Beyond Gerrymandering: A Structural Crisis of the American Electoral System

Abstract

Two key threats facing American democracy today are gerrymandering and voter suppression. In this article, I argue that both of these threats are a direct consequence of the US using a single-member district (SMD) electoral system. This is because SMD creates significant asymmetrical disproportionality, which is a type of electoral bias that can benefit larger parties over smaller parties. This bias leads to the two largest parties in the US winning more seats than their popular vote, which in turn leads to these parties gaining significant resource advantages over smaller parties. This sets off a self-reinforcing system that keeps these larger parties in power and squeezes out the smaller parties, a process that is especially potent when this dynamic is not offset by public funding of electoral campaigns. The resource advantages that result from such bias include control over government policy, which makes it easier for the larger parties to manipulate election laws to their advantage, including through gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Keywords:

• Electoral bias
• electoral systems
• Duverger’s Law
• gerrymandering
• malapportionment
• voter suppression
• authoritarianism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Erik J. Engstrom, Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Brad Epperly et al., “Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching, Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution of Voter Suppression in the U.S.” Perspectives on Politics 18, no. 3 (2020): 756–69. Tova Wang, The Politics of Voter Suppression: Defending and Expanding Americans' Right to Vote (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

2 Julia Kirschenbaum and Michael Li, “Gerrymandering Explained,” Brennan Center For Justice, August 12, 2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerrymandering-explained.

3 Kai Hao Yang and Alexander K. Zentefis, “Gerrymandering and the Limits of Representative Democracy,” EliScholar–A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publication at Yale, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3684&context=cowles-discussion-paper-series.

4 “What Georgia’s Voting Law Really Does,” The New York Times, April 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html.

5 Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 60–78.

6 Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, trans. Barbara North and Robert North (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1954), 223–6.

7 Edward R. Tufte, “The Relationship between Seats and Voters in Two-Party Systems,” American Political Science Review 67, no. 2 (1973): 540–54; Andrew Gelman and Gary King, “Estimating the Electoral Consequences of Legislative Redistricting,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 85, no. 410 (1990): 274–82; Andrew Gelman and Gary King, “A Unified Method of Evaluating Electoral Systems and Redistricting Plans,” American Journal of Political Science 38, no. 2 (1994): 514–54.

8 Bernard Tamas, “American Disproportionality: A Historical Analysis of Partisan Bias in Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives,” Election Law Journal 18, no. 1 (2019): 47–62.

9 Asymmetrical disproportionality is also measured differently than the more mainstream approach to measuring electoral bias, which is based on partisan symmetry (Gelman and King 1990). Partisan symmetry is based on the vote-seat curve, developed by Tufte (1973). While partisan symmetry has a number of advantages, including estimating how many seats each major party would win in a two-party system if they both received exactly the same percent of votes, it cannot measure the electoral bias in favor of major parties and against minor parties. Asymmetrical disproportionality is measured using the Directional Proportionality Index, or DPIx (Tamas 2019), which is derived from the Loosemore-Hanby index [John Loosemore and Victor J. Hanby. “The Theoretical Limits of Maximum Distortion: Some Analytic Expressions for Electoral Systems,” British Journal of Political Science 1 no. 4 (1971): 467–77)], one of the key measures of disproportionality in electoral systems. Unlike partisan symmetry, DPIx integrates the vote for all parties and is therefore better suited for measuring the bias between major and minor parties.

10 Guy Lardeyret, “The Problem with PR,” in Electoral Systems and Democracy, ed. Larry Jay Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), previously published as “Debate-Proportional Representation: The Problem with PR,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 3 (1991): 30–5; Quentin L. Quade, “PR and Democratic Statecraft,” in Electoral Systems and Democracy, ed. Larry Jay Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 92–7, previously published as “Debate—Proportional Representation: PR and Democratic Statecraft,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 3 (1991): 36–41.

