Blog #1 - Grayson

After just a cursory glance at this week’s readings regarding electoral systems, it should become strikingly clear that the United States is profoundly less “democratic” than it could be. In this case I don’t mean democratic in the classic political science, sense where political power is in the hands of the people, who exercise that power through election. Rather, I mean democracy as it is used colloquially: a political system where every citizen has a voice and a say in what occurs. The United States is a heavily majoritarian democracy. All national level electoral systems (with the possibly exception of that funky Electoral College) are “first-past-the-post” systems, where the winner is simply the candidate who receives the most votes. At the risk of making an excessively general statement, I would guess the vast majority of American students grow up believing that this electoral system in the most desirable and equitable in the world. Upon ingesting this week’s readings, it’s pretty clear that the latter is false and the former is seriously debatable.

 

            My point, however, has nothing to do with bashing our domestic electoral system. While some form of proportional electoral system, be it Party List, Single Transferable Vote or some other variation on that theme would, as Lijphart put it, “limit, divide, separate, and share power in a variety of ways” (227), our pluralistic/majoritarian system works remarkable well because it doesn’t operate in isolation. The American system, essentially “winner-take-all”, would be dangerously volatile in an extremely divided society that offers little protection for the minority, as that minority’s main method of protection (participating in government) would difficult. Countries in this situation, as Reilly explains, have experimented with proportional systems in order to encourage centrist policies. In contrast, while the US does have a rather politically divided population, there exists a long tradition of legal and executive protection of political minorities. For that reason, and many more, the majoritarian democracy we live in isn’t quite as scary as the authors we read can make it sound.