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In practice this usually involves ensuring that political parties in parliament or legislative assemblies receive a number of seats (approximately) proportional to the percentage of vote they received. This is known as party-list proportional representation. Another kind of electoral system that strives to achieve proportional representation but which does not rely on the existence of political parties is the single transferable vote (STV). Some electoral systems, such as the single non-transferable vote and cumulative voting are sometimes categorized as "semi-proportional".
Electoral systems that do not result in proportional representation are known as majoritarian system s. These include first-past-the-post (plurality), runoff voting (majority), the alternative vote and the bloc vote. Here, parties can receive seat numbers that bear no relationship to the national percentages they received in parliament. This is called disproportionality, and can be measured with the Gallagher Index (or Least squares), which takes the square root of half the sum of the squares of the difference between percent of vote and percent of seats for each party.
The district or constituency magnitude of a system (i.e. the number of seats in a constituency) plays a vital role in determining how proportional an electoral system can be. When using proportional systems, the greater the number of seats in a district or constituency, the more proportional it can be. Any system with single-member districts is by necessity majoritarian at the district or constituency level. However, district or constituency borders may be gerrymandered to create "majority-minority" districts or constituencies where a group of voters in the minority system-wide form the majority in a particular district or constituency, thus allowing a simulation of proportionality system-wide.
However, multiple-member districts do not ensure that an electoral system will be proportional. The bloc vote can result in "super-majoritarian" results in which, in addition to the normal disproportionality of single-member majoritarian systems, geographical variations that could create majority-minority districts become subsumed into the larger districts.
Proportional representation is unfamiliar to most citizens of the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in and CanadaCanada historically the Dominion of Canada is the second-largest, and northernmost, country in the world. It is a decentralized federation of 10 provinces and 3 territories, governed as a constitutional monarchy, and formed in 1867 through an act of Confe, but it is actually a much more common system of voting than first-past-the-post. In general, first-past-the-post is only used in former British colonies, but a form of proportional representation known as the mixed member system is now being used in the United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a state in Western Europe, usually known simply as the United Kingdom the UK Britain or less accurately as Great Britain . The UK was formed by a series of Acts of Union which united the formerly to elect the members of the Scottish ParliamentThe Scottish Parliament Parlamaid na h-Alba in Gaelic, Scots Pairlament in Scots) is the national legislature of Scotland. The original Scottish Parliament (or Estates of Scotland was abolished by the Act of Union 1707 along with the English Parliament, t and the Welsh National Assembly. All of the members of the European Parliament, or MEPs, including those elected from constituencies in Britain, are elected by proportional representation. Proportional representation is also used in many European countries.
Proportional representation does have some history in the United States. Many cities, including New York, once used it for their city councils as a way to break up the Democratic Party monopolies on elective office. In Cincinnati, Ohio, proportional representation was adopted in 1925 to get rid of a Republican party machine (the Republicans successfully overturned proportional representation in 1957).
Some electoral systems incorporate additional features to ensure absolutely accurate or more comprehensive representation, based on gender or minority status (like ethnicity). Note that features such as this are not strictly part of proportional representation; depending on what kind of PR is used, people tend to be already represented proportionally according to these standards without such additional rules.
See for a list of perceived advantages of proportional representation.
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