دموکراسی

Proportional representation

Also known as “PR”; proportional representation is the general name for a class of voting systems that attempt to make the percentage of offices awarded to candidates reflect as closely as possible the percentage of votes that they received in the election.

The most straightforward version of PR is simply to award a party the same percentage of seats in parliament as it gets votes at the election. So, if a party won 40% of the vote it would receive 40% of the seats. However, there are clear problems with such a system: Should parties that receive only 0.001 % of the vote also be represented? What happens if the voting percentages do not translate evenly into seats? How do you award a party 19.5 seats if it got 19.5% of the vote? More sophisticated PR systems attempt to get around these problems.