The lecture is long but very lucid, and I recommend it highly. But because it is so long, I'm going to quote a key section of it here.
While most of the problems Levitsky describes are in the Constitution itself and therefore extremely difficult to fix, there's one problem that he doesn't even mention but that could be addressed more easily.Steven Levitsky wrote:Many of our country's counter-majoritarian institutions were not designed as part of a carefully calibrated system of checks and balances. They were concessions made to small and slaveholding states in an effort to preserve the union. But they became entrenched, and today I want to suggest they threaten our democracy.
Why today? Why today and not 200 years ago?
Due to the small-state bias that was created by the framers, our institutions have for a very long time favored sparsely populated states. The Electoral College favors sparsely populated states. The US Senate heavily favors sparsely populated states. And because the Senate approves Supreme Court justices, the Supreme Court is also biased toward sparsely populated states.
That rural bias has always been there. It's always been undemocratic. But it never seriously advantaged one political party over another one, because for most of this country's history, both major parties had urban wings and rural wings. It is only now, in the 21st century, that US parties have split along urban-rural lines. Today, as you all know, the Democrats are overwhelmingly concentrated in metropolitan centers, while Republicans are overwhelmingly based in sparsely populated territories. That gives the Republicans a systematic advantage in the Electoral College, in the Senate, and in the Supreme Court. And that allows them to win and to hold national power without winning national majorities.
The Republicans have won the popular vote for president once, once, since 1988. Yet they've controlled the presidency for most of the 21st century. A popular majority was not enough for Joe Biden to win the presidency; he had to win the popular vote by at least by four points, and he'll need to do it again to win in 2024.
The Senate's even more skewed. States representing less than 20% of the US population can produce a majority in the Senate. Most of them are red states. In recent years, the Democrats have needed to win the popular vote for the Senate by at least five points to retain control of the Senate. So even if the Democrats consistently win 51, 52% of the popular vote for the Senate, Republicans will control the Senate. Senators are elected for staggered six-year terms, so a third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years. So that means it takes three elections to fully renovate the US Senate. The Democratic Party has won the overall popular vote in every six-year cycle since 2000. But the Republicans have controlled the Senate for nearly half that period. In 2016, the Democrats won the popular vote for the presidency and the Senate, but Republicans won the presidency and the Senate. That is minority rule.
The composition of the Supreme Court is also skewed. Four out of nine Supreme Court justices - Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett - were confirmed by senators representing less than half the US population. Three of them - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett - were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and then confirmed by senators who represented less than half the US population. If the popular vote determined who controlled the presidency and the Senate, the Supreme Court would likely have a 6-3 liberal majority today.
Today, you often hear commentators say that America is stalemated between two evenly matched parties. So phenomena like polarization and gridlock are attributed to an unusual degree of parity. Presidential elections are decided by razor-thin margins, the Senate is evenly split. But keep in mind that parity is manufactured by our institutions. Parity only emerges after our votes pass through the distortionary channels of our institutions.
Now, America's counter-majoritarian problem is bad in and of itself. Parties that win fewer votes win power, and in policy areas from gun control to abortion to health care to the minimum wage, large popular majorities are routinely thwarted or ignored. But I want to suggest it's worse than that. America's counter-majoritarian institutions are not just thwarting electoral majorities; they are reinforcing authoritarianism.
Our counter-majoritarian institutions reinforce Republican extremism by shielding them from competitive pressure. Democratic competition, at least in theory is supposed to work kind of like the market. When products don't sell, firms lose money. When firms lose money, they come under pressure to develop better products. Likewise, parties are supposed to win elections. When parties repeatedly lose elections, they're supposed to adapt and rethink their platform and broaden their appeal. So when the Democrats lost three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s they did a rethink, they moved to the center, they nominated Bill Clinton, a moderate, to run in 1992. That process of adaptation is not happening in the Republican Party. The Republicans, again, have lost the popular vote in seven out of eight presidential elections. They badly underperformed by all accounts in 2018, in 2020, in 2022. But so far there's been no serious effort to moderate or to rethink their strategy.
Commentators are pulling their hair out, trying to explain this seemingly irrational behavior. But it's really not so irrational. Our institutions give the Republicans an electoral crutch. They don't have to win national majorities. They can win 47, 48% of the vote. So extremism doesn't cost them as much as it would ordinarily in a truly competitive environment. Think about it. Despite all the crazy election denial, despite January 6, despite Trump's indictments, despite Marjorie Taylor-Greene, national power remains tantalizingly within reach for the Republican party. They are very, very likely to win control of the Senate in 2024; they've got a coin flip's chance of winning the presidency. If the Republicans had to actually win national majorities to wield power, they would face much, much greater pressure to rein in their extremism. But they don't have to.
The Constitution doesn't define how many representatives there should be in the House, only that each state gets at least one and no House district should contain fewer than 30,000 people. There is no maximum district size. Historically, Congress directly defined the number of seats in the House, increasing the number as the nation expanded. But in the 1910s, for complicated reasons, Congress refused to increase the number of seats and we got stuck at the rather random number of 435. Today, the population of several small states is less than 1/435th of the US population. Those states need at least one representative, so some populous states have to have undersized delegations to make room. During reapportionment, populous states can even lose seats even though their population has grown or held steady. (New York, for example, often loses seats during reapportionment, not because its population is declining but because its large share is being crowded out by growth in the Sunbelt and the West Coast.) The upshot is that rural states are overrepresented even in the House.
The simplest solution to this problem would be replacing the arbitrary number of 435 with a law that the maximum size of a House district is the same as the population of the smallest state. This idea is known as the "Wyoming Rule" (because Wyoming is the least populous state). Under the Wyoming Rule, the House would have 574 seats today.
Fixing this problem would also reduce, though not eliminate, the danger of the Electoral College. The number of electors for each state is equal to the number of senators and representatives for that state, so more representatives means more electors and more electoral power for populous urbanized states.
