Centripetal Democracy in America: Ranked Choice Voting in Theory and Practice

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Ranked Choice Voting is being adopted by an increasing number of jurisdictions across the United States and, by the end of this year, will be used by both Alaska and Maine for both state and federal general elections, including to the presidency. Advocates for RCV, such as Francis Fukuyama and Larry Diamond, identify it as a crucial institutional response to runaway polarization, to deep and dangerous forms of political division, and to democratic backsliding.

This panel brings together empiricists and normative theorists to share research on recent innovations in RCV in the United States and to discuss the wider implications of these findings. One team of researchers will report ongoing research on the recent Mayoral elections in New York. Another will consider whether the new Alaskan “final five” system might help mitigate dangerous forms of political polarization. Finally, two political theorists will provide complementary analyses that attempt to dig deeper into our grounds for valuing the use of preferential voting systems in rich post-industrial countries such as the United States (and, perhaps, for being wary of their use).

Ranked-choice voting is “centripetal” in the sense that it is expected to provide incentives for centre-seeking behaviour by office-seekers. Many participants in this panel also analyse RCV through a more elaborate theory of centripetal institutions that was originally developed by researchers studying democracy in deeply divided societies (Horowitz 1992; Reilly 2001). This approach is grounded on the underlying (and perhaps controversial) intuition that polarization in the contemporary US is sufficiently deeply connected to people’s social identities to be analysed with tools developed to understand polities with profound ethnic, religious, or linguistic division.

The panel attempts to build new lines of discourse across the subdisciplines of political science. In the present juncture, scholars of American electoral politics might fruitfully engage with students of democracy in deeply divided societies. Normative democratic theorists, who have previously tended to pay surprisingly little attention to debates about alternative electoral systems, can learn from both of them – and can perhaps, building on the work of “centripetalists” and other empiricists, help develop new frameworks for relating diverse democratic procedures to fundamental political values.

Sub Unit

• Division 34: Representation and Electoral Systems

Cosponsor

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Centripetal Elections - Daniel Hutton Ferris, Newcastle University

• Centripetal Innovations in the United States: The Case of Final Five Voting - Benjamin Reilly, East-West Center; David Lublin, American University

• Differences in Understanding and Utilization of Ranked Choice Voting - Todd Donovan, Western Washington University; Caroline J. Tolbert, University of Iowa

• Electioneering, Equality, and the Discursive Consequences of Preferential Voting - Justin Pottle, Harvard University

Discussants

• Donald L. Horowitz Duke University

• Emilee Chapman Stanford University