This a very common term and often used with regard to electoral and voting reform. It does, however incorporate a multitude of mechanism, most of them very complicated and all of them leading to coalition government.
More people get the party they voted for (most PR systems systematically exclude independents) but the proportionality ends there.
Parties campaign as they do now and make promises as they do now, however in the election and as the bar to being elected is much lower, many parties find themselves with elected representatives, but none of them with over 50% of the vote. What then happens is, what only can be described as, horse trading, where two or more parties compromise on their promises to seek a deal between them that can then manufacture a majority overall. Usually, party promises before the election are dumped so that MPs can get posh sounding jobs.
The last coalition government was between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats went into the election on a grand promise to remove University tuition fees and got 57 MPs, and a huge student vote. In their coalition agreement they dumped this promise like a hot coal and voted to increase tuition fees to their highest ever level to get some posh sounding job titles. Us Brits don’t trust coalitions.
