Thank you and good afternoon in Ireland.
I hope some day I'll be seeing you on more than video; this has been very helpful.
Professor Gallagher, I've been reading a chapter from a book you wrote, Ireland: The Discreet Charm of PR-STV. I've always wondered how it is that STV can be proportional, given, as you say, that there's no proportionality that is privileged by the way the seats are organized; there's no separate set of seats to represent the imbalance that's created by voting at the constituency level. I was very taken with the table that was in this chapter and the results of the 2002 general election. The parties had remarkable consistency between the number of seats they had and the proportion of the votes they got even though there's nothing that requires that.
In the work you've done, how do you explain the consistency? The 2002 election results are in your chapter for purposes of example, but I take it that it's fairly typical in results that you get a fair coherence between the percentage of the vote for the party and the percentage of seats that are won. How do you explain that in STV?