Two important factors to be considered when contemplating electoral districting alternatives are: (1) district magnitude and (2) the alignment of electoral district boundaries with existing administrative and/or political boundaries. District magnitude refers to the number of legislative seats assigned to a district3. A district can be either a single-member district or a multimember district, where the number of seats may range from two to one hundred or more. With regard to alignment, administrative divisions within a country can be used as electoral districts, or electoral districts can be specially drawn with little regard for administrative divisions, usually to meet equal population criteria.
These two factors form a matrix4. The first dimension, district magnitude, focuses on the issue of single-member versus multimember districts. The second dimension focuses on alignment or nonalignment of electoral districts with administrative or political boundaries.
Most single-member districts fall into the nonalignment category. The districts tend to be artificial pieces of geography that have no meaning outside the electoral context. Some single-member districts, however, particularly those in proportional representation countries, are small, highly distinctive communities. For example, a few small cantons in Switzerland form single-member districts.
Countries with multimember districts often use existing administrative divisions as electoral districts. Each district is assigned the appropriate number of legislative seats for its population, with individual districts having as few as two representatives and most districts having far more than two representatives. These countries usually employ some form of proportional representation. The more artificially constructed multimember districts are found in countries such as Ireland and Malta, which use districts that are uniformly small in magnitude because elections are conducted using the single transferable vote.
