can you tell me about what proportinal representation is?

Question

uk

Answer 1

To answer this, you need to understand single-member districts first. In the US and UK, legislators compete in set districts, based on population or geographic area. There can candidates from many parties running, but there can only be one winner for that distict. If 60% vote for the candidate from Party A, that candidate wins, and 40% of the votes (30% for Party B and 10% for Party C) are wasted.

In a proportional representation system (practiced in much of Europe), the districts are multi-member districts -- that is, they elect more than legislator. Instead of having 1 representative who wins 100% of the votes, you might have 10 representatives, and they are proportioned amongst the various parties. From the above example, 6 of the representatives would be from Party A, 3 from Party B, and 1 from Party C. In this example, no votes are "wasted," as opposed to the 40% of votes wasted in the single-member district system. Hybrid systems, such as Germany's, use both single-member and multi-member districts, but these are less common.

The nature of PR lends itself to parliamentary systems with multiple parties, depending to some extent on electoral law. Each party typically puts forth a "slate" of candidates: essentially, this is an ordered list of the people they will put in office if they win enough votes. However, the *person* is less important than the platform of the *party* in mature examples of these systems, because all party members are presumed to be likely to vote with the party almost all of the time. Each party will simply pick as many names from their slate as they are allotted, based on their proportion of the vote.

So, PR tends to decrease wasted votes, allowing people to vote for the party most closely aligned with their preferences, instead of voting strategically for the party they think is as close as possible to their views AND most likely to win. Conversely, it can decrease the feeling of ownership by the electorate, since one does not "own" one's representative -- there can be many representatives, and they are dominated by their party. However, the system has many advantages in responsiveness to the will of the electorate.

Answer 2

Same as percapita If 1000 Has 10 votes 100 have 1