Other Institutional Considerations

While we have focused on the House because it is the institution where multipartyism could be directly introduced by amending the Uniform Congressional District Act (UCDA), it would not be the only governing institution affected by multipartyism. Fully considering how multipartyism would impact elections and how institutions like the presidency and the Senate might operate in a multiparty system are beyond the scope of this paper. However, we want to acknowledge some of the most pressing concerns and suggest an agenda for scholars and reformers who are thinking about how proportional representation and multipartyism would work in the United States.

The details of the new electoral system are extremely important for a proportional system. Key questions include: How many members will be elected from the districts? Will there be a national vote threshold for a party to attain representation? Will states have discretion? Would the ballot be open list, closed list, or involve some sort of preference ranking?

The answers to these questions will ultimately determine important aspects of the party system and governing institutions, including how many parties are electorally viable, what kind of candidates have advantages, how much discipline party leaders will be able to impose on members, and more. To cite one example of why these details matter, a closed-list system, where parties decide which candidates appear on the general election ballot, would likely feature stronger party discipline in Congress compared to a system where candidates are more independent.¹

Importantly, these details may be specified in a new version of the UCDA that applies to all House elections, or they could be specified in state-specific legislation. Either way, the reform coalition should think hard about how these decisions will impact elections, political parties, and governance and whether a one-size-fits-all or state-by-state approach would be better.

We believe five to six national parties would provide a reasonable balance between too much stability and too much flexibility.² To do this, we would need a large proportion of districts to elect at least five or six members (M = 5 or 6 in the language of electoral system engineers). However, under the current apportionment of 435 House seats, there are 21 states with less than five seats. These 21 states collectively hold 50 of 435 seats, or 11.5 percent, and there are 37 states with less than 10 seats, the minimum number needed to draw two districts with M = 5. These 37 states collectively hold 168 of 435 seats, or 38.6 percent. In other words, a substantial portion of the population would have a limited ability to elect multiple parties. Proportional representation would mostly work in the large states where there could be multiple districts with five or more members. For the 10 largest states (which represent 57 percent of the country’s population), each would have at least two districts with at least five members. The largest state, California, would have 10 districts with five or more members.

To give voters in smaller states a better opportunity to participate in multiparty politics and to facilitate a transition to multimember districts that would not penalize incumbents, we could consider expanding the size of the House to 700 members—another change that is possible by amending statutory law rather than changing the Constitution.³ The United States House is an outlier in having an extremely high ratio of constituents to representatives.⁴ If we allocated 700 seats among the states, only 14 states representing 35 seats (5 percent of the 700) would have fewer than five seats, and just 24 states representing 104 seats (14.9 percent of the 700) would have fewer than 10 seats. Only Vermont and Wyoming would continue to have single-winner elections, while Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and South Dakota would have two representatives each (and would almost surely give one seat to each party). While this reform could help accommodate multipartyism, it also could cause problems in the House if the increase is not rolled out gradually.

We would need to reconsider the role of the president in the new system. For better or worse, the U.S. presidency is here to stay. However, there is some basic tension and incompatibility between a unitary president and a multiparty legislature.⁵ Most obviously, the president is a more prominent figure than any legislative actor and is elected separately in a single-winner race. This imposes a binary pro-president vs. anti-president structure onto the system, as most parties will be primarily defined by whether they are for or against the president. Fears of presidential domination have long haunted multiparty presidential systems.⁶

Unlike a legislature, the presidency is vested in one person, and he is an agent of a singular national will (or at least presents himself as such). Thus, much of American politics revolves around what the president is doing, either their legislative agenda or unilateral actions. However, presidents will not have as many “built-in” allies (i.e., copartisans) as they would in a two-party system and might struggle to advance their initiatives. This is particularly true in the United States, where presidents are much institutionally weaker than they are in Latin America. Presidents facing multiparty legislatures are most successful when they have tools to build and manage coalitions around their priorities.⁷ As such, the president might need new institutional tools— such as increased power over cabinet appointments—to operate in a multiparty environment. Presidents who cannot get their programs through the legislature are more likely to try to bypass the legislature, sometimes in ways that strain the constitutional separation of powers.⁸

At the same time, though, giving the U.S. president more institutional tools would make them more like a Latin American president, which would also increase concerns about executive aggrandizement and accountability. The United States is already in the midst of a long-term shift in power from the legislative branch to the executive branch. Ditching a strong speaker for a more decentralized arrangement might further weaken Congress vis-a-vis the increasingly powerful president (and judiciary, for that matter).

