💰 This Is How Spain's Electoral System Works
(20/12/2015) Spain has a closed-list proportional representation electoral system that favours sucking up to party bosses instead of listening to voters.
(Originally published on December 20, 2015)
36.5 million Spaniards are called upon to cast a ballot in Sunday's 2015 general election, but the system to elect MPs to the Spanish Congress—and in turn to produce the next government—does not work in the same way as it does in the United Kingdom or the United States.
In the UK, there are 650 constituencies in which each voter enters a polling station and puts one cross next to one name. Candidates can be independent or belong to a party and the one who receives the most crosses in that constituency on election night goes to Westminster. Job done.
That's not how it works in Spain.
Technically, the system used in Britain and the United States is known as "first past the post". In Spain, the system is "party list proportional representation". In theory, proportional representation is supposed to award a proportional number of seats to each party based on the total percentage of the vote each receives, but that bit does not work in Spain, which ends up with results as skewered as the UK's and with two-party dominance, although for different reasons.
But let's start at the beginning…
One of said 36.5 million Spanish voters rocks up at his local polling station—one of 22,951 that opened at 9 a.m. on Sunday—and is firmly set on casting a ballot instead of going to the beach and abstaining.
The first thing he sees after finding his assigned polling table is a huge stack of ballot papers, for all of the parties with candidates in that constituency, and here we come across the first two major differences.
First of all, there is not one single ballot paper with a list of names to choose from. There are stacks of ballot papers for each party that already come with lists of 36 candidates, ranked from one to thirty-six with the party leader for each party in each constituency at the top.
(You'll understand which people from the list make it into parliament in a minute, keep reading…)
Each Spanish voter expresses his will not with a cross next to a name but by choosing the right piece of paper to stuff into an envelope.
Spanish voters have no decision-making power over who makes it on to each party's list of candidates. This is what is known as a "closed list" proportional representation system. The candidates are chosen by the party boss at each level (national, regional, provincial, local, etc.).
This system means people wanting to become politicians owe their loyalty to the party boss and not to voters, which means voters have no way of getting rid of individual politicians if they do not find them agreeable, but let's stay focused on the mechanics.
The actual electoral lists for the four main parties in the province of Madrid this year, for example, look like this:
As you can see, the Spanish capital is where all of the national party leaders go, along with the most of the rest of the senior party figures in each case. In the PP's case, it's the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Agriculture Minister, the Finance Minister and Mr. Rajoy's top economics guru, Álvaro Nadal.
So for starters this is not one man, one vote, one candidate. It is one man, or woman, and one vote, but to a closed party list of candidates.
Several MPs in each constituency…
The second part of the problem is constituencies, the regions corresponding to MPs. Spain does not have one MP per constituency, it has several.
Congressional constituencies in Spain are the 50 Spanish provinces plus the two Spanish North African Cities of Ceuta and Melilla, giving us a total of 350 MPs spread over 52 electoral areas (there are 59 for the Senate, but we'll leave that for another day).
Each constituency gets a different number of MPs, supposedly linked to the size of its population.
The tiny North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla both get one MP. The northern province of Soria gets two. Then there are 41 provinces spread around the country that each get between three and eight MPs each.
Cádiz, on the southern tip of Andalusia, gets nine; Murcia gets 10, Málaga 11, Alicante and Seville 12, Valencia 15 and then, at the top of the tree, Barcelona gets 31 and Madrid gets 36.
So everybody chooses their preferred list of party candidates and, when polling closes at 8 p.m., the counting begins. At that point there are many ballot papers in favour of many parties that need to be shared out between the available number of seats in each area.
The solution is maths: tables and divisions, under what political scientists know as the d'Hondt method.
First, a party needs at least 3% of the vote to stay in the game, then the construction of the table begins, with the number of votes for each party being divided up between the number of seats to share out.
Let us imagine a simplified example in which the four main parties are fighting for five seats:
The five seats go to the five largest numbers in the division table, like this:
In our simplified example, the PP would get three seats, the PSOE one, Podemos one and Ciudadanos zero, even though there are five seats and the party came fourth.
The first seat in each province goes to the party with the most votes. The second seat goes to the party with the next highest number of votes according to the big division table, not necessarily the next party on the list.
So if the leading party has a very large majority compared to the second party, it may take the first two or more seats outright.
This process happens in every constituency (the 50 provinces and two North African cities) and the totals are added up. This is why, for similar percentages of the vote and votes, the number of seats each party ends up with is skewed.
Can you see how this tilts the system towards the first and second parties? In practice, it means third-, fourth- and fifth-place parties find it very difficult to win any seats, outside of the biggest constituencies. This is also why parties stuff provincial electoral lists (ballot papers) with senior party leaders from Madrid. They don't want them to lose out. The top of a big party's list in each province is Spain's equivalent of "safe seats".
This also explains why regional nationalist parties in Catalonia or The Basque Country can take many more seats than national minority parties like UPyD or United Left (IU) that win similar total numbers of votes or percentages of the vote. The regional parties concentrate their total votes in just a few provinces—putting them in leading positions for seats—while the national minority parties spread their total over the whole country—putting them in third, fourth or fifth places, with very few or no seats when the count and division has finished.
In the 2008 general election, for example, The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), Esquerra (ERC) in Catalonia and UPyD, a nationwide party, all won 1.2% of the vote and around 300,000 votes. PNV took six seats and ERC took three, but UPyD ended up with just one.
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