Michigan is considering proportional representation (PR) for its state legislature. Two families of PR systems dominate the conversation: open-list proportional representation (OLPR) and mixed-member proportional (MMP). Both deliver roughly proportional outcomes. They differ in mechanics — who controls nominations, how voters express candidate preferences, what fails when the system is gamed, and how minorities and factions are represented.

This quiz is a 10-question self-assessment. Each question presents a value tradeoff that Michigan reformers will have to resolve. Your answers score on an OLPR-MMP axis. At the end you will get a score, a design recommendation, and — if you want to go deeper — a link to the academic literature review that the questions are drawn from.

One note before you start. The quiz is not asking which system is better in the abstract. It is asking which tradeoffs you are willing to accept, given Michigan’s specific geography, demographics, and institutional history. Two sophisticated people can answer differently and both be right.

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Notes on the quiz

What the quiz cannot resolve. Four design questions the evidence doesn’t give clean guidance on, regardless of your score:

1. How the Voting Rights Act Section 2 applies under multi-member districts with preference voting. No federal case law yet exists. Michigan would need statutory state-level protections layered on whichever PR system it adopts.
2. Whether Michigan’s existing minor parties (Libertarian, Working Class, Green, US Taxpayers) survive OLPR with a 5% threshold. No close comparable case exists.
3. Whether Michigan partisan attachment resembles German or Swedish partisan attachment closely enough for the Buisseret & Prato (2022) flexibility thresholds to translate.
4. What happens to the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus under either system. Both paths are mechanistically viable, but they produce different caucus dynamics.

Where the quiz scores are imperfect. The ±2 and ±1 weighting is a reasonable first pass but should not be treated as precise. A score in the −4 to +4 hybrid zone is not a signal that you should be uncertain — it’s a signal that multiple designs genuinely fit your values, and your choice among them depends on secondary considerations (simplicity, political coalition feasibility, integration with MICRC, etc.) that the quiz doesn’t weigh directly.

Where this came from. The ten questions and the design recommendations are drawn from a close reading of seven papers in the comparative electoral systems literature: Linhart, Raabe & Statsch (2019); Blumenau, Eggers, Hangartner & Hix (2017); Bergman, Shugart & Watt (2013); Buisseret & Prato (2022); Saalfeld (2005); Buisseret, Folke, Prato & Rickne (2022); and Negri (2018). The companion evidence review walks through each paper’s findings in detail and cites the sources in full.

Use. The quiz is intended for Michigan reformers, legislators, civic groups, and academics thinking about state-legislative PR design. It is deliberately narrow: it assumes Michigan is adopting some form of proportional representation and is choosing between two major families. Questions prior to that choice — whether PR is desirable at all, what problem PR solves, how reform actually gets enacted — are outside this piece’s scope.