American Politics has a problem: Polarization. Polarization is the amount of divide between two sets of contrasting ideas, and in politics, it is the Right versus the Left. Unfortunately, the Pew Research Center quantifies that “Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years” (Desilver, 22). This means that polarization is extremely high, with the Right and the Left disagreeing on key issues even more often. This leads to legislative gridlock, as officials are less likely to work across the aisle on key issues. In fact, according to Sarah Binder, 75% of legislation is subject to gridlock. The solution? Ranked Choice Voting. But what is Ranked Choice Voting?
Let’s say that you’re being invited to a birthday party with 12 people in it, and the host asks you to rank your top 4 favorite pizzas. Arbitrarily, let’s put cheese as our top pick, pepperoni as our second, alfredo as our third, and pineapple as our fourth. Now cheese is pretty popular, but unfortunately in the party that we’ve been invited to, it turns out that cheese isn’t popular at all, and received the lowest amount of votes. As it turns out, no pizza type got a majority of the votes or 50%. Here are the rankings:
Now under our current plurality system, pineapple pizza would win with 5 votes. This is against the other 7 people who didn’t even vote for pineapple, leaving a majority unsatisfied. However, things are different under Ranked Choice. Under Ranked Choice, Cheese gets eliminated since it had the lowest amount of votes. Then, the people who voted for Cheese’s votes would move on to their next choice, in this case, Pepperoni. Now look at the rankings:
Here, the majority of people are satisfied since a majority of people picked the winner. And this is how Ranked Choice Works. The sequential elimination of candidates with the lowest amount of votes until one candidate wins a majority.
Before I get into why Ranked Choice solves polarization, let’s first discuss why the current system breeds so much polarization. Duverger’s Law says that under plurality voting, a two-party system is typically formed since third parties don’t actually win seats, leading to voters not voting for third parties due to fears of their ballot essentially going to waste. A two-party system leads to polarization in a few key ways, but the most contributing is negative campaigning. According to Martin Haselmayor, “Negative campaigning aims at persuading risk-averse voters ‘not to vote’ for a party or candidate…’” (Haselmayor, 19). What this means in a two-party system, is either convincing the undecided voter to vote for the negative campaigner over the opponent or not voting at all, either way, it takes votes away from the opponent. Negative campaigns are also appealing thanks to the ‘negativity bias,’ where people generally focus more on the negative things rather than the positive ones. In general, negative campaigning is good for a healthy democracy, but when candidates only focus on or mainly focus on the flaws and errs of their opponents, that’s when polarization runs rampant, as divides grow and debates turn into mudslinging events.
So how does Ranked Choice solve this? Well, one way it does this is by encouraging third parties to run. According to FairVote, “RCV allows supporters of third parties and minor candidates to sincerely rank their preferred candidate first…,” since they can always just rank a Democrat or a Republican second, preserving their voice in American Democracy (FairVote). Thanks to this, third parties are more incentivized to run, since they will start to get votes. This makes negative campaigning less effective since if you negatively campaign against someone, the voters don’t only have you as an alternative since there are more than two parties in the race. Plus, Ranked Choice solves Polarization even if third parties don’t pick up steam by disincentive negative campaigning because voters are less likely to rank candidates as their second choice if they harshly attack their first choice candidate. In fact, candidates are more likely to work together, since they want to appeal to each other’s voters' second vote slot.
This isn’t all just baseless contemplation either. Empirics prove that RCV works. For example, Derek Monson finds that under RCV campaigns were twice less negative, decreasing polarization (Monson, 22). When campaigns are less negative, voters can see the facts through the noise, and are more engaged, leading to a soar in voter turnout, which is why FairVote quantifies that RCV is “associated with a 10-point increase in voter turnout,” and that “cities using RCV found stronger turnout in RCV races than those held before RCV implementation” (FairVote, 23).
Analytically speaking this makes sense, since Negative Campaigning has the effect of dissuading voters from voting, less negative campaigning would lead to greater voter turnout. Finally on gridlock, Ranked Choice doesn’t disappoint here, either. Isabella Mourani finds that Ranked Choice decreased political gridlock by 90% in just two cycles.
Disagreement is important to any democracy, but when that disagreement turns toxic, democracy is threatened. The current plurality system exacerbates this by encouraging polarization through the form of negative campaigning, which has little to no drawback when the only alternative is you. Fortunately, Ranked Choice Voting provides a viable alternative, because candidates not only have to compete for first votes but also second and third ones, decreasing negative campaigning as voters are less likely to rank any candidate second if they harshly attack their first option. By empowering third-party candidates and empirically decreasing polarization and gridlock while increasing voter turnout, Ranked Choice works. So the question isn’t why, the question is when.
Works Cited
Binder, Sarah. “Polarized We Govern?” Brookings, 27 May 2014, www.brookings.edu/articles/polarized-we-govern/.
Blake, Aaron. “Why Are There Only Two Parties in American Politics?” The Washington Post, 27 Apr. 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/27/why-are-there-only-two-parties-in-american-politics/.
DeSilver, Drew. “The Polarization in Today’s Congress Has Roots That Go Back Decades.” Pew Research Center, 10 Mar. 2022, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/.
Haselmayer, Martin. “Negative Campaigning and Its Consequences: A Review and a Look Ahead.” French Politics, vol. 17, no. 3, 23 Mar. 2019, pp. 355–372, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-019-00084-8.
Kimball, Jim. “U.S. Is Polarizing Faster than Other Democracies, Study Finds.” Brown University, 21 Jan. 2020, www.brown.edu/news/2020-01-21/polarization#:~:text=PROVIDENCE%2C%20R.I.%20%5BBrown%20University%5D%20%E2%80%94%20Political%20polarization%20among.
Monson, Derek. The Benefits and Drawbacks of Ranked-Choice Voting in Utah.
Mourani, Isabella. Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses and Dissertations Spring. 18 May 2018.
“Representation of Third-Party and Independent Voters.” FairVote, fairvote.org/archives/representation-of-third-party-and-independent-voters/.
“Research and Data on RCV in Practice.” FairVote, fairvote.org/resources/data-on-rcv/.
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