Mixed-member proportional: Difference between revisions

* [[Germany]]

** ''[[Bundestag]]'' ([[Federation|Federal]] lower house)

* [[New Zealand]], where the system is known only as MMP (Mixed Member Proportional), not as AMS

** [[New Zealand Parliament|House of Representatives]] ([[unicameral]] [[Parliament]])

* [[United Kingdom]]

** [[London Assembly]]

** [[Scottish Parliament]]

** [[Welsh Assembly]]

It would be used for the proposed [[Regional Assemblies in England]].

AMS is also used in [[Bolivia]], [[Italy]], [[Lesotho]], [[Mexico]] and [[Venezuela]].

[[Hungary]] has a complex voting system that results in a less proportional representation than AMS but more proportional than [[Parallel voting]].

In [[1976]], the [[Hansard]] Society recommended that the Additional Member System be used for UK parliamentary elections, but instead of using closed party lists, it proposed that seats allocated by proportional , and the remainder seats of would be filled using open party lists. There was not a referendum before the [[2001]] election and the statement was not repeated.

Because a party can gain less seats by the party vote than needed to justify the won constituency seats, [[overhang seat]]s can occur. There are different ways of dealing with overhang seats. In the [[Scottish Parliament]] the number of overhang seats is taken from the number of proportional seats of the other parties, in Germany's ''[[Bundestag]]'' and the New Zealand House of Representatives the overhang seats remain.

Political parties can also abuse the system: in the 2001 Italian elections, the two main coalitions (the [[House of Freedoms]] and the [[Olive Tree]]) linked many of their constituency candidates to decoy lists (''liste civetta'') in the proportional parts, under the names ''Abolizione Scorporo'' and ''Paese Nuovo'' respectively, so that if they won constituencies then they would not reduce the number of proportional seats received by the coalitions. Between them, the two decoy lists won 360 of the 475 constituency seats, more than half of the 630 total number of seats, despite winning a combined total of less than 0.2% of the national proportional part of the vote. In the case of [[Forza Italia]] (part of the House of Freedoms), the tactic was so successful that it did not have enough candidates in the proportional part to receive as many seats as it in fact won, missing out on 12 seats.