what is proportional representation

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2024 Election

Many voters say congress is broken. could proportional representation fix it.

Hansi Lo Wang

A perimeter fence surrounds the U.S. Capitol in February ahead of President Biden's State of the Union speech in Washington, D.C. Mariam Zuhaib/AP hide caption

A perimeter fence surrounds the U.S. Capitol in February ahead of President Biden's State of the Union speech in Washington, D.C.

With an increasingly polarized Congress and fewer competitive elections , there are growing calls among some election reformers to change how voters elect members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

One potential alternative to the current winner-take-all approach for House races is known as proportional representation.

Instead of the single candidate with the most votes winning a House district's seat, a proportional representation system would elect multiple representatives in each district, distributing seats in the legislature roughly in proportion to the votes each party receives.

Supporters say proportional representation could help temper the rise of political extremism, eliminate the threat of gerrymandering and ensure the fair representation of people of color, as well as voters who are outnumbered in reliably "red" or "blue" parts of the country.

This story is part of a series of reports on alternatives to how U.S. voters cast ballots and elect their political leaders. Click here for more NPR voting stories .

And last year, a group of more than 200 political scientists, legal scholars and historians across the U.S. said the time for Congress to change is now.

"Our arcane, single-member districting process divides, polarizes, and isolates us from each other," they wrote in an open letter to lawmakers. "It has effectively extinguished competitive elections for most Americans, and produced a deeply divided political system that is incapable of responding to changing demands and emerging challenges with necessary legitimacy."

But how exactly proportional representation could change House elections is an open question with major hurdles. There's a federal law that bans it, and many of its supporters acknowledge it would likely be years, if not decades, before a majority of lawmakers allow such a big, untested restructuring of Congress.

What could proportional representation in the House look like?

There's a spectrum of ways to reform the House using proportional representation. Two key factors are how many representatives a multi-member district would have and how winners of House seats would be proportionally allocated.

In 2021, Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia led a group of other House Democrats in reintroducing a proposal that's been floating around Congress since 2017 . The Fair Representation Act would require states to use ranked choice voting for House races. It calls for states with six or more representatives to create districts with three to five members each, and states with fewer than six representatives to elect all of them as at-large members of one statewide district.

Some advocates also raise the possibility of increasing the total number of House seats, which has been stuck at 435 seats for decades .

Stuck at 435 representatives? Why the U.S. House hasn't grown with census counts

While there's no consensus on the mechanics, supporters say moving toward proportional representation could allow the country's diversity to be better represented — including in communities where elections, outside of primaries, have become non-competitive.

"When you're looking at New York City, where I live, it's a city of almost 8.5 million people. And there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Republican voters who find themselves in districts with lopsided Democratic majorities," says Reihan Salam, a Brooklyn-based Republican who heads the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and has written in support of proportional representation .

Salam sees proportional representation as "something that would be hugely healthy for our politics to see to it that you don't just have competitive elections in a small, tiny handful of swing districts or swing states."

And that increased competition could push political parties to be more willing to compromise and negotiate, says Didi Kuo, a fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Kuo, who has studied versions of proportional representation systems in New Zealand, Italy and Japan, notes that many other democracies around the world have rewritten their rules "when some people are marginalized or excluded from representation, or when votes are not being translated into seats."

"How would you like it if there were a system where you could at least ensure that one person you like gets elected or one person of the party that you support?" Kuo says about what proportional representation could offer.

It could also lead to the rise of more political parties, which supporters say could boost voter turnout by expanding voters' choices in candidates.

But that could come with complications, warns Ruth Bloch Rubin, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

"We've seen how difficult it was to elect a speaker with just two parties, that when you introduce multiple parties, it increases the odds that you're going to have collective action problems, coordination problems. It's just going to be slower and harder to get people to reach agreement," says Bloch Rubin, who has written about the potential challenges that could come with switching from the current system of two major parties.

Why is proportional representation in the House against the law?

In 1967, Congress passed a law that bans a House district from electing more than one representative.

Courts hearing redistricting lawsuits at the time were considering ordering states with contested maps to use multi-member districts and hold statewide at-large elections as a temporary fix — a scenario that many lawmakers wanted to avoid. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law, many lawmakers also wanted to block southern states from using multi-member districts and at-large, winner-take-all elections for the House to weaken the voting power of Black voters.

Since then, lawmakers, including Beyer, have introduced bills that would undo that requirement of single-member congressional districts and allow for multi-member districts.

Former Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell of California is seen in 2010. While serving in Congress back in 1999, Campbell testified in support of multi-member districts, which he says he still supports. Paul Sakuma/AP hide caption

While serving in Congress back in 1999, now-former Republican Rep. Tom Campbell of California testified in support of multi-member districts, which he says he still supports.

"No one looks at the House of Representatives today and says, 'There's a good model of functioning governance.' No one says that. And so the interest in trying something else has never been higher," says Campbell, who is now a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and has left the GOP to form the Common Sense Party of California.

But in recent years, there's been no public support for proportional representation from Republicans in Congress, which Campbell sees as a sign of how polarized Capitol Hill has become.

"A Republican who puts her name or his name on such a bill will be targeted in the next primary election for the simple reason that you are attempting to move towards a system that might allow more members of Congress who are not Republican," Campbell says.

For many representatives, regardless of party, there's not a lot of incentive to try and disrupt the status quo that got them elected, says Bloch Rubin, the political scientist at the University of Chicago.

"Everyone's adapted their campaign and electoral strategies for the way the rules currently function," Bloch Rubin adds.

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How could proportional representation ensure fair representation for people of color.

The U.S. Supreme Court's weakening of the Voting Rights Act over the past decade has helped fuel interest in proportional representation among some civil rights advocates.

While the high court upheld its past rulings on a key remaining section of that landmark law, the loss of other legal protections against racial discrimination in the election process has made it harder to ensure fair representation for people of color around the country.

"If you go into communities of color, they're increasingly disillusioned with the political process. And the system that we have now, in many ways, adds to that disillusionment," says Alora Thomas-Lundborg, strategic director of litigation and advocacy at Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. "It's a winner-take-all system, meaning that if you happen to be in a district where you don't represent the plurality of votes, then you just get no representation and folks feel as though they're not represented. And even when you're in a district where maybe you are being represented, if that district is no longer competitive, you may still feel that your elected representative is not responsive to your needs because they're not out there having to curry your vote."

For communities of color, proportional representation could, in theory, set up a House of Representatives that is more reflective of their shares of the U.S. population, which is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, Thomas-Lundborg adds.

But that promise is untested.

Thomas-Lundborg says more state and local governments adopting proportional representation systems could help assuage some concerns about what impact it would actually have in racially and ethnically diverse parts of the country.

