Executive Summary

Polarization and partisan combat in our two-party system have risen to historic levels in recent decades. Both sides tend to portray the next election in existential terms, with their opponent’s victory likely to lead the country into doom and destruction. Members of Congress have increasingly turned to centralized leadership to achieve their goals in this high-stakes, zero-sum environment. However, the centralization in our political institutions is at odds with the considerable pluralism and diversity in American society. We need to look no further than the chaotic 118th Congress for an example of pluralism bucking up against the constraints of a centralized, two-party system. Without reform, these contradictions will continue to heighten and threaten the integrity of our political institutions.

One solution would be to replace our antiquated and comparatively rare winner-take-all electoral system with a system of proportional representation, where more than two parties could hold a significant number of seats in the House and better represent the nation’s diversity. Proportional representation would likely end gerrymandering, improve the representation of historically marginalized groups, and help alleviate the toxic “us vs. them” political culture. But while proportional representation has long been heralded as an electoral reform, the reform community has had much less to say about how having multiple parties would affect governance. This includes concerns that multipartyism would make governing even more chaotic and difficult than it is under the current system, weakening Congress as an institution.

“Proportional representation would likely end gerrymandering, improve the representation of historically marginalized groups, and help alleviate the toxic ‘us vs. them’ political culture.”

Drawing from international comparisons and congressional history prior to the era of polarization, we expect that proportional representation would create a multiparty presidential system where various parties are organized under two broad pre-electoral coalitions. Affiliated with presidential candidates, or the government and the opposition, these broad coalitions would roughly align with the present-day Democratic and Republican parties, just with more clearly defined factions that voters could directly support during congressional elections. Inside the House, the coalitions would likely organize themselves as two legislative blocs and distribute “spoils,” like committee leadership positions, to the different parties within each coalition under a negotiated power-sharing arrangement.

We expect that the broad and looser coalitions would lead to more fluidity in legislative bargaining and complex dealmaking because members would not be as tied to the two broader coalitions as they are to the Democrat and Republican brands in the current system. To facilitate bargaining, we recommend reforms that would decentralize the House by empowering committees and latent majorities relative to the broader coalition leaders, most importantly the speaker. We also recommend reforms to rules like the motion to vacate to ensure that inter-party disputes within the majority coalition cannot easily lead to breakdown and chaos like we saw in the 118th Congress.

We encourage future research and critical thinking about how multipartyism would work if other basic institutional features of our constitutional system do not change. Specifically, we recommend further exploration of how introducing additional factionalism would affect Congress’s position within the separation-of-powers system, what role the Senate would play given that it cannot hold proportional elections, and how other details of the system—including district magnitude, ballot design, and the size of the House—might impact governing dynamics.

“Escaping bad equilibriums requires imagination, bold ideas, and deep thinking about systematic change.”

There are many possible paths that such a reform might take, and none of them would be guaranteed to improve our politics. Comprehensive institutional change is difficult. Uncertainty and unintended consequences lurk around every corner. However, not changing our institutions also entails risks. Escaping bad equilibriums requires imagination, bold ideas, and deep thinking about systematic change.