, is the Representative from that district. Then, each vote for a candidate is counted as a vote for their party, and the party totals across the nation are added up and Hamilton's method used to assign each party a quota of seats. The ones already won by winning pluralities are subtracted, the candidates who won pluralities deleted from each party's list ordered by the number of votes each one got. (voting for somone outside your district, that vote does not count toward their winning a plurality in their home district--plurality seats are for local voters only to decide. But they do count after that toward party quotas and toward the candidate who won the out of district votes standing as a vote-getter). The remaining seats are given to the top vote getters within each party.

Thus, each state is guaranteed a certain minimum of seats in Congress, by the number of districts they have. Then the remaining half of all seats is up in the air, but statistically speaking if all states had similar turnout and similar voting patterns, each would have an equal chance at roughly one more seat bringing the average to the old fashioned/OTL apportionment. No states have any strong reason to complain on this score. Individual voters have exactly equal power all across the nation, an improvement on before. Gerrymandering and improper district sizes are much less of a problem now; voters who were unfairly minimized before can still accumulate their full weight of influence on party delegation sizes and on which candidates fill out the party vacancies. Those who had unfair advantages have lost them now.
6) The Electoral vote for the President still continues in effect, but the map is modified. Since states have had their district apportionment cut in half, the baseline for each state's weight in the electoral College is reduced across the board. This tends to favor the small states more, so there is no doubling the Senate contribution to 4 from 2 even though each state can expect on average to eventually have 4 Senators representing them; states still have the number of Congress districts (not Representatives any more, since that number varies now) plus 2 for the 2 Senate seats they are guaranteed. Thus the Electoral College of 1948 will be different, favoring the small states more.
7) In 1948, everyone votes the same as OTL. This gives us a starting point! We will have to think about how people will react to events for the 1950 election, and subsequent ones, and game out how elected officials change in identity and policies shift in accordance to these shifts, and what effect that has on world outcomes.
In my next post I will give a short presentation of the Congress of 1948!
 
Using OTL data from Wikipedia here and following Hamilton's method I find the following composition of the House of Representatives in the 1948-50 session:

Democratic 229
Republican 198
American Labor Party 4
Progressive Party 4

The ALP managed to elect one representative OTL in 1948, the only third party member of Congress in that session OTL. The Progressives are of course associated with Henry Wallace's campaign for President, thus assuming Harry Truman wins in the modified EV, he will face 4 representatives of the party that opposed him from the left.

The Democrats still control the House but by a narrower margin than they enjoyed OTL, where they won 263 seats. Only 7 of their 34 seats down from OTL are going to third parties-the rest go to the Republicans gaining 27 seats over their OTL 171.

Because I presume there are half as many districts, we might figure that the Democrats managed to win 132 districts by plurality, and the Republicans 85. Democratic candidates who lost in 97 districts get a second chance via the proportional system, as do Republican candidates from 113 districts who failed to win a plurality there. But wait, there are only 217 districts! In this case, every Democrat who ran, assuming the Dems ran in all districts, steps into office and every district in the nation has a Democratic representative from the district, and the Democratic party names the remaining 12 to fill their share in some fashion they were required by law to declare before the election, but at party discretion. I suggest it becomes customary for each candidate to have an alternate they name with the party's or some local caucus's approval, who serves as their deputy in the election campaign and would replace them if they should die or otherwise be removed from candidacy, and that the top twelve of all vote getters among the 1948 Democratic candidates are awarded the seats as a reward for their role in helping their candidate win. This means these 12 come from the 12 districts where the Democratic candidates were most popular! Thus some districts might have three Representatives or even four...two Democrats, a Republican and perhaps someone from one of the two left wing parties. This is unlikely since the top 12 Democratic victory districts probably deplete the votes to be spit between some Republican and a radical, so most likely the proportional make up Republican did not come from those districts.

We can see then how the system tends to give people from each district representatives from their district who align with the ideological preferences of that district. At the same time, all Representatives are dependent on votes from somewhere and in particular the small parties gathered them from all over the Union.

91.2 percent of all districts have at least one Republican from the district. 100 percent have a Democrat and 12 of them or over 2.75 percent have two Democrats. 8 districts have sent in someone from a third party, just under 1 percent.

Figuring the Senate, and whether Truman is elected or not, comes in a later post!
 
