Why Democrats Should Move To The Suburbs If They Want To Win More Legislative Seats

This year the U.S. will go through its decennial redistricting process, which is resurfacing our national conversation around gerrymandering. But Stanford Professor of Political Science, Jonathan Rodden, says gerrymandering isn't the least of our problems when it comes to the politics of geography.

In his book, "Why Cities Lose", Rodden illustrates how we can still end up with minority majority rule, regardless of gerrymandering, due to the urban-rural divide.

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Transcript

William Howell:

I'm Will Howell.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

Anthony Fowler:

I am Anthony Fowler and this is Not Another Politics Podcast. 2021 is a big political year for lots of reasons. But one of the reasons that maybe we haven't thought very much about is that we are going to be redrawing all of our legislative districts in 2021.

Tape:

Whichever party gains control of state legislatures in 2020, is going to get to set district maps for a decade. Which will decide control of the U.S. House for a decade.

William Howell:

Yeah. Well, in the 2010s were a period of Republican ascendance at all levels of government and a lot of people point to the 2010 redistricting cycle as an important reason why having grabbed a hold of a lot of state legislatures, they rigged the game in which they would outperform relative to their popular vote.

Wioletta Dziuda:

There's another reason why the Republicans did so well. That's the urban-rural divide. People who support Democrats, people with more leftish ideology, they are concentrated in the cities. The suburbs and the rural areas are a little bit more heterogeneous. As a result, you might have minority of supporters. It might be that this fortress of Republican party are in minority. But nevertheless, due to the nice strange mathematics of districts, they can win the elections.

William Howell:

Anthony, you talked to somebody out at Stanford who has been thinking a lot about these issues of political geography and redistricting and urban-rural divides and their consequences for our politics.

Anthony Fowler:

I did. I spoke with Jonathan Rodden and he's written a book called Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide. And he talks about the implications of the urban-rural divide for the way that we draw our districts and some of the interesting partisan implications of that. So it's a fascinating book. There's a lot in there and we had a really interesting conversation that touches a lot of ground.

Anthony Fowler:

So a big topic in the book and certainly something that's going to be a big political issue to think through in 2021, our legislative districts. How they get drawn and what implications they have. Why is this urban-rural divide so important when we think about legislative districts and the way they get drawn in the upcoming redistricting that's going to be happening across the country this year?

Jonathan Rodden:

So there's this problem that the Democrats face and in the book I argue that Labor parties face in the U.K. and to an extent also in Australia where their support is highly concentrated in these urban places. So we have districts in which the Labor party or the Democrats win 75, 80% of the vote. And the crucial observation is that we don't have districts where Republicans or the Conservative party win by such a large majorities. So why is it that we have this urban-rural divide. Why are these rural districts not as Republican as the urban districts are Democratic.

And a lot of the answer to that is that the rural districts are actually... what we think of as a rural district, is a lot more heterogeneous than what we imagined. So in the U.S. context, our districts are so large that a rural district will often include a college town or a county seat that has a lot of unionized public employees, even within a rural Pennsylvania County. We'll see that as we go from the rural area to the county seat, we see a big increase in Democratic vote share. And so having that real concentration of support in the urban districts makes it hard for the parties of the left to transform their votes into seats.

Anthony Fowler:

Let's think through it, maybe try to think through a concrete example for fun. Suppose so Illinois, my home state, let's suppose that just for the sake of argument. So here, my model of Illinois is going to be that Chicago is 90% Democratic and let's suppose downstate everything that's not in the Chicago area is let's say 35% Democratic or something like that. And I've got 18 districts that I'm going to draw. There's different ways you could draw these districts if you did just get it down to kind of what drew compacts districts that properly considered city boundaries and so forth. You'd end up with half the districts in Chicago and half the districts Downstate and you get half Democratic districts and half Republican districts.

Even though the state is leaning Democratic very strongly. So you get a lot of state...a lot that's like that, but there are other ways you could draw the districts as well. So in fact, Illinois is one of the states that draws the districts a little bit differently. You could almost imagine like pie cuts coming out of Chicago where, every district is half Chicago and half Downstate. And now all of a sudden you have 18 Democratic districts and no Republican district. So the way we draw the districts matters a lot, obviously.

