When comparing America to other westernized countries around the globe, it could become disparaging at times to look at our current policies and see how “behind” we are to other countries. While we are still fighting over issues that have been passed and have been proven means-tested in other nations, we see the rest of the world taking bold and daring changes to their government to try and ensure more equality and equity in their societies that have never been tried before. We see out nation in a “tug of war”, while we see others forming coalitions between parties and uniting under strong, single-minded governments that can actually pass substantial change. Why is this? What makes American Democracy so stagnant?

While there are various symptoms and diagnoses one could bring up to say why America is stagnant, I think a very fundamental issue is our voting system, and how we allot representatives. Both of these stem from a common idea, the idea that politics is almost a “game” of sorts, a “winner-take-all” where the winners get to decide the policies of hundreds of millions of citizens until the next big election cycle. In reality, especially in a democracy, politics most likely should be proportionate of the vote base regardless of “winners” and “losers”, there shouldn’t be a real concept of “winning” in a district in a real democracy besides party primaries. Under this competitive way of thought, we see towns, counties, and even states where 51 percent of the voter base could decide all of the representation for the other 49 percent, without the others having a single say in the government. While that might seem like an exaggerative hypothetical, we see this regularly with 60/40 and 70/30 splits, and in our current society we are merely meant to be okay with this limited representation in our government because the party “lost”. This is a rather childish way of viewing how we decide who gets a say in making life or death policy situations for citizens.

The first issue that causes this lack of representation is the fact that we only have single representatives per voting districts. Each district only voting for a single representative, only having one seat to their name, leads to a large minority of the voting base not truly being represented in this democracy. Even if we just increased a hypothetical congressional district to 3 seats, while the “winning” majority party may still get 2 seats and maintain their hegemony, the “losing” party would still have someone to represent them in their government, rather than having hypothetically zero say in their government whatsoever.

The second way we could bring about rather larger change in our government procedures would be by getting rid of First Past the Post voting. This is our current way of voting, where we only vote for a single winner, the person we want to win the most. Instead, we could have single transferable vote based elections, which would increase overall voting for third parties or people who may have less electability because our votes could still go towards the “less of two evils”. Say we have a Lion, a Tiger, a Dog, and a Wolf running in a district. The Lion gets 5 percent of the population’s vote, the Tiger 40 percent, the Dog 30 percent, and the Wolf 25 percent of the vote. While the Tiger would be the winner here, in a STV system the Wolf’s votes could go to the Dog’s votes, due to them having much more in common than the Lion voters or the Tiger voters, and the Dog now has 55 percent of the vote. If this is a multi-seat district, the Wolf could still keep 9 percent of the vote, since the Dog only needs to beat 45 percent (the Tiger+Lion’s votes combined), leading with the three seats being taken by the Dog, Wolf, and Tiger. The way these votes function are through ranking candidates instead of choosing a sole winner, which is how votes are allocated through rounds of rankings. While STV is much more complex than that and this was a very very poor simplification, I hope it made sense!

These two changes in our democracy would make great strides in increasing representation in our government, as well as increasing unity and compromise between parties. Due to this, if these changes were every made, we may yet again be able to catch up to the rest of the democratic world in terms of progress.