How We Elect Our Leaders

Originally published in the Summer 2007 issue of the Kennedy School Bulletin.

As an historian, Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar thinks a lot about the past. Understanding history is not only important for its own sake, he says, but also for informing and explaining the present.

Such analysis, says Keyssar, is critical for explaining the current U.S. electoral system, which most recently, in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, revealed deep flaws.

By understanding history and where our institutions came from and why they exist, it becomes easier to imagine changing them, he says. "They no longer look like parts of the natural landscape or like fundamental parts of democracy. You understand them to be the results of hardball, hard-knuckled partisan battles from years ago, and that there's no reason to regard them as being engraved in stone and as systems we can't change."

Leaving voting rights to the states, for instance, was not the result of broad principles and conviction, he says. Instead, it was done in the 1780s because it was what the people who wrote the constitution thought had to be done in order to ratify the constitution.

"Every state already had its own requirements for voting, and the writers of the constitution were afraid that if they set any national standards, some state would get annoyed and not ratify the constitution. So they said, 'OK, we'll leave it to the states.' It wasn't that they believed in leaving it to the states."

Keyssar is currently working on a book due out next year that will put the current political system into its broader, historical context. Focusing on the evolution of three structures -- the electoral college, districting, and campaign financing -- Keyssar will seek to show the impact they have on the outcome of today's elections.

"Why do we still have the electoral college given its unpopularity?" he asks. There have been more constitutional amendments to get rid of it introduced into Congress than for any other subject in American history.

"It was clear within an hour after the constitution was written that this was not the finest work of the founding fathers," says Keyssar. "Virtually everybody, including a number of the founding fathers, believed that having electors chosen by district, rather than winner-take-all, is more democratic. Jefferson and Madison thought we should get rid of it. Why do we still have it?"

Regarding districting, he says, there is nothing in the constitution that says that representatives to Congress have to be chosen in single member districts instead of through some proportional representation system.

"The reason the country ended up with the particular districting that now exists has a lot to do with the partisan politics of the 1840s and deals that were cut between the Whigs and the Democrats," he says.

The critical moment for campaign financing, he says, came in a Supreme Court case in the 1970s, ruling that it's permissible for Congress to regulate donations, but not permissible to regulate expenditures.

"What we've learned since then, which seemed fairly obvious even then, is that if you don't regulate expenditures, it doesn't matter how much you regulate donations, candidates and parties will find some way around it," says Keyssar.

A good example is the McCain-Feingold Bill, which was passed in 2002 that sought to put a ban on soft money. "People worked very hard on that bill, but it had no effect," he says. "Politicians found other ways. They created different kinds of issue organizations. If you don't limit expenditures, the money will find a way to get there. The water will roll downhill."

Change in the current political process will not come easily. Reform of political and electoral institutions, he says, is in some ways more difficult than in other areas because you're trying to get people who benefit from the current system to agree to change it.

"You're asking the foxes guarding the chicken coop to change the rules of access to the chickens," he says. The Federal Elections Commission's attempt in 2002 to reform the system was ineffective, he says, because "the two parties are figuring out the rules of engagement for themselves."

This is where he hopes sound, historical analysis will have an impact. "It is history aimed at changing policy," he says.