American GovernmentU.S. Congressional Elections

Congressional Elections

• Elections for the U.S. Congress in particular may be as competitive and nearly as important as the presidential campaign.

• Congressional elections are important because of the central role the Congress plays in making policy.

• Unlike a parliamentary system, the American system is one of separate powers between Congress and the president. All laws are written in and must be passed by the Congress.

• Also as opposed to parliamentary systems, party discipline is often less strictly observed. Members of Congress are free to vote on policies as they think best, including what they think best for winning their own reelection.

U.S. Congressional Elections: Nuts & Bolts

• The House and the Senate have nearly equal powers, but their means of election are quite different.

• The Founders of the American Republic intended members of the House to be close to the public, reflecting its wishes and ambitions most faithfully in legislating.

• Therefore, the Founders designed the House to be relatively large and to have frequent (two-year) elections. Originally, a two-year term was considered by some to be too long.

U.S. & FPTP “First Past the Post”

• Section II of Article 1 of the Constitution states "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second year by the People of the several States.... Representatives...shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers."

• The Constitution did not, however, specify the manner in which representatives are to be apportioned -- only that there be a certain number of representatives from each state. The framers of the early government of the United States also did not prescribe the means of electing representatives.

SMDs & Congress

• This arrangement changed with an apportionment act in 1842 (5 Stat. 491). This act set the House membership at 223 members and contained a requirement for single-member districts.

• It stated that representatives "should be elected by districts composed of contiguous territory equal in number to the number of representatives to which said state may be entitled, no one district electing more than one representative."

• Thus single-member districts were officially instituted by Congress.

SMD Advantages

• provide voters with strong constituency representation because each voter has a single, easily identifiable, district representative

• encourage constituency service by providing voters with an easily identifiable "ombudsman"

• maximize accountability because a single representative can be held responsible and can be re-elected or defeated in the next election

• ensure geographic representation.

Democracy in the World: PR Systems

• Proportional representation, also known as full representation, is an electoral system in which the overall votes are reflected in the overall outcome of the body or bodies of representatives

• Proportional representation involves a close match between the percentage of votes that political parties receive and the number of seats they obtain in legislative assemblies.

Proportional Voting

• The basic approach of proportional representation is simple: • legislators are elected in multimember districts instead of

single-member districts, and the number of seats that a party wins in an election is proportional to the amount of its support among voters.

• So if you have a 10-member district and the Republicans win 50% of the vote, they receive five of the ten seats.

• If the Democrats win 30% of the vote, they get three seats; and if a third party gets 20% of the vote, they win two seats.

Proportional Voting: Votes & Seats

TABLE 1: A 100 SEAT LEGISLATURE ELECTION

PARTY % OF VOTE IN ELECTION

# OF SEATSIN GOV’T

Liberals 22% 22 seats

Conservatives 25% 25 seats

Green 18% 18 seats

Communists 05% 05 seats

Fascists 10% 10 seats

Christians 10% 10 seats

Socialists 10% 10 seats

Types of Proportional Systems

• Party List• Open• Closed

• Mixed• Single-Transferable Vote

Party List - Closed

Party List - Open

Single Transferable Vote Ballot

Two Party System

• Elections that are decided by plurality rule, especially from single-member districts, are very likely to result in a system with exactly two major political parties.

• This is so because any third-party candidate has very little chance of winning.

• Voters prefer to avoid "wasting" their votes on what they consider to be hopeless campaigns, and candidates who want to win election therefore avoid affiliation with any hopeless party.

Duverger’s Law

• Duverger's Law is a principle which asserts that a first-past-the-post election system naturally leads to a two-party system.

• The discovery of this principle is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a “law”.

• It is important to realize Duverger's law suggests a nexus between a party system and an electoral system - with a proportional representation (PR) system creating the electoral conditions necessary to foster party development and a FPTP system marginalizing many smaller - single issue - political parties.