"We are at a point where we're asking a lot of questions and trying to think about the future as the nature of the Supreme Court is changing and the demographics of our country is changing," Thomas-Lundborg says. "And it's a really important time to start thinking proactively about these issues."

Edited by Benjamin Swasey

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What is Proportional Representation?

What exactly do we mean by “proportional representation”, or PR?

PR is a property of electoral systems in which the makeup of the  elected body closely matches the makeup of the  voters , as expressed through their ballots. PR stands in contrast to majority-take-all systems, in which a majority (often a plurality) of voters controls the makeup of the body.

In PR systems, a majority of voters still elect a (representative) majority of a legislative body, but smaller groups have the power to elect their own representatives as well, directly via the ballot.

What PR is not

There are other meanings of the term “proportional representation”. To avoid confusion, we’ll mention some of them, noting that this is  not what we’ll be talking about.

• Population proportionality. The 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are allocated (mostly) proportionately by population to the various states. Here the proportionality is a function of state population, not of voters in an election.
• Geographic proportionality. Many elected bodies in the US are elected from single-seat districts, in which a degree of geographic proportionality is guaranteed, at the expense of any other basis for proportionality. PR systems permit voters to vote on a geographic basis, but it’s seldom their highest priority.
• Redistricting. Within a state, congressional districts, as well as state legislative districts, are drawn so that each elected member represents roughly the same number of constituents. This is a kind of proportionality, in that each member represents the same proportion of the statewide electorate, but again it’s not what we’ll be talking about here.
• Other quotas. Some systems allocate some number of seats in advance to some subgroup of candidates. This might be gender (the Democratic and Republican Parties mandate a degree of gender balance in their National Committees) or another criterion, such as a quota of party members on legislative committees.

When we talk about proportional representation, we mean proportionality based on voter preference expressed through an election — not proportionality or quota mandated by some predetermined characteristic, whether geography, gender, party membership, or anything else.

STV and List PR

While the principle of proportional representation is our primary concern, implementing PR requires a voting mechanism. In most PR systems, voters express their preferences in one of two ways: single transferable vote (STV PR), or list PR.

Under the single transferable vote (STV), voters rank individual candidates in order of preference, and an STV counting system arrives at proportionality based only on individual voter preferences, without regard to party membership of either voters or candidates (thus STV PR is especially useful for non-partisan elections). STV PR is used in Ireland, for the Australian Senate, and for some local elections in New Zealand and Scotland. In the US, STV PR is used for local elections in Cambridge MA and Minneapolis MN.

In list PR systems, each vote counts toward a list (often a party list) rather than for a candidate, and the winners are taken from a list of candidates prepared in advance, often by each party. A list that wins 30% of the total vote is awarded 30% of the legislative seats. If that happens to be 25 seats, then the top 25 candidates on that list are elected. In open-list systems, the voter expresses a preference for a particular candidate, which affects that candidates position on the list. List PR systems come in many different variations, but the general idea is the same. List PR systems are very widely used, for example in Germany, all of Scandinavia, Switzerland, Brazil (and many other South and Central American countries), Iraq and Israel.

One Response to PR Basics

These concepts, STV and Party List, can be usefully combined, in a method I call “Candidate List”. All candidates are eligible for all open seats (if necessary, the country might be subdivided into large districts of ten seats each.) Each candidate is required to post, in advance of the election (say, two weeks in advance) a list of all the candidates for that election, IN ORDER OF that candidate’s preference. Voters cast a ballot for their single favorite candidate, or (alternatively) their favorite for each open seat; so (if using this alternative) a voter could vote for the same candidate for each open seat, or distribute their votes to several candidates, in the style of “cumulative voting”. So, the voters face a simple ballot, they do not have to rank a long list of candidates; the ballots can be tallied in local polling places and the totals sent to the central election administration. The totals for each candidate, together with that candidate’s ordered list, are used as the input data for an STV election. See http://www.atheistnexus.org/profiles/blogs/proportional-representation

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proportional representation

Definition of proportional representation

Examples of proportional representation in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'proportional representation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1870, in the meaning defined above

Dictionary Entries Near proportional representation

proportional rate

proportional tax

Cite this Entry

“Proportional representation.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proportional%20representation. Accessed 29 Aug. 2024.

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proportional representation summary

proportional representation , Electoral system in which the share of seats held by a political party in the legislature closely matches the share of popular votes it received. It was devised in Europe in the mid-19th century to guarantee minority groups more representation than was possible under the majority or plurality systems. Its supporters claim that it creates a more accurate reflection of public opinion; its opponents argue that by allowing more parties in a legislature, it may result in weaker, less stable governments. Two methods for apportioning seats are the single-transferable-vote method, under which voters rank candidates by preference, and the list system, under which voters select a party’s list of candidates rather than individuals. Some countries (e.g., Germany and Russia) use a combination of plurality and proportional methods for allocating seats in the lower house of the national legislature. See also legislative apportionment .

What is proportional representation?

Proportional representation (PR) is a principle that says the percentage of seats a party has in the legislature should reflect the percentage of people who voted for that party. If a party gets 40% of the vote, they should get 40% of the seats.

Under our non-proportional voting system, a party can win a majority of seats and all the power with far less than half the popular vote.

Proportional representation ensures that majority governments have an actual majority of the voters behind them. Under our non-proportional voting system, in most elections, most voters don’t elect anyone to represent them. They don’t affect the election at all. Their votes are “wasted”. This is what leads to distorted results. With PR, almost every vote helps elect an MP. Almost everyone is represented . With PR, every law passed will have the support of MPs representing a real majority of voters. That means better policy decisions for everyone.

Proportional representation 101: Video

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Offered on the 15th of every month. 1 PM Eastern if the date is on a weekend, 8 PM Eastern if the date is during the week. Register for any of the upcoming sessions.

12 Proportional Representation Pros and Cons

Proportional representation, sometimes called simply “PR,” is defined as an “electoral system in which parties gain seats in proportion to the number of votes cast for them.”

This is different than a direct system of representation, where each seat is put up to a vote for a specific candidate, regardless of what party to which they associate.

In a proportional representation system, if the party wins 50% of the vote over 12 districts, then 6 seats would be awarded to them from the election results.

Here are some of the key pros and cons of proportional representation to think about and discuss.

List of the Pros of Proportional Representation

1. It allows different voices to be heard. As long as a party receives enough of a proportional vote to equal one seat, they will be represented within the government at some level. The structures behind proportional representation allow independent candidates and minority parties an opportunity to be elected, which can end the dynasties of the major political parties in that country. With more voices heard, there is a better chance that real action can be taken within the government.

