Where this was said
The Gender Correction Mechanism: Good Idea, Poor Design
At 1:52:00 · chapter starts 1:38:20
Before the 2022 election, Malta introduced a gender-correction mechanism: if women don't make up at least 40% of elected MPs, additional seats are allocated to the highest-ranking female candidates who narrowly missed election. In practice this pushed parliament from 65 to 79 seats. David walks through the formula with specific examples — Sandra Gauci is cited as someone whose entry via the mechanism illustrates both its good intentions and its complications. Jon's critique is structural: adding seats inflates the parliament and increases costs without addressing the underlying incentives that produce gender imbalance in the first place. The mechanism also interacts unpredictably with the existing bonus-seat constitutional provision, producing parliament sizes that are neither fixed nor clearly proportional.
The gender-correction mechanism introduced before the 2022 election pushed Malta's parliament from 65 to 79 members, the largest expansion since the bonus-seat constitutional amendment.