Jonathan Rodden:

Yeah. That's one of the things that when I first started on this project, I was actually most interested in looking at parliamentary democracies like Canada and the U.K. and Australia, where they have independent districts and boundaries commissions. Because to me, gerrymandering was a real distraction. It was something that kind of stood in the way of the kind of inferences that I wanted to draw. And so that's why I started working with some folks to figure out how to do automated redistricting. And we kind of started a bit of a cottage industry in trying to use algorithms to draw districts and we've used those in court and so forth. But yeah, the real question though, is what happens when politicians draw the districts and Illinois is definitely a good example. Is a good one to think about.

It's hard for us to draw any districts outside of Chicago that will have Democratic majorities. But the other thing they can do as you described is start drawing a district that Lake Michigan and extend that out like a pie slice into the suburbs and you can make a district that would be 85% Democratic by bringing in a bunch of suburbs you can make it a much smaller majority. And then you could try to get more seats that way. And that's exactly what the Democrats have done when they've drawn districts in Illinois.

Anthony Fowler:

So tell us about those automated districts. How do you draw automated districts that don't factor in anybody's party or anything like that? So that we can get a sense of what would a map look like if it was just drawn by a computer that was just trying to... what are the kinds of things that you feed into your computer program and tell it to do?

Jonathan Rodden:

This is something that has really kind of expanded dramatically. But mainly the idea is to choose a kind of a seed, a precinct or census block group and then start combining it with surrounding ones. And then to build some things into the algorithm that you can actually play around with parameters that make them more compact, less compact. You can dial up and dial down the extent to which you are willing to accept crossing county boundaries or crossing municipal boundaries.

So that is something that in some states is actually built into the rules of the redistricting process and other places that's not. They often end up with a rather similar story in terms of the underlying... if the question is; what is the underlying bias in favor of the Republican Party associated with drawing some districts in this way. We get pretty similar answers, no matter which of these approaches we use.

And what's nice about this technology of simulating districts with an algorithm is that you can get a sense of like some states, the actual underlying bias in favor of the Republicans is relatively large and others it's not very large at all. And so you have a baseline against which to compare what the legislature, when they draw the districts and what they've done. And so some states, I have one example I make a lot of in the book is Pennsylvania. And it's one that has gotten a lot of attention because of some lawsuits at the federal and state lawsuits. And the basic story in Pennsylvania is that, yes, when you do these simulations you get some pro Republican bias, but the amount of pro Republican bias in the plan enacted by the legislature was far larger.

North Carolina is another example of this. These are places where I think everyone agrees. I don't think it's not very controversial to argue that these places are highly gerrymandered, but these simulations have been used in court in both cases to try to convince the court that the districts drawn by the legislature are really kind of outside the bounds of what we see in a more neutral redistricting process that is captured to some extent by these simulations.

Anthony Fowler:

So you have a really interesting chapter in the book about what you call the battle for the soul of the left. So one question you might ask yourself reading the book and thinking about all of this evidence is; why have the Democrats been so bad at playing this political game? This is the game that we're playing. We draw these districts. Democrats seem to have picked platforms that might advantage them in terms of the National Popular Vote, but we don't use a National Popular Vote for anything. Why have they not worked harder to reposition themselves somehow to appeal to more suburban voters and get a broader base of support so that they can do better on the kind of seats votes curve that we've been talking about?

Jonathan Rodden:

One of the important things that underlies this analysis is that when we look at a distribution of vote shares across districts and we were just talking about this big left tail and the distribution. That there's a lot of districts in the tail of distribution that are very Democratic. One of the things we learned from survey research and trying to get a sense of what is the distribution of preferences across districts. It's not just that there are lots of people who are marginally Democratic, who happened to all live in cities.

It's also the case that preferences people express on various issues and surveys are quite a bit to the left in urban areas. There's a big ideological gap between cities and the suburbs. And I think everybody who observes U.S. politics understands that a lot of the ability to when the legislature lies in the suburbs and this is no different than the U.K. and Australia and Canada. When you have a majoritarian system like this and an urban-rural divide, the suburbs are really the pivotal places.

So the question is; well, why don't the Democrats just figure out how to set their platform right at the preference of the median voter in the median usually suburban district. And the reason for that, I think in part is that the party internally is very much influenced by its longstanding and competence and powerful leadership elites who are from urban areas and who faced a lot of pressure from their constituents to pull the platform to the place where they feel comfortable. And we don't see quite as large a battle.