2. It provides a system of true representation. In the United States, where there are two major parties in a winner-takes-all format, each elected representative only represents a simple majority of the population. In some instances, it may not even be a true majority if a third-party candidate performs well in a specific election. Under proportional representation, everyone would have an opportunity to have their views represented in their government in some way.

3. It reduces the idea of a wasted vote. In traditional elections, there are “safe” seats present for incumbents. There may even be “safe” states in U.S. presidential elections since most states award all electoral votes to the majority candidate. If a voter knows that their candidate is polling 20 points behind, then voting for that candidate is essentially a wasted vote. They have no way of having that vote be represented. Proportional representation removes this obstacle, allowing real issues to be debated instead of trying to woo swing voters that could provide a simple majority vote.

4. It conforms to what the rest of the world is doing. Just 5 countries in the world today use a system that is based on plurality voting. Canada, France, and India join the U.S. and the United Kingdom as being an alternative structure. Other nations experience higher levels of voter turnout than these 5 nations because their vote really does count on some level. That creates two unique advantages in this category: people have more influence over the structure of the government and become more invested in domestic issues.

5. It reduces the effects of extremism in politics. Any system of government can fall victim to extremism. Several countries, since 2016, have elected representatives and leaders that have promoted isolationist views. It is more difficult to have extremism in government when proportional representation is in place as a full majority is more difficult to achieve. That means the representatives are required to build consensus through compromise, which results in moderate, centrist policies instead of sliding to the left or the right.

6. It encourages a coalition government. The party which receives the most votes in a proportional representation structure will work with other parties to form a full majority. Different from an absolute majority, a full majority brings more voices into each debate, allowing for a diversity of opinions to be heard. More people feel like they are adequately represented under this type of structure.

7. It allows for multiple candidate preferences. Under a standard system of proportional representation, voters are able to cast a single transferable vote, or an STV. In this system, the voter would rank the candidates on their ballot based on choice. They would indicate a first choice, a second choice, a third, and so forth. Until a candidate reaches more than the set share of votes, no one is declared a winner. That prevents incumbents from staying in office, even if 60% of the population has voted against them.

List of the Cons of Proportional Representation

1. It makes things easier for extreme parties to gain representation. Under the system of proportional representation, any party with a high enough percentage of the vote will receive a seat in the government. That structure makes it easier for extremist views to find official representation. The seldom receive access to the majority coalition and rarely earn an absolute majority, but there is always the possibility that their voiced opinions will gain traction with the general population.

2. It can create political gridlock, just like in any other system of government. Coalition governments are encouraged to compromise and pursue centrist views. The reality of this type of governing, however, is that each party wants to have its own way with things. That creates a system of government that tends to be indecisive and weak because everyone argues for their own best interests. More gridlock, instead of less, can be created, especially if more than two parties are involved in the coalition.

3. It does not provide direct representation to specific communities. Under the system of proportional representation, seats are not awarded based on community or district voting. That means those who serve in the government are less likely to focus on local issues as they have no local representation responsibilities. It creates a system of government where more voices can be heard, but fewer actually receive a listening ear. Many communities under this system can come away feeling like they don’t matter to the governing coalition.

4. It is not always wise to compromise. Even in countries that have encouraged proportional representation, some of the largest changes that have occurred in those societies happened when an absolute majority was present within the government. There are times when a strong majority in the government is required to push through needed reforms.

5. It can be an unstable form of government. Italy has proportional representation built into their government structures. Over the last 4 decades, the government has been forced to dissolve its parliament 8 times. In Belgium, the negotiations required after their 2010 election to form a governing coalition took 18 months to complete, leaving a crippled government in its place where nothing got done. Having more voices can be a good thing, but it can also create a discord that makes it impossible to government.

These proportional representation pros and cons have certain benefits that allow for greater inclusion and variety. At the same time, greater inclusion can also lead toward higher levels of extremism within the government, while encouraging more gridlock if the political parties are unable to find a pathway toward compromise.

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Policy Brief 31

Majoritarian versus Proportional Representation Voting

Ethan Kaplan

What kind of voting system should countries have? This policy brief discusses the two main electoral systems in modern political democracies. It makes an argument that majoritarian systems such as what exists in the United States fail to properly represent voters. It suggests replacing the U.S. majoritarian political system with a proportional representation system and shows how this could be done within the context of current U.S. law.

Both economists and political scientists have worked on the impact of electoral systems. Empirical methods from economics as well as economic analysis of the incentives created by different political systems have contributed to our understanding of the consequences of electoral systems on representation. Additionally, economists have estimated the impact of electoral system on fiscal expenditures, something we will discuss towards the end of the policy brief.

There are two main voting systems in modern democratic societies: majoritarian systems and proportional representation systems. Federal voting in the United States is majoritarian though some states such as Maryland have proportional representation at the state level. In a majoritarian system, also known as a winner-take-all system or a first-past-the-post system, the country is divided up into districts. Politicians then compete for individual district seats. The candidate who receives the highest vote share wins the election and represents the district.

The main alternative to a majoritarian system is a proportional representation system. In a proportional representation system, citizens vote for political parties instead of individual candidates. [1] Seats in a legislature are then allocated in proportion to votes shares. In an ideal proportional representation system, a party that receives 23% of the votes nationwide also gets approximately 23% of the seats in the legislature.

Redistricting

One important aspect of a majoritarian system is that representation occurs by geographical district. In each district of a pure majoritarian system, whichever candidate gets a plurality of the vote serves as representative for that district. However, people move in and out of districts and thus district sizes change. As a result, most majoritarian systems have a redistricting process. In the United States, redistricting happens every decade after the population is counted in the Census.

One large problem with redistricting is that how districts are drawn can have a large influence on representation. For example, imagine that a country has 50% right wing voters and 50% left wing voters. Suppose the left-wing party gets to draw the district boundaries and suppose that ten districts need to be created. The left-wing party could simply pack right wing votes into one district by being creative with how it draws maps. If the left-wing party did this, there would be one right-wing seat with 100% right-wing voters. In the remaining areas, 5/9 of voters would be left-wing. Thus, the left-wing party could end up with nine of the ten district seats despite only having 50% of the votes by drawing its maps creatively. This is called gerrymandering.