11 Donald Jenks Ziegler, Prelude to Democracy: A Study of Proportional Representation and the Heritage of Weimar Germany, 1871–1920 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), 4–11; Quade, “PR and Democratic Statecraft,” 88.

12 “Hungary's Orbán Opens CPAC by Telling Conservatives ‘We Need to Coordinate the Movement’ of Allies,” CBS News, May 20, 2022, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/viktor-orban-hungary-cpac-2024-decisive/.

13 David Folkenflik, “Hungary's Autocratic Leader Tells U.S. Conservatives to Join His Culture War,” National Public Radio, August 4, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/08/04/1115541985/why-hungarys-authoritative-leader-is-drawing-conservative-crowds-in-the-u-s.

14 András Bozóki and Dániel Hegedűs, “An Externally Constrained Hybrid Regime: Hungary in the European Union,” Democratization 25, no. 7 (2018): 1173–89; Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai, and Kim Lane Scheppele, “Hungary’s Illiberal Turn: Disabling the Constitution,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 3 (2012): 138–46.

15 Péter Bajomi-Lázár, “Party Colonization of the Media: The Case of Hungary,” East European Politics and Societies 27, no. 1 (2013): 69–89.

16 Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121–45.

17 Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, NY: Random House, 1977).

18 Aliaksei Kazharski and Silvia Macalová, “Democracies: ‘Sovereign’ and ‘Illiberal’. The Russian-Hungarian Game of Adjectives and Its Implications for Regional Security,” Journal of Regional Security 15, no. 2 (2020): 235–62.

19 Robert G. Moser, “Electoral Systems and the Number of Parties in Postcommunist States,” World Politics 51, no. 3 (1999): 359–84. Bánkuti, Halmai, and Scheppele, 138.

20 Bernard Tamas, From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary, 1989–1994 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, Columbia University Press, 2008), 182–90.

21 Bernard Tamas, “A Divided Political Elite: Why Congress Banned Multimember Districts in 1842,” New Political Science 28, no. 1 (2006): 23–44.

22 Jack Santucci, More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

23 Richard S. Katz, “Why Are There So Many (or So Few) Electoral Reforms?” in The Politics of Electoral Systems, edited by Michael Gallagher and Paul Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57–76.

24 Matthew Søberg Shugart, “Comparative Electoral Systems Research: The Maturation of a Field and New Challenges Ahead,” in The Politics of Electoral Systems, ed. Michael Gallagher and Paul Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25–55.

25 Duverger, Political Parties, 226.

26 Ibid., 223–224.

27 Ibid., 224–226.

28 William H. Riker, “The Number of Political Parties: A Reexamination of Duverger's Law,” Comparative Politics 9, no. 1 (1976), 93–106.

29 See, for example, Gary W. Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

30 Ibid. Mark Fey, “Duverger's Law Without Strategic Voting,” 2007. Working Paper, https://www.rochester.edu/college/faculty/markfey/papers/Exit3.pdf.

31 David M. Farrell and Ian McAllister, The Australian Electoral System: Origins, Variations, and Consequences (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), 3–7.

32 Bernard Tamas and Michael Marshall, “SMP Countries in Africa: Examining Duverger’s Law, Electoral Bias, and Party Systems” (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, Illinois, April 8, 2022).

33 Bernard Tamas, The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties: Poised for Political Revival? (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 33–56, 146–68.

34 Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 161–5.

35 Steven J. Rosenstone, Roy L. Behr, and Edward H Lazarus, Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 27–39; Paul S. Herrnson, “Two-Party Dominance and Minor Party Forays in American Politics,” in Multiparty Politics in America: People, Passions, and Power, ed. Paul S. Herrnson and John C. Green (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 30–33; Tamas, Demise and Rebirth, 146–57.

36 “Campaign Finance: United Kingdom,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/uk.php; “Regulation of Campaign Finance and Free Advertising: Canada,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance-regulation/canada.php; “Campaign Finance: Australia,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/australia.php.