I argue in the book that the ideological distance between the pivotal suburban district and rural districts is just not quite as large. And so these battles have been not quite as fierce on the right. Now that in the era of Trump that might be changing. And that's one of the things I consider and at least open as a question at the end of the book. In the era of populism and the changing nature of party platforms on the right, is it possible that, that gap will grow to be just as large as it is on the left? And that's still I think an open question.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. So it's interesting to think about the fact that on the one hand, this kind of geographic sorting that you've been talking about is a dilemma for Democrats because it disadvantages them electorally, but it also might be the reason that they're in this predicament to begin with. Because all of the long-standing incumbents in the Democratic party, the people who are making important decisions and setting the agenda for the party, the only way to have been a longstanding incumbent from the Democrat party is probably to have been from one of these very urban places to be Nancy Pelosi.

If the Democrats could go to Claire McCaskill and ask her to lead the party, but she might not be around much longer. And so there's some sense in which there's almost this self perpetuating thing that once your party becomes tied to urban areas, you will increasingly be more tied to urban areas because all of your leaders are from urban areas and they cater their positions to those voters. Is that the story you have in mind?

Jonathan Rodden:

Yeah, exactly. And I think there's another little component of this that a lot of people are going to latch onto recently, which I think is important, which is the nationalization of politics and the party system in the U.S. In the past, it was the case that if the urban left was doing its thing in the urban districts, the ability to escape, whatever that does to the party label seems to have changed as politics has become more nationalized. It's a harder in a pivotal suburban, or say a mixed district. One that has a mixture of kind of a college town and some surroundings, suburban and rural areas.

It's becoming harder to have your own brand name that's distinct from the Democratic Party brand name in that kind of a district. It used to be that in Northern Wisconsin, if brought a lot of good projects to the district and were able to kind of distance yourself from the party on some hot button issues, social issues and firearms and so forth, that'd be quite possible to hold on to a district that was voting Republican in presidential elections. A Democrat could hold under that district for a long time and now that's becoming much more difficult. And so that just enhances what you just described, this sort of the dynamism and the leadership and the elites in the party tend to be more urban.

Anthony Fowler:

Let's talk about some of the alternatives. So if we thought this was a problem, if we thought the kind of unfairness of that system was a problem, one of the things we could do that we kind of briefly touched on is you could intentionally gerrymander the districts in such a way that maybe you had a fair seats votes curve. So you could have some independent commission whose goal was to draw all of these crazy pie cuts out of cities in just the right way. So that maybe things are fair. Another kind of obvious alternative would be to have something like a proportional representation system. How do you think about the benefits of a PR system in a place like the U.S. or Australia or the U.K. or Canada?

Jonathan Rodden:

This is where on days when I'm being unrealistic and optimistic, I would advocate for a new electoral system and for proportional representation, the probability of this happening in my lifetime and United States is very low. But just looking around the world at how things work, I think having more parties that spread themselves out in a multi-dimensional issue space, having an option if one is disappointed with one's party, having another option that is viewed as ideologically, somewhat proximate is very useful.

Having a two party system where so many things have been bundled up into those two parties and then having an urban-rural arrangement to those bundles. I think that's one of the things that has become so destructive about U.S. democracy. So even if we could solve the problem of representation. So even if we had a better districting system that at least got rid of this one problem of asymmetries and the transformation of votes to seats, I think we'd still be left with this intensely polarized system that many of us view as dangerous and unpleasant to live in.

So that's one possibility the U.S. one of the parties cracks up even within the majoritarian system. And we end up with a multi-party system. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen. And strangely enough, I think it could be in the current moment, it could even be people in kind of the old school Republicans of the Portman, Romney variety. Folks like that actually are the ones that have the most to gain from a proportional system where it might be possible to have different packaging of issues and positions on the right in addition to the left.

Anthony Fowler:

All right, thanks so much, Jonathan. It's great to talk to you. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners or to discuss that we didn't touch on?

Jonathan Rodden:

Oh, we were talking about, well, how does this all end? But one of the other possibilities is that the bad geography for the Democrats eventually starts to fade on its own through residential moves. And I think we all imagine that people are moving in ways that put them in increasingly homogeneous environments. And I think it is the case that we're very segregated at the micro level.

And Ryan ITOs has recently published some work that shows that at the micro level within cities. But if we move up to substantially to the level of congressional districts or even just looking at counties, a lot of the places that are growing most rapidly are places that are gaining educated, knowledge economy, employees, young people who are moving to sprawling suburban areas.