In a majoritarian political system, districts need to be drawn and redrawn and it is very easy to draw districts in order to benefit one political party over another. Unfortunately, in the United States, district maps are largely drawn by politicians. In most states, redistricting bills must be passed by state legislatures and signed by the Governor. All state legislature except for Nebraska have two chambers (an Assembly or House and a Senate). If a party has control over both chambers and the governorship, it can potentially redistrict without any input from the other political party. Coriale et al. (2020) show that in the past two decades, the average seat share gain in the House of Representatives from legal control by the Republican party over redistricting is an average of 8 percentage points over the subsequent three elections. Though we do not see a similar impact of Democratic control of redistricting on Democratic seat shares, we do for large Democratic states. Overall, these effects are sizable. They account for between 50% and 60% of the gap between the two parties in the House of Representatives in both the 2000s and the 2010s. Coriale et al. (2020)’s estimates of the impact of legal control are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Average Aggregate Partisan Effects of Partisan Redistricting by Decade

A move away from majoritarian electoral systems to proportional representation systems would get rid of political districts and, as such, would get rid of gerrymandering.

Geographic Concentration

There is a second problem with majoritarian systems. Even without parties manipulating district boundaries for political advantage, majoritarian systems can lead to systemic over-representation of some parties at the expense of others. For example, it is possible for the Democratic party to win just over 50% of the seats with only slightly more than 25% of the votes if the Republican party’s voters are concentrated in 100% Republican districts. This extreme failure of representation in a majoritarian system is interesting in theory but is it a problem in practice?

As pointed out by Rodden (2019), this has, in fact, become endemic in modern majoritarian systems. Political parties, over time, have become geographically polarized by population density with more urban areas further on the left and rural areas further on the right. There is now a clear spatial gradient with urban areas voting heavily for parties on the left, suburban areas voting moderately for the right, and rural areas voting more heavily for the right. This is not just true in the United States but also in other countries as well, particularly ones with majoritarian systems such as the U.K. and France (Piketty, 2018).

Majoritarian systems with a spatially even mixing of left-wing and right-wing voters can be problematic in that small differences in popularity of a party can lead to huge differences in representation. A party’s share of Congressional seats could decrease from 100% to 0% with a very small change in votes if voters were homogeneously spread across districts. However, the problem faced by modern majoritarian systems is due to differential concentration of left-wing and right-wing voters. Jonathan Rodden, in his book, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide shows this differential concentration based upon work with Jowei Chen. They look at each person’s nearest 250,000 neighbors. They choose 250,000 neighbors because the average upper chamber district in Pennsylvania contains around 250,000 voters. They find that over 25% of Democrats’ nearest neighbors are more than 70% Democrats whereas no Republicans’ nearest neighbors are more than 70% Republican and only 10% have more than 60% of their neighbors being Republican.

In a recent paper, Chen and Rodden (2018) do the same analysis and present the average share of Democrats in the nearest 700,000 neighbors of each Democrat and the average share of Republicans in the nearest 700,000 neighbors of each Republican. They do this by state. The results are presented below. Republicans are more concentrated only in five states: Arkansas, Hawaii, Illinois, Mississippi, and New Hampshire. Moreover, in most states, Democrats are far more concentrated than Republicans.

Table 2: The Geographic Concentration of Democratic and Republican Voters

Why does the greater concentration of Democrats lead to a failure of representation? The best way to understand this is to use Nicholas Stephanopolous’ concept of the efficiency gap. Stephanopolous (2015) computes wasted votes (all votes in a district for any loser in the district and the number of votes above plurality for the winner in a district). The problem is that the greater concentration of Democrats in cities than Republicans in rural areas leads to more wasted votes by Democrats than by Republicans. Since Republicans waste fewer votes, they are able to win more districts. In other words, they get systematically greater representation given their vote shares. Idiosyncratic differences across parties in representation average out. However, the differences we see these days in the United States, the U.K. and France as well as in other majoritarian systems such as Australia’s House of Representatives display systemic over-representation of rural over urban voters.

Overall, proportional representation does a better job at representing the will of voters in that political preferences of voters more closely match seat shares in a proportional representation system.

Duverger’s Law

One additional consequence of having a majoritarian political system is that there tends to be fewer political parties. In any given district and sometimes overall at the national level, only two political parties emerge. In this sense, the United States, with its two main political parties is a textbook example of a majoritarian system. Why does the electoral system help determine the number of political parties?

In a majoritarian system, there is only one winner. With a plurality rule for deciding the winner, this gives parties which are ideologically closer to each other a reason to combine forces into one party. For example, suppose that there are two left wing parties each of which garners 30% of the vote and there is a right-wing party which garners 40% of the vote. In a majoritarian system, the right-wing party will win even though 60% of the people prefer a left-wing party. As a result, the two left-wing parties have strong incentives to combine and form one party or at least voters will have strong interests in coordinating on one of the two left-wing candidates. In a proportional representation system, by contrast, having two left wing parties may attract overall more left wing voters. Maybe some ideological voters would only vote for one of the two. In that case, having both will bolster turnout for the left and thus the left-wing seat share in parliament or Congress.

This empirical regularity about the number of parties in proportional representation as opposed to majoritarian systems as well as the logic behind it was first pointed out in Maurice Duverger’s book Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (Duverger, 1954). Modern day Australia provides a natural experiment which illustrates Duverger’s law. Australia’s Senate is elected using state-level proportional representation whereas Australia’s House of Representatives is elected in majoritarian districts. Whereas ten different political parties are represented in the Senate, the House is dominated by the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal-National Coalition (Rodden, 2019).

Rank-Choice Voting

One increasingly popular alternative to proportional representation in multi-member districts is ranked-choice voting in single-member districts. In a rank-choice voting system, instead of voting for one person or one party, voters rank alternative candidates. Then, top-ranked votes are tabulated for each candidate after which the worst overall performer is eliminated. If no candidate has reached a majority of votes cast, the votes for the eliminated candidate are reallocated to the next preferred candidates listed by the eliminated candidates’ voters. This system has been implemented in Alaska, Maine and New York City among other places. Moreover, somewhat similar systems which eliminate candidates in two rounds exist in states such as California, Georgia and Louisiana. Though there is very limited theoretical work or empirical evidence on rank-choice voting, switching to rank-choice voting would likely tend to moderate candidates and thus improve representation relative to a single-member district system with plurality voting. This moderation would probably be large given the current electoral system in the United States with highly partisan districts and candidates selected in highly partisan primaries.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose there are 3 candidates: one far-right candidate with support from 40% of voters, one moderate-right candidate with support from 35% of voters, and one left wing candidate with support from 25% of voters. Moreover, lets assume that right wing supporters prefer the other right-wing candidate to the left-wing candidate and that supporters of the left-wing candidate prefer the moderate-right to the far-right candidate. In that case, in a majoritarian system with a primary, the far-right candidate would defeat the moderate-right candidate in a primary and then the left candidate in a general election. However, with rank-choice voting, the left-wing candidate would lose in the first round of counting. After that, the votes of the left voters would be transferred to the moderate-right candidate, who would then defeat the far-right candidate 60% to 40% in the second round of counting.

