Why I Like Instant Runoff Voting

In a few months, the people of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will hold a referendum election on the question of whether to change their electoral system fundamentally. Currently Britain's parliament is elected on the same basis as the U.S. House of Representatives: several hundred geographic districts hold elections, and whoever gets the most votes is elected. It's a very simple system, and it sounds very appealing. But if this referendum is successful, Britain will replace it with what they call alternative vote, or what I call instant runoff voting (AV/IRV). Reading two law review articles about presidential government which happened to discuss proportional representation, I was reminded of why I really like IRV.
The articles were written by Professors Bruce Ackerman and Steven Calabresi, the latter of whom is teaching the class that I'm reading them for. They are both responding to the other, Ackerman to one of Calabresi's earlier works and Calabresi to this specific article of Ackerman's. They are debating the relative merits of American-style Presidential government (Calabresi) against Germany-style constrained parliamentary government (Ackerman), but they agree on a few things, one of which is that mixing an independent president with a proportional-representation legislature is a recipe for disaster. A PR legislature, they argue, will have tons and tons of splinter parties and factions, which will form only a very weak coalition majority and will have virtually no organized loyal opposition. Combine that inherent weakness with a president and you have an invitation for that president to run rough-shod over the legislature, possibly even disbanding it in a time of crisis and taking absolute power to himself (c'mon, we know it would be a "he" in that case).

But the first-past-the-post system that we use in America and that Britain is currently debating has some serious problems. It doesn't just promote a two-party system, it entrenches it so thoroughly that it's impossible to challenge. Consider this: no one has ever successfully challenged the existing two-party system in America, created a new main party, and overthrown one of the old two parties. Never. It's never happened. What has happened, twice, is that one of the two major parties has died, and a new party, largely composed of the same people and interests, has arisen to take its place. When the Federalists fizzled out after their disastrous 1814/15 Hartford Convention, the resulting power vacuum led the Democratic-Republican Party to take complete control of the government. But before long, the D-R's started dividing into Democrats and Whigs, along roughly the same lines that the old Republican/Federalist divide had run. A few decades later, in the mid-1850s, the Whigs met a similar fate as their predecessors, losing all coherence and splintering apart in the face of the slavery crisis. As the Whigs disintegrated, many former party members in the north joined together to form a new party, the Republicans, which effectively took the Whigs' place, though it never captured the allegiance of Southern Whigs.

A challenge to the two parties has been attempted several times, but it has never succeeded. Most notable are the Populist and Progressive Parties of the 1892-1924 era, which captured electoral votes three times ('92, '12, '24). The Populists were swallowed into the Democratic Party, however, in the 1896 election with the advent of William Jennings Bryan. Should we count this as a successful challenge? You can make the argument that the populists did manage to more or less shatter the old Bourbon Democrats, and transform the party into a kind of populist-democratic hybrid. On the other hand, the Populists had more or less of a single-issue platform, and the Democrats nominated the conservative Alton Parker in 1904 and the even-more-conservative John Davis in 1924; even Al Smith in 1928 was reasonable conservative, and ended up opposing much of FDR's New Deal.

The Progressives had a good twenty years when both political parties subscribed more or less whole-heartedly to their ideology. Conservative factions in the Republican Party in particular resisted, and in 1912 nominated the only-vaguely-conservative Taft against the flamboyantly progressive Roosevelt, but Taft was still reasonably progressive. But I'm not sure this gives the Progressives more rather than less credit for challenging the two-party system: I think progressivism was just sweeping the country, and took both parties along with it from the inside. 1912 was the result of the power of the Republican Party elite to deny the nomination to the more popular Roosevelt. 1924 was a bit of an anomaly; La Follette ran because both Coolidge and Davis were distinctly conservative, but the Democratic Party was already moving in the direction of more left-wing candidates.

Other attempts have been less notable. Various segregationist third parties were always distinctly temporal in nature, and in any event failed dramatically, though the fault there lies more with the arc of history than anything else (did I say fault? I meant credit). Ross Perot's two bids can be seen as an attempt to challenge the two-party system, and it didn't work out very well. The result of an attempt to challenge the Democratic Party from the left in 2000 was, obviously, the enabling of the election of the most conservative President in a long time, an experience which has scared most of the left away from third party challenges.