They're not moving to the urban core, especially post COVID. This process has been pushed on along even further. And so it's kind of part of the story of Georgia flipping is these suburban sprawling areas in these new cities like Phoenix, Orlando, Houston, Austin and of course Atlanta and some places in North Carolina as well. These counties that surround these cities are growing dramatically. They're gaining a lot of population and the Democratic vote share is increasing also dramatically in those places. The places that are losing population are becoming more Republican. So it's become a weird kind of cleavage based on population movement.

William Howell:

So that was a terrific interview. I think it's worth reiterating what that kind of set of facts he's concerned about. One in most basically, the popular vote doesn't automatically translate into the representation of people on state legislatures or within Congress. There's a systematically a divergence between the kind of votes that are cast and how well parties are for.

Moreover, he shows that one party disproportionately benefits from this divergence. Again and again, he shows it's Republicans that to the extent that somebody is disproportionately represented, it's the Republican party. And so if Democrats are going to do well, they've got to perform unbelievably well to get a majority. And then third, there's this concern about the urban-rural divide

Anthony Fowler:

One of Jonathan's interesting points is that even if we didn't have any gerrymandering whatsoever, even if all the districts are drawn by a computer in what seems like a completely non-partisan way, that is going to have partisan consequences. And it's going to have partisan consequences precisely because of the ways that people geographically sort themselves. So that's kind of interesting point because Democrats tend to be clumped in these cities together.

If you just try to draw a nice compact districts that don't consider party explicitly, you're going to end up disadvantaging Democrats. Even though you thought you were joining the districts in a fair way. How do you... that seems like, so that's a problem in Jonathan's mind. That's a problem that we need to grapple with in our political system and say something is a miss. And it has nothing to do with gerrymandering, even if we didn't have any bad actors in the legislature playing around with districts, that's a problem.

William Howell:

The gerrymandering isn't entirely benign, it in fact is malignant. It on top of it on top of that can turn bad to worse.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I don't think that we... in so far, it's interesting that we have this urban-rural divide. We should study it, but I don't know to what extent I should worry about this so much. Because, there's a reason why we have districts. If we wanted to have the Congress completely representing ideological composition of the society, we could have some elections at large.

But we don't because we want our representatives to represent some local interests. We want every locality to be represented in Congress. And we want districts that represents localities. And if localities are heavily Democratic in one place and a little bit more heterogeneous in another place, so we eat. And just the fact that at the end we ended up with not completely representative Congress. Well we had to go since somehow something has to give.

Anthony Fowler:

Try, there's there's obviously trade-offs. I agree with that. I agree that probably all of us want a world being living in Chicago, where there's at least one member of Congress who represent Chicago and is looking out for if there are any Chicago specific issues that need to be debated in the federal government. We want somebody in the chamber to be from Chicago and be looking out for those interests.

But at the same time, we care about lots of other things, too. We care about whether or not the median voter in the whole country seems to be represented well or are they not getting their way? Is there because of an accident of political geography, if it turns out that farmers' views are expressed in Congress much more than somebody who lives in a city, something seems wrong about that.

Wioletta Dziuda:

And that brings me to thinking about if we are trying to get rid of gerrymandering and sort of automate or make the process of redistricting less partisan, what should be our objectives? And I think one clear answer that comes to mind is that we should try to maximize the sort of locker representations, try to create districts that mean something that they represent ethnic group or some sort of local industrial interest and so on. And subject to that, then we can tweak a little bit these district to try to go a little bit closer towards the national presentation, but I don't think it's obvious that we would like to abandon this locker room presentation altogether.

Anthony Fowler:

You've raised another interesting dilemma. There's a related debate. There's a big debate in the U.S. about majority-minority districts. There's legal debates about that and legal requirements in place, but that's another place where the rubber meets the road and it's not obvious what the right thing to do is. There are even some people who worry that if we have lots of majority-minority districts, we could potentially be actually harming those minority groups, because sure we're giving them a few districts where they're the majority, and they're almost surely going to elect a candidate they really like.

But we've essentially taken them out of other districts. And so it could be the case that the media and legislator overall is actually further from their preferences. So it's still this problem that won't go away, it seems like if you really focus on making sure particular groups get represented and make sure that there's lots of Chicago districts and lots of districts that are looking out for black interests and Hispanic interests, you're going to run into this other problem of maybe the media and legislator overall will be quite far from the median voter in the population.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So that actually brings me to another question that I had when I listened to the interview. Jonathan seems to portray this urban-rural divide as something negative. And I'm not talking here about the fact that people have different preferences, which has always been problematic to some extent when you try to govern one country. But he views the concentration of Democratic electorate in the cities as something negative. But can't one tell a different story, which is related to the story you just put forward.