Though rank-choice voting sometimes would lead to a more moderate choice when that choice would be preferred in aggregate by voters, sometimes it would not. Let’s now reverse the support for the moderate-right and the left voters from our previous example. We thus get: 40% support for the far-right, 25% for the moderate-right and 35% for the left. Let’s assume that the secondary preferences of voters remain the same (right-wing voters prefer the other right-wing voter to the left-wing candidate and left-wing voters prefer the moderate-right candidate to the far-right candidate). In this case, in the first round, the moderate-right will be eliminated and in the second round, the moderate-right votes will be transferred to the far-right. Thus, even though a 60% majority of voters prefer the moderate-right to far-right, the far-right candidate will still win even with rank-choice voting.

In addition, since the rank-choice voting variant of single member districts is still a single member district system, it will not fundamentally eliminate the problems associated with over-representation of rural interests due to greater spatial concentration of urban voters; it also won’t solve the problem of parties strategically drawing district boundaries to increase the seat shares of their parties.

Economic Policy

We now discuss how the number of parties can affect voter turnout and the types of political coalitions that form. Proportional Representation systems having a greater number of parties likely increases voter turnout. Some voters are only motivated to turn out to vote if they are ideologically similar enough to a party. Citizens who do not vote are much likely to be lower income and are more likely to support greater economic redistribution. Funk and Gathmann (2013) demonstrate that when Swiss Cantons converted from majoritarian to proportional representation electoral systems, voter turnout increased, representation of left-wing parties rose, and social expenditures increased.

Redistributive economic policy may additionally be de-emphasized in a majoritarian system. A majoritarian system shapes coalition formation. As mentioned earlier, in the United States, the cities support the Democratic party, the rural areas support the Republican party and the suburban areas swing between the two. The Democratic party could seek alliances with suburban voters on social issues or rural voters on economic issues. Since the suburbs are more electorally competitive, the Democratic party has shifted towards more conservative economic policy and more liberal social policy. Since the Democratic party needs a plurality of votes, it largely abandons rural voters and the issues they care about. However, under a proportional voting rule, the Democratic party would instead orient its policy towards policies that would get the greatest support rather than towards voters in swing districts. Thomas Piketty (2018) shows that, over the past half a century, left-wing parties in France, the U.K. and the U.S. have shifted towards away from redistributive economic policy as more educated voters have increasingly voted for the left.

U.S. Legislation

In this policy brief, we have demonstrated that majoritarian systems allow political parties to increase their representation by controlling the redistricting process. We have also discussed research which shows that majoritarian systems over-represent rural interests and under-represent support for economic redistribution. In this final section, we discuss policy changes that are feasible in the United States.

Is proportional representation feasible in the United States? Currently, ten states use some form of proportional representation: Arizona, Idaho, Maryland, New Jersey, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. In these states, some state representatives serve in multi-member districts which allow multiple parties to represent a district. Though these multi-member districts are small and thus don’t capture the main benefits of proportional representation, it would be easy to enlarge state districts or just get rid of them entirely. Voters then would vote for all representatives simultaneously as one unified state and a proportional representation rule could easily allocate seats based upon votes.

At the federal level, the United States Senate is not easily changed as representation in the Senate is constitutionally mandated. Given the difficulty of passing constitutional reform, moving to rank-choice voting would likely at least improve representation. It would not, however, be difficult to change the voting rules for the House of Representatives in the United States. In particular, the Constitution would not have to be amended. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there were multiple predominant systems of electing representatives. For example, it was common in the early 19th century for states to elect members to the House of Representatives using at-large voting. In this system, whichever party received a plurality of the vote at the state level would get all of that states’ representatives. This practice was banned with the Apportionment Act of 1842. However, it was weakly enforced and at-large elections persisted. In 1967, this changed when Congress passed and President Johnson signed 2 U.S.C. § 2c. Since 1967, majoritarian district elections for the House of Representatives have been required. It would only take an act of Congress to change the voting system from single majoritarian district elections to proportional representation.

[1] In some more complex proportional representation systems, voters cast ballots for both parties and candidates. I focus here on the simplest of proportional representation systems. Also, many countries such as Japan and Germany have mixed systems where citizens cast ballots both for particular representatives of a local district as well as for a party. The party votes determine how many additional at-large seats a given party will have in parliament.

Chen, Jowei and Jonathan Rodden, “The Loser’s Bonus: Political Geography and Minority Representation” (2018), working paper.

Coriale, Kenneth, Ethan Kaplan and Daniel Kolliner (2020), “Political Control Over Redistricting and the Partisan Balance in Congress”, working paper.

Duverger, Maurice (1954), Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State , John Wiley & Sons.

Funk, Patricia, and Christina Gathmann (2013), “How do electoral systems affect fiscal policy? Evidence from cantonal parliaments, 1890–2000.” Journal of the European Economic Association 11.5: 1178-1203.

Piketty, Thomas (2018), “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict.” WID. world Working Paper 7 .

Rodden, Jonathan (2019), Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide , Basic Books.

Stephanopoulos, Nicholas O., and Eric M. McGhee (2015), “Partisan gerrymandering and the efficiency gap.” U. Chi. L. Rev. 82: 831

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• From Our Desk
• Democracy Reform
• Redistricting

Proportional Representation: Reimagining American Elections to Combat Gerrymandering

By Mac Brower

November 18, 2021

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One aspect of American politics that’s been getting a lot of attention this year is redistricting and the way politicians can use redistricting to gerrymander congressional and legislative districts in their favor. One potential solution to gerrymandering, redistricting commissions, has been in the public eye with new commissions at work this year in Colorado and Michigan . But there are other, more radical ways to address gerrymandering. One such reform is switching our system of elections to a proportional system where the number of seats a party wins is proportional to its share of the vote.

Most elections in America use a plurality voting system.

In the United States, we elect most of our legislators at both the federal and state level through a plurality, winner-take-all voting system from single-member districts. In practice, this means that the one candidate who wins the most votes — not necessarily a majority — is elected. Some states, like Georgia, have runoff elections for certain positions, and in 2018 Maine became the first state to implement ranked-choice voting for federal offices . Additionally, a few states like Maryland elect legislators from multimember districts, though these states still use a plurality system, so the candidates with the most votes win (usually, this means one party just sweeps all the seats in a district). But for the most part, to win an election in the United States, you just need to receive the most votes to be elected.

