Bangladesh’s political theater is once again consumed by the familiar quarrel over how the next election should be run.
This time, the flashpoint is the proportional representation (PR) system,a debate less about mechanics of democracy than about who stands to gain, or lose, when ballots are finally cast.
Jamaat-e-Islami, joined by a clutch of smaller Islamist parties, has revived its push for PR in a bicameral parliamentary structure. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), suspicious as ever, sees this less as reform and more as a convenient excuse to stall the national elections due in February.
The irony, of course, is that amid all this noise, nobody has put forward a clear blueprint of what sort of PR model is actually being proposed. The devil, as political scientists remind us, is always in the details, details conspicuously absent here.
At a recent rally, Jamaat leadership cast PR as a miracle cure for Bangladesh’s ills: a system that could sweep away black money, muscle power, and authoritarianism, ushering in an inclusive government.
“Those who oppose it are against the people,” Jamaat declared on its official website, wrapping the demand in populist absolutism. The rhetoric is seductive, but it reads less like political science and more like a manifesto of wishful thinking.
History tells us otherwise. The architects of PR did not design it as an antidote to dictatorship; they designed it to broaden representation, to amplify diverse voices, to make parliaments look more like the societies they claim to represent.
In the words of political scientist André Blais, writing in the International Political Science Review in 1991, “the major virtue of proportional representation is a broad and fair representation.” Campbell Sharman, another scholar, put it more bluntly: PR is built on the premise that “diversity should be accurately reflected in representative assemblies.”
That is the true foundation of proportional representation: not a cure for political rot, but a safeguard against it by ensuring pluralism, by limiting the distortions of gerrymandered maps, by making sure even small voices are not drowned out.
To mistake it for a silver bullet against authoritarianism is to misunderstand both the tool and the disease.
Grasping the nuances
Beyond its central purpose–maximizing representation–proportional representation (PR) serves no third function. It does, of course, generate side effects.
And in fragile democracies like Bangladesh, those side effects often tilt toward the dangerous.
Political scientists have catalogued them for decades: unstable coalition governments, disproportionate power handed to small extremist factions, a diffusion of accountability, overly complex ballots, and the emergence of kingmakers who manipulate the system from behind the curtain.
In other words, PR is no magic wand.
In fact, PR is a system suited for mature democracies that can withstand its complications. Even the United States, whose Founding Father Thomas Jefferson once floated a modified version of PR, rejected it. The reasons are clear: the risks outweigh the rewards.
So why would Bangladesh, with its brittle democratic institutions, embrace those risks? What exactly would we gain? The truth is stark: nothing. Worse, the system could deepen the very dysfunction it claims to solve.
Bangladesh’s central governance problem is not under-representation but over-concentration of power. Parliaments are routinely bent into instruments of the ruling party, regardless of how elections are structured.
No PR system will prevent a majority party from consolidating control. History makes this painfully clear: even the carefully balanced American system could not prevent Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses.
The problem is not electoral math; it is the absence of strong, independent centers of power capable of checking executive excess.
If a party wins ten seats with less than 3 percent of the vote, that is the democratic right PR was built to protect. To disqualify such representation would itself be a kind of authoritarianism, undercutting the very pluralism PR promises.
Which raises the question: why adopt PR at all if we intend to hollow out its principles before applying them? What democratic dividend, exactly, do we expect to reap?
Identifying the rot
Proponents of PR claim it will weaken the grip of political parties. In reality, it risks doing the opposite–turning them into even more undemocratic machines.
If today nominations are traded like commodities, tomorrow entire parliamentary seats will be up for sale. Parties won’t be tamed by PR; they will be emboldened, and more dangerous.
Nor will PR cure Bangladesh of its chronic polling-center wars. That myth collapses under the weight of political reality. Both the Awami League and the BNP operate less as ideological organizations than as patronage networks, built on economic incentives.
Leaders and activists are sustained by access to resources rather than vision. In such a structure, capturing polling centers is not an aberration but the lifeblood of politics. To imagine that PR could dilute this culture is delusion.
The system would also chip away at what little accountability remains. Under the current model, local representatives must at least stand before their constituents every five years.
A PR system blurs that link, placing the party–rather than the people–at the center of representation. It is a step further away from democracy, not closer.
PR, moreover, is a complex system, one that thrives in societies with high literacy and robust institutions.
A recent study in the Journal of Global Initiatives found Ghana’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system relatively successful precisely because it was straightforward to administer in a largely illiterate electorate. Bangladesh is no different.
For a country still struggling with low political literacy, FPTP has proven broadly comprehensible and widely accepted.
Replacing it with PR would demand vast new resources–expanded parliamentary chambers, new bureaucratic structures, training programs for officials and voters alike–without delivering the democratic dividends its advocates promise.
And even more crucially, PR does nothing to address Bangladesh’s core problem: the suffocating centralization of power. The hypothesis that a bicameral system built on PR will decentralize governance is simply wrong.
On the contrary, it would hand parties another lever of control, allowing them to tighten their stranglehold over politics. Far from liberating democracy, PR risks feeding the very demons it claims to exorcise.
Where lies the solution?
Bangladesh is not a country that can afford extravagance. To saddle it with two bloated parliaments and 500 members would be like keeping elephants in a house that can barely afford rice.
If we are serious about structural reform, then let us at least speak of reform with purpose.
The American model remains the gold standard of bicameral balance. Its genius lies not simply in having two chambers, but in the staggering of elections: no single party can sweep all seats at once, insulating governance from the volatility of populist waves.
If Bangladesh must pursue a bicameral path, it should be with that kind of discipline, not with half measures that only entrench our ruling parties further.
A leaner lower house–100 to 150 members–could be elected through a proportional or PR-STV system, with the prime minister chosen alongside them. Legislative authority would remain firmly in this chamber.
The upper house, meanwhile, would be rooted in geography, not patronage: two members elected from each district, chosen in staggered cycles every two or two-and-a-half years.
That cadence–mirroring the U.S. Senate–would prevent the monopoly of one election dictating the fate of the entire legislature.
Such a system could restore balance between treasury and opposition benches, especially if MPs were granted true discretionary power, including the right to cross the floor.
But institutional engineering alone will not suffice. Democracy in Bangladesh has been smothered not just by executive overreach, but by the hollowing out of every counterweight.
To repair that, we must build independent, elected bodies–an election commission that does not answer to the prime minister’s office, and even a constitutional media commission empowered to protect press freedom from the suffocating grip of the state.
If reform is to mean anything, it must do more than rearrange the furniture of parliament. It must redistribute power, hard and soft alike, so that no ruling party can strangle the republic at will.
Anything less would be cosmetic and Bangladesh can no longer afford cosmetics.
Note. This article was originally published in the BanglaOutlook on September 23, 2025 can be found at https://en.banglaoutlook.org/opinion/235788
Abu Taib Ahmed 
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