Proportional Representation - History

History

The British schoolmaster Thomas Wright Hill is credited as inventor of the single transferable vote, the use of which he described in 1821 for application in elections at his school. The method, which guarantees proportional representation, was introduced in 1840 by his son Rowland Hill into the public election for the Adelaide City Council. Unlike several later systems, this did not allow for party-list proportional representation.

Single Transferable Vote was first used in Denmark in 1857, making STV the oldest PR system, but the system used there never really spread. STV was re-invented (apparently independently) in the UK, but the British parliament rejected it.

A party-list proportional representation system was first devised and described in 1878 by Victor D'Hondt of Belgium. The procedure, known as the D'Hondt method, is still widely used. Victor Considérant, a utopian socialist, devised a similar system in an 1892 book. Some Swiss cantons (beginning with Ticino in 1890) preceded Belgium which was the first to adopt list-PR in 1900 for its national parliament. Many European countries adopted similar systems during or after World War I.

STV was used in Tasmania in 1907. In the last Irish elections to the UK Parliament in 1919, STV was used in the University of Dublin constituency; two Independent Unionists were elected. STV has been in use since Irish independence. A mainly centrist party, Fianna Fáil, typically receives 30%-50% of the vote while opposition parties, traditionally the centre-right Fine Gael and the centre-left Labour Party, are comparatively weak. This has led to a series of coalition governments; there has not been a single-party government since 1989.

PR is used by more nations than the single winner system, and it dominates Europe, including Germany, most of northern and eastern Europe, and for European Parliament elections. France adopted PR at the end of World War II, discarding it in 1958. In 1986 it was used for parliament elections.

While First-past-the-post voting is commonly found in countries based on the British parliamentary system, and in Westminster elections in the United Kingdom, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly use a form of PR known as the mixed member system, after New Zealand adopted it in 1993. Five Canadian provinces—British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick— are debating whether to abolish FPTP.

PR has some history in the United States. Many cities, including New York City, once used it to break up the Democratic Party city councils monopolies on elective office. Cincinnati, Ohio, adopted PR in 1925 to get rid of a Republican Party party, but the Republicans returned the city to FPTP in 1957. From 1870 to 1980, Illinois used a semi-proportional cumulative voting system to elect its State House of Representatives. Each district across the state elected both Republicans and Democrats year-after-year. Cambridge, Massachusetts and Peoria, Illinois continue to use PR. San Francisco had city-wide elections where people would cast votes for five or six candidates simultaneously, delivering some of the benefits of proportional representation.

In his essay, Overcoming Practical Difficulties in Creating a World Parliamentary Assembly, Joseph E. Schwartzberg proposes the use of proportional representation in the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly in order to prevent, for instance, lower castes of Indians from being excluded.