Proportional representation in variable-size legislatures (Q2266655)

The purpose of this paper is to formulate a particular method of proportional representation in variable-size legislatures which was first analyzed by Black (1958). Each candidate is a member of a political party, but voters, in addition to voting for candidates, indicate their favored party in a plurality election. The total votes for the parties are used to adjust the legislature's size by adding defeated candidates from parties that are underrepresented in the legislatures base. Five rules (rules of catch-up, fair share, monotonicity I, monotonicity II and adjustment) are proposed by the authors. It is shown that these five rules work fairly well in the two-party case. The general multiparty situation is much more complex, however. So it remains an open question to see what augmentation procedure is best suited for such a general case.