37 Gregory S. Warrington, “Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution,” Election Law Journal 17, no. 10 (2018): 39–57; John N. Friedman and Richard T. Holden, “Optimal Gerrymandering: Sometimes Pack, but Never Crack,” American Economic Review 98 no. 1 (2008): 113–44.

38 Jonathan A. Rodden, Why Cities Lose. The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019), 15–38.

39 Christian R. Grose, Jordan Carr Peterson, Matthew Nelson, and Sara Sadhwani, “The Worst Partisan Gerrymanders in US State Legislatures,” USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy; Nathaniel Rakich, Aaron Bycoffe, and Ryan Best, “How Redistricting Affects the Battle for State Legislatures,” FiveThirtyEight, April 5, 2022, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-redistricting-affects-the-battle-for-state-legislatures/.

40 The Senate analysis for each year includes all the regular elections from not only that election but also the previous two elections, to combine the impact of an entire cohort of Senate elections. The Electoral College data is based on how many electoral votes each state gets, not which candidate wins overall. See Appendix A for data sources.

41 Bernard Grofman, William Koetzle and Thomas Brunell, “An Integrated Perspective on the Three Potential Sources of Partisan Bias: Malapportionment, Turnout Differences and the Geographic Distribution of Party Vote Shares,” Electoral Studies 16, no. 4 (1997): 457–70; Jonathan Cervas and Bernard Grofman, “Legal, Political Science, and Economics Approaches to Measuring Malapportionment: The U.S. House, Senate, and Electoral College 1790–2010,” Social Science Quarterly 101, no. 6 (2020): 2238–56; Jack E. Riggs, Gerald R. Hobbs, and Todd H. Riggs, “Electoral College Winner's Advantage,” PS: Political Science and Politics 32, no. 2 (2009): 353–7.

42 John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck, The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 5–13.

43 Ari Berman, “How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement,” The Nation, July 28, 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement; for impact of Florida felon lists, see Guy Stuart, “Databases, Felons, and Voting: Bias and Partisanship of the Florida Felons List in the 2000 Elections,” Political Science Quarterly 119, no. 3 (2004): 453–75.

44 Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein, “What Georgia’s Voting Law Really Does,” New York Times, April 2, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html; see also Nathan Layne, “Explainer: Big Changes Under Georgia’s New Election Law,” Reuters, June 14, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/big-changes-under-georgias-new-election-law-2021-06-14/; and “Full Text: Georgia's Voting Law,” New York Times, April 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/01/us/politics/georgia-voting-law.html.

45 Fitzgerald, Mary, “Greater Convenience but Not Greater Turnout: The Impact of Alternative Voting Methods on Electoral Participation in the United States,” American Politics Research 33, no. 6 (2005): 842–67.

46 Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielson, “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes,” Journal of Politics 29, no. 2 (2017): 363–742.

47 Stephen Ansolabehere, “Effects of Identification Requirements on Voting: Evidence from the Experiences of Voters on Election Day,” PS: Political Science and Politics 42, no. 1 (2009): 127–30. Jason Mycoff, Michael Wagner, and David Wilson, “The Empirical Effects of Voter-ID Laws: Present or Absent,” PS: Political Science and Politics 42, no. 1 (2009): 121–26.

48 Quan Li, Michael J. Pomante II, and Scot Schraufnagel, “Cost of Voting in the American States,” Election Law Journal 17, no. 3 (2018): 234–47.

49 Tamas, Demise and Rebirth, 3–7, 114–20.

50 Marc J. Hetherington, “Resurgent Mass Partisanship: The Role of Elite Polarization,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (2001): 619–631.

51 Ibid.

52 Tamas, Demise and Rebirth, 148–51.

53 “Historical Population Change Data (1910–2020),” Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html.

54 Clerk of the House of Representatives, “Election Statistics: 1920 to Present,” https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/.

55 Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998); Clerk of the House of Representatives, “Election Statistics.”