Many countries that use a form of proportional representation where the national proportion of representation is ensured to be proportional to the national level of support (as opposed to doing so on a regional level) have a cutoff where parties that don’t reach a certain level of support (usually 2.5 − 10% of the vote) don’t receive representation in the governing body, at least not through non-regional means.
This helps filter out extremist parties and single-issue parties, and instead encourages parties that are able to build a broad base of support. (Though, it is maybe a little weird to have a hard cutoff. I remember my brother once warning me against any mechanism that involves a hard cutoff, since it leads to weird incentives near the border.)
This reminds me of the reason why I like approval voting and quadratic voting / funding so much: they encourage building broad coalitions, and penalize those who focus too narrowly on one niche or alienate too many people.
I feel like maybe linear proportional represtation has too much room for parties that define themselves in opposition to a ideologies that exist for perfectly good and valid reasons (though this is also a symptom of most PR countries choosing their head of government via methods roughly isomorphic to FPTP).
I’m curious what results we would see if representation in the governing body were instead proportional to something like n*sqrt(n) or n^2 instead of directly linearly proportional to n. Would we see more consensus-building? Would we see fewer, but more widely-appreciated parties? Certainly such a system could get rid of the hard cutoff required for representation; a party that doesn’t build a somewhat wide base will automatically have a hard time receiving any representation under such a system.
Many countries that use a form of proportional representation where the national proportion of representation is ensured to be proportional to the national level of support (as opposed to doing so on a regional level) have a cutoff where parties that don’t reach a certain level of support (usually 2.5 − 10% of the vote) don’t receive representation in the governing body, at least not through non-regional means.
This helps filter out extremist parties and single-issue parties, and instead encourages parties that are able to build a broad base of support. (Though, it is maybe a little weird to have a hard cutoff. I remember my brother once warning me against any mechanism that involves a hard cutoff, since it leads to weird incentives near the border.)
This reminds me of the reason why I like approval voting and quadratic voting / funding so much: they encourage building broad coalitions, and penalize those who focus too narrowly on one niche or alienate too many people.
I feel like maybe linear proportional represtation has too much room for parties that define themselves in opposition to a ideologies that exist for perfectly good and valid reasons (though this is also a symptom of most PR countries choosing their head of government via methods roughly isomorphic to FPTP).
I’m curious what results we would see if representation in the governing body were instead proportional to something like n*sqrt(n) or n^2 instead of directly linearly proportional to n. Would we see more consensus-building? Would we see fewer, but more widely-appreciated parties? Certainly such a system could get rid of the hard cutoff required for representation; a party that doesn’t build a somewhat wide base will automatically have a hard time receiving any representation under such a system.