Denmark got PR prior to April 1920 Folketing election. that is what Wiki says.
... all seats now elected by proportional representation from a mix of multi-member constituencies and a nationwide district for top-up
Official Danish government website
describes Denmark's electoral system:
PR members:
nine MMDs electing 133 constituency members, from 10 to 21 in each
Bornholm MMD electing two members
40 members are top-up as per three electoral provinces, by party shares but the members are named to specific MMDs.
combined constituency members and top-up gave each MMD 14 to 28 members (in 2011), except Bornholm which gets guaranteed two members (and seldom more than that).
so party-list in MMD and party-list top-up nation-wide but allocated per electoral province (I am a bit fuzzy on this)
four members not elected through MMP:
two members from Faroe Islands and two from Greenland
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to get top-up seats, a party must pass a threshold:
The three thresholds are: 1. winning a seat directly in any of the ten multi-member constituencies; 2. obtaining in two of the three electoral provinces a number of votes corresponding – at least – to the provincial votes/seat ratio (using in the calculation of these ratios the number of seats in the multi-member constituencies in the electoral provinces in question, excluding the provinces‘ compensatory seats); or 3. 2 per cent of the valid, national vote. (this seems the most important of the three -- any party that does not have 2 percent has not usually in recent times passed any other threshold. Parties are nation-wide and do not only get local or regional support anymore.)
(In Canada, regional parties are common - Quebec-only or Prairies-only parties are significant.)
For interest sake
I quote the official description of the electoral system
"Taagepera and Shugart argue that an electoral system of this kind should have at least 25 per cent of its total number of seats as compensatory seats (1989: 131). However, Denmark is only just below this level: 40 out of 175 corresponds to 23 per cent." (I don't know who Taagepera and Shugart are.)
In Canada. 25 percent top-up of 338 (our existing HofC) would be 85 members.
But such would necessitate re-drawing almost all our districts.
Adopting Denmark's system of MMDs would necessitate re-drawing almost all our districts anyway.
if 338 members are continued as district MPs, then 25 percent top-up would give us total number of 450 MPs, due to 112 top-up members being added.
Districts would not have to be re-drawn unless we adopt MMDs.
With about 80 percent of votes being used effectively in a MMD, instead of as much as two-thirds of the votes not being used effectively, the vote structure of a MMD system would vary totally from our existing FPTP, although every party that now gets seats would (likely) get some representation under MMD. (although of course voters may vote differently under a fair system than they do now under FPTP - some who don't vote now may even get out and vote!)
Voters may be accepting of a moderately-wide range of voter-to-member ratio district to district as long as most of the votes count.
so the re-drawing of districts may not have to be so rigorous as is done in our pretend-fair FPTP system where each district is mostly the same size but the percentage of the vote that elects the winner varies from 34 percent or less to 74 percent or more.
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2023 Fair Vote Canada conducted a webinair on Danish PR
here's the link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yNXgvuO9ko
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other remarks on Denmark's democracy
For the MMP fans out there, you can have multi-member districts with MMP.
Denmark comes to mind.
Denmark got PR prior to April 1920 Folketing election. that is what Wiki says. ... all seats in Danish Folketing (parliament) elected by proportional representation from a mix of multi-member constituencies and a nationwide district for top-up the-parliamentary-system-of-denmark_2011.ashx (thedanishparliament.dk) describes Denmark's electoral system: ten MMDs electing 135 constituency members, from 10 to 21 members in each. 40 members are top-up as per three electoral provinces, by party shares but the members are named to specific MMDs. combined constituency members and top-up gave each MMD 14 to 28 members (in 2011), except Bornholm which gets guaranteed two members (and seldom more than that). so party-list in MMD and party-list top-up nation-wide but allocated per electoral province (I am a bit fuzzy on this) To get top-up seats, a party must pass a threshold as described above.
And as someone once said "...Partisan dis-proportionality is larger than provincial dis-proportionality."
if we were to get PR, the number of effective votes votes actually used to elect someone would go from about half or less to about 80 percent or more (whether in STV or MMP), so the comparison between old FPTP results and New PR results would be night and day.
in Switzerland, the PR allows such fairness that there is great disparities in ratio of voter to member from canton to canton and still no complaints.
Here in Canada we pay lots of attention to drawing districts so they are generally (within a broad range) of equal size. Then we see anywhere from 24 percent to 74 percent of the votes cast used to actually elect the member.
In Switzerland ratio ranges from (just two examples)
Aargau 400,000 voters 16 members for national council 2 for council of states
Appenzol Innerhoden
12,000 voters. 1 member for national council 1 for council of states
But voting system is so fair that people don't worry about a little imbalance district to district.
Canada has real imbalance in how many voters each member represents (the number that elected him or her) but that is hidden in the pretend fairness of generally equal-sized districts:
Although districts are of generally equal size (perhaps range of 1 to 1.5), voter turn-out and vote splitting and plurality to win rule means wildly different amount of votes are used to elect the (one) member.
range of 1 to 5.5 happened in the 2021 federal election.
smallest numbers (excepting massive districts with small populations such as Territories)
Charlottetown (PEI) 9000 votes elected the member
Bonavista (NS) 14,000 votes elected the member
largest numbers
Orleans ON 39,000 votes elected the member
Banff AB 44,000 votes elected the member
Edmonton Wetaskiwin 48,000 votes elected the member.
But yet we (most of us) accept the imbalance because of pretend fairness of equal-sized districts and pretend fairness of the rule that the candidate with most votes gets the (one) seat -- no matter how many votes they get or what percentage of the votes in the district they get.
It is time to lose the fiction.
(more on the 2021 election in my blog:
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in Canada, no overall threshold is possible as votes do not cross provincial borders.
But as seats are (mostly) allocated in fair proportion to provincial populations, with the use of fair voting, the effective electoral threshold in each district would be same or less than total votes/total seats.
Also, fair voting would mean that in each district, the effective electoral threshold would be no greater than provincial votes/provincial seats, unless some arbitrary electoral threshold is put into effect at the provincial level or some other lower level.
Thus under fair voting, district electoral threshold ≤ total votes/total seats.
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