Proportional
Representation:
Destabilizing
Idea
ABIGAIL THERNSTROM
Senior
Fellow, Manhattan Institute
Testimony
during hearings on “H.R. 1173/States’ Choice of Voting Systems Act,” U.S.
House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the
Constitution, September 23, 1999
Here are my thoughts on the proposal to allow states to use districting systems
other
than
single-member districts to elect representatives to Congress.
The
current system works well. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
[Advocates
of proportional representation] argue, of course, that repair is, in fact,
needed—that
states should not be forced to elect members of Congress exclusively
from
single-member districts. The process of congressional redistricting involves
many
disruptions
and much uncertainty, they argue. But where political interests are at
stake,
that is inevitable. They point to the costs of litigation, but those costs have
been
the
consequence of attempts to draw ludicrously gerrymandered districts in an effort
to
create a maximum number of safe black seats. That expense, in other words, was a
self-inflicted
wound. Now that such race driven redistricting has been ruled unconstitutional,
the
legal expenses associated with line-drawing should go down.
Advocates of proportional representation] also suggest that increased racial
polarization
is
the price America pays for single member districts. The attempt to draw such
districts
in such a manner as to give minority voters a chance
to elect
the “representatives
of
their choice…has heightened racial divisions.” This is a difficult argument
to
understand.
The Supreme Court [in Reno
v. Shaw,
1993] forced North Carolina to
redraw
Congressman [Mel] Watt’s district, and its black population dropped from 57
percent
to 36 percent. With a majority white constituency, Mr. Watt was compelled
to
forge a biracial coalition. Such coalitions do not increase racial polarization;
they
reduce
it. Any system of elections that encourages biracial or multiethnic coalitions
is
a plus. America is still too racially divided; every device that brings us
together should
receive
a very warm welcome.
In addition, the black voters in the first and twelfth districts of North
Carolina have
not
been deprived of a “chance”
to elect the representatives of their choice. Indeed, the
only
time black voters have no
chance to
elect the representatives of their choice
(who
may be white, of course) is when whites are a majority and refuse to support
anyone
who can pick up black votes. In an earlier era, there were such settings. But
America
has changed—as is so well illustrated by the victories of Mr. Watt and
Ms.[Eva]
Clayton [elected in 1992 as the first black members of Congress from
North
Carolina in a century]. In 1998, in his 36 percent black district, Mr. Watt won
with
56 percent of the vote. Sixty-two percent of the voters cast their ballots for
Ms.
Clayton
in her 50 percent white district. They will undoubtedly argue that they had
an
enormous advantage as incumbents, but they were not incumbents in the newly
drawn
districts
in which they had to run. Doors are wide open to black candidacies
today;
everyone knows Colin Powell would have had massive white support had
he
chosen to run for the presidency. In 1999 our problem is not bigoted white
voters
(a
relatively small minority), but a paucity of black candidates willing to test
the
biracial electoral waters. If Mr. Watt and Ms. Clayton are serious about wanting
to
narrow
the racial divide, they should encourage
other potential African American
candidates
to build biracial or multiethnic coalitions in settings that are not safely
majority-black.
Increasingly, that will become essential. Black voters are becoming more
residentially
dispersed.
Over 30 percent now live in suburbia; segregation is down in central
cities
as well—contrary to conventional wisdom. The proposed legislation would
undercut
the incentives currently built into the single-member system to form such
biracial
and multiethnic coalitions—incentives that will grow stronger as black voters
become
less residentially concentrated. With demographic change, Mr. Watt
and
Ms. Clayton may worry that safe black seats—majority black constituencies
—will
be harder to create. And they may believe that multimember districts
will
better allow the perpetuation of racial gerrymandering to maximize black office
holding.
Indeed,
race-conscious line drawing is not confined to single-member districts;
racial
considerations can play a dominant role in setting the contours of,
say,
the three multimember districts that a particular state might contain. But such
gerrymandering
is not in the interest of either white or black voters.
In a series of recent voting rights decisions that was precisely the Supreme
Court’s
point. Such gerrymandering is not in the public interest. As Justice [Sandra
Day]
O’Connor put it in Shaw
v. Reno,
contours obviously drawn with race in
mind
suggest racial stereotyping. They reinforce “the perception that members of
the
same
racial group—regardless of their age, education, economic status, or the
community
in
which they live—think alike, share the same political interests, and will
prefer
the
same candidates at the polls.” In other words, individuals—not
races—differ.