Congressional Elections Votes / Seats 2004

Partied Seats Popular Vote

20021 2004 +/- Strength Vote % Change

Republican Party 229 232 +3 53.3% 55,713,412 49.2% -0.4%

Democratic Party 204 202 -3 46.4% 52,745,121 46.6% +1.6%

Independent 1 1 0 0.2% 674,202 0.6% +0.1%

Libertarian Party - - - - 1,040,465 0.9% -0.5%

Green Party - - - - 331,298 0.3% -0.1%

Independence Party - - - - 246,070 0.2% 0.0%

Working Families Party - - - - 145,979 0.1% N/A

Constitution Party - - - - 132,613 0.1% 0.0%

Reform Party - - - - 85,539 0.1% +0.1%

Other parties - - - - 2,063,606 1.8% -0.8%

Total 435 435 0 100.0% 113,192,286 100.0% –

Source: Election Statistics - Office of the Clerk1 Vacancy due to death of Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii.

SMD Representation Bias: Solutions?

• Multi-member Separate Voting districting versus single member districts

• Multi-member Separate Voting – More is better?• All candidates run in one big district, each voter votes in

each race• Example: City with 4 At Large City Council seats: Vote for

4 seats (with candidates running for an individual seat rather than any of the seats)

• Ex 1 (SMD). Candidate A runs for Seat 1 while Candidate C runs for Seat 2 and you vote for each separately

• Ex 2 (MMSD). Vote for Candidate A on Seat 1 and vote for Candidate C on Seat 2 where each candidate gets a plurality vote.

• Assume 60% D and 40% R and these voters all vote straight party district. What will happen:

Elections with Multi-Member Separate Voting

TABLE 1: MMSV in Columbia City Council Election

SEAT 1 D CANDIDATE 60% R CANDIDATE 40%

SEAT 2 D CANDIDATE 60% R CANDIDATE 40%

SEAT 3 D CANDIDATE 60% R CANDIDATE 40%

SEAT 4 D CANDIDATE 60% R CANDIDATE 40%

More isn’t Necessarily Better

• Multi-member districts have the same bias that single member districts do.

• The Democrats win every seat. Multi-member Separate Voting tends to favor the majority dramatically.

Possible Future: MMCV

Multi-Member Cumulative Voting• As a cure to the under-representation of various

groups in the American system, other kinds of electoral systems are available.

• MMCV is a variant of proportional voting.• Recall the example of the 4 City Council Seats

• One open race for all the seats, where any number of people can run

• Voters may cast a total of Four Votes• NEW: Votes can be distributed however the voter wishes to

(you can give all 4 votes to 1 candidate, divide it out among two candidates equally, 1 vote for four different candidates, etc.)

• The Top Four Vote Getters Win.

TABLE 2: POSSIBLE VOTE STRATEGIES UNDER MMCV

Election CandidatesElection Candidates Strategy 1Strategy 1 Strategy 2Strategy 2 Strategy 3Strategy 3 Strategy 4Strategy 4

Candidate A 4 votes 2 votes 1 votes 3 votes

Candidate B 0 votes 0 votes 1 votes 0 votes

Candidate C 0 votes 2 votes 1 votes 1 votes

Candidate D 0 votes 0 votes 1 votes 0 votes

Candidate E 0 votes 0 votes 0 votes 0 votes

CUMULATIVE 4 4 4 4

MMCV: Diversity

• Result? More diversity in terms of who gets elected. Highly motivated groups can strategically vote to get representation (they can mass all 4 votes of each voter with one candidate thus, despite the fact they don’t have a majority in the district, they are able to get a representative).

• This isn’t just theory: Alabama Chilton County has MMCV. • 40% Black 60% White, 55% D 45% R• The Chilton County Commission was under SMD• The result then was all 5 commissioners were white and

Democrats.• They went to MMCV• They now have a black member and two Republicans.

