Proportional Representation League

The Proportional Representation League was an organization founded in 1893 in the campaign for the adoption of the Proportional representation system of voting at the city, state and federal level in the U.S. (There was a separate Proportional Representation League in the United Kingdom as well.) Many Canadians as well as Americans were active in the League. The date of its demise is unknown but its newsletter, The Proportional Representation Review, apparently ceased publication in 1932.

The Proportional Representation League was founded at the Memorial Art Institute of Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition on August 10–12, 1893, to promote the cause of proportional representation within the United States.

Prominent members included League Secretary Stoughton Cooley, Rhode Island Governor Lucius F. C. Garvin, federal judge Albert Branson Maris, and economist and labor reformer John R. Commons.

The League's activities included distributing information to inquirers on the reform and publishing pamphlets, books and The Proportional Representation Review. Ten quarterly issues of the Review were published 1893-1896. The issues included articles by pro-rep luminaries of the time, including Alfred Cridge (husband of suffragette and socialist author Annie Cridge), Massachusetts Representative Wm H. Gove, Professor Ernest Naville and Sir John Lubbock.[1] Due to lack of funds, it was suspended. The League continued to publish annual reports of P.R. events and concerns. The Review was later again in publication, from 1901 to about 1932, as section of the The Direct Legislation Record And The Proportional Representation Review: A Non-partisan Advocate Of Pure Democracy.

Robert Tyson, a resident of Toronto (Canada), was the editor of the PR Review from 1901 to 1913. In 1891 he met Australian Catherine Helen Spence, a pioneer of effective voting (which was her term for PR), and president of the Effective Voting League of South Australia, when she visited Canada. In 1903 he conducted the election of the executive of the Trades and Labour Congress using Hare-Spence PR (Single transferable voting). Tyson authored two pamphlets that were published by the PR League -- Proportional Representation including its relationship to the Initiative and Referendum (1904) and Proportional Representation - its Principles, Practice and Progress, with description of the Swiss Free List, the Hare Spence Plan and the Gove System.

Clarence Gilbert Hoag became editor of the PR Review in 1914. Hoag had authored the pamphlet The Representative Council Plan of City Government, published by the PR League in 1913. Hoag also was co-author (with George Hervey Hallett) of the 1926 book Proportional Representation.

Statement of League's beliefs

Here is a statement of the beliefs of the PR League.

"WHAT WE ADVOCATE" "The P. R. League urges the Hare system of proportional representation ("P. R.") for the election of representative bodies. This system of election gives every group of like-minded voters the share of the members elected that it has of the votes cast. It does this by giving every voter a single vote, either at large or in a district electing several members, and requiring a separate quota of votes for the election of each member.It allows the voter to make his vote count without knowing whether his favorite can secure the necessary quota or not. All he has to do is to mark not only his first choice but as many alternative choices as he likes. If it is found that his ballot cannot possibly help elect his first choice, it is used instead for the first of his later choices whom it can help. For a detailed description of the system, see the P. R. League's Leaflet No. 5."

Outside links

• Proportional Representation Review: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=propreprev (many of the issues of the 1893-1924 period)