American democracy is cracking. These ideas could help repair it.

Lee Drutman was quoted in the Washington Post on how proportional representation can be used as a tool to combat polarization.

A year ago, 200 political scientists, noting that barely 10 percent of House districts are truly competitive, proposed a dramatic change to the system: multimember districts and proportional representation. Each district would include several members to the House, rather than just one, and those elected would be based on the proportion of the vote received by candidates from the parties competing.

Undoing a 1967 law that requires all House members be elected from single-member districts and adding proportional representation, the political scientists said, “would mean almost every voter could cast a meaningful vote, regardless of where they live.”

Lee Drutman of the think tank New America sees proportional representation as a critical tool at a time when politics has become so charged. “We’ve got to do something to break what I call a two-party doom loop, which is the escalating, binary, us-against-them dynamic that is making the shared project of electoral democracy incredibly uncertain,” he said.