Which is if you have a city that consists mostly of supporters of Democrats, shouldn't they get a representative that's more in line with their preferences? Because candidates do not have to compromise. They can just look at this very leftist directorate and they can adopt exactly these positions. And they can be strong advocates for these positions in Congress. While if you are being elected in a district where you have majority Republicans, but there's still sizeable Democratic minority.

You are still uncertain about your elections. You're forced to compromise your position. So you're not going to be as conservative as you could be otherwise. So in a sense, yes, Democrats lose the number of seats in Congress. But those cities that get representation, they get representative score more intensely going to fight for their interests than the districts that are a little bit more balance and competitive.

Anthony Fowler:

And that's exactly the fight people have with majority-minority districts. People say, "Sure, maybe if you have some majority black districts that you get a small handful of members of Congress who are really looking out for the black community, maybe that's better for them overall than having every member have to worry a little bit about black interests." So I think, you're absolutely right. One part of what you said that I don't agree with is that most members of the public, even most people who live in cities are not nearly as politically extreme as other elected officials.

And we've talked a lot about polarization and so forth before, but I don't think it's the case that there are lots of people who live in Chicago or San Francisco or Boston who were saying, "I like Nancy Pelosi, but I really wish she was even more to the left." There are a few of those people, but they're not a lot of them, even the liberals who live in cities are more moderate than the typical Democrat in Congress. So I don't think that's something that the typical Chicago resident would like to have even more extreme representatives. I just don't think that empirically holds up.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So that's interesting. So one way I could respond to you is, well, yeah, perhaps I don't want someone even more to the left than Nancy Pelosi. But the reason why Nancy Pelosi was elected because we have this concentrated Democratic district, otherwise we will have someone who was actually a little bit more moderate and would have been less happy. So that would be the theoretical story that I could tell. Another thing that, what you say made me think is that, well, perhaps there's something wrong with the story.

Because, I don't know whether it's empirically true that cities actually elect more extreme politicians than the suburban districts or the rural districts. There's this anecdotal evidence that actually the Republicans in Congress are more extreme than Democrats in Congress. I don't know how much we believe those results, but I don't think there is a sense to that. I don't think there's a sense that this goes in the other direction.

William Howell:

But with extreme relative to what? That is, when we say that somebody is extreme, are we talking about relative to the median voter in their district? Relative to the other party?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Relative to the median supporter of a particular party? Theoretically, I would say if you have a city that's fully Democratic, the representative should be exactly what the median of people Democratic inclination are. If the district is more... it's leaning Republican, but it's a little bit more heterogeneous. You should expect someone who is more moderate than the median in the Republican party. I don't know whether that's true empirically.

Anthony Fowler:

In districts where the public is more extreme or more partisan. You get an elected official who is also more extreme, but it's not very strong. It's weak. So if you want it to explain at least the relative extremism of the Democratic party, relative to your typical Democratic voter, some of it probably does have to do with the fact that most of the Democrats in Congress come from the very urban districts. And don't represent suburban and rural voters. And so maybe don't have to worry about appealing to those voters. And that's something that Jonathan I talked about.

William Howell:

And then he wrote about it in the book. It's a function, the production of candidates for the Democratic party is within cities. And if you want to be a candidate and get the nomination as a Democrat, you better satisfy urban interests. And as a result, they're not doing as good a job as they might otherwise in appealing to suburban interests and thereby mitigating that urban-rural divide and thereby mitigating their problem that they have. The implications that, that has for their ability to pick up seats.

Wioletta Dziuda:

And I found this part of the interview actually very interesting because yeah, at the end of the day what you were saying is, we don't have a geography problem. We have some sort of party institutional persistence problem. At the end of the day, then there's nothing preventing Democrats from moving a little bit to the let's say, right.

And capture the cities and also the suburban voters. Yeah. So for me, this was not about geography. Geography should not really keep us awake at night. It's more those processes within parties that made the parties a little bit set in their old ways, as opposed to responsive to actually what the electorate wants.

