Andrew Sullivan writes:

I have to say the way some get worked up about this—I’m talking to you, Rick—baffles me.

You talkin’ to me, Andrew?

I guess so, since, sadly, I seem to be the only Rick who gets worked up about “this”—this being the basic electoral arrangement we inherited from Great Britain a couple of hundred years ago: the single-member-district, geographically based, plurality-winner-take-all system of representation, which the Brits call “first past the post,” or FPTP.

The United States, some other former British colonies (e.g., Canada and India), and certain Latin American republics that made the mistake of aping the Colossus of the North still labor under the disadvantages of this eighteenth-century political technology. Pretty much every other democracy—including the whole of continental Europe—has chosen one or another version of proportional representation, which was invented in the mid-nineteenth century. In recent decades, ex-colonies New Zealand and Australia have moved beyond FPTP. So has the mother country herself for elections to regional legislatures and the European parliament—everything but the kingdom-wide House of Commons. And if the Liberal Democrats do well tonight, change might be on its way to Westminster as well.

Andrew links approvingly to a thoughtful Jonathan Bernstein post and pulls out two key points. Here’s the first:

What [proponents of P.R.] get wrong, I think, is that the ultimate goal of a political system cannot be to accurately reflect the strength of each party in parliament, much less accurately reflect the strength of all the views of the citizens in parliament, which is essentially impossible anyway. No, what matters more is whether the government is responsive to citizens.

More accurate representation is one of the goals of P.R., but so is responsiveness. And there are plenty of others. A partial list: boosting the legitimacy of democratic government in the eyes of people whose candidates or parties lose as well as those whose candidates win; increasing participation; opening the policy debate to more points of view; discouraging irresponsibility, special interest influence, and scorched-earth negative campaigning; fostering civility, coöperation, and consensus; and giving fair representation to all kinds of minorities, ideological and political as well as racial, ethnic, and gender, while still guaranteeing that the government represents a majority of voters.

Bernstein’s second point:

[O]n electoral reform, my instincts are to be cautious unless there’s a clear violation of democracy that needs to be remedied, such as the massive rural bias that the US remedied with one person, one vote in the 1960s. I don’t see anything close to that in using first-past-the-post instead of p.r. That’s not to say that I’d be against reform, but I’d recommend proceeding cautiously. You don’t want to be (if I can slip in a baseball comparison here) a Bud Selig, constantly changing the rules to react to the latest complaints.

Though one-person one-vote partially remedied rural bias, it necessarily left the U.S. Senate—the inviolable homeland of rural bias—untouched. It must be said, though, that rural bias (i.e., gross malapportionment) was one of many obvious problems (like slavery, school segregation, “sodomy” laws, and gender discrimination) that the elected branches of our government have been unable to solve and that have had to be dealt with via civil war or judicial fiat. (The Supreme Court’s one-person one-vote decision also rendered two-house state legislatures redundant. Too bad the Court didn’t go a step further and just declare state senates unconstitutional. They do nothing but gum up the works and create opportunities for corruption and inaction.)

On P.R., we have been “proceeding cautiously,” here and in the U.K., for rather too long. The idea has been around for a century and a half. It is thoroughly tested. In the democracies that use it, it is embraced across the political and ideological spectrum. By contrast, FPTP essentially disfranchises voters in “safe” districts—a large majority of the population even in Britain, where districting is left to a nonpartisan commission, and a gigantic majority, upwards of eighty per cent, in the gerrymandered United States. Is that a “clear violation of democracy”? I’d say so. But even if you don’t think it amounts to outright rape, it’s certainly the political equivalent of abuse.

Still with me here? Eager for more, you masochist you? Well, in my book “Politics” you can find a nice long polemic on proportional representation (pp. 495-507). Or you can read the piece for free, right now, on Google Books. One of the thirteen pages is missing (why does Google do that?), but, mortifyingly, the missing page doesn’t add much—it mainly says that a lot of the changes reformers advocate (fairer redistricting, public campaign finance, free TV time for candidates, etc.) wouldn’t do us anywhere near as much good as P.R.