Over 200 Democracy Scholars Call on Congress To End Single-Member Congressional Districts and Adopt Proportional Representation
WASHINGTON, DC– Today, more than 200 political scientists, legal scholars, and historians from academic institutions across the United States released an open letter calling on Congress to reject the United States’ winner-take-all system of elections in the wake of a failed 2020 redistricting process and adopt multi-member districts with proportional representation for the U.S. House of Representatives.
The letter’s 200+ signatories include experts in fields ranging from comparative electoral politics to constitutional law. They include nine Johan Skytte Prize winners, often considered the ‘Nobel Prize of political science’: Robert Axelrod, Francis Fukuyama, Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, David Laitin, Margaret Levi, Arend Lijphart, Philippe Schmitter, and Rein Taagepera. Other prominent signatories include leading voices on the perilous state of American democracy like Steven Levitsy, Jennifer McCoy, and Brendan Nyhan, as well as experts on America’s current electoral system like Larry Sabato, and Matthew Shugart, among many others.
“Our arcane, single-member districting process divides, polarizes, and isolates us from each other,” the letter says. “It has effectively extinguished competitive elections for most Americans and produced a deeply divided political system that is incapable of responding to changing demands and emerging challenges with necessary legitimacy.
“Accordingly, we urge Congress to ensure that this is the last redistricting cycle under a failed single-winner system and to adopt inclusive, multi-member districts with more proportional representation.”
The letter is the latest sign of the growing momentum for proportional representation in the U.S. Despite broad-based scholarly consensus on the desirability of more proportional systems for decades, the instability of American democracy in the last few years has catalyzed greater efforts from activists and academics alike to promote a system for electing Congress that addresses the core problems facing the country.
As the 2020 redistricting cycle made clear, America’s current system of winner-take-all elections allows for gerrymandering, makes the great majority of seats uncompetitive, and fuels the extreme polarization and rigid two-party politics that cause legislative dysfunction. In a proportional system, multiple representatives per district are elected in proportion to their share of the vote, making gerrymandering obsolete, ensuring that every election is competitive, and enabling more electorally viable parties to emerge.
The letter is available here and is included below, followed by the full list of 204 signatories.
An Open Letter to Congress
September 19th, 2022
As the 2020 redistricting process comes to a close, it is clear that our winner-take-all system—where each U.S. House district is represented by a single person—is fundamentally broken. We call on Congress to adopt inclusive, multi-member districts with competitive and responsive proportional representation.
According to a recent analysis of the newly-redistricted House map, more than 90% of districts are effectively a lock for one of the parties this November. This means that many millions of voters have no meaningful say in general elections, with the overwhelming majority of Congress effectively chosen by low-turnout primaries. In other words, winner-take-all increasingly means we already know the outcome of almost any given race.
This collapse in competitive elections helps explain why Congress today is so polarized and held hostage by obstructionist politics. Because 90% of House members don’t have to worry about general elections and are beholden only to their district’s small number of primary voters, extreme elements are overrepresented to the point where one party in our two party system has been taken over by members that reject democracy itself.
Contrary to popular belief, geography—not gerrymandering—is the primary cause of this districting crisis. As the country has sorted geographically, with Democrats concentrating in cities and Republicans in rural areas, it is often impossible to draw competitive single-member districts that offer any semblance of geographic continuity and that keep communities of interest together. In fact, maps drawn by nonpartisan commissions in this redistricting cycle had just as few highly competitive districts as those drawn by politicians.
At the same time, our political divisions are far less dire than our electoral system implies. At the level of narrow, winner-take-all districts, only the majority opinion gets represented and we appear divided between fully Democratic and fully Republican districts. But on the scale of our communities, regions, and states, the United States remains a diverse and complex political tapestry. In 2020, there were more Trump voters in California than any other state and more Biden voters in Texas than in New York or Illinois. The vast—even overwhelming—majority of Americans don’t fit precisely into the ideology of their single-member congressional representation.
Congress has the ability to embrace this political richness by joining most other advanced democracies in moving to more inclusive, multi-member districts made competitive and responsive by proportional representation.