William Howell:

But you're saying two things Viola, one, you're saying, "No, we should think about geography in so far as we think about location and different people from different locations, having real interests. And they ought to have some kind of representation at the state or national level." So there's that, but then there's this other piece, which is to say, "Parties, deal with those facts and adjust accordingly." If what you want to do is be more competitive. Chicago, pay some attention to the suburban towns whose interests don't perfectly overlap with yours, but moderate your positions so that you could be competitive there, right?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes, absolutely. Yes.

William Howell:

So why don't they do this? Why is it the Democratic party... why isn't there a solution to the Democratic party to simply recognize that they are grossly underperforming at all levels of government, as long as they're fixated on attending to representing the pure interests of their urban districts.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So I have. few thoughts on that. There's just this sort of persistence that it used to be that party bosses were basically urban people and they still end up being the powerful people in the party. And then they just push down to the forward. They will be elected anyway because they represent the cities. So that's actually this negative aspect that shapes this dynamics. But I think that there's not explanation. I don't know what you think about it.

People might be ontological and they might feel like our goal is not only to win elections, but it's to also shape the agenda. And I think historically we've seen that putting extreme positions on the national agenda. Yeah, might not play well with the current median voter, but shifts the conversation and shifts where we end up in the long run. And I don't think that this is a strategy of the Democratic Party, but I can see how this might be a strategy of certain members of the Democratic Party.

William Howell:

That's probably right. But there it is. It's all an all SQL argument, like all SQL. It clearly is the case. If you can shape the agenda and pull it to the left and you're a progressive, that's a good thing. But—

Anthony Fowler:

Not if it helps Republicans win all the elections.

William Howell:

That's just it. Not if then the person who is the agenda setter ends up being a Republican as opposed to a moderate Democrat. And so at what cost? Democrats have pursued that strategy if that's what's going on.

Wioletta Dziuda:

But It must be that some of them are thinking this way because it must be that AMC knows that putting this leftist agenda forward is going to cause Democrats vote. That raising the minimum wage and just completely wiping out all the debt of the older educational debt. And so on. This is going to actually scare quite a few independents, quite a few swing voters.

That's one swing voter, but all of them will be swayed away. She must know that if she doesn't know that, someone has told her this and she must believe that. But I'm guessing she just believes that in the long run her agenda will win. And it's worth sacrificing the current electoral gain for putting certain items on people's minds.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. I gree with most of what's been said, I think it's a mix of things. I think there are agency problems within parties. What's good for AOC and what's good for Nancy Pelosi, need not be what's good for that agenda in the long run. It might be that AOC's way to rise to prominence is to be the most extreme vocal member of the party. But that might actually be damaging to her party in the long run, in terms of how many seats they win and so forth. And then the other problem is they may just not be able to help themselves.

It might just be the case that even if they knew and even if they thought about it and even if they did really want policy to shift in their preferred direction in the future, they're ideologues. The reason they ran for Congress is because they're ideologues and they just can't help themselves. And even though they know it would be a bad idea to transfer trillions of dollars to college graduates and to screw over all the people in middle America who have like... they just can't help themselves because what they really want are things that are good for cities and things that are good for them. And so maybe the answer is actually just not that complicated.

William Howell:

And Jonathan talks about in the book. This may be playing out on the right as well. That is the truly rural parts of America, maybe going down a path to that will alienate suburban votes, which will put suburban both back in play and provide the opportunity for a kind of correction that it isn't just Democrats that can lapse into ideological thinking and assume positions that are extreme. So too can Republicans, particularly in this period of populism.

Anthony Fowler:

Hey, if you're getting a lot out of the research that we discuss on this show, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out. It's called Big Brains. Big Brains brings you the engaging stories behind the pioneering research and pivotal breakthroughs reshaping our world. Change how you see the world through research. Keep up with the latest academic thinking with Big Brains, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.

Anthony Fowler:

It certainly doesn't have to be this way and maybe there will be some really entrepreneurial politicians who will come along and take advantage of some opportunity here. It's not obvious that Flint Michigan should be voting for the same party as Boston, Massachusetts. It's not obvious that poor people in Wyoming should be voting for the same party as hedge fund managers in Connecticut. So maybe there's going to be some clever politician that comes along and says, "I want to be the party of the working class, which is going to cut things in a different way." I don't know.

William Howell:

Or I'm going to be the party for moderates and that's... isn't this and you talked a lot about this. Jonathan talks a lot about this in the book, the values of multi-party proportional representation, electoral systems. Where in an entrepreneurial moderate could step in and say, "I'm going to capture that suburban vote on my own." And rather than having these crazy people on the left and crazy people on the right, trying to grab a hold of it.

