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This article shows that for a single-vote electoral system for a representative body to treat all voters and all parties equally, it must produce results essentially identical to list proportional representation (PR). Democratic theory has often been agnostic concerning representative institutions. Different institutions have been compared in terms of behavioral outcomes rather than axiomatic properties. Building on van der Hout (Annual meeting of the Public Choice Society, San Diego, 2002) result, we show that for an electoral system to completely respect the principle of liberal political equality and popular sovereignty, its results must be equivalent to those of list PR.

This article provides a justification of proportional representation (PR) in strictly liberal terms. Previous justifications of proportional representation have tended to be based either on its intuitive fairness to political parties, or on its being fair to social groups. The arguments of critics of PR, we argue, likewise rely on fairness to group identities. In contrast, our result shows that proportionality is logically implied by liberal equality, that is, by the requirement that all individual voters be treated equally. Thus we provide a justification for PR in terms of the theory of voting, similar to May's theorem for majority rule.

Abstract
This paper discusses the characteristic properties of List PR systems and FPTP systems, as given in Hout 2005 and Hout et al. 2006. While many of the properties we consider are common to both systems, it turns out (see Hout 2005) that the British system distinguishes itself by satisfying the district cancellation property, while the Dutch system distinguishes itself by satisfying consistency and anonymity. For scoring rules, topsonlyness is equivalent to being party fragmentation-proof (see Hout 2005; Hout et al. 2006). One might present this as an argument in favour of requiring topsonlyness. However, we will also give counter-arguments against insisting upon the property of being party fragmentation-proof.