Voting in Perspective

• Why is this important? The Courts may be considering forcing MMCV in place of SMD.• Side-effects: increases the costs of voting (the

task of voting is much more difficult).• With Congress, district elections would be state-

wide (this is a much more complicated election system) and that presents Constitutional problems.

• Local issues would necessarily take a blow in favor of state-wide issues (since congressman would be elected state-wide rather than locally)

Factors in Congressional Elections

• Throughout most of U.S. history, congressional elections were "party centered."

• Their efforts as individual incumbents often only marginally added to or subtracted from their support.

• In more recent years, candidates' personalities and issues have emerged as forces that add to the impact of party loyalties.

• Elections have become: candidate-centered.

Candidate-Centered Elections

• The ability of candidates to campaign over television, to raise huge amounts of money, and to conduct polls and other aspects of modern campaigning has made the voter more aware of the candidate as an individual.

• As a result, voters tend to consider their impression of the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates, in addition to weighing their party loyalties.

The Incumbency Advantage

• Candidate-centered voting is a major advantage to incumbent members of Congress.

• Incumbents, in general, receive far more exposure on television and in newspapers than those challenging them.

• With greater media exposure and substantial influence over public policy, incumbents are also able to raise far greater sums of money with which to campaign.

• For these reasons and more, incumbents who run for reelection are very likely to win. • Reelection rate for Senate: 88 percent • Reelection rate for House: 96 percent

Incumbency

• Regular party voting is voting your partisan identification.

• A congressman that makes himself personally popular doesn’t have to worry about the ebb and flow of popularity for Democrats or Republicans as a whole.

• Thus they can insulate themselves from challengers & win reelection.

Assessing the Incumbency Advantage

• The incumbency advantage can be a bit overstated:• Not much competition.• Incumbents who are vulnerable don’t have

to run for reelection. The vulnerable incumbent can (and often do) retire. Thus they self-select out of reelection.

Causes of Incumbency Advantage

• Experience – an incumbent by definition is experienced. He or she has already won at least one election. They have an inkling on what to do to get elected.

• Franking – congressional privilege that allows congresspersons to send out mail to their constituents FOR FREE. It’s in the Constitution. Challengers don’t get to send out free mail to the district or state.

• Free Media – local media like covering congressman. Furthermore, they can go on national TV shows, they have an office in Washington that can create media releases.

• Pork – congressman bring federal spending into their local areas to benefit the district (which thus increases goodwill in the district for you). Naturally challengers can’t do this.

• Casework – when individual constituents have a problem and call their congressman. It’s an easy, non-controversial way of making voters happy. People helped (no matter what party) will be more likely to vote for him and they will tell their friends. A large proportion of their staff is dedicated to doing casework.

• Campaign finance – the ability to raise money. They have a big advantage over challengers because they are already in congress with a vote over legislation and thus interest groups will attempt to influence them (whatever their party).

CONTRIBUTIONS TO INCUMBENT AND CHALLENGER CANDIDATES TO THE U.S. HOUSE FROM PACs1983-2000

Ultimate Cause of I.A.

• Bottom Line Cause: Scaring away quality challengers. • The average challenger is not necessarily (not even likely

to be) the best candidate available in the district. • Why are there no quality challengers?

• Because incumbents are very good at making themselves look invulnerable – thus true and quality challengers don’t run loosing campaigns (they will run somewhere else). It is no coincidence that when an incumbent retires or dies that a number of individuals (quality) run for the office.

• Sometimes a quality challenger does come out of the woodworks and runs…and the incumbent does much worse (he may even loose). Ex. Richard Hardy, 1992.

Districts & Redistricting

• As mentioned earlier, House members run in ‘districts.’ These districts have their geographical boundaries set, generally, every 10 years by the state legislature and based on the decennial census.

• Single Member Districts (SMDs) are districts where only one representative will ‘win’ election and represent that district.

Redistricting

• Redistricting: the process of redrawing district lines.