And he then goes on to argue and show that in most proportional representation systems, there's a greater correspondence between the outcomes of elections and the popular vote. The very problem that's motivating his whole book. This schism between how people are voting and who's actually occupying office, doesn't seem to be so great in systems of proportional representation. But as our resident expert from Poland, Viola, who has lived under a system of proportional representation with multi parties, what are these things and how do they work?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Well, glad you asked. So the simplest definition of proportional representation is that seats in the parliament are assigned in proportion to the overall vote that the particular party received. So you still have a person representing a particular district, but the person representing the particular district might not be the person who got the highest number of votes in this district.

But she might get into parliament just because her party received overall a very high proportion of votes in the country. So definitely you have a much better representation, but I don't know how much you have followed Polish politics recently that does not always result in a very Democratic country with a very flourishing economy. So is this a good idea?

William Howell:

Jonathan says, "Yeah." Jonathan says it is for two reasons. One is again, this greater correspondence between popular votes and representation of parties in a national or state legislature. So there's that and the other piece is that then this thing that he says is of real concern, this divide between urban and rural districts, the politics are not as volatile or the schism doesn't cut quite so deep.

Because there could be moderating forces, that can be moderate parties that step into the gap and provide this kind of connective tissue. And so we don't have people sort of screaming across an ever widening canyon. Rather, you have representative voices carrying all the way through, which makes for a healthier politics.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So I think there are two things one can say to that. One is, yes. His argument is correct. Theoretically, correct. And it seems on the surface of this, the first step empirically validated in many European countries when you have the PR system, you indeed have many more parties. You have parties that represent more fringe interests like a Green Party, for example, has been for a long time in many countries.

But that does not always result in very good politics. We've had examples of countries where you don't have governments for months. You think about Spain, you think about Belgium. We have examples of coalitions that are being built that actually result in policies that are not necessarily representing the interests of the biggest group in the contract that selected the party, that has the largest share in the parliament.

So in Poland for example, for the longest time you had relatively two relatively big parties. The identity of who those two big parties changed because parties just died out and new parties came along. But usually there were two parties in every election that would rather be large or two coalitions that were large.

And then there was this person's party that was relatively small, but every time we had elections, this person's party was needed to form a majority government. And at the end of the day, a lot of politics and a lot of places were skewed towards the interest of this person party. And we can debate how good it is, the minority actually captures policymaking.

William Howell:

And so the pathologies that he describes playing out on the electoral landscape, in this urban-rural divide in a proportional system may play out in the formation of a government. So, okay. Yes, we have representation all the way through, it corresponds better with the popular vote, hooray. But at the end of the day, a coalition government needs to be formed.

And there, we may see certain interests vastly disproportionately represented in the adoption of policy, just as we see all kinds of cleavages and screaming and shouting happening then at the elite level. And so what we avoid at the electoral level, we have to deal within the legislature itself.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes. And even if you want to take a step back and say I don't know exactly how these forces are playing out, which system leads to which kind of coalition building. Let me just look at how countries are doing. Can I just say that countries that have one system overall perform better than countries with another system? It's hard to run a regression that will be really reliable in this situation, but anecdotally it doesn't seem so. It seems that you have pathologists in the U.S. you have pathologists in Europe.

Sometimes one country is doing better. Sometimes one system seems to be producing better outcomes, but I think it's more related to this in my mind, it's more related to who are the current candidates? Who are currently the politicians? What's the quality of the current politicians that are available in this country? And less to the particular institutional solutions that the particular country adopted.

Anthony Fowler:

And one thing Jonathan can say and I agree with all the problems that you've raised, all the concerns you've raised and trade-offs, you've raised. One thing he might say in defensive PR is that while there are these pathologies, none of them are explicitly tied to where people live. There won't be any systematic reason that urban people or rural people or farmers or religious people or whatever group you have in mind will be systematically disadvantaged.

Every group, every set of political interests will have their chances of being politically influential will depend on their size and it'll depend on their positions and how much they can compromise with other groups. It won't have to do with, "Oh, you happen to live in a city around a bunch of other people like you and therefore you're going to be disadvantaged." So that's something.