This method of electing representatives has a variety of consequences. First and foremost, it means many politicians are elected without winning a majority of the vote. Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), for example, won her election in 2020 with 48% of the vote. Our system also results in a large amount of “wasted” votes . In winner-take-all elections like ours, every vote cast for a losing candidate and every vote cast for a winning candidate in excess of the number required to win is wasted because those votes don’t impact the outcome of the election. Democratic votes in very red districts, for example, are wasted. At the same time, all the Republican votes in those districts in excess of the margin needed to win are also wasted. Finally, single-member districts are susceptible to gerrymandering . When a state has to be carved up into many districts that elect just one candidate, it’s easy to manipulate district boundaries and group different partisans together to determine election outcomes in advance. 

All three of these factors combined can result in fairly unrepresentative election results. In 2012, Republicans won only 47% of the vote for the U.S. House but came out with 53% of seats. This disparity is even more apparent when you consider state-level results. In North Carolina, Democrats won 51% of the vote for the U.S. House but only 30% of seats. Likewise, Republicans won about 30% of the vote in Massachusetts but no seats in the U.S. House. Americans are consistently not getting the representation they vote for as our electoral system fails to fully account for the diversity of the electorate.

Proportional representation is an alternative voting system used in many other countries.

The U.S. is by no means alone in using plurality voting in single-member districts to elect legislators — Canada and the U.K. both elect their parliaments in this way, although plenty of their citizens wish they didn’t . But most other advanced democracies utilize another kind of electoral system to elect legislators: proportional representation.

Broadly speaking, proportional representation aims to ensure political representation in the legislature — either on the national or state level — matches the voting preferences of the electorate. The actual mechanism for how this is achieved differs depending on the specific system chosen but typically involves using multimember districts rather than single-member districts. The key difference between a proportional system and a plurality system is that the seats in each district are awarded to multiple political parties based on their percentage of the vote, rather than simply having the most-voted party win all the seats — the election is no longer winner-take-all. For example, if in a five-member district, Party A wins 40% of the vote, Party B wins 40% of the vote and Party C wins 20% of the vote, then Parties A and B would both win two seats and Party C would win one. Once the results from all districts are aggregated, the partisan breakdown of the legislature roughly corresponds to the proportion of votes each party receives from the broader electorate.

One example of a country that uses proportional representation is Germany. In the 2021 Bundestag election , the three largest parties respectively won 26%, 24% and 15% of the vote. This corresponded to 28%, 27% and 16% of seats — much more in line with how the population voted than our election results often are.

Proportional representation has several key advantages over our current electoral system.

1. it limits gerrymandering..

One of the biggest advantages of proportional representation over our system is that it effectively renders gerrymandering impossible . On a basic level, multimember districts are simply harder to gerrymander. Multimember districts are larger, meaning there are fewer district boundaries to manipulate. This makes it more difficult for mapmakers to precisely slice up clusters of voters. More importantly, gerrymandering becomes much less effective since the political minority will always win political representation that matches its share of the vote no matter how the district lines are drawn. Drawing a multimember district where Republicans outnumber Democrats doesn’t preclude Democrats from still electing some representatives from that district.

2. It better represents the preferences of voters by ensuring fewer votes are wasted.

Proportional systems also tend to better represent voters by ensuring fewer votes are wasted . In a proportional election, every vote matters since each vote goes into determining how the seats are distributed to political parties. Even if your preferred party doesn’t win the most votes in your district, your vote still helps determine what share of the seats your party does win. Your preferences still end up being represented even if you don’t form part of a majority in an area. This would mean better representation for Americans throughout the country — Republicans in Massachusetts would likely win representation they currently lack in Congress, as would Democrats living in parts of the country that skew heavily Republican. The U.S. House of Representatives would align more closely with what voters actually want.

3. It encourages the development of third parties.

Finally, proportional representation tends to make third parties more competitive due to the lack of wasted votes. Our winner-take-all system encourages voters to either vote for the Democratic or the Republican candidate since those are the candidates most likely to win — voting for a third party almost guarantees your vote will be wasted. Under a proportional system, however, voting for a third party is more impactful because a third-party candidate doesn’t need to win the most votes to be elected. In a hypothetical five-member district, winning just 20% is enough to be elected. Given that many Americans wish they could vote for a third party , this might be one of the most compelling reasons to switch to a proportional system for our elections.

Proportional representation is becoming increasingly popular.

While much of the focus on electoral reform in our country has been directed to things like redistricting commissions or bans on partisan gerrymandering, proportional representation is growing in popularity among advocates. The organization FairVote is pushing for legislation to implement a proportional system for elections to Congress — H.R. 3863, the Fair Representation Act — and there’s a growing consensus among political scientists that proportional representation is the best way to improve our system of government. Advocates also argue proportional representation would boost turnout and might even address extreme polarization .

Switching to a system of proportional representation would represent a huge change in how we elect our representatives. But as we highlighted in our Data Dive last week , Americans are highly dissatisfied with our political system and are near-unanimous in wanting significant changes. Given the desire for change and the failure of redistricting commissions to fully solve our gerrymandering problem, there may be no better time to consider more radical solutions than now. 

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The real fix for gerrymandering is proportional representation

It’s time to consider radical solutions.

by Matthew Yglesias

The furor over the Supreme Court case considering limits on gerrymandering has reminded me of a conference I attended years ago. This was a meeting mostly composed of legal scholars focused on progressive reforms to the American judicial system. Gerrymandering, which is a hot topic today, wasn’t a major focus of the conversation. But we did get one presentation from a distinguished scholar of redistricting matters who explained that redistricting is a particularly hard problem to solve because there are a number of different goals that are mostly incompatible:

• It seems like a system should offer partisan fairness such that control of a legislature is typically in line with the population’s overall preference.
• Districts should align communities of interest and correspond in some sense to real places that we can characterize, like “the South Side of Chicago,” rather than just be arbitrary zones, like “some of the suburbs of San Antonio and some of the suburbs of Austin plus a big disconnected patch of rural Texas.”
• Racial minority groups should get fair representation. A state like Georgia that’s 30 percent black shouldn’t have an all-white congressional delegation.
• There should be fair-fight districts with real electoral competition, not just everyone segregated into safe seats that protect incumbents.
• Districts should be compact and look like a nice checkerboard of squares and triangles, rather than a bunch of crazy squiggles.

Sometimes you can make this all work together, but oftentimes you can’t. Creating majority-minority districts to ensure racial representation can look a lot like “packing” Democratic voters into lopsided seats. Aiming at fair fights sounds nice but will end up violating communities of interest. Aiming for partisan fairness will necessarily involve some odd squiggles, since neighborhood-level partisanship can be very disparate.

So I asked this scholar: “What about proportional representation?”