Assume
otherwise, O’Connor suggested, and racial lines are likely to harden.
Such
racial gerrymandering is not in the public interest, but if the voting rights
section
of
the U.S. Department of Justice continues to believe that the Voting Rights Act
is
an instrument with which to maximize black officeholding (reflecting the
conventional
wisdom
in the civil rights community), then race-conscious multimember
districting
will most likely be transformed from a mere option—as advertised—to a
full-blown
entitlement on the theory that anything less would “dilute” the black vote.
And
thus single-member districts won’t even be a choice in those states in which
multimember
districting is advantageous to black congressional candidates.
Suppose
the consequence of leaving the current system unchanged is a disproportionately
low
number of blacks and Hispanics in Congress. That is, suppose the
black
membership in Congress does not reflect precisely the black proportion of the
U.S.
population. (Indeed, as long as almost all African American members of Congress
are
Democrats, the black proportion will reflect Democratic Party strength rather
than
the black presence in the American population as a whole.) Is there something
wrong
with black underrepresentation by the measure of proportionality?
To begin with, answering, yes, assumes that only black officeholders can
represent
black
interests. And yet would anyone argue that only whites can represent white
interests?
Such an assertion would correctly be viewed as racist.
In addition, the purpose of an electoral system is not to mirror the population
precisely,
but
to produce officials who can govern. The current system not only creates
incentives
for reaching across racial and ethnic lines during campaigns, but also forces
compromise
among various political factions. From multimember districts, the next
step
will be to cumulative voting, which will encourage a multiplicity of parties,
some
of which will be racially defined There will be a David Duke party [Duke is
a
segregationist leader and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan]
and a black nationalist party, and blacks and whites will both be the losers.
In
order to govern, representatives from a variety of warring parties will have to
create
shifting
coalitions, but such temporary post-election alliances will inject instability
into
a system that now works well. Congress banned at-large elections for
congressional
seats in 1967, but the preference for single-member districts actually
stretches
back much further. Moreover, at the state level there has been a dramatic
decline
in the use of multimember seats, largely as a consequence of actual or
threatened
civil
rights litigation. (In 1962, 41 lower houses used some multimember districts;
by
the mid-1990s, the number was 12; for state senates, the number dropped
from
30 to 4.) Civil rights groups have long regarded at-large voting and multimember
districts
with the deepest suspicion, and with litigation, threats of litigation, and a
cooperative
Justice Department have forced the adoption of single-member districts for
elections
at the state and local level across the nation. Maps were drawn, jurisdictions
with
at-large and multimember districts were targeted, and a sustained campaign to
bring
them all down was launched. The reasoning behind that campaign
was
clear: Where black voters are residentially concentrated, such single-member can
be
carefully drawn to create absolutely safe black legislative seats. But for those
of us
who
lived through this history, today’s sudden change in sentiment—embodied in
this
bill—is simply incredible. A vital component of civil rights orthodoxy has
been
abandoned
without so much as a pretense of an explanation. If multimember districts
and
at-large voting are okay for Congress, are such electoral arrangements now
equally
acceptable
in the Mississippi counties from which they were banned by the Supreme
Court
in it’s 1969 landmark decision? Can other counties and cities return to
at-large
elections?
What is the principle here? Last I knew, even the Supreme Court had
directed
lower courts, who were imposing redistricting plans, to use single-member
districts.
The smaller districts that the civil rights community has insisted upon have
reduced
the
costs of campaigning, and have thus encouraged candidates with limited financial
resources.
Cumulative voting might solve the latter problem, but it carries with
it
other serious difficulties, as already suggested. Some of the problems are quite
technical.
For instance, could residents of a multimember district expect a member of
Congress
within that large district to represent everyone, or would constituency services
be
available only to that small minority of citizens (organized perhaps in a
splinter
party)
who provided the needed votes? In any case, if proponents of this bill want
cumulative
voting, they should say so directly.
In short, Mr. Watt and Ms. Clayton
were elected
under precisely the circumstances
that
have been the staple of civil rights dreams. And they should celebrate
the
gains that America has made. They are black officeholders elected with
substantial
white
support. A new chapter in American history has opened; Congress should not be
tempted
to close the book when the story has finally become so heartening.