Adding members when switching to PR was identified in Canada as the way to go, years before New Zealand did it.
Back in 1979 the Task Force on Canada Unity reported: [...] The simple fact is that our elections produce a distorted image of the country, making provinces appear more unanimous in their support of one federal party or another than they really are. Quebec, for instance, has for years given an overwhelming proportion of its Commons seats to Liberals: in the 1974 federal election, that party won 81 per cent of the seats though it got only 54 per cent of the popular vote. In the same election the Progressive Conservatives gained the second highest popular support while, with less total support across the province, the Social Credit Party won four times as many seats. In the elections of 1972 and 1974 two Alberta voters out of five favoured other parties but every elected member was a Progressive Conservative. Nor are these examples exceptional. Under our current electoral system, which gives the leading party in popular votes a disproportionate share of parliamentary seats in a province, the regional concentration in the representation of political parties is sharply accentuated. This makes it more difficult for a party’s representation in the House of Commons to be broadly representative of all the major regions. In a country as diverse as Canada, this sort of situation leads to a sense of alienation and exclusion from power. Westerners in particular increasingly resent a disproportionate number of Quebec members in a Liberal caucus which has very few of their own. If there were more Quebec members in the Progressive Conservative caucus representing more accurately the popular vote in that province, that caucus would be in a better position to reflect and understand the concerns of Quebecers. To correct the existing situation with its corrosive effect on Canadian unity, we propose a major change in the electoral system. We would continue the current simple-majority single-member constituency system because of the direct links it establishes between the voter and his MP, but would add to it a degree of proportional representation. We would increase the overall number of Commons seats by about 60 and these additional seats would be awarded to candidates from ranked lists announced by the parties before the election, seats being awarded to parties on the basis of percentages of the popular vote. We have opted for these additional seats being assigned to those on party lists announced before an election rather than to candidates who have run and placed second in individual constituencies in order to avoid any connotation that these additional members are second-class representatives and to encourage parties to use this means to attract candidates who might otherwise be difficult to entice into politics. We have examined in some detail various ways in which this could be done, although we would prefer to leave the final choice in this matter to Parliament in consultation with experts. One method would base the allocation of the 60 seats on the basis of the vote in each province won by a party, the additional seats being awarded to those parties which otherwise would be proportionately under-represented. Another method would be to allocate the 60 seats on the percentage of the country-wide vote received by each party and apply what is known as the d’Hondt formula for allocating seats provincially among parties. The procedure for allocating seats in the second method is more complex and difficult for electors to understand, but reduces the likelihood of minority governments resulting. Canadians have traditionally expressed a fear that a system of proportional representation would produce frequent minority governments and hence weak and unstable cabinets. An analysis of how our proposal might have worked in each federal election since 1945 suggests that the combined electoral system we are proposing, with about 280 single-member constituencies plus 60 additional seats to make representation more proportionate, would not only have produced a more broadly based representation within each party in the Commons but would not have significantly increased the incidence of minority governments over that period. [...] (https://primarydocuments.ca/task-force-on-canadian-unity-a-future-together/) There have been incidences of false majorities since 1945 but there have also been minority governments. My analysis of federal elections tells me that PR would have given us minority governments instead of majority governments elected under FPTP, in a few cases: 1949, 1953, 1968, 1974, 1988, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2011 and 2015. The others were actual majority governments elected with support of majority of votes (1958 and 1984) or minority governments elected with only minority of the vote (all the others). Those ten instances were cases where a party was elected to government in our history who only had support of a minority of the voters. Obviously the leading party would have had to get co-operation of one or more other parties to stay in power, just as minority governments do in most of the other cases. Lester Pearson's minority governments of the 1960s are generally considered the most effective and progressive of any governments in our history. So although it is simpler to have a majority government and democratic to have majority government elected by a majority of voters, we cannot always count on any one party taking votes of majority of voters. In most cases a minority government elected by a minority of voters is the most democratic result we can hope for. The minority government to stay in power would have to have support of a majority of members, and those members in a PR system would reflect the votes cast by a majority of voters.
======================================================
Comentarios