• Politics of Redistricting - Gerrymandering: Drawing district lines to advantage a particular group and/or disadvantage a particular group.

• There are 2 kinds of gerrymandering:• 1. Packing – place all the members of the other

party into one district.• 2. Dilution – spread out the members of the other

party so that they don’t have enough votes to win any district, though they have a block of voters in each district.

Gerrymandered District

Gerrymandering: Urban vs. Rural

• The folks in the rural districts wanted to ‘disadvantage’ the urban districts (the rural leadership controlled the state legislatures).

• This was accomplished by having one really BIG district (in terms of population) with all the urban voters ‘packed’ into it while the rest of the state consisted of numerous equal size (geographically) but smaller (population) rural districts.

• In the 1960’s, the Supreme Court decided this sort of district packing was held to be illegal. The Key Case was: Baker v. Carr.

• Baker v. Carr: established the principle of one man, one vote. Equal voting power should be distributed across a population equally.

• SC explicitly made an exception for the United States Senate.

Hypothetical ‘Packed’ District

FIGURE 1: PACKING A DISTRICT 500K 500K 1MIL 500K 500K

Gerrymandering: Party vs. Racial

• Party vs. Minority Discrimination• Gerrymandering for the purposes of ‘party’ is legal.• Gerrymandering for the purposes of ‘racial’ discrimination is

illegal.

• The distinction: racial characteristics are easily identified…while party is hard to define and not a necessarily reliable distinction.

• Gerrymandering IV: Affirmative Action• Blacks are ‘represented’ in Congress disproportionate to

their numbers in the population.• In the early 1990’s a new Voting Rights Act was passed that

allowed gerrymandering for the purpose of affirmative action.

Hypothetical Majority-Minority District

FIGURE 1: MAJORITY-MINORITY DISTRICTS 10% BLK 5% BLK 70% BLK 10% BLK 5% BLK

Majority-Minority Districts

• The result was gerrymandering to create Majority-Minority Districts. It was ‘effective’ in that blacks were being elected to Congress.

• Congressman sued for loosing their seats on the basis of racial gerrymandering.

• The Supreme Court decided that race cannot be a predominant factor in drawing district lines in a 1993 Supreme Court decision (Shaw v. Reno). They determined that creation of a "majority-minority" district solely for racial reasons was unconstitutional.

• Gerrymandering cannot be explicitly about race. Those districts were held unconstitutional, though Majority-Minority districts were not held unconstitutional.

• Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, joined by the court's conservatives [in the 1993 opinion], wrote for the majority that the oddly shaped district embodied unfounded assumptions about how blacks and whites vote, and that racial gerrymandering threatened to "balkanize" the country."

Racially Gerrymandered District 1992

Racially Gerrymandered District 1998

Supreme Court & Racial Redistricting

• The Court returns to the issue in 2000 (Miller v. Johnson): by a 5 to 4 vote, the justices upheld a congressional district challenged because of its heavy minority voting population.

• Supreme Court ruling sets a precedent allowing states to create "majority minority" voting districts as long as the redistricting criteria are primarily concerned with factors such as voting behavior.

• Since blacks and Hispanics vote heavily Democratic, then in a district with a large number of Democrats a high proportion of them could well be racial minorities.

• Supreme Court Stephen G. Breyer's opinion: "The evidence taken together . . . does not show that racial considerations predominated in the drawing of District 12's boundaries. That is because race closely correlates with political behavior" in North Carolina. Blacks in this state traditionally vote 90% Democratic.

Racial Gerrymandering Reconsidered

Some points to consider…• It didn’t always work.• The argument can be made that affirmative action

gerrymandering helped the Republicans. It had a ‘whitening’ effect on other districts.

• This was racial ‘packing’ in that you were throwing all these solid Democrats into one district. Some in fact argue that the 94’ revolution might, in part, be the result of this.

• This raises questions about Representation: are you ‘better off’ having someone who looks like you represent you.