Editor’s note: This article is part of a new series from leading experts with practical solutions to democratic backsliding, polarization, and political violence.
There is no single cause of political violence. In the current environment, it is natural to focus on the role of specific political leaders, extremist organizations, or the spread of violent ideologies online. These are just some of the factors that can lead to politically-motivated violence in today’s society. Yet there is an upstream condition that enables political violence—indeed, a critical one—that is often overlooked: electoral system design.
Just as soil supports the growth of certain crops (and the weeds that feed on them), so does an electoral system generate the conditions to stifle or inflame political violence. Electoral systems—or the rules by which votes get translated into legislative seats and, thus, political power—can either aggravate or temper polarization and political extremism.
In the United States, the electoral system provides some of the most fertile ground worldwide for the democracy-eroding effects of political violence. America’s winner-take-all system of electing lawmakers (including state legislatures) makes polarization, extremism, and political violence worse than in countries with more proportional systems of representation. In fact, research and analysis from around the world demonstrates that proportional representation can help democracies like America’s better manage conflict, mitigate extreme elements in the polity, and foster more trust in our elections.
2024 is a seminal year for American democracy and its ability to withstand threats of political violence. But Americans’ ability to grow more resilient to political extremism will require more than short-term, symptomatic remedies. A wholesale change in the electoral system—away from the current two-party system to proportional representation—could greatly reduce the long-term risks of political violence.
Political Violence Creates the Risk for Democratic Breakdown in the United States
Political violence in the United States is higher than it has been in fifty years. While overall physical political violence (such as assault or murder) is still relatively rare, other forms of violent behavior—such as threats, intimidation and harassment—have become startlingly more common in American politics. Local officials, members of the judiciary, and members of Congress all report rising numbers of threats. And the trend is not slowing down: threats and harassment of local officials in the first seven months of 2024 were up 87 percent compared to the same period in 2022.
Globally, there are common risk factors that foster political violence. In the most extreme cases, some scholars of civil war point to factors like “horizontal inequality”—where divisions like racial or ethnic discrimination limit opportunities for political participation or economic advancement for entire cultural groups. Others highlight that conflict happens when groups fear or experience a relative change in status (“downgrading”), such that a rational calculation of the risks and benefits of conflict becomes more difficult. Regardless of the particular factors, significant violence becomes more likely when something tips the scales away from compromise and cooperation. What could tip the scales? Risk factors include leaders who are unaccountable, ideologies that drive people towards violence, or when people believe they cannot trust their opponents to stick with compromises.
Today’s divisions in American politics contribute to these kinds of risks. The United States is a divided society, with social and political relationships heavily influenced by factors such as race, geography, and religion. Increasingly, these divisions are exacerbating a phenomenon scholars call “affective polarization” – that is, when citizens do not merely disagree with their fellow citizens’ political views, but instead mistrust and dislike each other at a personal level.
Affective polarization has increased dramatically over the past two decades. According to polling conducted by Pew Research in 2022, for instance, Republicans and Democrats increasingly “view not just the opposing party but also the people in that party in a negative light.” Both sides are increasingly willing to describe the other as immoral, dishonest, close-minded, lazy, and unintelligent. In such an environment, political compromise—a cornerstone of the system of government envisioned by America’s founders—is exceedingly difficult.
Affective polarization also increases the risks of extremism and political violence. In a two-party system such as America’s, political leaders have perverse incentives, often capitalizing on this kind of polarization to garner support. Indeed, political leaders are themselves more polarized than the general population, and local party leaders often prefer extreme candidates to centrists. Such a system increases the prevalence of dehumanizing rhetoric and allegations that opponents harbor ill intent. As a result, Americans today grossly overestimate the willingness of their political rivals to use violence.
While data from Protect Democracy and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University indicate that most experts believe political violence is not yet at a crisis point for American democracy, many worry that the current state of affairs raises the risk for democratic breakdown in the future. So while there is surely no cure-all measure to eliminate the risks of political violence and extremism, Americans should consider serious reforms that would reduce them. The electoral system is among the first places they should look.
America’s Two-Party Electoral System Fuels Political Violence . . .
While it may seem natural to many Americans, the U.S. electoral system is an anomaly among democracies around the world. The American winner-take-all system uses single-member districts for the House of Representatives and for most state legislative races, in which a single candidate wins each district (“takes all”). A growing body of research finds that America’s winner-take-all system is particularly prone to political violence because it: (1) structures political conflict as binary, which, in turn, exacerbates affective polarization, and (2) generates more “losers” willing to violently challenge the system.
