Could someone explain Mixed Member Proportional Representation simply? I tried Wikipedia but I tend to zone out when things get too wordy.
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An example may help. New Zealand has a system like this, here’s how it works:
There are 120* seats in the House of Representatives. The country is divided into 72 districts. Each district elects a representative in the usual way; a bunch of candidates run and whoever gets the most votes wins.
In addition, everyone gets to cast a second vote for a particular party. When all the delegates are selected, the remaining 48 seats are filled by party members such that the partisan makeup of the final legislature is proportional to that vote. E.g. if Party A wins 50% of the partisan vote and 40 of the 72 districts, they will get 20 additional seats so that they end up with 60 out of 120 overall.
* currently NZ’s legislature has 123 members because of something called “overhang” which happens with MMPR systems: sometimes a party will win more districts than their proportional vote should allow for. In NZ’s case, they simply temporarily increase the size of the legislature to allow for that.
The idea is to combine the best parts of district-based representation and proportional representation. Districts are great because your representative is supposed to be beholden to your particular local needs, but it often leads to national legislatures that (by design or accident) don’t represent the political makeup of the nation as a whole, e.g. if every district has a 51% majority of Party A, then 100% of the delegates will be from that party.
Proportional representation solves this latter problem, but it means that politicians aren’t elected locally and it gives partisan elites and insiders a great deal of control over who gets those “extra” seats and in what priority.
It’s an electoral system that essentially tries to balance a First-Past-The-Post style “clear winner” outcome with a “proportionality” outcome. The ideal is to get the best parts of both systems.
Normally what happens is that voters issue TWO votes at an election – one for their local district and one for their preferred party. If a given party’s total seats are deemed to be NOT in proportion with their overall vote, they are awarded additional parliamentary members to make up the difference.
For example, Party X wins 10% of the vote but only 5% of the seats. They are then awarded additional members such that they end up with a total of 10% of the total members in parliament.
This is seen to avoid the main drawback of FPTP, where “winner takes all” even if the result is exceptionally close, while still ensuring each district has one clear winner.
It also helps in cases where a voter might strongly like their own local representative even if they don’t represent their preferred party (or vice versa). Voters can express their personal opinion with their local district vote, but still vote their preferred party with their party vote.
If I were to break it down even further, MMPR allows a country who may need a certain number of people to run a country to have those numbers without requiring the electorates to be cut down so small that they end up cutting towns and neighbourhoods apart to form electorates, which can often happen and causes problems if you end up with two Sheriffs in what ought to be a one Sheriff town and they can’t agree on anything.
As the other person said, you have some seats assigned to electorates, and then other seats assigned to a pool which get assigned to parties for them to fill with their chosen politicians. When you vote, you vote on the member you’d like to represent you, and then vote on how you’d like the split to be decided, and that makes the government.
The benefits of this are pretty nice, mainly that you can keep electorates representative of population and how those areas actually operate, meaning you can kind of keep electorates tied to actual towns irrespective of population (to an extent) without having to constantly have the bordering electorates start to encroach on the growing electorate to keep things balanced, which happens a bunch in places who don’t use MMPR like Australia.
You also get the option of creating new representative electorates by taking one from the party pool and assigning it to an electorate, again avoiding having to redo electorate boundaries in a way that isn’t reflective of the population or operation of the area, and in the case of New Zealand, where the Māori population want representation specific to their issues, you can create another layer of electorates and assign them to Māori seats, which often cover multiple general electorates and instead serve to provide parliament with Māori representation based on Māori tribal boundaries and not general population distribution.
I think the easiest way to think about it is like this: Countries with MMPR basically assign a portion of their parliament to act how a country with both a lower and upper house would act, but instead of those party seats being placed in a separate parliament, they’re instead grouped into the main parliament, or what would be the lower house in a system that had both.
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