Editing Politics of Papua New Guinea (section)

== Legislative branch ==
{{main|National Parliament of Papua New Guinea}}
Papua New Guinea has a unicameral [[National Parliament of Papua New Guinea|National Parliament]], previously known as the House of Assembly. It has 111 seats, with 89 elected from single-member "Open" electorates and 22 from province-level "Provincial" electorates. Members are elected by popular vote to serve five-year terms. The [[2022 Papua New Guinean general election|most recent]] election was held in June to July of 2022.

[[Member of Parliament|Members of Parliament]] are elected from the [[Provinces of Papua New Guinea|nineteen provinces]] and the [[National Capital District (Papua New Guinea)|National Capital District]]. After independence in 1975, members were elected by the [[first past the post]] system, with winners frequently gaining less than 15% of the vote. Electoral reforms in 2001 introduced the Limited Preferential Vote system (LPV), a modified version of [[Instant-runoff voting|alternative vote]], where voters number their first three choices among the candidates. The first general election to use LPV was held in 2007.

Parliament introduced reforms in June 1995 to change the provincial government system, with provincial members of Parliament becoming provincial governors, while retaining their national seats in Parliament.  However, if a provincial member accepts a position as a cabinet minister, the role of governor falls to one of the Open members of Parliament from the province.

As of 1 February 2019, Papua New Guinea was one of only three countries in the world out of 235 that had no women in its legislative branch or parliament.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://archive.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm|title = Women in Parliaments: World Classification}}</ref> There have only been seven women elected to parliament ever, one of the lowest rates of legislative representation in the world. See ''main article [[Women in the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea]] ''