William Howell:

I think it's a big... that's not a small thing. I think that's a big thing. That's a big thing. And that if you're in the United States and you're a Democrat, you're pulling your hair out. Because you're thinking this is, think about all the layers of the problem in the senate. Isn't just urban-rural, within state. It's also more rural versus more urban states. You see smaller states, disproportionately represented in the senate. And those smaller states are disproportionately Republican.

You see an electoral college system that disproportionately represents Republican interests twice in 2000 and then in 2016. And then because of this problem that Jonathan lays out of where people are located geographically, just because of how district lines are drawn. Even if they're drawn neutrally, Democrats are once again disadvantaged. And you're saying, "This is what we have in the United States as minority government. That's what we have."

Anthony Fowler:

Another thing we could talk about that Jonathan brings up at the end of the book, which is kind of fun. It's just some speculation about the future of our political geography. And there could be demographic changes that turn out to be prickly important in the future.

And maybe even with the COVID-19 pandemic and with a lot of people relocating from cities and to suburban and rural areas. Maybe we're already starting to see some of that. What do you guys think? Do you have any speculations about how our political geography change in the future and what implications that might have?

William Howell:

It's an interesting idea. With changes in the nature of work, people that are freed up and that maybe Democrats who currently are confined to cities may say, "Hey, I'm going to go live out in the country." Now, if what you say is that the distinguishing characteristics of Democrats is they like to eat, wear skinny jeans and eat at posh cafes which require a measure of density of population. Well then unlikely, but there's some notion. People are pouring out of New York city currently.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I think there's something to what you said that there's a correlation between your political leanings and ideological positions and what kind of life you want to lead. But on the other hand fancy cafes are also popping out in suburban areas. So I think it can go either way. I can envision a situation in which Google moves to Arizona and located in some sort of middle of nowhere and that attracts fancy cafes and highly educated people. And that becomes—

William Howell:

And then that place will become another one of these urban centers I think. Then we'll have the Silicon Desert and it'll be just like...

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. So the question is, how much density do do we want to sustain?

William Howell:

What's your bottom line Wiola?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Well, what's my bottom line? I think we should get rid of gerrymandering. We should not worry so much about geographical sorting. And we should be a little bit cautious when we think about reforming the system and replacing it with PR because that's a very costly proposition. That's going to cause a lot of political fighting and at the end of the day, it does not guarantee any success and any improvement in how politics is being conducted and how policy is being made in the United States.

William Howell:

Well, I guess I have a bottom line that's kind of a reaction to the book as a whole, which is I really enjoyed reading the book. It ties together a whole bunch of big and important themes about structural advantages that one party has in American politics. This urban-rural divide that has become of increasing prominence in our politics. He ties it into discussions of different electoral systems, whether or not you have single party winner take all elections within districts or you have systems of proportional representation and their consequences.

And to his considerable credit, he wrote all this before the 2020 election. And he ties this into themes that go back decades. So he holds out some possibilities for change as a function of alterations in population movements or a switcher proportional representation. And well, will they happen unclear. He says, as much. Will they generate the effects that we'd like to observe? Maybe some of them, but not... it needs to be salutary all the way through. But this is a book that's really well worth reading and I learned a lot from it.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. I thought it was a fantastic book and I really enjoyed reading as well. I learned a ton from it. I think maybe one of the things I can say, maybe that illustrates that the most is as I was reading the book, I was regularly embarrassed. I feel like I should have known some of the things that were in the book and I didn't, I'm supposed to be an expert on this topic and I've been thinking a lot for my entire career about these political cleavages and why some places do better than others and so forth.

And I didn't know a lot of these facts and I didn't know a lot of these historical trends. So just as an example, there's a pretty fun graph in the book that shows that an extremely strong predictor of Hillary Clinton's vote in 2016 is how much manufacturing there was in a place in 1910.

And he goes into... it's not just a completely... it's not like a random thing that he found. It's like he has a very clear story about why that's true. And it turns out there's a very weak correlation between manufacturing in 2010 and voting in the 2016 election. So you've got to really understand the history of these places. You got to think about why that's something I'd never deeply thought about before. And even though it's not obvious that it would be this way, you see the same exact patterns in Canada and Australia and the U.K.

And that was something I hadn't thought about very deeply before either. And it seems like in some ways this is a product of the political system. So anyway, there's a lot we could talk about with this book, but I was regularly learning things that I feel like I should have known about already and was embarrassed. And so that's a sign that I think lots of people should be able to learn a lot from this book, I hope.

William Howell:

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics Podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and it's produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.