Degressive proportionality

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Degressive proportionality" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (January 2025) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,498 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Degressive Proportionalität]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Degressive Proportionalität}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Degressive or progressive proportionality is an approach to the allocation of seats in a legislative body among administrative divisions of varying population sizes. It aims for fair representation of each division while also taking into account the number of voters in each one. Under systems using degressive proportionality, smaller divisions therefore have a higher seats-to-votes ratio. It is used in the European Parliament and the Bundesrat of Germany, among others.^{[citation needed]}

Degressive proportionality is an alternative to, for instance, each subdivision electing the same number of members, or electing a number of members strictly proportional to its population. Degressive proportionality is intermediate between those two approaches. Degressive proportionality can be achieved through various methods, and the term does not describe any one particular formula. Any system that reserves a minimum number of seats for a sub-body is to some extent degressively proportional.^{[citation needed]}