Just as historic popular uprisings have swept across the Middle East and North Africa, a similar, if less violent, wave of discontent has engulfed the state of Wisconsin, where Republican Governor Scott Walker has moved to rein in public spending by trimming public employee benefits and removing them from the collective bargaining process. Massive protests have been held in the state capital of Madison. The nearby state of Indiana looks set to experience similar turmoil.
Friday, March 4, 2011, 9:35 AM
March 4th, 2011 | 10:37 am | #1
Proportional representation sounds promising for state legislatures and the U.S. House of Reps. What would you do with the U.S. Senate?
March 4th, 2011 | 11:17 am | #2
I am open to suggestions on the Senate. I think I would tend to leave it alone, because in a well-balanced federal system, there needs to be a legislative chamber representing the interests of the individual states. The best functioning federal systems have this, including the US, Australia, India and Germany. Canada’s Senate does represent the ten provinces, but its members are appointed by the federal prime minister, which I think is an all round bad idea. More on Canada’s Senate here.
March 4th, 2011 | 1:03 pm | #3
Why not keep everything about the Senate the same the except for two (modest?) changes: increase the number of Senators from each state (e.g., bump it up to a dozen apiece, across the board), and then have each state use a proportional representational system to elect its Senators? While this obviously still compromises the proportional representation of individual citizens, it would better achieve that goal without eliminating the separate legislative chamber wherein individual states get equal representation. Anything lost?
Would the worry be that such Senators would be too tethered to their smaller, sub-state constituencies to practically represent the interests of their state as such? (This would strike me as a curious worry insofar as it seems to pit the interest of better representing a state against the interest of better representing the citizens of that state.)
March 4th, 2011 | 2:06 pm | #4
Not that anyone is necessarily making this comparison, but just to prevent it from happening:
The Wisconsin protestors are not in any way, shape, or form, similar or tied to the protestors in Egypt and the Arab world.
It just so neatly happened that Scott Walker decided to make a boneheaded decision during a wave of democratization in the Middle East.
March 4th, 2011 | 2:14 pm | #5
Mr. Ehrlich, it sounds as though you have some familiarity with the Australian political system, where each of the six states has 12 Senators elected on the basis of PR. I don’t think you would find any takers in the US for increasing the size of the Senate to 600 members. Upper chambers are usually smaller than lower chambers in most parliamentary bodies. Also there would be 500 more elected officials to support financially. I think it’s a nonstarter for more than one reason.
March 4th, 2011 | 2:30 pm | #6
It might ease some alarm to think about this not simply in terms of absolute numbers but also in terms of Senator to population ratios. As for the costs, limiting the number of Senators probably just means you have to finance a much larger senatorial staff. So, while you may end up paying for roughly the same number of government employees, one version just doesn’t allow you to elect them.
But what are your other reasons?
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