Single-Member Districts and One-Party Authoritarianism: Case of Jim Crow South

• In Event: Minority Representation and Reaction

Abstract

In this paper, we build from research on American third parties and electoral systems as detailed in Bernard Tamas’ New Political Science (NPS) article “Does Fusion Undermine American Third Parties?” and book “The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties”, to address how, contrary to most current views, single-member district (SMD) electoral systems, like the United States, can increase the probability of authoritarianism.

It is often argued that proportional representation (PR) poses a higher threat to democratic stability than SMD systems because PR is more likely to permit dangerous factions, like right-wing populist movements, into government, giving them a foothold from which to potentially gain public support and eventual control over the government. Thus, the argument continues, while SMD systems do a worse job of representing various public interests and tend to promote two dominant political parties, at least these systems keep out threats to the democratic process.

In this paper, we make the opposite argument. Specifically, we argue that the inherent disproportionality of SMD can, under certain circumstances, inflate the power of a single party to such a degree that it puts that party in a position to legally undermine the democratic process. More specifically, we argue that whenever elections are administered in single-member districts, the translation of votes into seats is highly related to the geographic distribution of party support, which can produce results that are both odd and potentially a threat to democracy. In this situation, various, often random factors can dramatically inflate the percent of seats a single party wins, putting that party in a position to legally undermine the democratic process. When the vote for the strongest party is consistently higher than the second strongest party across districts, such as when voter support is homogenous across districts, or when opposition parties divide their support, then the number of seats won by the strongest party can escalate dramatically, putting it in a position to made dramatic and even dangerous decisions.

This, for example, helps explain how present-day Hungary has effectively become an authoritarian regime—it had an electoral system that was heavily based on single-member districts, which led to a single party (Fidesz, which promotes a right-wing, populist ideology) winning enough seats in 2010 to rewrite the country’s constitution, and paving the way for authoritarianism. We argue that a similar process happened in former Confederate regions of the US in the first half of the twentieth century.

 
The Jim Crow south, especially the period from around 1898 to 1968, had many of the characteristics that we see in right-wing, competitive authoritarian regimes. The region was superficially democratic, including holding regular elections that any citizen could technically participate in, and any party could compete in, provided that they met the requirements set by the state. However, like hybrid regimes such as Russia or Hungary, southern states rigged the system in ways that led to the overwhelming dominance of the Democratic Party. The party justified its dominance of the region through a race-baiting strategy that was not dissimilar from the strategy of right-wing authoritarian current regimes. Similarly, by reviving the Civil War conflict with northern states, southern states created an external enemy to help maintain support among poor Whites, a strategy consistent with, for example, the Hungarian government treating the European Union as a threat while accepting its funding.

This rise of competitive authoritarianism in the American South around 1900 is also related to third-party movements in the late nineteenth century. In Tamas’ recent book and NPS article, he argued that state election laws, like ballot access laws and fusion, had little to do with the decline of third parties, and their decline around 1920 and current reemergence is closely related to partisan polarization and changes in mass communication. However, as we will explore in this paper, the process of third-party decline was very different in the former Confederacy. Because of the Republican Party’s role in Reconstruction, the Democratic Party became the regionally dominant party in the late nineteenth century, with the Republicans barely playing a role as the second major party. At the same time, the lack of a viable second party option for southern voters in the late nineteenth century helped increase the strength, and threat, of third-party movements, like the Populists. While the Populist threat helped fuel the impetus for southern authoritarianism, the split of the vote between Republicans and Populists within single-member districts helped give Democrats the legislative power to impose Jim Crow and undermine the democratic process.

Authors

• Joseph W. Robbins, Valdosta State University

• Bernard Tamas, Valdosta State University