STUMPTOWN, INDEED! Portland’s Urban Regime and the Conditional Effects of Electoral Reform

Abstract

In 2022, Portland, Oregon became the first American city in decades to adopt the Single Transferable Vote (STV) in multi-member districts. STV , the multi-winner form of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), is a proportional representation (PR) system designed to allocate seats in a legislature in proportional to a party or group’s share of the electorate. STV has grown increasingly popular in recent years as a means of increasing proportional representation and voter choice. Today, Portland and Cambridge, Massachusetts are the only two U.S. cities using multi-member STV in municipal elections. Crucially, the innovation of Portland is to combine multi-member STV with geographic districts in order to increase the voting power of geographically concentrated communities. However, from adoption to electoral outcomes, STV in Portland has functioned in ways that standard electoral reform theory neither predicted nor anticipated. This thesis argues that STV’s effects are not determined by electoral rules alone, but are fundamentally shaped, and in turn shaped by, structural design features and the political and institutional contexts under which it operates. Drawing on historical analysis, comparative endorsement and vote transfer data, and an adapted Loosemore-Hanby Index, this thesis examines Portland’s City Council across three dimensions: its adoption as defying the party parity hypothesis and shifting-coalitions theory; its organizational effects as shaped by Portland’s urban regime; and that proportionality improved under STV but minority representation declined. Together, these findings suggest that, in treating electoral rules as deterministic rather than contingent on contextual factors, existing theories and frameworks fail to anticipate patterns of organizational coordination, dynamics of political competition, and variance in the proportionality of representative bodies. As such, understanding STV reform in Portland requires a framework that centers specific political contexts as a defining force shaping electoral outcomes.