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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