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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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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