The following story may help answer that question: In the early 1980s, workers at the Ford Motor Company were known to be the most demoralized in their industry and were producing cars with a reputation for poor quality. So the managers at one plant tried an experiment. They installed a switch at every workstation that let any employee stop the whole assembly line. So if a worker saw a defect on any car going by, he or she could halt the line to fix the problem. The workers were soon stopping the line over 20 times a day, far more often than the managers had expected. But most of the halts lasted under 30 seconds. Employee morale soared. Car quality climbed along with it. So the managers deemed the experiment a big success.
The connection to politics? A typical American voter today is like a worker on the old Ford assembly line: Whatever a voter does in the polling booth makes no difference that he or she can see. Whatever a typical voter does, he can’t get a representative who shares his strongest beliefs. Understandably, most Americans voters don’t bother to find out where candidates stand on major issues.
What the Ford experiment suggests is that if voters got a real choice of who would represent them on the issues they cared about, most voters would put far more thought into that choice.
Very few people pick a home or a car based on one feature alone. Why? Because a typical buyer cares about several features and has many homes or cars to consider.
A typical voter today is in a very different position. He or she may have only two viable candidates to choose from and, often, neither one addresses the voter’s concerns on major issues. So some voters choose a candidate based on one highly emotional subject.
With PAR, though, each voter would have over a dozen candidates to choose from and could get a representative who shared the voter’s perspective on several issues that were impacting the voter’s life. So, fewer voters than now would choose candidates based on one issue alone.
Most Americans who are politically engaged now have a favorite columnist or commentator — someone they feel speaks to them and for them — even though they surely disagree with some of his or her stands.
How does that happen? It’s that a typical columnist articulates a philosophy or way of thinking that appeals to his or her audience so strongly that they stay loyal, despite some disagreements with him.
A PAR lawmaker would likewise need to articulate a coherent set of values or priorities that would attract a large bloc of voters. He or she would then need to do a good job of advancing those priorities. If so, most of his voters would likely feel that he had represented them well — even if they disagreed with him on some issues.
In any election system, for a voter to be represented, he or she needs to have a set of values that many other voters share. That’s the nature of representative democracy. Voters with highly idiosyncratic views get little if any representation. With PAR, though, many more voters would feel represented than can possibly feel that way today.
Wouldn’t some voters prefer a lawmaker who stuck to his principles rather than one willing to compromise? So couldn’t PAR lead to even more gridlock?
Surveys consistently show that the vast majority of Americans want lawmakers from opposing camps to work out their differences. So if voters could truly choose their lawmakers, most voters would prefer a good negotiator over an inflexible ideologue.
As for voters who preferred inflexibility, over time many of them might grow weary of seeing their camp make no progress while other camps did.
In other words, good negotiators can find creative ways to resolve their differences without compromising their principles. If they compromise, it’s on the details.
For voters to hold a representative accountable, they would need reliable information about her work on the key issues. But the media don’t provide such details about each lawmaker. So where would the information come from?
The media cover topics that people care about. So if the average city resident began to care about what his or her representative was up to, some print media and websites would likely start to keep track of what each lawmaker was doing. Each lawmaker would also keep his or her constituents posted on his work, albeit in a self-serving way.
Isn’t politics already afflicted by too many interest groups pursuing self-serving agendas and blocking proposals requiring sacrifices on their part?
Interest groups will always seek power. It’s an inescapable fact of political life. The question is: How is power allocated? With today’s elections, voters are so disengaged that a typical representative caters to the best organized groups while most of his voters neither know nor care.
With PAR, though, voters would have far more incentive than now to keep track of their representative and more options for replacing any representative who couldn’t defend his or her decisions. And the most practical way for each representative to defend his decisions would be to craft efficient solutions to public problems.
Wouldn’t most PAR legislators just cater to constituents’ wants, showering voters with benefits while trying to conceal the costs, like many lawmakers do today?
Many voters would still make unreasonable demands, and many legislators would still try to appease them. That’s the human condition. In a PAR election, though, candidates would have every reason to highlight any incumbent who made wasteful decisions. Voters would, in turn, have far more reason than now to weigh what those challengers had to say, to weigh the costs of their lawmaker’s decisions, and to vote out any incumbent who spent money unwisely. So lawmakers would have far greater incentives than now to weigh the costs of their actions.
Most voters will never grasp complex issues in enough depth to be able to evaluate their representative’s justification for a deal that requires them to make sacrifices. So wouldn’t PAR representatives refuse to sign on to such deals?
If a representative has constituents who share her values, she is in the best position to explain to them the trade-offs in complex deals. For instance, a union representative is in an ideal position to show workers at a company in trouble how they would benefit by foregoing a wage hike and, instead, accepting bonuses based on profits. A PAR representative would likewise be in a far better position than representatives today to explain to constituents how they could benefit from creative deals.
Incumbents will always have the advantages of name recognition, access to campaign contributors, and a government-paid staff. So even with PAR, wouldn’t incumbents consistently win reelection?
With PAR, each voter would have a preferential ballot. Each voter would also have many more candidates to choose from than today. So any voter who thought an incumbent had done a mediocre job would have every reason to rank other candidates ahead of incumbents. Incumbents would thus win far less often than today.
Politicians value votes more than money. Most politicians, after all, don’t pocket the money from lobbyists. Politicians use that money to buy campaign advertising in order to drum their names into voters’ heads and attack opponents.
Meanwhile, over 80 percent of voters know almost nothing about the candidates’ track records — including which lobbyists have given them money and how much, even though that data is publicly available. So a politician who sells out to lobbyists boosts his odds of winning reelection — at no risk.
The most realistic solution is to reverse those odds, by a) giving voters far more incentives to scrutinize politicians’ track records, including whom they have taken campaign contributions from, and b) enabling voters to easily replace any politician who has sold out to lobbyists.
Will politicians whose main skill is winning votes ever be able to do the high quality research and analysis necessary to find the best solutions?
Lawmakers can turn to staff members and outside experts for quality research and analysis. But lawmakers today often ignore those resources because they lack incentives to seek out first-rate solutions. PAR’s purpose is to give them those incentives.
That depends on the city. Some cities, of course, hold nonpartisan elections.
But even in cities that hold partisan elections, PAR would likely work best if independent candidates could also get on the ballot. Voters would then have more choices, so they could more easily hold their lawmaker to account for his or her actions.