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Demand for Wealth-Reducing Institutional Change: The Role of Ideas and Interests Read chapter Read first chapter

2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Federalism, Proportionality, and Popular Will in US Presidential Elections: Did Colorado Have the Right Idea?

Authors : Jose M. Pavía, Fernando Toboso

Published in: The Political Economy of Governance

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

As is well known, the United States is a federal country composed of 50 states plus the District of Columbia, where the individual states and the country as a whole are each sovereign jurisdictions. This is reflected everywhere in its political-administrative structure, including the election of the US President, who is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the people; an issue that provokes a confrontation between abolishers of the Electoral College and supporters of the current system each time a candidate not winning the most popular votes is elected President (last time in 2000 elections). Between both extremes, there are intermediate solutions that, while continuing to respect the spirit of a federal nation like the USA, enable proportionality to be incorporated into the process. This was, for example, the idea behind Amendment 36 to the Colorado Constitution (LCCGA, Analysis of the 2004 ballot proposals. Research Publication No. 527-1. Legislative Council of the Colorado General Assembly, Colorado, 2014). After studying the merits and drawbacks of the current system, this paper investigates what would have happened if Colorado proposal had been used nationwide in Presidential elections from 1828 to 2012. The chapter concludes that the Colorado idea might have made electoral colleges’ results closer to popular will, would have diminished the risk of electing a non-popular winning President and would have served to require a more balanced regional support to be elected. As counterpart, it would have encouraged the emerging of third minor candidates.

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previous chapter Fiscal Deficits and Type of Government: A Study of Spanish Local Elections
Footnotes
1
On the many other institutional-organizational aspects influencing electoral results see, for example, Lijphart and Grofman (1984), Cox (1997), Schofield and Sened (2006), Toboso and Arias (2006) or Schofield and Caballero (2011).
 
2
As exceptions, Neubauer and Zeitlin (2003) study how different sizes for the Electoral College might have affected the outcome of the US Presidential election in 2000 and Pavía (2011) investigates how different allocating formulae, based on the d’Hondt rule, would have impacted on US Presidential election outcomes for historical elections.
 
3
The district system considers the congressional district division of each state and selects one Electoral College delegate by the popular vote within each congressional district and the remaining two electors by a statewide popular vote. This system reform, which implies an increase in the number of constituencies, is the only proposed Electoral College modification that has actually been tested in the United States (Peirce 1968), having been historically used in Illinois (1820, 1824), Kentucky (1792, 1796, 1800, 1804, 1808, 1812, 1816, 1820, 1824), Maryland (1796, 1800, 1804, 1808, 1812, 1816, 1820, 1824, 1828, 1832), Michigan (1892), Missouri (1824), North Carolina (1796, 1800, 1804, 1808), Tennessee (1804, 1808, 1812, 1816, 1820, 1824, 1828) and Virginia (1789, 1792, 1796), and being currently employed in Maine (since 1972) and Nebraska (since 1992).
 
4
Nowadays, about seven-eighths out of the population of the US live in non-competitive congressional districts, compared to two-thirds who live in non-competitive states (Pavía 2011).
 
5
Denoting by XXXX the year of the election, for example 1952, the url address of the pages from which the data have been taken are http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​United_​States_​presidential_​election,_​XXXX.
 
6
Indeed, the Electoral College system was the result of a compromise over whether the legislature or the people ought to elect the President. A compromise on how much power the people should have and how much power small and large states should have (Walbert 2014).
 
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Metadata
Title
Federalism, Proportionality, and Popular Will in US Presidential Elections: Did Colorado Have the Right Idea?
Authors
Jose M. Pavía
Fernando Toboso
Copyright Year
2015
Book
The Political Economy of Governance

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15550-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-15551-7

Copyright Year: 2015

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15551-7_20