1925
1925 Chile -- PR adopted because unlike previous Cumulative Voting, list system introduced incentives for candidates of the same party to work together, and by seeking their own benefit, the candidates benefited the party. Claro Solar said that a PR system à la d’Hondt would permit the most “exact representation … of all the opinions dividing the electoral body strongly enough to be taken into account and contribute to the progression of the State”. DM ranged from 2 to 18.
open-list PR at district level -- Each list might contain as many candidates as there were seats to fill. The system used cédula particular, there being no ballot containing all the candidates, so that each candidate, party, or electoral pact prepared his, her, or its own ballots. if no candidate marked, then vote taken as vote for the list. Votes for candidates of each party were totalled and divided by 1, 2, 3, etc. to get number of seats for each party in district.
(previously DM varied from 1 to 13, mostly 2 or 3. Voting was by Cumulative Voting. The Chilean CVS worked as follows: each voter had as many votes as there were seats to be filled in the district. Voter could give all the votes to a single candidate or distribute them differently. (Article 77, Law 2.883). Candidates with the most individual votes were elected --in a 3-seat district, the three with the largest number of votes were elected.)
PR In use until 1973 military coup. (see 2015)
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(see Gamboa and Morales, "Deciding on an Electoral System", online Cambridge Univ. Press)
This article has info on why open-list PR with large DM can still have corruption:
"Vote Buying and the Proportional System
Promoters of the reform argued that opting to adopt proportional systems would raise more obstacles to corruption. Now, as the literature linking electoral systems and corruption recognizes, the personalized vote helps to generate clientelistic links that are sometimes corrupt. But it is also true that proportional systems can stimulate corruption. For instance, it has been argued that open-list systems and high district magnitude (DM) (Geddes and Ribeiro 1992) foster corruption owing to the low public visibility of the elected candidates. Furthermore, in high-DM districts, candidates tend to form small knots of voters who, in some cases, respond to featherbedding or exchange of favors for votes (Kunikova and Rose-Ackerman 2005; Persson et al. 2003; Cox and Thies 2000)."
explains why open-list PR is good for party cohesion but also may produce intra-party competition p. 56
gives deep info on why Chile went from CV to PR, an unusual transformation in world history.
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