Editors' Note: Fixing Institutions Won't Guarantee Political Outcomes
Reconstruction has to have a deeper target than simply redesigning institutions.
America's institutions are so poorly designed that, should we ever muster the political will, we could pluck a great deal of low hanging fruit. Gerrymandering is incredibly easy to solve if one simply adopts proportional representation for legislatures, or at minimum creates districting bodies with genuine institutional independence. The Electoral College is a uniquely insane method that almost any other method used by almost any other democracy would be superior to.
Americans also face "the long ballot," in which we do not just have a separately elected top executive at the state level, but also separately elected executives from the attorney general on down to the local sewage commissioner. All the best evidence we have is that most voters have a hard enough time keeping track of who their state legislators are, never mind tracking each elected executive position they are a constituent for. Consolidating the long ballot would go a long way to helping economize political accountability effectively.
Would these and other useful reforms fix what ails us? That's a harder question to answer. As someone who cares about these questions a lot, and seeks out experts to write about them for us as often as possible, the answer is more ambiguous than I might like.
What follows argues that institutional design cannot replace the work of politics. Design shapes what are fundamentally black boxes, influencing political possibilities but unable to truly determine a nation's politics. Politics are fundamentally indeterminate; this is both our great challenge and our permanent opportunity.
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