Calabresi argues that a two-party system is basically a good thing. Such a system promotes stability and moderation, and also forces society to organize around broad-based ideological principles rather than narrow factionalism. I think I basically agree. But I think it's dangerous to create a system in which it is impossible to challenge the dominant two parties from without. For one thing, it gives more and more power to the Median Voter Theorem. One problem with this "theorem" is that in the real world, if both parties moved to the opinions of the median voter then there would be a considerable niche for parties representing the two wings of the spectrum. The harder you make it for new parties to arise and legitimately challenge the system, the more the system will cater sycophantically to the center of the center. Calabresi thinks this good, to at least some degree, as it will reduce the influence of truly radical groups like neo-Nazis or Communists. That's fair enough, but I think there's definitely a point of being too obsessed with centrism (as anyone who's read most of my previous posts probably understands!). For one thing, if the two parties really do move ever-closer to one another, what choice is left to the voters? For another, I think it tends to be true that the "centrist" voters in a nation like ours are really what I might call "a priori" centrists, i.e. those who do not actually have particularly strong opinions but are inclined to believe that "the truth" lies somewhere between what the two parties are each saying. They will also be voters who don't pay very much attention to politics, I think, or at least will be so more than more ideological voters. Such voters are likely to be easy to manipulate, might be prone to misinformation, and are less engaged in the process anyway. And besides, who made the 20% of voters who "fall in the middle" the only ones who matter around here?

So let's say that we agree with Calabresi and Ackerman that a system of pure proportional representation is dangerous, in that it splinters parties hopelessly into tiny bits, weakens legislative bodies, and facilitates the rise of truly dangerous extreme groups. Let's say we also agree with me (and since I'm writing this, we do) that there is a danger in being too eager to promote a stable two-party system. What's the solution? I think that it is nothing more and nothing less than a single-member-constituency-based legislature where elections are held using IRV (with any independent Presidents also elected using IRV). Here's why.

It's easy to see why IRV should, at least in theory, make it easier to rock the boat of the existing two-party system. In 2000, had there been IRV in place in America and had I been eligible to vote, I would almost certainly have voted 1. Nader 2. Gore 3. whoever, etc. Given our plurality-winner system, however, I would have voted for Gore, and I do in fact feel kind of displeased with liberals who voted for Nader. I think there are a lot more like me, many of whom probably did vote. I bet that in an IRV world, Nader would have gotten a lot more than 3%. And I also believe that Gore would have won; hell, that part's easy.

What's less obvious but, I think, equally true is why IRV doesn't encounter the problems that Calabresi is worried about. First of all, I don't think there's any danger that the kind of system I'm detailing would get lots of neo-Nazis elected. The great virtue of IRV is that whoever wins must be someone at least relatively palatable to an actual majority of the electorate. By still confining ourselves to single-member constituencies, we ensure that any extremist would need to actually convince a majority of some 700,000-person district (in the US) to tolerate him before he got elected. That wouldn't happen. Unlike in PR, where getting 2% gets you a spot in the legislature, with this system 2% would get you axed in the first few rounds of instantly running off. The votes of the fascists would filter up to the center-right parties, and the votes of the communists would filter up to the center-left parties.

This would also counteract fragmenting in general, since each candidate would need to ultimately accumulate 50% in their own constituency. Something like Britain's Liberal Democrats might prosper in this system (which is why they're pushing it), where they could run a split progressive ticket in most every district and in some cases Labor would win and in some cases the Lib-Dems would win. But something like the BNP would gain next to nothing from this system. They get 2% or less in national elections, and their best constituency result ever was a 14.6% showing in a majority-labor London constituency, shortly behind the Tories. As long as the BNP never became popular enough to overtake the Conservatives in first-round voting at least in some places other than solid left-wing seats, they would never win any seats. It's as simple as that. So the IRV world I'm describing would maintain a tendency toward a small number of major parties.

One ironic result of this combination is that the main big-tend parties might actually have greater license to move toward the center, since they could afford to lose a noticeable amount of flank support and still be in a position to re-absorb all of those votes after a few rounds of instant runoffs. But the mechanism would exist to challenge and overthrow a main party if the desire to do so arose. I've heard, in fact, that in Australia the adoption of IRV did not lead to a proliferation of third parties as its advocates had hoped. To me, that's part of the point. The IRV system is clearly not designed to choke off a third-party movement before it can become viable, as the American system is. If no third parties arise under it, that must mean there isn't really a hunger for a challenge to the existing party system.