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==Advocacy==
Proportional representation is unfamiliar to mostmany citizens of the United States. There are many organizations who campaign for Proportional Representation but they often use the term loosly and use it to refer to systems. Such campaigns have use advocacy for the poorly defined term "proportional system" in order to gain support. The dominant system in former British colonies was [[Single Member Plurality|single member district plurality (SMDP)]], but [[Mixed-member proportional|mixed -member systemproportional representation (MMP)]] and [[Single Transferabletransferable vote|single transferable vote Vote(STV)]] replaced it in a number of such places.
Proportional representation does have some history in the United States. Many cities, including New York, once used it for their city councils as a way to break up the Democratic Party monopolies on elective office. In Cincinnati, Ohio, proportional representation was adopted in 1925 to get rid of a Republican party machine (the Republicans successfully overturned proportional representation in 1957).
Some electoral systems incorporate additional features to ensure ''absolutely''more accurateexplicitly or more comprehensiveproportional representation, based on gender or minority status (like ethnicity). Note that features such as this are not strictly partrequired offor a system to be called "proportional representation;". depending onMany whatproportional kindrepresentation advocates argue that, ofgiven PRtheir ispreferred usedsystem, peoplevoters tendwill toalready be alreadyjustly represented proportionallywithout accordingdemographic torules these(and standardsusually withoutin sucha additionaldemographically rulesproportional manner).
See [[two-party system#Arguments for and against|Two-Party System: Arguments For and Against]] for a list of perceived advantages of proportional representation.
==Non-Partisan Definitions==
===The backstory===
Thiele, a danishDanish statistician, and Phragmen, a mathematician have been debating these two philosophies in Sweden. Thiele originally proposed [[Sequential Proportional Approval Voting]] in 1900 and it was adopted in Sweden in 1909 before Sweden switched to [[Party List]] voting afterwards. Phragmen believed there was flaws in Thiele’s method, and came up with his own sequential method to correct these flaws, and that started [https://rangevoting.org/NonlinQuality.html#debate a debate about what was the ideal metric of proportionality]. Thiele also came up with the approval ballot version of [[harmonic voting]], however during that time the harmonic method was too computationally exhaustive to be used in a governmental election. Both his [[sequential proportional approval voting]] and his approval ballot version of the harmonic method were lost to history until about a century later when they were independently rediscovered.
===Comparison===
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