The Official US Politics Thread 'Ron Paul quietly amassing an army of delegates while GOP frontrunners spar' and 'Mitt Romney rebounds against the Santorum surge'

[Mr Khan]

Fayceless said:

Mr Khan said:

Rath said:
What do Americans think of the idea of proportional representation?

We have become very attached to the idea that our congressman represents us, that is, that he or she is a local individual that really gets into our community.

Yes, we like that idea, but it's not true.  Congressmen typically represent their party, or movement (such as the Tea Party), nothing more.  They don't represent us, they represent one flawed one-size-fits-all ideology or the other.

There is effective regional variation. A Chicago Democrat and a Montana Democrat are going to have distinct views on gun control, for instance, simply because of the differences in urban and western rural lifestyle. Similarly, an Orange County Republican and an Oklahoma Republican may have critically different views on, say, contraception.

There is significant pressure within the political parties for everyone to move in lock-step, but the simple reality is that America and Americans are too varied for a 2-party system to be more than two broad coalitions that happen to exist along whatever the broadest divide in society is at the moment.

With proportional representation, we could get more disciplined parties that behaved more ideologically, but then there would be more of them so you could take a party that much more closely matched your personal views, but these parties would be regionally lopsided (imagine a political party centered around the views of Union workers, which would likely be heavily biased towards the broader Great Lakes region), weakening the notion of national unity