On the other hand, Congress was a more effective counterweight against the president during the mid-twentieth century, when partisan ties between the legislative and executive branches were much weaker. Moderate and liberal Republicans joined with Democrats to provide effective oversight of the Nixon administration after Watergate. Similarly, some Democrats stood against President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War.

Moreover, in recent decades, multiparty presidential democracies have proven more resilient than the conventional wisdom of earlier scholarship had expected. Indeed, the new conventional wisdom among comparative scholars is that multiparty presidentialism can work just fine and perhaps is even more resilient than two-party presidentialism with its risks of hyper-partisan polarization. Mainwaring and Drutman argue that multipartyism could lead to stronger checks on the president than occur in a unified government in a hyperpolarized two-party system.⁹

While our focus in this paper has been on coalition-building in the House, other reforms would be necessary for multipartyism to improve or maintain presidential-congressional relations. We also favor increasing Congress’s capacity to engage in independent policymaking and executive oversight through investments in human capital resources, like staff and nonpartisan research agencies based on Capitol Hill.¹⁰ We believe these capacity reforms are most likely to work if decentralization increases member efficacy and members begin to believe it is possible for them to enact policy that challenges the executive. A greater sense of efficacy would hopefully encourage members to use their new resources for more robust executive oversight rather than communications and partisan messaging.

The U.S. Senate presents a unique issue for multipartyism. Since states receive equal representation in the Senate, the chamber is highly disproportionate by geography and population. Senate elections are also winner-take-all elections since only one senator is elected at a time. While altering the UCDA would likely lead to multiple parties winning seats in the House, it would not affect elections for the Senate, a body that is constitutionally designed to represent the nation’s 50 states as equal political units rather than give all voters equal weight.

The Constitution implies that the Senate must conduct winner-take-all elections, so there is no guarantee that multiparty coalitions would form in the Senate even if they emerge in the House. In a best-case scenario, senators might align themselves with a coalition of parties also present in the House.¹¹ We might also see variations in regional strength, where certain parties run in Senate races in some parts of the country but do not field candidates in others, leading to multiple parties in the chamber.¹²

What happens in the Senate is particularly consequential for Congress because, unlike upper chambers in most other democratic legislatures, the Senate is uniquely powerful. Not only must it ratify any law passed by the House, but it also has special powers, like confirming the Cabinet and ratifying treaties, and has slid into an equilibrium where as few as 41 senators can block a majority from taking action through a threat to filibuster. This minoritarian impulse is exacerbated by the body’s malapportioned structure as smaller states that are more rural, white, and conservative have more representation relative to larger and more urbanized states where liberals and racial minorities are concentrated.¹³ As such, even if a multiparty coalition representing a majority of the country was able to take action in the House, senators representing a minority of the country could still block them.¹⁴

If the Senate frequently halts legislative action, it would blunt the potential for new alliances to unlock policy stalemates. In other words, party system reforms that ignore the Senate’s minoritarian tendencies may have limited impacts on the problems they aim to solve. An obvious reform here would be to abolish the filibuster. Beyond that, though, making the Senate work with multipartyism is tricky. One goal could be to make the Senate more similar to upper chambers in other democracies, where they rarely possess similar levels of veto power or empower political minorities to the same extent.¹⁵ Getting there is not simple, though, as any plausible institutional change (i.e., amending the Constitution) requires the consent of the Senate.

A more likely scenario for change is some long-term shift in norms where the Senate loses legitimacy and relevance, similar to the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. It is difficult to change norms through institutional reform, but in a world where proportional representation can happen, we would likely see partisan realignments and new coalitions that would be more receptive to dramatic change than they are in the current system. The United States has a long history of democratic institutional adjustments. Certainly, in a moment of zero-sum partisan warfare, in which even once bipartisan issues have become aspects of partisan hardball, it is difficult to imagine anything changing. But if we widen our aperture and expand our historical lens, many more possibilities come into focus.