An electoral system that elects part of a legislature from single-member districts and the remainder from party lists, with the list seats allocated to correct any gap between a party's district-seat share and its share of the vote, so the combined result is proportional even though half the seats are won by plurality. West Germany adopted the system for the Bundestag from its first postwar election in 1949, refining it into its fully compensatory form by the 1953 federal election, and it remains the system's defining real-world example; New Zealand adopted the same design for its Parliament after a 1993 referendum, replacing first past the post. Britannica's own survey of proportional systems classes it, alongside the party-list and single-transferable-vote methods, as one of the working methods that achieve proportionality despite differing in mechanics.
Facts
Origin YearWest Germany's first Bundestag election in 1949 already combined a district tier and a list tier, but the fully compensatory mechanism that makes the overall result proportional, list seats correcting for district results, was in place by the 1953 federal election, which the source cited here credits as the system's settled starting point. Founding ContextMixed member proportional systems were designed to combine the local accountability of single member constituency voting with the overall fairness of proportional representation, using a second, compensatory tier of list seats to correct the disproportionality a plurality tier alone would otherwise produce. West Germany's postwar electoral system is the one most often credited with developing the fully compensatory version of this design. 2 Connections
Associated With
Source Germany: The Original Mixed Member Proportional System (ACE Project)
Influenced
Why this is disputed. Whether mixed-member proportional representation's compensatory list tier produces the same multiparty pull as full proportional representation, or whether the plurality-won district tier still exerts some of the two-party pressure Duverger's law predicts, is disputed in the comparative electoral systems literature; Germany itself has sustained more than two significant parties under the system, which both sides of the debate cite for different reasons.
Practiced By
Source Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (Wikipedia)
WikipediaOther names section
referred to as 'personalized proportional representation' (German: personalisiertes Verhaltniswahlrecht) or PPR.
In Group: Proportional Representation Systems, Lead paragraph
in a way that produces proportional representation overall
Practiced By: New Zealand, Lead paragraph
The specific system of New Zealand for electing its parliament is known as MMP
View the Source 2. Germany: The Original Mixed Member Proportional System (ACE Project)
ACE Electoral Knowledge NetworkGermany: The Original Mixed Member Proportional System page, second paragraph
Its essence is the way in which it combines a personal vote in single-member districts with the principle of proportional representation.
- Associated With: Germany
View the Source Systems of Proportionality (Britannica)
Encyclopaedia BritannicaPart Of: Proportional RepresentationView the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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