Shevek23 said:
Using OTL data from Wikipedia here and following Hamilton's method I find the following composition of the House of Representatives in the 1948-50 session:

Democratic 229
Republican 198
American Labor Party 4
Progressive Party 4

The ALP managed to elect one representative OTL in 1948, the only third party member of Congress in that session OTL. The Progressives are of course associated with Henry Wallace's campaign for President, thus assuming Harry Truman wins in the modified EV, he will face 4 representatives of the party that opposed him from the left.

The Democrats still control the House but by a narrower margin than they enjoyed OTL, where they won 263 seats. Only 7 of their 34 seats down from OTL are going to third parties-the rest go to the Republicans gaining 27 seats over their OTL 171.

Because I presume there are half as many districts, we might figure that the Democrats managed to win 132 districts by plurality, and the Republicans 85. Democratic candidates who lost in 97 districts get a second chance via the proportional system, as do Republican candidates from 113 districts who failed to win a plurality there. But wait, there are only 217 districts! In this case, every Democrat who ran, assuming the Dems ran in all districts, steps into office and every district in the nation has a Democratic representative from the district, and the Democratic party names the remaining 12 to fill their share in some fashion they were required by law to declare before the election, but at party discretion. I suggest it becomes customary for each candidate to have an alternate they name with the party's or some local caucus's approval, who serves as their deputy in the election campaign and would replace them if they should die or otherwise be removed from candidacy, and that the top twelve of all vote getters among the 1948 Democratic candidates are awarded the seats as a reward for their role in helping their candidate win. This means these 12 come from the 12 districts where the Democratic candidates were most popular! Thus some districts might have three Representatives or even four...two Democrats, a Republican and perhaps someone from one of the two left wing parties. This is unlikely since the top 12 Democratic victory districts probably deplete the votes to be spit between some Republican and a radical, so most likely the proportional make up Republican did not come from those districts.

We can see then how the system tends to give people from each district representatives from their district who align with the ideological preferences of that district. At the same time, all Representatives are dependent on votes from somewhere and in particular the small parties gathered them from all over the Union.

91.2 percent of all districts have at least one Republican from the district. 100 percent have a Democrat and 12 of them or over 2.75 percent have two Democrats. 8 districts have sent in someone from a third party, just under 1 percent.

Figuring the Senate, and whether Truman is elected or not, comes in a later post!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

1948 is also when a segregationist splinter party of the democrates managed to get 39 electoral votes and 2.4% of voters. There is little reason to think that in this timeline they would have continued to run as democrates at the lower levels instead of simply splitting into a separate party. So using the state vote percentages in the presidential election you will get the State's Right Democratic Party taking 32 seats from the Democratic Party. This allows racist segregationists to move from simply being implicitly the kingmakers to explicitly the kingmakers.
 
Tasrill said:
1948 is also when a segregationist splinter party of the democrates managed to get 39 electoral votes and 2.4% of voters. There is little reason to think that in this timeline they would have continued to run as democrates at the lower levels instead of simply splitting into a separate party. So using the state vote percentages in the presidential election you will get the State's Right Democratic Party taking 32 seats from the Democratic Party. This allows racist segregationists to move from simply being implicitly the kingmakers to explicitly the kingmakers.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Indeed we are starting off with training wheels, not being entirely realistic yet. For the 1948 election to give us a starting point, I assumed the outcomes in terms of who got voted for under which party banner were exactly as OTL. If we were totally realistic, naturally many people would vote differently than OTL from the get go.

But after all how the heck did anyone get this PR scheme past these same conservatives you are talking about? Would progressives regard the need to switch to PR (largely untried in the world at this point, unlike today where we have hundreds of nations who have been doing it for generations to look at) as important enough to unite and make it happen--and if they did, how come Harry Truman was dealing with the kind of obstructionism from Republican Congress majorities he was OTL?

We'd have to imagine that both conservatives and progressives regarded it as a solution to problems that needed solving, and that no one was passionately opposed. Whereas of course with my system half the politicians lose their more or less safe seats, the optics could easily be clouded by state delegations being chopped in half as well. And this is before we get to the outcomes of the system which I believe would do some good in the world from the get go.

I already mentioned gerrymandering is suddenly just about dead in the water--all the people the clever riggers tried to either suppress or enhance are back to normal again, each one of them just as influential as any other voter in determining the national proportions of parties.