She said that when she teaches redistricting law, she does proportional representation last because it solves all the problems and the point of the class is for the students to work through the different complexities and legal doctrines governing the American system. That seems smart as a pedagogical approach, but as an agenda for political reform, solving all the problems is a good idea.

The many flavors of proportional representation

The basic idea of proportional representation is that instead of each place having a single representative selected by either plurality or a runoff system, you aggregate a bunch of people’s votes and then assign seats to parties in proportion to their popularity.

Proportional representation can work in a bunch of different ways, but there are two broadly popular schemes:

• In a party list system, voters simply mark a ballot for a party and then seats are allocated based on the share of the votes that party got. If the Cranky Oldsters party gets 25 percent of the vote, they get 25 percent of the seats, and if that works out to 40 seats, that means the first 40 people on their list get seats.
• In an alternative vote system (endorsed by conservative magazine National Review’s editorial, Reihan Salam ), individual candidates still run for office, but instead of single-member districts, each state might be a big district with multiple members. In a state like Maryland with eight House members, voters would rank a bunch of candidates in order of preference, and then a formula would determine which eight people get the seat.

There are also innovative systems out there, like Jameson Quinn’s proposal for PLACE voting . The main downside of an AV system is that AV ballots are very complicated. A party list system, by contrast, is very simple, but some people don’t like the way it breaks the direct connection between voters and politicians. Germany and New Zealand use a system called mixed-member proportional representation that combines features of both to offer a simple ballot and personalized representation, with the main downside being that the under-the-hood details of how it works are complicated.

But while these different systems all have some pros and some cons, they all fundamentally solve the redistricting dilemma. The main way they do that is by simply making decisions about where the boundaries go much less relevant. Most states wouldn’t have any district boundaries at all. A big state like Texas or California might need to be sliced into three or four chunks, but because the outcomes are guaranteed to be proportional, the exact details of the chunking don’t matter very much.

Proportional representation solves many problems

The big upside to all flavors of proportionality — and the reason places hardly ever backslide from proportional to nonproportional systems — is that it basically solves all the map-drawing problems in one fell swoop.

Questions about representation for ethnic minority groups or communities of interest are taken care of exactly the way they should be — from the bottom up by voters and parties. If Latinos want to vote for fellow Latinos, then they will end up being represented by Latinos in proportion to their numbers. Or if Latino identity loses salience relative to other factors (ideology, geography, socioeconomic class, whatever) they won’t be.

Proportional representation also ensures that almost every district is in some sense a “fair fight.” Even if a state like Georgia has a pronounced lean toward the GOP or a state like Massachusetts has a strong lean in the other direction, the margin of victory ends up mattering a lot. And since the margin of victory matters, parties have incentives to try to communicate with, appeal to, and mobilize voters in every corner of the country. That helps boost participation and engagement, but also ensures that no incumbent can feel so “safe” in his seat that he doesn’t need to try to work hard, avoid scandal, and otherwise do his job.

Since most states wouldn’t need to be subdivided at all under PR, the “squiggly district” problem would be entirely eliminated except insofar as some states (looking at you, Maryland) are themselves squiggly. States that do need to be subdivided could be sliced in compact ways without sacrificing any other values. People who live in cities wouldn’t have their votes devalued due to some arbitrary notion of “clustering.” And nobody’s vote would be “wasted” — the views of Republicans in Los Angeles and liberals in West Virginia would count just as much as the views of anyone else.

Courts should think boldly about solutions

Until the 1962 Supreme Court case Baker v. Carr, it was commonplace for state legislature districts in the United States to contain wildly different numbers of people.

There’s no black-letter constitutional text requiring that state legislative districts be drawn with equal populations, and obviously the US Senate operates along exactly the opposite principle. So for the first 150-plus years of the republic, state legislatures apportioned themselves however they wanted to. This often meant leaving maps based on decades-old population data in place, deliberately overweighting rural areas, and other violations of democratic principles. But as the Warren Court began handing down civil rights rulings in the 1950s, pressure grew to confront states’ untrammeled boundary-drawing power.

Fifty-five years later, the ruling feels like common sense, but it was extraordinarily controversial at the time with Justice Felix Frankfurter and others arguing that for the Court to insert itself into the redistricting process violated the separation of powers. But having decided otherwise, the Court’s majority articulated a principle of “one person, one vote,” drawing on legal and political principles that could just as easily have been articulated as “all citizens’ votes should carry equal weight” — i.e., electoral systems should be proportional.

Not only does a proportionality mandate solve the problems of redistricting more elegantly, it solves the problem of judicial meddling with electoral mechanics much better. The Supreme Court fairly clearly doesn’t want to set itself up as a national district-drawing body that is perpetually being asked to decide whether a given setup counts as “gerrymandering” or natural “clustering” or whatever. Mathematical tools like the “efficiency gap” are a useful first step in quantifying partisan gerrymandering, but they still leave tons of other line-drawing goals in play. The judicial system’s experience with the effort to ban racial gerrymandering only to find itself sucked into a million debates over whether such-and-such a gerrymander is really about disenfranchising black people (which is bad) or just about screwing over Democrats (which is okay) is an unhappy precedent.

Requiring states to adopt proportional systems would be more disruptive in the short term, just as the requirement that districts be equal in population was disruptive. But the distinction between a proportional and a nonproportional system is fairly clear and doesn’t leave a ton left to argue over. It would solve the substantive problem of excessive partisan gerrymandering and the procedural problem of how to avoid excessive policing of partisan gerrymandering and solve the other dilemmas of redistricting at the same time.

Fixing everything in one fell swoop would make for a boring law school class, but as a policy outcome, it’s a pretty great idea.

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Pros and cons of proportional representation

Could a change of voting system heal the UK’s polarised politics?

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1. Pro: better reflects voting

2. con: pathway for extremists, 3. pro: ends ‘wasted votes’, 4. con: local issues suffer, 5. pro: more representative locally, 6. con: compromise coalitions.

Keir Starmer has been accused of acting like a “feudal monarchy” after the Labour leader indicated he would not put a pledge for electoral reform in the party’s next election manifesto.

Labour members overwhelmingly backed a motion at the party conference in Liverpool to replace the current first-past-the-post system with proportional representation (PR).

Can Labour win the next general election? Is tactical voting a threat to the Tories? The important changes coming to future elections in the UK

And the views of the grassroots membership appear to align with voters in the so-called “Red Wall” constituencies Labour needs to win back to have any chance of forming the next government . A survey commissioned by campaign group Make Votes Matter of 40 heartland seats in the Midlands, North of England and Wales found 47% supported adopting PR, compared to just 12% who were in favour of keeping the existing electoral system.

