Following our recent federal election, calls for a reform of the electoral law
become louder. Why that call? Hadn't we just changed our electoral law?
While
the United States has a House of Representatives with 435 members for a
population of 340 million, the previous
Bundestag had 736 members for 86
million.
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Instead of the initially planned 598, there were 736 MPs before the
recent election.
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A new electoral law in Germany applied in the recent federal
election capped the number of seats in the
Bundestag at 630. This
is still too high for many citizens, but it nevertheless means a savings of
125 million euros of taxpayers' money annually.
I briefly described the
German electoral law in a previous blog. The law is schizophrenic because we try to square the circle by mixing
proportional representation with a majority vote system. Let's get it
straight.
In its purest form, a majority vote elects the person
obtaining most of the votes in a constituency. The number of seats in parliament
equals the number of elected deputies. This system has the advantage that the
person elected is known and regarded as the representative for the people living
in the constituency. With this bonding, the citizen knows whom to address when
needed.
On the other hand, minority opinions and parties are ignored.
So, Churchill said of the majority vote as practiced in the UK and the USA,
where the winner takes it all, "It isn't one hundred percent democratic,"
adding, "but it works."
Proportional representation is more
democratic since it allows the presentation of smaller parties in parliament.
However, this leads to a fragmentation of votes, making it challenging to find
majorities to form stable governments. In addition, the representatives in
parliament do not feel responsible for a constituency and, therefore, remain
"invisible" to the voter.
The negative example of a pure proportional
voting system was the Weimar Republic. Due to the poor economic situation (mass
unemployment), the share of votes for parties on the extreme right and left
wings in the
Reichstag increased from election to election. This made it
increasingly difficult for the moderate center-left to collect the many small
parties under one democratic umbrella and form viable governments. Ultimately,
it was possible to govern the Republic only by
Notverordnungen (executive
orders). So eventually, the Nazis gave the collapsing Republic the death blow
with the
Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) of 1933.
This is
why the electoral law of the Federal Republic of Germany has the so-called five
percent hurdle. Only parties that receive at least 5% of the votes are
represented in the Bundestag, although this is not 100% democratic either.
In
Germany's initial electoral law, half of the MPs, i.e. 299, were elected in
constituencies according to the majority system, the other half were determined
proportionally to the percentage of votes a party obtained in the election.
Additional direct mandates gained than the percentage to which a
party was entitled gave rise to
Überhangmandate (excess seats). To
correct for the proportionality of the votes received, other parties were
compensated with
Ausgleichsmandate (leveling seats). With this
praxis, Germany ended up eventually with a bloated
Bundestag.
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Constituencies where directly elected candidates did not get their
seats.
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The fixation to 630 MPs at the recent federal election led to the
situation that some candidates elected as deputies in a constituency could
not take up their mandates.
Christian Democrats lost most of the direct mandates and were outraged
about the "undemocratic electoral law reform." While reducing the size of the
Bundestag was "necessary," it should not have been "at the expense of
democracy." However, the CDU/CSU cannot yet say how a more democratic model in
the future should look.
If we decide to retain our schizophrenic
election system, the only way to keep the number of MPs small would be to
reduce the number of constituencies. One would end up with a variable number
of deputies, but the
Bundestag would be smaller than 730 MPs.
My
question at the end is why we don't adopt the French electoral system? In
France there are constituencies with one MP each. Whoever obtains the absolute
majority of votes for his party in a constituency is elected.
If
none of the candidates gets 50% of the votes in the "premier tour" there is a
run-off election between the two best-placed candidates or even a
"triangulaire" with the best three. In this "second tour", the candidate with
the highest relative number of votes wins the constituency.
A classic example of a "triangulaire" in Germany would have been
constituency 281 Freiburg with Chantal Kopf, Klaus Schüle and Ludwig
Striet.
The French way of voting comes closest to my understanding of
democratic voting, as the candidate elected represents a constituency in
which he/she is known to the people. At the same time, such an election
procedure still reflects the balance of votes between the parties quite
well. Although the system is not 100% democratic, it would work.
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