Entrenchment

Yglesias also has a couple posts up about the 'first past the post' electoral systems we have in the United States.

We've been covering vote dilution, malapportionment and gerrymandering in my conlaw class the last few days, and one theme comes up in every case: entrenchment.

Political theorists (and philosophers!) can spend all the time they want discussing possible benefits of switching to proportional representation, but finding a way to actually create such a switch is more difficult.

The idea of entrenchment is rather simple, but goes far to explain many of the voting and election controversies in our history. Put simply, those who wield power will not make expansions to the political community or changes in the electoral system because the status quo is what put them in power.

Take malapportionment for example. Until the Supreme Court got involved in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), several states had not reapportioned their legislative districts since the turn of the century. The state having thus ignored the massive urbanization our country experienced, voters in urban areas were underrepresented in the state legislature by shocking magnitudes. But the legislature itself was never going to make the necessary changes, because those in power were only there because of the malapportionment.

That's why the courts intervened. I assume that Matt is not interested in seeing the courts order a restructuring of Congress, and of course such a possibility is incredibly remote.

So I wonder what the mechanism for this change would be. I have trouble imagining Congressmen themselves supporting such a change, since it poses a tremendous threat to their parties (and their own seats). The only possibility I see is doing it at a state level (individual state legislatures changing the way they elect their own Congressmen; obviously they'll never change the way they themselves get elected). What states would be good targets for such an effort?

Of course if we're setting up a new system, like in Iraq, this problem doesn't exist. But it is interesting to look back at the obstacles to change in America's own electoral system.

UPDATES: Chris Lawrence points out that current federal law mandates single-member districts. That poses an almost insurmountable problem for any movement to multi-member districts, which is the way most who favor proportional representation would probably want it done.