[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Juho]

On Aug 25, 2008, at 18:05 , James Gilmour wrote:

> I do appreciate that the political culture is very different in  
> countries that have used party list PR voting systems for many
> decades.  Their electors seem perfectly happy with the whole  
> country as one district for PR, but they often have some form of
> regional allocation of candidates to seats within the national  
> envelope.

In Finland there are 14 districts. Currently each district elects its  
representatives locally using PR. There is however a reform proposal  
to count proportionality at national level (to guarantee equal  
threshold for parties at each district).

Voters vote for their local candidates. The philosophy has not that  
much been to make the representatives as local as possible (this  
seems to be a central theme in the FPTP countries) but rather to  
guarantee that the whole country will be represented in the  
parliament proportionally.

The district border lines to some extent follow some very historical  
tribal and dialect border lines that still today have some  
significance in characterizing different parts of the country. One  
possible solution that was discussed when planning the electoral  
reform was to make the districts more equal in size. This would have  
to some extent solved the basic problem of regional differences but  
people rather wanted to keep the historical districts (probably also  
some general fear of changes) and find other ways to solve the  
problems (like the current proposal of counting political  
proportionality at national level and then using that information to  
elect representatives at the district level).

Juho






	
	
		
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