The last time I looked, many decades ago, I swear that the German Bundestag was populated 50% by individually elected members, and the other 50% on a proportional basis, generally limited to parties with at least 5% of the national vote.
However, according to Wikipedia the current Bundestag includes an additional 111 “overhang and compensation seats”, which as far as I can tell is the political equivalent of injury time in football.
My questions:
Is this a relatively recent addition, or just something I never knew about?
Why is this even needed in the first place?
Do any other countries have something similar? Is this the newest Eurotrend?
It’s so that parties are proportionally represented in the legislature according to the actual preferences of voters, independent of who particular candidates might be in their districts.
New Zealand also has it, I believe. It looks like a good system to me.
It recognizes that in a representative democracy, we give power to groups of people not individuals. And those groups exercise their influence as parties. That way no voter is faced with a dilemma of preferring a particular candidate for X reason, but preferring a different party for Y reason. It helps smooth out anomalies.
It’s been too long since I’ve studied this stuff to answer your other two questions. As to why it’s “needed”, the idea is to allow voters to vote for a specific candidate to represent their specific district and to ensure proportional representation.
The calculations can get kind of complex, but the basic idea is this:
Say a land (state) has 10 electoral districts. Each district elects one representative under a first-past-the-post system. Under the German dual track system, that land also gets a certain number of party list seats - let’s say 5.
Each voter votes once for the candidate they want to represent their district, and then once for the party list they favor. The five seats are distributed among the parties according to their share of the party list vote.
But, that means the total representation of each party from that land may not match their vote totals. Party A may get 60% of the total vote, but due to the vagaries of districting and first-past-the-post voting and the popularity of individual candidates, it might wind up with only 7 of the 15 total seats from that land. Under the German system, Party A would get additional “overhang and compensatory seats” so that it winds up with 60% of the total number of seats from that land. But you can’t just give them 2 more seats (9 of 15 = 60%), because now there are 17 seats from that land, and 9 of 17 /= 60%.
Plus, Germany doesn’t have a two party system. You’ve got to simultaneously compensate multiple parties so that each party’s total representation in the Bundestag roughly matches their share of the vote. So every election, you’ve got a variable number of “overhang and compensation seats”.
It’s a complex system. In theory, though, the result is that German voters get a specific representative from their district who is accountable to them (and can provide constituency services) and the representation of the various parties in the Bundestag is roughly equal to their share of the vote total. So, in theory, the best of both the Westminster first-past-the-post single member constituency system and the proportional representation system. In theory.
They proposed such a system here in Ontario a couple of decades ago. It always rubbed me the wrong way, though.
This just seems like a half-assed way to get proportional representation. It’s based on the common perception that first past the post votes produce the “wrong” results, so we must somehow fix that. This system does it by penalizing the parties that win “more than they should have” in the fixed ridings.
When this was proposed, they tried to market it as “You get more choice! You can vote for party X with one vote, and Party Y with the other!”, except, if Party X “wins too many seats”, your Party Y vote actually ends up counting against Party X in the proportional vote.
I can see there being times when I would want Party X to be the government, but with a contingent of Party Y members in opposition, but if my second vote downgrades my first vote, I might not get the result I want, so I’d likely end up just voting for Party X with both votes.
In my opinion, the results of the two votes should be entirely unconnected. If you get 30% of the proportional vote, you get 30% of the proportional seats, no matter how many of the other seats you get. This actually has some benefits, since people like party leaders and potential cabinet members can be elected by a nation-wide vote, and thus not be beholden to one riding’s group of voters, while still giving the individual ridings a member who is beholden to them, rather than the party itself.
But, if you really want a proportional system, just do that, not this half-assed stuff.
One problem with this process is that each election cycle the rounding process to get proportional representation pushes up the number of seats - they’re up to 735 now, compared to 622 in 2009. They’re well aware of that problem, but are at a bit of an impasse because the easiest fix would be cutting down the number of constituent districts, and some parties don’t want to do that.
As for whether it makes sense, I don’t know. One good example of where it mattered was in the 2019 Thuringia state election, where the Minister President, Bodo Ramelow, is very popular, but other members of his party (The Left) less so. The result was that his party got 31% of the party vote (thus putting him in as PM again, though it was a close call), while the individual members of his party got < 26% in direct mandate voting.
Hard to say if it all makes sense, but it’s entertaining to watch.
A question for those who have gotten their heads around this system in various locations - one of the key tenets of representative democracy is transparency of process. If the system is overly complex there is a diminishing understanding of how it works, leading to loss in confidence and trust in the result [cue picture of White House rioter to show how low the bar of distrust can be set]. The other consequence is it creates more avenues to game the system, which we see here [Australia] with preference swaps between minor parties allowing some with very low direct votes to eventually claw a seat in parliament.
Do you see either of those things taking place or being a significant factor in electoral outcomes?
As a German, I may answer this. No, the only concern that’s always held up against this system is the steadily increasing seats in the Bundestag. With the new one, we’re at about 730 seats, and I think I’ve read somewhere that we have the second biggest parliament in the world. And that’s the crux: until the early 80s, when always only three factions were in the Bundestag, this system worked well. But now we have six factions, each always winning some direct votes, so it has become more complicated and led to the expansion of the Bundestag. Everybody agrees that it’s a problem to be tackled, but no party is really interested, because they would all minimize their influence by allowing to reduce their respective amount of Bundestag seats.
That’s only true if you assume the proportional votes are what the voters “really” want. As I explained, there might be good reasons to vote for two different parties, which means at least some voters don’t “really want” that exact proportion.
But this system negates that voting plan, by attributing motives to the voters that they may not actually have.
If you want a proportional system in which seats are assigned in exact accordance with the proportion of votes each party gets, just make it a purely proportional system. If a proportional system is what you want, what benefit is there to this system? It just complicates the issue.
Which is what they had in the Weimar Republic, and what they were trying to balance out in designing the Bundesrepublik.
One factor not mentioned is the 5% minimum threshold to get any party list seats, which is some brake on fragmentary minority interests complicating the results and possibly creating instability.
AFAIK, the distinctive thing about the German system is that the proportional element acts in addition to the FPTP constituency results, which can weight the system towards those who already benefit disproportionately from the FPTP results. This may (bearing in mind the Weimar experience) be a feature rather than a bug, as favouring the established and nationwide (rather than minority/insurgent) parties.
Where we in the UK have something similar (Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, Greater London Assembly) a fixed number of additional members are allocated to make the overall result (including the FPTP members) more (but not precisely) proportional. So we don’t have “overhang” numbers, but there is some mitigation of the inherent disproportionality in FPTP.
You’re not describing a problem here. The votes are in the voters’ hands. The voters don’t get to choose a proportion; they get to state their preference. That’s what is fair.
There’s nothing “impure” about the result here. There’s less gaming in this system than there would be if all a voter were to get was a chance to specify a party.
The only improvement here I can think of is to add ranked choice and transferable votes.