Apportionment (Election law)

Apportionment is the process by which seats in a legislative body are distributed among constituencies in a Redistribution operation, or among parties in a party-list proportional election; the two takes are mathematically equivalent. This page presents the general principles and issues related to apportionment. The apportionment by country page describes the specific practices used around the world. The mathematics of apportionment page describes mathematical formulations and properties of apportionment rules. The simplest and most universal principle is that elections should give each vote an equal weight. This is both intuitive and stated in laws such as the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (the Equal Protection Clause). One example of deliberate malapportionment is seen in bicameral legislatures: where the lower house represents constituencies in proportion to their population, the upper house represents the constituencies as such, giving them an equal number of seats despite their population variance. This is modeled after the Connecticut Compromise, which formed the basis of the United States Senate; for that reason it is particularly common in states where the regions enjoy significant political autonomy from the central government, such as federations and regionalized unitary states.