Proportional Representation

Proportional Representation (PR) starts from a completely different idea: instead of voting for an individual candidate in a small constituency, voters vote for a party, and each party is then given a share of the seats in the legislature that matches its share of the vote as closely as possible. A party fills its allotted seats using a list of candidates it has already declared before the election, in the order of that list, rather than voters choosing a single named person.

Israel is the standard example. It elects its 120-member parliament, the Knesset, entirely by PR, treating the whole country as one single constituency — any party that clears a minimum threshold of 3.25% of the national vote earns a proportional share of all 120 seats. The 2015 Knesset election shows the pattern clearly:

Notice how closely each party's seat share tracks its vote share — very different from the 1984 Lok Sabha table above — and how a party with a genuinely small vote share (Israel's Left, under 4%) still wins real seats, something FPTP would very likely deny it. Because no single party comes close to a majority of 61 seats on its own, Israeli governments are almost always multi-party coalitions.

PR itself comes in variants. One version, used in Israel and the Netherlands, treats the entire country as a single constituency. A second version, used in countries like Argentina and Portugal, divides the country into several multi-member constituencies, with parties fielding a ranked list of candidates in each. Either way, more than one representative can come out of the same constituency, and — because seats are awarded to parties rather than individuals — voters give up the idea of "my own MP for my own area" that FPTP provides.

FPTP compared with PR