A Multidimensional System of Proportional Representation

In a representative deliberative democracy, a subset of the population—a committee—is selected to enter into deliberations as well as to make decisions on its behalf. In order to make a system of proportional representation fair to individual voters, the deliberations and decisions of the committee should be as close to deliberations and decisions in the ideal direct democracy where all are able to participate. The Chamberlin-Courant system claims to achieve this with its committee selection rule and voting weight distribution among committee members. After offering a novel streamlined presentation of the Chamberlin-Courant system, I argue that it in fact does not guarantee fairness to the individual voter because it does not take sufficient account of the fact that the satisfactoriness of a representative for an individual may vary per issue. I then propose an alternative—the multidimensional system—that is able to do exactly this. I then connect formal political theory with statistics on the use of voting guides to further motivate the proposed system and show that it is feasible to implement.