STV goes the farthest in this respect; mixed-member systems less so.

In the case of California, as described by Paul and Weinberg, there is no real reason to have more than one region since the laws of California would affect everyone in California equally. Parties developed in a system of party-list PR would organize themselves naturally to represent every county and constituency on their own, and anyone not represented would either develop their own party or the parties that would operate in the system would figure out a way to provide representation. The key logic of single-jurisdiction/single-district party-list PR is that it creates an efficient market, in direct contrast with single-member district plurality elections where as much as half of those who vote, which can easily be as little as 30% of the electorate, have no real incentives to vote. SMD plurality has no penalty for wasted votes, and wasted votes are in fact considered a completely acceptable part of the system, even though it turns government and politics into nothing more than a game, an increasingly expensive one, when government and politics are incredibly important to everyone’s lives. Single-jurisdiction/single-district party list PR is set up to encourage maximum participation and disincentives any failure to provide representation and treats politics and government as the important part of life that it really is.

Districts are only means to create wasted votes and reduce representation. So to the real point, why does anyone encourage districts outside of self-developed (party-organized) districts, or the counties or municipalities that would be the source of votes anyway? Cities and counties would have their local party organization under SJ/SD party-list PR, so why attempt to set up regions that don’t exist and would inevitably be gerrymandered anyway? I just don’t get it. Really, it just seems like a bad habit coming from limited creativity and vision. If there is something that I’m missing, I’d really like to know.

“1922: Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland has used STV-PR to elects its lower house of Parliament since 1922.
An overview of the Northern Ireland STV rule is available here.”

However the link takes to a run down of the STV rules for the Irish Republc which are separate jurisdictions.

Is it safe to assume the same rules are used in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland?

I should also add an entry for Belgium.

The effect has been to force a collaborative approach to governance, since the National Council in turn elects the executive Federal Council. No one party has had a majority in the legislative since 1919.

I do think that STV has a decent chance in the near term for local elections, especially where (as in California) they’re non-partisan, no-primary elections. I’m not sure that a party-list proposal for statewide elections would get much farther than STV.

I’m intrigued by the example of Norway (described briefly elsewhere on this site). It’s nominally a closed list, but non-party (or minor-party) entities can put forward their own list by petition. Open, but in a different and perhaps more useful way.

At any rate, the mission of this site is primarily education, with a focus first on PR per se, and only secondarily on the mechanism my which it’s achieved.

There is no reason to think that the results would be any different if STV were to be put to the test in any US state with initiative and referendum. In states without i&R it would be a long shot-duopoly pols have a natural resistance to putting their jobs at risk.

Open list PR (e.g. Finland) is a simpler and far more widely used system that should be an easier sell-especially combined with easy ballot access for new parties.
It’s a natural proposal in the 49 of 50 states with bicameral legislatures. Since the SCOTUS “one man, one vote” decisions of the early ’60′s these states have been electing mirror-image houses in elections that normally result in interchangeable D or R party bosses running each house. Electing one house by open list PR with a single statewide district (or a handful of districts) would allow for a wider number of ideological and other interests to represented in government. To understand what I’m getting at think of Illinois, where a bipartisan corrupt “combine” (see John Kass, Chicago Tribune) with links to organized crime has been running state government as more or less a private hunting preserve for decades.

P.S. STV again: it takes too much ‘splainin’ to address charges like these:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/bcvotes2009/stv.html
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STV’s complicated voting system means your single vote will be fractionalized and distributed so that you may never know how it was counted. You can mark your preferences but you have no control over what part of your single vote gets distributed to any of your preferences.

STV supporters use the analogy of your vote being like a dollar and you decide to spend it on several candidates, but that is misleading because STV does not allow you to determine whether your first preference gets 50 cents, 10 cents or nothing at all. How much is spent on each candidate depends entirely on how the vote count unfolds.

Those who vote for sure losers, like the Work Less Party, get to have their vote transferred at full value to their second choice, but those who cast a serious vote have their second preference count for a small fraction of a vote. What’s fair about giving sure losers a second vote and serious voters a small fraction?
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I added a placeholder for PRSA on the online-resources page. Would you care to contribute a brief description for that entry? I couldn’t find your founding date on the PRSA site, among other things.

WRT this page, I’d also welcome a contribution from someone (you?) who is more knowledgeable on the subject than I.

This site is very much a work in progress. Corrections, criticisms and additions are most welcome.