Giving a parliament more total seats can leave one state with fewer seats, not more
When a country's legislative seats are divided among states or regions by population, using one common rounding method, increasing the total number of seats available, with every state's population held exactly fixed, can paradoxically cause a specific state's own seat count to go down rather than up. Why would adding more seats to hand out ever reduce any single state's share?
Reveal the answer
It happens because standard rounding methods, like the once-used Hamilton method, assign leftover seats one at a time to whichever states have the largest fractional remainders, and the ranking of those remainders can shuffle unpredictably as the total number of seats changes. The US Census Bureau's chief clerk discovered this in 1880 while testing seat counts for the House of Representatives, finding Alabama's own allocation would shrink if the House grew from 299 to 300 seats, which gave the flaw its name: the Alabama paradox.