In the 1950s and before, we had even worse problems than gerrymandering--we had state governments that grossly misapportioned their districts, both their assigned CD and the internal state legislature districts, to favor rural over urban voters typically. Between 1900 and 1940 a great demographic shift had occurred, prior to which a majority of Americans were rural in many states, after which the majority became urban just about everywhere, but state governments that had been grossly shortchanging urban populations perhaps going back to days of territorial self government would see no reason to change that now, resulting in diluting the urban vote, hence that of the majority of the population, by refusing to subdivide them into enough districts. Well gosh, that's even more blatantly undemocratic than gerrymandering is, but it was common as hell until SCOTUS decisions blew it apart in mid century and affirmed that equal apportionment was an obligation that would be enforced. We are right in the cusp of that argument right here in 1948.

In fact considerations like this are one reason I hope PR advocates can win, since it pretty much solves most of the problem at a stroke. Indeed classic party-list PR does away with districts completely and thus definitively ends these problems completely and forever--the whole nation is one big district, boom! I am pretending something else is done and districts exist and if abused badly enough can still have some measurable impact, but they no longer stand as a door locked firmly shut, just a bit of a tripping hazard as it were if not laid out correctly. The people hurt by this have less power than they ought to but still most of what they should and are in a position to make noise about in the US congress, and despite possible buyers remorse over the new Congress and Senate system, I bet that most state legislatures switch over to some kind of PR within a decade, reluctant machine legislators being badgered into it and threatened with Congress level investigations and reforms.

So yeah, the morning after the election is the first day things start to really change. The votes were the same as OTL but the process is different. Both mainstream parties are more threatened by competition, which has managed to place 8 representatives from neither into Congress. By themselves they can be ignored in the process, but they have a bully pulpit. If they are shunted aside and snubbed, any problems in the next two years will look entirely like the Democrats' or perhaps Republicans' fault and both their parties might gain votes, with the next congress seeing 80 of them where there had been 8! There are reasons that might not happen, due to the weird status of the two parties, both of which are widely known to be involved with shadowy influences.

So, once we get day after election day sorted, we can take stock and start considering how the factions might fall out. Will the Dixiecrats really be stronger outside the Democratic tent than within it? Will politicians like Rockwell who are outspoken Nazis get a traction and respectability they did not have OTL? Will Joe McCarthy and people like Roy Cohn be even stronger than in OTL? Or will they be counterbalanced by new freedom for leftists who stood little chance of winning any district elections being able to find a footing of their own, and the moderate majority split among several parties finding them the less crazy of the alternatives to veer toward? This is a strange time, with the Cold War about to go almost hot in Berlin and Korea before the next election!
 
Having taken one party that managed to get one and one only Representative seated (ALP) off life support, or anyway looking stronger than OTL with 4 seats instead of one, and injected an equal number of Progressive Party (Wallaceite) members into the Congressional bloodstream as well who went nowhere OTL, we should take a look at who these people are. Of the two the ALP seems more likely to me to achieve a footing and keep growing. On paper, from an abstract point of view, the Progressive party ought to be well situated, if not to take over, then to achieve a firm permanent place. I provided links to Wikipedia on both. From skimming these articles, I can see that the status of the Prog party is very very murky. It might look like one thing on election day, but in fact it seems clear that a considerable degree of Communist meddling not only affected it but probably provided the very grounds of its existence. I am not sure how much we can trust the single source the Wiki article leans so heavily on, but it does seem reasonable to assume much if not all of what she claims would be true. Basically, Henry Wallace paid very little attention to the party, thinking of it as just a vehicle for his own Presidential election and left it in the hands of organizers who were quite often Communists acting covertly. It was true that in these last days of hope for the post-WWII alliance with the Soviet Union continuing to anchor an era of world peace and cooperation, a great many leftists would hear no criticism of the Russians and the Progressive platform reflected that speak no evil of the Reds mindset. OTL though after losing the election, Wallace himself broke with this and became (belatedly, even a leftist like me must admit, and also from the point of view of his overall electoral appeal already by 1948) more critical of Soviet misbehavior. Meanwhile the internal party machinery of the Party, which in this ATL gets a second shot at life in the form of 4 Representatives, was largely run by the Communists who had largely handpicked the candidates.

