Moments of Permanence - Proportional representation isn't good, people...

From: elspethdixon Date: May 10th, 2010 07:32 pm (UTC) (Link)

The very idea of not having someone at the federal/national government level to represent your local interests just seems alien to me, as an American. Granted, there are some parts of the country where faithfully representing the residents' wishes in congress is probably a bad idea, like, say, Arizona (where racial profiling is now legal *facepalm*) and it's pretty much the reason pork in legislation exists, but it's just the way things are set up here. I suspect it's because the states predated the national government as political entities, and a proportional representation system would have taken away part of their sovereignty.

Not that specific localities can't be completely run by single political parties - a lot of US cities were basically run by the Democratic party via machine politics for a lot of the late 19th/early 20th century, and some state governments are essentially Republican machines.

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