Political Mechanisms
Mixed-Member Proportional Representation
Also Known As Personalized Proportional Representation
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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 Cross-Tradition Connections
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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.
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