In order to game this out in detail, we'd have to learn who these four winners would have been, where they came from, and what sort of character we can infer they had. The question is, will they continue to do and say whatever a bunch of Communists quietly tell them to, indeed do they realize this is what they have been doing and are they in fact disciplined agents of Moscow...or do some or all of them have reasons to be skeptical of the so-called leaders and the interest and ability to stage a coup in the party and take a more grassroots control? Even if they do this, the sincere convictions of the American far left might leave them vulnerable to withering attacks indeed, but I suspect if they can plausibly burn their bridges to the Kremlin and demonstrate an American independence, they can stick to quite radical guns and still gain seats faster than they lose them, and stabilize at a pretty respectable percentage of Congress in bad years, and surge along with other progressives to quite large ones--maybe never a majority in themselves, but perhaps very close to it, needing relatively few moderate allies to put a leftist majority over the top? That might not happen for decades, but it may be in the cards all along.

ALP also has some clouds about it and is liable to come under serious attack by whatever form McCarthyism may take here. No doubt about it, something like McCarthyism seems likely to ride pretty high in the next 5 years or so, given the open rupture of the postwar hopes of leftists who believed the Soviet Union would prove a stable and respectable partner. War in Korea seems inevitable, and almost certain to blindside Truman in the way it did OTL. The Maoist Chinese Communists are poised already on the edge of total victory in mainland China and will achieve it in the next year, and OTL the Democrats were blamed for this debacle as we saw it. Sooner that that comes the Berlin Crisis, I see no reason why Stalin would regard the election of 4 possible puppets and 4 despicable capitalist-tool Second International "social fascists" to Congress as a reason to change any of his plans. Nor were some events even in his control--Mao and Stalin would put up a brave front of unity and Mao did indeed defer quite a lot to Stalin, but Stalin did not control Mao's responses in the Korean crisis and I think neither of them really controlled with the North Koreans were up to. I am honestly confused as to the true cause of the Korean War, whether it might in fact have been triggered by American protected South Koreans taking rash actions of their own--either way though I am convinced it was started by loose cannon Koreans, not by a desire by either Washington (or Wall Street) nor the Kremlin and not even Mao Zedong to have this particular fight at that moment. Both sides ran with it of course, and the American side is going to be deeply affected. The Congress of 1950 will be less left wing...but it does not follow that Progressives must fail, if they reassert their independence in time, or that there will be fewer third party leftists overall. We have to look closely at who people are and what their changed options are here. As for the Dixiecrats and possibly Taftite Republicans splitting off, they need a close look too. In some Solid South states, this might go smoothly, but in others serious rupture might be the outcome. In the 1950s many Southern states wound up supporting Republicans to a limited extent OTL!
 
Shevek23 said:
I actually have a plan for that. It would take an Amendment but so would any implementation of PR in any form anyway.

Keeping with the spirit of the current form of the Senate, we must perpetuate the manner in which each state is equal. I would propose doubling the size of the Senate, by having three classes of Senator as we do now. Currently we have I believe two classes where 33 states have someone up for election for Senate, one single statewide vote of course, and in the third class there are 34 Senate seats in each of 34 states up. Raise that to 67 seats for the 33 state classes and 66 for the 34 state one.

Each state runs its own Senate race, but the votes for each party are counted as a percentage of the state total of votes cast for Senate. These percentages are divided by the number of states in the class and added up, and the Hamilton Greatest Remainder method applied relative to the larger number of seats at state, 67 or 66, to determine how many seats each party gets. Then the number of seats actually won by winning a plurality in each state is subtracted, and the roster for each party filled in order of which unsuccessful candidates had the highest percentages. In this way, the power of each state's electorate is equalized, and only residents of those states participating in the class vote--the 1/3 of the nation not holding a Senate election has to sit it out unrepresented by this class. As we do currently.

Thus, the votes across the nation are aggregated, in a weighted way, and third party candidates have a fighting chance to win some seats, and every vote is counted, in a weighted way, toward the victory of their party. The staggering effect of leaving 1/3 of the states out of it every time, and the weighing of the states, presumably distorts the outcome versus straight national proportional vote, so that the two bodies, Senate and House, do not mirror image each other, as intended. The time lag effect of the Senate changing only by 1/3 each election is retained in effect as well.

So yes we can do it; the result is distorted from one person one vote proportional but has many of the advantages PR systems do. Given the basic rule of equality of states instead of people, it is fair, and opens the door for diverse groups to get a hearing in the Senate and gain some real power there.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Interesting, I could see that working and I think I could actually support that.
 