In contrast to proportional representation, winner-take-all systems tend to produce two-party systems, which creates a binary structure for political conflict. While a variety of factors determine the number of political parties in any given country, the number of winners per district is by far the most important. It is no accident that the United States, which almost universally relies on single-member districts, has arguably the strictest two-party system in the world. This is especially consequential for the prospect of political violence because scholars consistently find that winner-take-all systems are particularly bad at managing political conflict in “deeply divided societies.”
Winner-take-all systems also experience higher levels of affective polarization, which can depress “trust and cooperation across party lines” and even “undermine democratic norms and institutions.” The reason goes back to the strict two-party system produced by winner-take-all voting. Such a system consistently generates an “us” vs “them” politics that fuels affective polarization. In fact, an in-depth analysis by Noam Gidron, James Adams, and Will Horne demonstrates the connection between America’s winner-take-all (single-winner) electoral system and intensifying affective polarization.
These same dangerous dynamics have contributed to political violence far beyond America’s shores, particularly in India and Ireland. In India, a winner-take-all system similar to the one used in the United States has aided the rise of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party led by Narendra Modi. Modi rose to power “in the wake of significant violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002,” and has since employed dehumanizing rhetoric towards Muslims as a way to stoke ethnic divides and social grievances. As Rachel Kleinfeld has explained, India’s winner-take-all system enabled politically manipulated mob violence—“the form of electoral violence most like what the United States is experiencing”—to swing elections. Similarly, in Northern Ireland, a winner-take-all system is credited with “inflaming religious tensions by shutting out the Catholic minority. Protestants crowded out Catholics ‘until all too many Catholics replaced their meaningless ballots with bullets.’”
Therefore, it should not be surprising that “the majority of civil wars appear to have occurred in winner-takes-all systems.”
. . . But Proportional Representation Can Make America’s Democracy More Resilient
Fortunately, experience from around the world indicates that there is a better way for democracies at risk to operate. Most other democracies use some form of proportional representation in which each district elects multiple representatives, with each party securing legislative seats in proportion to their share of votes. A great deal of political science research points to proportional electoral systems as a vital tool for peacefully managing social conflict in divided societies. Scholars have explained how proportional systems can usher in a “kinder, gentler” politics—one that rewards compromise and defuses partisan animosity.
To be sure, there is no single, perfect inoculation against political violence—it is too complex a disease to expect that type of cure. But data from a wide range of contexts looking at a variety of types of violence largely points to inclusive institutions, such as proportional representation, as a wise, stabilizing choice.
For example, countries that use proportional systems have substantially less election violence than winner-take-all systems. They see fewer terror attacks and fewer new terrorist organizations emerge. And in the most vulnerable and most conflict-prone countries—those striving to build (or rebuild) democracy in the wake of civil war—proportional representation ranks high among the various tools of political power-sharing that scholars have found to be critical components of preventing future violence.
A proportional system could also break America’s two-party doom loop by creating an incentive for multiple political parties to cooperate and compromise, thereby reducing affective polarization. With more political parties, there are greater opportunities for fluid coalition-building. This, in turn, generates less dangerous degrees of polarization and lowers the risk of political violence. Indeed, research shows that countries with proportional systems and multiparty coalitions have “lower levels of both issue-based and identity-based polarization.”
Where winner-take-all systems tend to ossify political conflict into repeated contests between the same two dominant “camps,” multiparty coalitions shift over time. Critically, a group of scholars recently determined—based on data from 77 elections across 19 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017—that governing coalitions formed in proportional systems can help defuse partisan hostility in a way not possible with disproportional systems like the one in the United States
While some argue that multiparty systems can allow extreme parties to gain representation, this assertion fails to understand how different electoral systems deal with extremist factions. No electoral system is able to eliminate extremes—and any reform agenda promising such an outcome is insincere. Instead, the key questions are: How do different systems channel extremist views? Does the system enable political actors to better mitigate and marginalize extremists, or does it hamper such efforts?
