What in the world is proportional representation?

This system – popular worldwide – could be on its way to Portland.

By dividing Portland into four city council districts and allowing each district to elect three representatives, Portland’s Charter Commission hopes that more voices will be heard in government.

Professor Michael Latner, an expert on proportional representation, thinks that would be a win for Portland.

Michael Latner, Professor of Political Science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Is Portland ready for a complete overhaul of its city council system?

Quite possibly. 

Polling firm GBAO recently surveyed 600+ likely Portland voters and found that around 70% support increasing the size of the city council and electing representatives by districts.

To satisfy voters’ appetite for change, the Charter Commission wants to grow Portland’s City Council from five to twelve members and bring back district representation to a city that has elected its city council citywide for 109 years.

Charter Commission wants proportional representation on City Council.

The traditional way to go about districting would be to divide the city into twelve smaller districts around specific neighborhoods or populations, and let each district elect one representative. That’s how Portland was structured before 1913, except back then Portland had fifteen city council districts.

But that’s not how the Charter Commission wants to do it.

Instead, charter commissioners recommend dividing Portland into four relatively large districts and letting each district elect three representatives. That’s what the Charter Commission means by multi-member districts, because each district has multiple seats, rather than just one.

This system, known as proportional representation, has a limited history in the United States, but is popular around the world. 

Read my interview with Charter Commissioner Robin Ye on why the Charter Commission wants multi-member districts.

Multi-member districts would be positive for Portland, professor says.

By giving constituents three representatives per district instead of one, charter commissioners want both majority and minority interests to gain representation at City Hall.

How would that work? In Portland’s current winner-takes-all elections, only the candidate with the most votes gets a seat on the city council. Under the proposed system, the runners-up in second and third place would each get a seat as well.

“That's going to be a positive development,” says proportional representation expert Michael Latner, professor of political science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Senior Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy.

Follow Professor Latner on Twitter.

Charter Commission’s proposal is conservative by international comparison.

Proportional representation exists in nearly one hundred countries. Most systems have considerably higher numbers of representatives than what the Charter Commission is proposing for Portland’s City Council.

“It's a pretty conservative measure by electoral system standards,” Professor Latner says.

The philosophy behind proportional representation is that all votes should count toward the makeup of government, and that parties or candidates should get a share of representation that corresponds to their respective percentage of the total vote.

“Proportional representation is the only electoral system that ensures political equality, because any deviation from proportional representation means that you're valuing the votes of some voters more than others,” Professor Latner says.

“It’s the most democratic system, in my view,” he adds.

Candidates would no longer need to appeal to the majority to win.

Proportional representation can seem foreign to Americans, since our national political system offers a binary choice between either Democrats or Republicans. But in other countries, like most European nations, there are many political parties with varying percentages of the overall vote, and those parties form coalitions in order to govern.

Political parties in proportional systems don’t need to appeal to the majority in order to win their respective share of representation. As a result, smaller parties can position themselves as champions of certain interests, like the green parties that consistently get enough votes to gain at least some seats in parliaments around the world.

An important difference between most proportional systems worldwide and the Charter Commission’s proposal, is that proportional systems tend to have partisan elections that are organized by political parties, while Portland’s city elections would continue to be nonpartisan.

Proportional representation encourages coalitions.

So how would candidates for Portland City Council try to differentiate themselves in a nonpartisan proportional system?

It’s hard to speculate, but as a candidate, you’d no longer have to appeal to the majority in order to win a seat. You would simply need to capture enough votes to finish second or third in your district.

The Charter Commission envisions that candidates might position themselves as champions of renters’ rights, small business interests, or specific racial and ethnic populations. It’s also possible that candidates might run on district-specific issues, such as parks and street improvements in that particular area.

Once elected, council members championing minority interests could use the city council as a platform to advocate for their priorities, and try to boost their power by forming coalitions across district lines.

Latner suggests involving neighborhood associations in Portland elections.

Professor Latner says he understands the Charter Commission’s motivation behind creating geographic districts, because districts can lower the costs of political campaigns, make it easier to mobilize specific voters and ensure some form of geographic representation.

But Latner thinks Portland could get even better place-based representation by empowering neighborhood associations to nominate candidates. This would allow candidates to benefit from the organizational power of the neighborhood associations, similar to the way political parties help turn out the vote for candidates in partisan proportional representation systems, he says.

“I would use one of the things that makes Portland a unique and interesting political ecology, which is that you have this rich tradition of neighborhood associations that are organized and mobilize voters. I would take advantage of that and empower them and allow those neighborhood associations to run slates of candidates,” he concludes.

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