I used Presidential election numbers so gerrymandering doesn't even come up with my very rough and tumble math. I used the percentage of the statewide vote so there is zero gerrymandering calculated into those numbers. They might be slightly high for Alabama because Truman wasn't even on the ballot but for the rest it should be relatively close. Though it does show the power of political malfeasance that was going on in the south even once you take away gerrymandering.

Though I do think you will need to give a hand wave of some kind as to why the Dixiecrats didn't split in 48. After all the entire reason they were founded was to toss the presidential election to the house of representatives so they could extract concessions from whoever they could. They were already acting as a third party and had all the political machinery set up to run as a regional third party but they only keep with the democrats to have a stronger influence on the president. Adding actual third party congressmen to their presidential revolt seems like a very obvious thing for them to do now that several of the barriers to that are taken away and there is a threat that they won't win every single seat every single time.
 
Re Dixiecrats, they had little ambition as yet to operate as a real third party; they already controlled a lot of states under the Democratic banner which was a strong identity pull in the South, so they had something to lose by separating completely. What they wanted was the leverage they were accustomed to control the national Democratic agenda. Their plan in '48 was to force the election into the House where they thought they would leverage things their way, and to thus break the progressive wing of the Democratic party, at least as far as civil rights were concerned.

Funny you should mention that.

I am halfway through a laborious process of determining, from handwriting in numbers from this PDF of the Congressional report on the election, exactly what the percentages were for each state's vote for Congress, and also what sort of turnout each state managed versus the national average.

You see, here is a sneaky little democracy bomb at work. If all states have identical turnout rates, then by state each one has roughly equal power. (I remind everyone--every citizen who votes, in any state, has the same power throughout the nation--anything I say about differential power of states is irrelevant to any citizen who showed up to vote having more or less--they don't , it is all the same for every voter. But states are another story...) But what happens if one state's citizens show up to vote in double the proportion of the average, while in another state only half the expected numbers show up? The states are between them allocated 217 districts which guarantee each state a more or less proportional share of half of Congress, every state has a guaranteed minimum therefore. But the 218 seats outstanding are distributed so as to make each party delegation proportional...and this means that districts with low turnout are unlikely to provide a second representative, while those with high turnout might manage three, four or even more. There is nothing unfair about this in my view; it provides an incentive for each region to encourage high turnout, automatically rewards high turnout with a high representation in Congress, and punishes low turnout with a lower representation.

The consequences of the Jim Crow regime on the southern delegation are becoming intuitively obvious when I look at the shares each Southern state brings to the elections, versus the shares highly competitive big northern states do. A big purpose of what I am doing now is to map out just who will staff the new Congress. We know for which parties, but the question is, what kinds of Democrats or Republicans are favored?

We already know that actually, every Congressional candidate who runs under the Democratic banner will be seated, along with twelve more. Who are these twelve though? For now, Jim Crow southern establishment politicians will retain their seats...well, sort of.

By redistricting down to just 217, of course I eliminated half the district seats. Those incumbents are not coming back unless they primary out their rivals within their own party in the new consolidated bigger districts--one or the other goes down and out. The overall numbers for the party are only moderately lower for the delegation, but the new Democrats who mostly replace those eliminated in the redistricting will come from places that Democrats used to not come from, Republican strongholds in fact. The geographic character of each party delegation will change as the Republicans too, having lost half their usual number, will greet a lot of Southern Republicans who never stood a chance to take office OTL.

A major reason I conceived of the rule that says a person can vote for any candidate anywhere in the nation is for people such as the limited number of African Americans who can manage to vote in the Jim Crow South! If they can cast their vote secretly and freely, and trust it will not be illegally purged but allowed to stand--big ifs of course, but I assume for this election they can--they could vote for some Northern African American candidate who can get on the ballot in New York or Illinois or Michigan. It might be too dangerous to get an African on the ballot in say Kentucky, but they have this safety valve that can elevate African American politicians running in districts where it is safe for them to do so and thus empower them. It is then possible for them to use their power in Congress to make local candidacies safer in more Southern districts, and thus enable Southern African Americans to be elected.

As a general rule the out of district vote option is intended to give an out from repressive local conditions, or also to enable people who wish to support a movement with practically zero support in their region.

Meanwhile, insofar as Jim Crow prevents most African Americans from voting at all, the hole this makes in the electorate costs the regions that practice this discrimination the share of Congress one expects from the Census population. In general any such regional oppression costs the oppressive group power in Congress.