Unlike proportional political systems, winner-take-all systems provide a pathway for extremists to capture majority political power, and even take control of one of only two major political parties. Compared to other wealthy, well-established democracies, the United States has a similar proportion of the population with genuinely extreme political views. America is not special in that regard. And it is possible—perhaps even likely—that proportional reforms would allow for extremist parties to secure some share of seats commensurate with their support. That is common in other democracies that use proportional systems. The difference is in, well, the proportionality of that power. In America’s winner-take-all politics, extremists have secured outsized support. For instance, the MAGA faction of the Republican party wields far more influence than its actual support in the electorate suggests it should. As Kleinfeld has explained, this makes the U.S. system more “brittle” and prone to authoritarian takeover.
In contrast, proportional systems are more resilient, and can marginalize extremist views.
Two approaches explain how more parties and cross-cutting coalitions help reduce the risk of political violence. First, researchers point to the strategy of establishing a “cordon sanitaire”—that is, refusing to cooperate or enter into coalitions with extremist parties as a means of denying them legitimacy or access to governing power. Mainstream parties in Belgium, for example, have taken this approach by refusing to form coalitions with the Vlaams Belang party. Second, researchers have examined what is often called the inclusion-moderation hypothesis, where the realities of participating in the democratic process and joining a government coalition lead extreme parties to moderate and/or lose their electoral support. This is the story of the far-right Finns Party in Finland, whose historic electoral performance enabled it to enter into a coalition government with the center-right in 2015, only to find that the realities of governing politics caused it to fracture and lose support. In both approaches, multiparty coalitions that typically accompany proportional representation provide pro-democracy leaders with more options to either marginalize or mitigate extremist views. In winner-take-all systems, neither strategy is as readily available.
Proportional Representation Produces More Winners and Less Losers
Winner-take-all systems also raise the risk of political violence because they produce more “losers” who feel shut out of the political process. The willingness of candidates and parties to accept electoral defeat, or what scholars call “loser’s consent,” is particularly low in winner-take-all systems where only one candidate wins in each district and everyone else, well, loses. As a result, more candidates and more voters feel like they “lost” or casted a vote that didn’t “matter.” This creates a dangerous dynamic because, as Barbara F. Walter explained in an essay for The New Yorker, “losing an election may leave significant portions of the electorate without representation, reduce incentives for interparty collaboration, and allow the winning side to impose its agenda on the losers.” When elections are set up as “us” vs “them” battles, losing takes on existential, life-threatening weight. This very dynamic is playing out in the United States, where the election denialism movement has become part of the platform for one of the two major political parties.
Proportional representation can help mitigate the risk of political violence associated with “loser’s consent,” due to two key effects on how “losers” perceive the legitimacy of government, one direct and the other indirect. First, proportional systems have multiple winners in each district—sometimes 5 or 7 winners in every district—instead of just the 1 in winner-take-all. This is significant for the legitimacy of a system because more winners means a greater segment of the electorate feels represented and fewer people feel shut out, compared to winner-take-all systems.
Second, research indicates that even “losers” are more willing to consent in proportional systems because these systems encourage multiparty coalition governments. Researchers have found that these coalition governments are closer to the median voter than a government that is the product of a winner-take-all system, so even “losers . . . are comparatively happier with the policy positions of the government.” Beyond policy preferences, this is good for democracy. Scholars have found that “losers” rate various aspects of electoral democracy higher in countries with more proportional systems. As Matthew Germer of R Street succinctly summarized: “Proportional representation reduces the impact of losing a vote by giving losers more influence in the overall composition of their government. This directly encourages losers’ consent by diminishing the number of people who fall squarely in the ‘loser’ category and ensures that political minorities still have a voice in their government.”
Thus, a shift to proportional representation could realign political leaders’ incentives from top to bottom and foster an environment in which a wider range of perspectives are included. Research using the criteria from the Worldwide Governance Indicators and the Economist Intelligence Unit shows that proportional systems do better than winner-take-all systems in “representing minority groups and minority interests, representing everyone more accurately, and representing people and their interests more inclusively.” This kind of inclusion and incentive for cooperation and compromise is essential for stabilizing American politics, particularly given that extremist views among the population are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Conclusion
Rightfully so, over the next few months there will be intense scrutiny of elite political rhetoric and the differences between the only two political parties in the United States. And yet, even if cooler heads prevail in the short run, there is no guarantee that the nation will avoid a crisis in the future. Any serious desire to address the root causes of political violence must include electoral system reform. The body of literature makes clear that proportional representation can help make American democracy more resilient against the scourge of political violence.