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Report: “Understanding How Proportional Representation Might Work in New York City”

John Ketcham and I have a new report out today with the Manhattan Institute. In it, we show that the effective number of electoral parties at the last New York City council election was 3.3. We defend this computation by reference to the seat-product model. Then we simulate two forms of proportional representation: open-list at the borough level, mixed-member PR with a citywide compensation tier of 20 seats.

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Trojan Horse or distraction?

At the Election Law Blog, Rick Pildes describes two rationales for adopting proportional representation (PR) nationally. One of these is anti-gerrymandering. He describes the other as the effort to induce a system of 5-6 political parties. On both, he writes:

There’s another issue to flag about the relationship between these two versions of PR in the rhetoric around reform. I’m concerned that advocates for the second version of PR will draw on the intuitions behind the first version of PR to gain support for the second version. In other words, support for the first version of PR will become a Trojan Horse for the second version.

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Flag etiquette

Here are the instructions that came with an American flag I own. It is 100% cotton and was new-in-bag when I got it. The packaging suggests it was manufactured in the early-to-mid-1960s.

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Descriptive racial representation and anti-gerrymandering at once

This post follows up on my earlier advice to consider minority-party representation (MPR) as an anti-gerrymandering measure. Its basics are described here and reproduced at the bottom of the post.

This week’s news has been about the potential for new Republican district maps to reduce the number of Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives. MPR can be designed to address that problem too.

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