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“Yet the Labour leader’s office has been reluctant to back PR,” said The New Statesman . “It would make the party vulnerable to Tory attack lines about electoral pacts, stitch-ups and a ‘coalition of chaos’. Plus, for MPs who have won their seats and held them under the existing system, there is little incentive to change.”

So what are the arguments for and against PR?

“Under PR systems the number of seats in parliament reflects the number of votes cast overall in elections,” said The Independent . Advocates believe, therefore, that if a party receives 20% of the vote, it should have 20% of the seats.

The current first-past-the-post (FPTP) “majoritarian system”, however, delivers disproportionate majorities that favour larger parties, voters in rural constituencies and does not reflect the true voting preference of the general public.

Under the existing UK system, for example, in the overall popular vote the Conservatives “need a lead of 5 points to secure a Commons majority; for Labour, the lead needs to be at least 12 points”, said The Guardian . If the two parties received an equal share of the vote at the next general election, the Tories would win 23 more seats than Labour, the paper said.

A more proportional system would also give smaller parties and independent candidates a better chance of getting into Parliament and introduce different voices to our national political life.

PR seldom results in one party holding an overall majority but rather leads to governments that need to compromise and build consensus. This means that – in theory, at least – stable, centrist policies that reflect a spectrum of views often prevail. This is the case in Germany, which has a government made up of centre-right free marketeers, the centre left and Greens.

By contrast, FPTP “is increasing polarisation, weakening accountability, and perpetuating an increasingly dysfunctional two-party system”, a report by The Constitution Society has warned.

“The premise that PR can be good for fringe parties is based on a kernel of truth . In the Netherlands and elsewhere, PR helps extremist parties and radical ideas turn diffuse votes into seats in legislatures,” said the Nato Association of Canada , citing a Harvard Kennedy School of Government study that found that PR systems tend to favour extreme right-wing parties.

If the 2015 UK general election had been held under a PR system, UKIP would have been the third-largest party in Parliament, with 83 seats instead of one. Good news for its supporters but worrying for those who linked the party’s popularity with a resurgence of xenophobia and nationalism.

“It is undoubtedly true that PR allows for higher numbers of MPs from ‘non-mainstream’ parties,” said Dylan Difford on the Electoral Reform Society site.

Most European parliaments contain at least one left-wing socialist and one right-wing populist party or in the recent case of Sweden and Italy right-wing populist parties can break through and win enough votes to form a government.

A more representative form of PR would put an end to millions of votes being “wasted” at elections.

In 2019, for example, analysis by the Electoral Reform Society found that across the UK, more than 22 million votes (70.8%) were “ignored because they went to non-elected candidates or were surplus to what the elected candidate needed” to win the seat.

A change to PR would mean candidates having to appeal to a much larger section of the public rather than just targeting a tiny proportion of swing voters in marginal constituencies. This in turn could lead to a higher turnout at the polls, as voters feel more engaged with the democratic process.

A study into voting patterns in New Zealand after its switch from FPTP to PR in 1996 found that “voters who were on the extreme left were significantly more likely to participate than previously, leading to an overall increase in turnout”. PR also fostered “more positive attitudes about the efficacy of voting”.

One of the main arguments against PR during the failed AV referendum of 2011 was that it would weaken the link between constituents and their MP.

Under FPTP, MPs serve the constituency they campaign in, so are more inclined to tackle local issues and represent the specific views of their constituents at a national level. Under the PR “list” system, electoral constituencies would have to be much bigger in order to have multiple seats to fill proportionately, possibly leading to local issues being overlooked.

FPTP allows MPs to be elected with a small overall percentage of the vote. Some representatives have been elected to Parliament despite 75% of their constituency voting for other candidates.

According to the Electoral Reform Society, the concentration of the Labour vote in certain areas meant that in 2019 it took on average 50,835 votes to elect a Labour MP, whilst only 38,264 votes were needed to return a Conservative MP.

The alternative vote (AV) system, which is not fully proportional but is still likely to increase the representation of small parties, and single transferable vote (STV) , which is truly proportional, would take into account voters’ back-up choices to end up with a candidate that satisfies a majority.

Talk of a so-called “coalition of chaos” made up of Labour, the Lib Dems and SNP was a feature of the Conservatives’ 2015 election campaign and fears of something similar are driving the current Labour leadership to shy away from backing PR.

In a country like the UK, which is used to long periods of single-party rule, the idea of a never-ending series of weak and indecisive coalition governments has been the main obstacle to electoral reform over the years.

Neither the trade union reforms that Margaret Thatcher pushed through nor Tony Blair’s raft of improvements to public services could have been carried through without a strong governing majority.

Detractors also claim PR carries an inherent instability. The Italian parliament, which uses such a system, is constantly in a state of uncertainty and has been prematurely dissolved three times since 2008.

There is also the messy process of forming a coalition. In Germany last year, this process took three months. And in October 2020 Belgium ended a record-breaking 653 days without a government or prime minister when Alexander de Croo was able to form a new four-way coalition, said Euronews .

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How the 2024 election could have looked with proportional representation

Posted on the 5th July 2024

And the results are out. This election has the biggest difference ever between how we voted and the MPs that now represent us.

This was the first election ever where four parties got over 10% of the vote share. It is clear that the British public is already voting as if we have a proportional system.

But what if we had used the same electoral system they use for the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments instead? With the Additional Member System (AMS) you choose a constituency candidate and have a second vote for your preferred party to represent you regionally. You can cast both votes for the same party or vote for different parties in your constituency and regional ballots. Regional seats are then allocated to parties on a proportional basis, taking into account the constituency MPs each party won.

It is important to note from the outset that it is impossible to predict with certainty what electoral results under different voting systems would be. This projection is merely an indication of what the results of this general election – conducted under FPTP – could have looked like using a different electoral system. 

It is of course impossible to account for the other changes that would accompany a switch to an alternative electoral system, such as changes in voter behaviour, party campaigning, or the number of parties standing candidates.

Our projection shows a result that is more in line with how we voted at the 2024 general election. Based on our projection, the Labour Party is still the largest party, but more in line with their percentage of the vote.

While Labour have fewer seats, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Green Party and Reform UK have shares far closer to their share of the vote.

No government should be able to win a big majority on a minority of the vote. Westminster’s voting system is warping our politics and we’re all paying the price. Under a proportional voting system, seats more closely match votes, so we can all have more impact on what happens in Westminster.

This projection is based on a model of AMS with half constituency MPs and half regional list MPs. The regional lists are based on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland plus the regions of England. Due to the complexities of the party system, Northern Ireland has not been modelled.

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