Lee Drutman is an American political scientist. He is a senior fellow at the

New America Foundation New America, formerly the New America Foundation, is a think tank in the United States founded in 1999. It focuses on a range of public policy issues, including national security studies, technology, asset building, health, gender, energy, educa ...

. He is known as an advocate for

proportional representation Proportional representation (PR) refers to a type of electoral system under which subgroups of an electorate are reflected proportionately in the elected body. The concept applies mainly to geographical (e.g. states, regions) and political divis ...

with

ranked-choice voting Ranked-choice voting may be used as a synonym for: * Ranked voting, a term used for any voting system in which voters are asked to rank candidates in order of preference * Instant-runoff voting (IRV), a specific ranked voting system with single-w ...

in the U.S. political system, arguing that it would reduce

political polarization Political polarization (spelled ''polarisation'' in British English) is the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes. Most discussions of polarization in political science consider polarization in the c ...

and minimize the risks of

democratic backsliding Democratic backsliding, also called autocratization, is the decline in the democratic characteristics of a political system, and is the opposite of democratization. Democracy is the most popular form of government, with more than half of the nat ...

Life

He has a PhD from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, and a BA from

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

. He received the 2016

American Political Science Association The American Political Science Association (APSA) is a professional association of political science students and scholars in the United States. Founded in 1903 in the Tilton Memorial Library (now Tilton Hall) of Tulane University in New Orleans, ...

's Robert A. Dahl Award for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy". He has advanced his arguments in favor of proportional voting in ''Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America''. In 2021, ''Washingtonian'' magazine listed him as one of the most influential people of Washington D.C., citing his advocacy for proportional voting. He is a regular contributor to

FiveThirtyEight ''FiveThirtyEight'', sometimes rendered as ''538'', is an American website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States. The website, which takes its name from the number of electors in th ...

, where he writes on current affairs. His work appeared in Noema, and Foreign Policy.

Bibliography

* ''The Business of America Is Lobbying,'' Oxford University Press, 2015 . * ''Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,'' Oxford University Press, 2020.

References

Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American political scientists Brown University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni {{US-polisci-bio-stub