The effects would be far-reaching and salutary. More proportional representation would render gerrymandering obsolete and help ensure that a political party’s share of votes in an election actually determines how many seats it holds in the House. Larger, multi-member districts would mean almost every voter could cast a meaningful vote, regardless of where they live. And as the Supreme Court further weakens the Voting Rights Act, proportional representation allows communities of color to have their voices reflected—and their candidates elected—at the ballot box.
This fix would require only an act of Congress. Proportional, multi-member districts are not only constitutional, they are broadly consistent with American history and political norms. In fact, multi-member House districts were common across the country for over 150 years—albeit without proportional representation, which proved a fatal flaw, as at-large districts were used to effectively disenfranchise minority groups and grossly over-represent narrow majorities. Congress must now improve upon, not ignore, this history.
This redistricting cycle is a wake-up call for voters and our elected representatives. Our arcane, single-member districting process divides, polarizes, and isolates us from each other. It has effectively extinguished competitive elections for most Americans, and produced a deeply divided political system that is incapable of responding to changing demands and emerging challenges with necessary legitimacy.
Accordingly, we urge Congress to ensure that this is the last redistricting cycle under a failed single-winner system and to adopt inclusive, multi-member districts with more proportional representation.
Sincerely,
Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
William Aceves, California Western School of Law
Peter Christian Aigner, CUNY Graduate Center
John Aldrich, Duke University
Tyler Anbinder, George Washington University
Anne-Marie Angelo, University of Sussex
Elisabeth Anker, George Washington University
Bettina Aptheker, University of California, Santa Cruz
Deborah Avant, University of Denver
Robert Axelrod, University of Michigan
David Barker, American University
Naazneen Barma, University of Denver
John Barry, Tulane University
David Bateman, Cornell University
Rachel Beatty Riedl, Cornell University
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University
Paul Bender, Arizona State University
Sheri Berman, Barnard College
John Bieter, Boise State University
Robert Blair, Brown University
Jon Bond, Texas A&M University
Adam Bonica, Stanford University
Nikolas Bowie, Harvard Law School
John Brooke, The Ohio State University
Nadia Brown, Georgetown university
John Carey, Dartmouth College
Simone Caron, Wake Forest University
Alton Carroll, Northern Virginia Community College
Dan Carter, University of South Carolina
Alessandra Casella, Columbia University
Katherine Charron, North Carolina State University
Erica Chenoweth, Harvard University
Beverly Cigler, Pennsylvania State University
Joshua Cohen, University of California, Berkeley
Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University
Josep M. Colomer, Georgetown University
Mark Copelovitch, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame
Robert Cottrell
Gary Cox, Stanford University
Melody Crowder-Meyer, Davidson College
Matt Dallek, George Washington University
Christian Davenport, University of Michigan
Hannah Demeritt , Duke University School of Law
Matthew Dennis, University of Oregon
Lee Drutman, New America
Thomas Dublin, State University of New York at Binghamton
Chris Edelson, American University
Mark Edwards, Spring Arbor University
Nate Ela, University of Cincinnati
Kevin Esterling, University of California, Riverside
Matthew Evangelista, Cornell University
Sara M. Evans, University of Minnesota
Christina Ewig, University of Minnesota
David Faris, Roosevelt University
Christopher Federico, University of Minnesota
Ronald Feinman, Florida Atlantic University
Steven Fish, University of California, Berkeley
Dana R. Fisher, University of Maryland
Jill Frank, Cornell University
William Franko, West Virginia University
Caroline Fredrickson, Georgetown Law
Amy Fried, University of Maine
Scott Frisch, California State University, Channel Islands
Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University
Daniel Galvin, Northwestern University
Marshall Ganz, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Martin Gilens, University of California, Los Angeles
Simon Gilhooley, Bard College
Annalise Glauz-Todrank, Wake Forest University
Benjamin Goldfrank, Seton Hall University
Sara Goodman, University of California, Irvine
Jake Grumbach, University of Washington
Hannah Gurman, New York University
Nancy Hagedorn, State University of New York at Fredonia
Hahrie Han, Johns Hopkins University
Gretchen Helmke, University of Rochester
Charlotte Hill, University of California, Berkeley
Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University
Wesley Hogan, Duke University
Aziz Huq, University of Chicago
Jeffrey Isaac, Indiana University, Bloomington