This is of course the single biggest obstacle to the introduction of PR of any kind in America in this time frame; the Southern Dixiecrats fully understand all this and will be quite bitter about it. But insofar as we assume by magic that it happens despite their disgruntlement, it automatically pulls the rug out from under them.

Obviously if they were allowed to commit overt fraud and make up the votes, they might be much more supportive. A necessary aspect of a national PR system then is strict oversight of election integrity and championing of the right of unpopular people to go to the polls, vote, and have their votes counted.
 
These are the questions we have to game out. I am still grunging through trying to figure exactly what the outcomes look like! I have found the Wikpedia pages on the Congressional and Senate elections extremely frustrating; they do not present a collated outcome by state--how much of say Michigan's congressional delegation is Republican and how much Democratic, nor is there a table listing the winners with appropriate statistics let alone a complete presentation of all votes cast district by district. For some elections, some of the links in the state by state summary will take you to more detailed state election of that year pages, but for 1948 it is just California and Virginia that have these. Generally the summary page for the election of a given year will tell you which candidate won each district in a state by state chart taking some concentration to read, and then list the winner and a few competitors, rarely all of them I think unless of course the state balloting system refuses to record more than a handful of alternatives, with percentage numbers attached instead of absolute numbers, nor are the total votes tallied in each district race generally given.

Fortunately for me the Virginia election page did link me to a PDF of the summary made by Congress itself after the election, giving the official figures actually acted on. This will enable me to do the Senate project but that is not going to be easy even so, I must hand type in what the PDF offers.

I have just now completed the state by state analysis of the Congress election, largely to determine where the PR chosen candidates would come from--remember every candidate in my system, despite it being a very fine tuned PR system, is also a candidate for a party (or an alternative type of affiliation I would provide for, to allow independent candidates to band together across the districts as they see fit) FROM a particular district; the district candidates and PR "list" ones are the same people, and the fill up seats go to the largest vote winners left over after plurality seats are taken. The former would generally be the largest winners of course.

As it happens, given the votes cast in 1948, neither major party would have run as many candidates as they would earn seats, so first of all everyone who showed up as a candidate for a district for either major party would walk into Congress as a Member. Secondly to make up the deficit I imagined a system that chooses a loyal party functionary from the strongest districts-the Democrats' top 17, the Republicans' top 9. Unfortunately I did not have a complete pasteable list of all candidates of each party in every district, and remember I had to reduce them from 535 to 217 districts too. (The alternative would be to double the size of Congress, to 871 seats, which is what I and probably the politicians would prefer, but is a bear to implement).

As I expected when I was finally done, the South stood out as a region that suffered serious reduction in the portion of its Congressional delegation versus OTL; the Midwest and West gained the most. Turnout varied tremendously, not just between Jim Crow states and those outside Dixie but with no very clear pattern beyond that except that big non-Southern states tended to have very high turnout, so California and Illinois tended to gain more--surprisingly New York state did not do so well despite gaining 4 third party seats, and the second state in the 1940 census, Pennslyvania, actually lost a seat's worth of influence.

I still have to analyze the difference the different outcome demographics make to the two major parties. The Progressives by the way get two members from California and one each from Oregon (a woman) and Illinois. Meanwhile the South is in fact pretty screwed overall, and as I said before I believe Jim Crow is the culprit. First of all forbidding a large segment of the population from voting at all is going to hurt them as a region. Second, the wider Jim Crow regime, with the effectively enfranchised population mesmerized by the priority of maintaining white supremacy, is in effect a one-party dictatorship, and thus only insiders who can affect the Democratic party primary have any real power. The general election therefore would tend to have low turnout since its outcome is often a foregone conclusion, indeed in several Southern states, no Republican votes were recorded whatsoever. In another, Louisiana IIRC, one Republican got under 250 votes in one district--and that fellow is going straight to Congress because he registered as a Republican candidate and his party earned more seats than they actually ran as mentioned, so he is automatically IN. Southern states with no or few Republican contenders suffer from not being able to enhance their total delegation beyond the apportionment!

So first of all the first political effect from this straightjacketed election is to cut the power of the Dixiecrats considerably. OTOH a fair number of Southern Republicans who normally would not stand a chance of seeing Congress from the floor are going to the Capitol now!

We need to identify who the ATL Congress people are versus OTL, and get an idea how they might react differently, versus assuming that events might steamroller in the same kind of people who won OTL--I am sure that is too simplistic, but doing it right is not going to be easy!

