How Nepal's Electoral System Works: FPTP + PR Mixed-Member Explained (With Worked Example)

Nepal's lower house of the federal parliament, the House of Representatives (Pratinidhi Sabha), has 275 members. Article 84 of the Constitution of Nepal 2015 divides these seats between two separate counting methods that run side by side, which is why it is called a 'parallel' or mixed-member majoritarian system rather than a fully proportional one.

Of the 275 seats, 165 (about 60%) are filled by the first-past-the-post (FPTP) method, and the remaining 110 (about 40%) are filled by closed-list proportional representation (PR). The two tiers do not compensate for each other: a party's PR seats are calculated independently of how many constituency seats it already won. Members serve a five-year term unless the House is dissolved earlier.

The design is a deliberate compromise. FPTP preserves a direct, geographic link between voters and a single local representative, while the PR tier ensures that smaller parties and historically under-represented social groups still gain seats roughly in line with their national vote share.

On election day each voter casts two separate votes on two ballots. The first ballot is for the FPTP contest: voters choose one candidate to represent their local electoral constituency. Nepal is divided into 165 such single-member constituencies, drawn on the basis of geography and population, and the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins that seat outright, even without an absolute majority.

The second ballot is for proportional representation. Here the whole country is treated as one single nationwide constituency, and voters choose a political party rather than an individual. Each party submits a 'closed list' of candidates in advance, meaning the party fixes the ranking and the order in which its candidates take seats; voters cannot rearrange the list. The share of the national party vote determines how many of the 110 PR seats each qualifying party receives.

Because the two ballots are counted separately, a voter can split their support, for example backing a strong local candidate from one party on the FPTP ballot while voting for a different party on the PR ballot.

Not every party that contests the PR ballot wins seats. To qualify for any of the 110 PR seats, a party must win at least 3% of the total valid votes cast nationally in the proportional contest. This legal threshold is intended to keep the parliament from fragmenting into a large number of very small parties. Parties that fall below 3% receive no PR seats, and their votes effectively do not translate into representation in this tier.

Among the qualifying parties, seats are distributed using the Sainte-Laguë (Webster) method, a highest-quotient formula favoured for treating large and small parties relatively even-handedly. Each qualifying party's total PR vote is repeatedly divided by a series of odd-number divisors: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and so on. After each division a table of quotients is produced, and the 110 highest quotients across all parties each win one seat.

Practically, the Election Commission allocates seats one at a time. The single highest quotient in the whole table wins the first seat; that party's divisor then advances (so its vote is next divided by 3, then 5, and so on), and the process repeats until all 110 seats are assigned. A party's running divisor can be expressed as V divided by (2s + 1), where V is its total votes and s is the number of seats it has already been allocated.

To see how the Sainte-Laguë method works, take a simplified example with three qualifying parties competing for just five PR seats. Suppose Party A wins 100,000 votes, Party B wins 60,000, and Party C wins 30,000. (All three are assumed to have cleared the 3% threshold.) Each party's votes are divided by 1, 3, 5, 7, and so on, and the five largest quotients each win one seat.

The quotient table looks like this. Divided by 1: A = 100,000, B = 60,000, C = 30,000. Divided by 3: A = 33,333, B = 20,000, C = 10,000. Divided by 5: A = 20,000, B = 12,000, C = 6,000. Listing every quotient from largest to smallest gives: 100,000 (A), 60,000 (B), 33,333 (A), 30,000 (C), 20,000 (A, tied with B's 20,000).

Reading off the five highest values in order, the seats go to: seat 1 = A (100,000), seat 2 = B (60,000), seat 3 = A (33,333), seat 4 = C (30,000), seat 5 = A (20,000). The final tally is Party A 3 seats, Party B 1 seat, Party C 1 seat. Each party then fills its won seats from the top of its pre-submitted closed list, working downward while honouring the inclusivity quotas described below. The same procedure scales up to Nepal's real contest of 110 seats among all parties that pass the threshold.

The PR tier is the main engine of social inclusion in Nepal's parliament. The Constitution and the House of Representatives Members Election Act, 2017 require each party's closed PR list to reflect the country's diversity by drawing candidates from specified clusters in proportion to their share of the population, so that historically marginalised communities are represented.

The recognised clusters and their indicative proportions on the lists are Khas Arya, Adivasi Janajati (indigenous nationalities), Madhesi, Dalit, Tharu and Muslim, with additional attention to persons with disabilities and citizens from backward (economically disadvantaged) regions. Because seats are taken from the top of a closed list, the ordering of names is what ultimately determines which cluster members enter the House.

Gender inclusion is reinforced by a strong constitutional rule: women must make up at least one-third of the total members each party sends to the federal parliament, counting FPTP and PR seats together. Since relatively few women typically win FPTP constituency races, parties usually have to ensure a large share of their PR list seats go to women to meet this one-third floor.

Nepal adopted this mixed model as a central plank of the post-2006 peace process and the writing of the 2015 Constitution, following a decade-long conflict and demands from Madhesi, Janajati, Dalit and other movements for guaranteed representation. A purely FPTP parliament had historically produced a legislature dominated by a few groups, while a purely PR system would have weakened local accountability.

By combining the two, the framers tried to balance stability and accountability (from FPTP) with proportionality and inclusion (from PR). The same parallel logic is mirrored at other levels of Nepal's federal structure, including the provincial assemblies, which also blend FPTP and PR seats.

The system has critics. Some argue the PR closed lists concentrate power in party leaderships, and that the 60/40 split still under-represents the proportionality the PR tier was meant to deliver. Nonetheless, the framework has markedly increased the presence of women and marginalised communities in parliament compared with earlier eras.