Karl Jacoby, Columbia University
Dolores E. Janiewski, Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka
Joel Johnson, Colorado State University – Pueblo
Nathan Kalmoe, Louisiana State University
Nancy Kassop, State University of New York at New Paltz
Richard Katz, Johns Hopkins University
Peter Katzenstein, Cornell University
Thomas Keck, Syracuse University
Nathan Kelly, University of Tennessee
Robert Keohane,
Alex Keyssar, Harvard University
Helen Kinsella, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rachel Kleinfeld, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
Louise W. Knight, Northwestern University
Richard Kohn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ronald Krebs, University of Minnesota
Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Tim Lacy, Loyola University Chicago
David D. Laitin, Stanford University
Derek Larson, The College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University
Bruce Larson, Gettysburg College
Jeffrey Lerner, Wake Forest University
Margaret Levi, Stanford University
Peter Levine, Tufts University
Steven Levitsky, Harvard University
Robert Lieberman, Johns Hopkins University
Robert Lifset, University of Oklahoma
Arend Lijphart, University of California, San Diego
Kriste Lindenmeyer, Rutgers University
Nancy MacLean, Duke University
Scott Mainwaring, University of Notre Dame
Thomas Mann, Brookings Institution
Jane Manners, Temple University
John Martin, Duke University
Seth Masket, University of Denver
Fritz Mayer, University of Denver
Eleanor McConnell, Frostburg State University
Jennifer McCoy, Georgia State University
Jason McDaniel, San Francisco State University
Bonnie M. Meguid, University of Rochester
Walter Mignolo, Duke University
Terry Moe, Stanford University
Ralph Morelli
Daniel Myers, University of Minnesota
Carol Nechemias, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg
David Niven, University of Cincinnati
William Nomikos , Washington University in St. Louis
Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College
Stan Oklobdzija, University of California, Riverside
Peter Onuf, University of Virginia
Annelise Orleck, Dartmouth College
Benjamin I. Page, Northwestern University
Richard Parker, Harvard University
Josh Pasek, University of Michigan
Thomas Pepinsky, Cornell University
Isabel Perera, Cornell University
Rick Perlstein
Benjamin Peterson, Alma College
David Peterson, Iowa State University
Minh-Thu Pham, Princeton University
Dirk Philipsen, Duke University
Brian Pollins, The Ohio State University
Ethan Porter, George Washington University
Charles Postel, San Francisco State University
Lawrence N. Powell
John Quist, Shippensburg University
Ben Railton, Fitchburg State University
Miles Rapoport, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Daniel Richter, University of Pennsylvania
Kenneth Roberts, Cornell University
Bert A. Rockman, Purdue University
Joel Rogers, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Deondra Rose, Duke University
Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Vicki Ruiz, University of California, Irvine
Larry Sabato, University of Virginia
Anoop Sarbahi, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Martha Saxton, Amherst College
Ethan Scheiner, University of California, Davis
Stephen Schlesinger
Vivien Schmidt, Boston University
Philippe Schmitter, European University Institute
Sanford Schram, Hunter College and the Graduate Center CUNY
Robert Shapiro, Columbia University
Matthew Shugart, University of California, Davis
Peter Siavelis, Wake Forest University
Dan Slater, University of Michigan
Jason Scott Smith, University of New Mexico
Steven Smith, Washington University
Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania
Shannon Smith, College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University
Joe Soss, University of Minnesota
Thomas Spragens, Duke University
Leonard Steinhorn, American University
Susan Stokes, University of Chicago
Jennie Sweet-Cushman, Chatham University
Rein Taagepera, University of California, Irvine
Paul Taillon, University of Auckland
Bob Pepperman Taylor, University of Vermont
Steven Taylor, Troy University
Alexander Theodoridis, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Susan Thorne, Duke University
Chloe Thurston, Northwestern University
James Traub, New York University
Chuck Tryon, Fayetteville State University
Mustafa Tuna, Duke University
Antonio Ugues Jr., St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Jennifer Victor, George Mason University
Penny Von Eschen, University of Virginia
Barbara F Walter, University of California, San Diego
Elizabeth Wemlinger, Salem College
Tisa Wenger, Yale University
Robb Willer, Stanford University
Garry Wills, Northwestern University
Amanda Wintersieck, Virginia Commonwealth University
Daniel Wirls, University of California, Santa Cruz
Christopher Witko, The Pennsylvania State University
Alex Zakaras, University of Vermont
Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania
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