It is going to be necessary to assume that the PR system will not be dismantled, and that would not seem very probable conventionally speaking. We need to identify who would benefit from it and how they can countervail the objections of the people we are sure will see it as a curse.
 
Shevek23 said:
These are the questions we have to game out. I am still grunging through trying to figure exactly what the outcomes look like! I have found the Wikpedia pages on the Congressional and Senate elections extremely frustrating; they do not present a collated outcome by state--how much of say Michigan's congressional delegation is Republican and how much Democratic, nor is there a table listing the winners with appropriate statistics let alone a complete presentation of all votes cast district by district. For some elections, some of the links in the state by state summary will take you to more detailed state election of that year pages, but for 1948 it is just California and Virginia that have these. Generally the summary page for the election of a given year will tell you which candidate won each district in a state by state chart taking some concentration to read, and then list the winner and a few competitors, rarely all of them I think unless of course the state balloting system refuses to record more than a handful of alternatives, with percentage numbers attached instead of absolute numbers, nor are the total votes tallied in each district race generally given.

Fortunately for me the Virginia election page did link me to a PDF of the summary made by Congress itself after the election, giving the official figures actually acted on. This will enable me to do the Senate project but that is not going to be easy even so, I must hand type in what the PDF offers.

I have just now completed the state by state analysis of the Congress election, largely to determine where the PR chosen candidates would come from--remember every candidate in my system, despite it being a very fine tuned PR system, is also a candidate for a party (or an alternative type of affiliation I would provide for, to allow independent candidates to band together across the districts as they see fit) FROM a particular district; the district candidates and PR "list" ones are the same people, and the fill up seats go to the largest vote winners left over after plurality seats are taken. The former would generally be the largest winners of course.

As it happens, given the votes cast in 1948, neither major party would have run as many candidates as they would earn seats, so first of all everyone who showed up as a candidate for a district for either major party would walk into Congress as a Member. Secondly to make up the deficit I imagined a system that chooses a loyal party functionary from the strongest districts-the Democrats' top 17, the Republicans' top 9. Unfortunately I did not have a complete pasteable list of all candidates of each party in every district, and remember I had to reduce them from 535 to 217 districts too. (The alternative would be to double the size of Congress, to 871 seats, which is what I and probably the politicians would prefer, but is a bear to implement).

As I expected when I was finally done, the South stood out as a region that suffered serious reduction in the portion of its Congressional delegation versus OTL; the Midwest and West gained the most. Turnout varied tremendously, not just between Jim Crow states and those outside Dixie but with no very clear pattern beyond that except that big non-Southern states tended to have very high turnout, so California and Illinois tended to gain more--surprisingly New York state did not do so well despite gaining 4 third party seats, and the second state in the 1940 census, Pennslyvania, actually lost a seat's worth of influence.

I still have to analyze the difference the different outcome demographics make to the two major parties. The Progressives by the way get two members from California and one each from Oregon (a woman) and Illinois. Meanwhile the South is in fact pretty screwed overall, and as I said before I believe Jim Crow is the culprit. First of all forbidding a large segment of the population from voting at all is going to hurt them as a region. Second, the wider Jim Crow regime, with the effectively enfranchised population mesmerized by the priority of maintaining white supremacy, is in effect a one-party dictatorship, and thus only insiders who can affect the Democratic party primary have any real power. The general election therefore would tend to have low turnout since its outcome is often a foregone conclusion, indeed in several Southern states, no Republican votes were recorded whatsoever. In another, Louisiana IIRC, one Republican got under 250 votes in one district--and that fellow is going straight to Congress because he registered as a Republican candidate and his party earned more seats than they actually ran as mentioned, so he is automatically IN. Southern states with no or few Republican contenders suffer from not being able to enhance their total delegation beyond the apportionment!

So first of all the first political effect from this straightjacketed election is to cut the power of the Dixiecrats considerably. OTOH a fair number of Southern Republicans who normally would not stand a chance of seeing Congress from the floor are going to the Capitol now!

We need to identify who the ATL Congress people are versus OTL, and get an idea how they might react differently, versus assuming that events might steamroller in the same kind of people who won OTL--I am sure that is too simplistic, but doing it right is not going to be easy!

It is going to be necessary to assume that the PR system will not be dismantled, and that would not seem very probable conventionally speaking. We need to identify who would benefit from it and how they can countervail the objections of the people we are sure will see it as a curse.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Okay then. Keep up the good work.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top