Compensation (electoral systems)

Condorcet methods Positional voting Cardinal voting Quota-remainder methods Approval-based committees Fractional social choice Semi-proportional representation By ballot type Pathological response Strategic voting Paradoxes of majority rule Positive results Compensation or correction is an optional mechanism of electoral systems, which corrects the results of one part of the system based on some criterion to achieve a certain result, usually to make it more proportional.

[citation needed] In mixed non-compensatory systems, such as parallel voting, the proportional allocation is performed independently of the district election component.

Under such a system, the total number of seats (FPTP + PR) received by each party would not be proportional to its share of the popular vote.

Most of Germany changed to the two-vote variant to make local members of parliament (MPs) more personally accountable.

[6] The Scandinavian countries have a long history of using both multi-member districts (members elected through party-list PR) and nationally based compensatory top-up seats using the same method as MMP, however because the local MPs are also elected using PR, these systems are not usually considered MMP as they are not mixed systems.

For example, the provincial parliament (Landtag) of North Rhine Westphalia has, instead of the usual 50% compensatory seats, only 29% unless more are needed to balance overhangs.

The compensatory effect characteristic of MMP is in the fact that a party that won constituency seats would have lower averages on the table than it would if the election used MMM.

(Gallagher) number of overhang seats Some compensatory electoral systems have properties that make them vulnerable to manipulation, which is usually intended to subvert the compensation mechanism.

Unlike in parallel voting, the PR seats are allocated in a manner that corrects disproportionality caused by the district tier.

[citation needed] The type of MMP which does not always yield proportional results, but sometimes only "mixed semi-proportional representation" is called an additional member system.

In Bolivia and Lesotho, where single vote versions of AMS are used with a relatively large number of compensatory seats, results are usually proportional.

AMS models used in parts of the UK (Scotland and Wales), with small regions with a fixed number of seats tend to produce only moderately proportional election outcomes.

The system was proposed by the Jenkins Commission as a possible alternative to FPTP for elections to the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Proposed as an alternative to FPTP for Canadian elections, DMP appeared as an option on a 2016 plebiscite in Prince Edward Island and a 2018 referendum in British Columbia.