Proportional representation

Party-list PR is also more complicated in reality than in the example, as countries often use more than one district, multiple tiers (e.g. local, regional and national), open lists or an electoral threshold.

The single transferable vote is an older method than party-list PR, and it does not need to formally involve parties in the election process.

Final-round vote tallies and party satisfaction break-down (quota is 25 percent plus 1) Under STV, to make up the 200-seat legislature as large as in the examples that follow, about 67 three-seat districts would be used.

Compare the MMP example to a mixed-member majoritarian system, where the party-list PR seat allocation is independent of the district results (this is also called parallel voting).

The case for a single transferable vote system, a form of proportional representation, was made by John Stuart Mill in his 1861 essay Considerations on Representative Government.

In the 2005 UK election, for example, the Labour Party under Tony Blair won a comfortable parliamentary majority with the votes of only 21.6 percent of the total electorate.

Another criticism is that the dominant parties in plurality/majoritarian systems, often looked on as "coalitions" or as "broad churches",[29] can fragment under PR as the election of candidates from smaller groups becomes possible.

[citation needed] Canada, which uses FPTP with a multi-party system, had more elections between 1945 and 2017 than PR countries such as Norway, Germany and Ireland.

However, its effectiveness in this regard depends upon the features of the system, including the size of the regional districts, the relative share of list seats in the total, and opportunities for collusion that might exist.

[45][46] This illustrates how certain implementations of mixed systems (if non-compensatory or insufficiently compensatory) can produce moderately proportional outcomes, similar to parallel voting.

With relatively small multiple-member districts, in particular with STV, there are counter-arguments: about 90 percent of voters can consult a representative they voted for, someone whom they might think more sympathetic to their problem.

[citation needed] As a consequence, these coalitions might have difficulties presenting a united front to counter presidential influence, leading to a lack of balance between these two powers.

[38] After the introduction of STV in Ireland in 1921, district magnitudes slowly diminished as more and more three-member constituencies were defined, benefiting the dominant Fianna Fáil party, until 1979, when an independent boundary commission was established, reversing the trend.

By contrast, a natural threshold is (equal to a Droop quota) is the smallest number of votes needed to mathematically guarantee a seat.

[63] Other aspects of PR can influence proportionality such as the size of the elected body, the choice of open or closed lists, ballot design, and vote counting methods.

This low level of disproportionality is consistently achieved in European PR[67] but is much lower than was produced in the 2015 Canadian election under first-past-the-post voting, where the Gallagher index was 12.

This was changed for the 2013 national election after the constitutional court rejected the previous law, not compensating for overhang seats had resulted in a negative vote weight effect.

Invented in 2013 in the Canadian province of Alberta, DMP received attention on Prince Edward Island where it appeared on a 2016 plebiscite as a potential replacement for FPTP,[89] but was eliminated on the third round.

This peculiarity is accepted by the Zürich electorate because the resulting city council is proportional and all votes, regardless of district magnitude, now have equal weight.

[96] In a related proposal for the UK parliament, whose elections are contested by many more parties, the authors note that parameters can be tuned to adopt any degree of proportionality deemed acceptable to the electorate.

Manual methods used in early times and still today in places where STV was adopted in early 20th century (Ireland and Malta) transfer surplus votes according to a randomly selected sample, or transfer only a segment of the votes held by the successful candidate as surplus, selected based on the next usable marked preference.

[107] As he stated:[108] May I, in conclusion, point out that the method advocated in my pamphlet (where each elector names one candidate only, and the candidates themselves can, after the numbers are announced, club their votes, so as to bring in others besides those already announced as returned) would be at once perfectly simple and perfectly equitable in its result?However, his entreaties to Lord Salisbury, leader of the Conservative Party and future prime minister, to adopt “clubbing” were rejected in 1884 [109] as “too sweeping a change".

[116] One of the earliest proposals of proportionality in an assembly was by John Adams in his influential pamphlet Thoughts on Government, written in 1776 during the American Revolution: It should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large.

[121] A PR system that uses single transferable votes was invented in 1819 by an English schoolmaster, Thomas Wright Hill, who devised a "plan of election" for the committee of the Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement in Birmingham that used not only transfers of surplus votes from winners but also from losers, a refinement that later both Andræ and Hare initially omitted.

The list plan system was conceived by Thomas Gilpin, a retired paper-mill owner, in a paper he read to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1844: "On the representation of minorities of electors to act with the majority in elected assemblies".

STV was also invented (apparently independently) in the UK in 1857 by Thomas Hare, a London barrister, in his pamphlet The Machinery of Representation and expanded on in his 1859 Treatise on the Election of Representatives.

The 1865 edition of the book included the transfer of preferences from dropped candidates and the STV method was essentially complete, although Hare pictured the entire British Isles as one single district.

Through her influence and the efforts of the Tasmanian politician Andrew Inglis Clark, Tasmania became an early pioneer of the system, electing the world's first legislators through STV in 1896, prior to its federation into Australia.

[125] In Russia, Leon Trotsky had proposed the election of a new Soviet presidium with other socialist parties on the basis of proportional representation in September 1917.

He therefore argues that parties on the right adopted PR as a way to ensure that they would survive as potent political forces amid suffrage expansion.