From what I know if you get 16% of the vote you get 16% of the seats, but how does the party choose which person gets to be in parliament? Sorry wrong sub probably I don’t know where to ask
15 comments
Yes, 16% gives 16%. Depending on the country you might also be allowed to rank/vote for a specific candidate on the parties list. Which will follow the order of peoples ranking or who has the most candidate votes on the list on determining which candidates then actually get a seat.
Depends on the area.
In Spain, there are candidates lists, closed lists, you just grab the list (there’s a bajillion quantity in the voting building). When results are done, each lists gest a certaing quantity of seat and those are asigned in other to the people inside the list that got that result,
Here in Spain, there are 350 seats in the lower chamber (Congress) which are apportioned per province, as the province is the electoral circumscription: each province gets a minimum of 2 representatives, and the rest are distributed proportionally to population.
My province, Coruña, has got 8 representatives. With the electoral results, the 8 seats are distributed among the political parties using the D’Hondt method, which avoids having to round up or round down.
In the elections, we vote for a closed list of candidates, which is to say we pick one ballot with the name of the party we prefer, which contains the list of candidates in order. So, if the party you voted for gets three of the seats, then the top three names of that list become reps.
How does one end on a party’s list, and on its higher section? Basically, backstabbing, conspiring, and bootlicking within the party.
Germany has closed lists on federal parliament elections: the party defines the order of candidates on the party list.
Cyprus has open lists in parliamentary elections: the voter can influence the order of the party list they are voting for by boosting specific candidates inside that list. The party has the option to select one candidate to be the list leader, and that candidate gets the first spot regardless of the preference votes Most but not all parties use this option.
Depends on the country probably.
At least in the Netherlands a party makes a numbered lists of candidates. The party leader is at spot number 1, then you have number 2, number 3, number 4, all the way down the list. How many candidates a party has depends on the type of elections (there’s generally more seats up for grabs in national elections than local elections, so lists for national elections are longer) and on the party itself. The largest parties will usually have the largest number of candidates.
How the order on the list is decided depends on the party. Usually people who are active in the party get put into the top spots likely to actually be elected, and the rest of the list is often filled up with people from local politics and the occasional well known person way at the bottom who’s just there to attract some extra voters.
For election results they divide the total number of votes cast in an election (say for example, 8 million) by the number of seats to be divided (150 for parliamentary elections). So 8m/150=53,333 votes will equal one seat.
Let’s say party A has 4 million votes, party B has 2.5 million votes, and party C has 1.5 million votes.
4m/53,333=75
2.5m/53,333=46.88
1.5m/53,333=28.13
Party A will get 75 seats, with people on spots 1-75 on the list getting seats in parliament.
Party B will get 46 seats, with people on spots 1-46 getting seats in parliament.
Party C will get 28 seats, with people on spots 1-28 getting seats in parliament.
That’s 149 seats in total, and there’s then some calculations as to who gets the remaining seats based on the total number of remaining votes. In this case party B has the most “left over” votes so they’ll get the remaining seat which will go to the person who was number 47 on the list.
Of course this is just a simplified example, since in actual elections there’s usually at least two dozen of not more parties vying for seats (for national elections anyway, for local elections usually still at least a dozen) so you’ll have a lot more leftover seats as well as parties who got votes but no seats. And there’s also preferential votes where people lower down the list can still get a seat if they got a certain % of individual votes.
Edit: also here you vote for a candidate, not a party. For example I might vote for A. Smith who is number 32 on Party A’s list. And all the votes for candidates on a party’s list get added together to get the total number of votes for that party.
In Turkey, basically if a province will have a total of let’s say 10 MPs, each party also proposes 10 MPs in an ordered list. If they manage to get 1 seat for that province, only the first candidate of that party list gets elected.
You can’t really give exact proportional seats in this case because let’s say some party get 16%, and if the province has 10 MPs, that party would get 1.6 seats which is impossible and cannot be rounded up without messing with other parties. So, the D’Hondt system is used which is basically a simple algorithm which is proportional enough to work out.
Depends on the country, Germany has two lists: one where you vote only for a party, and it picks its representatives, and one for people directly; if the latter votes cause an imbalance compared to the results of the first, additional seats are added to the house (so technically, the Bundestag doesn’t have a set number of reps)
For the Polish Sejm, the nation-wide results are only important when it comes to the 5%/8% threshold; each district then grants seats depending on how many votes a party got, and then which of their candidates got best results. It more or less evens out, but outliers happen (2015 was horrid because 1/6 of votes went to the bin)
Scotland 🏴
We use a ridiculously complex hybrid system for Holyrood in order to have both (a) specific MSPs for constituencies, and (b) a PR-like overall outcome.
Politically, it was designed to prevent any one party gaining an overall majority, though this happened anyway in 2011 in a landslide victory for the SNP.
As one of the handful of people in Scotland who understands it I can try to explain it if anyone cares 🤣
We use the D’Hondt method with **open** lists in Finland, so it’s straightforward… Voters vote directly for individual candidates, not for party lists. Once a party is allocated seats (depending on the party’s total votes), those seats then go to the party’s most-voted individual candidates. It doesn’t matter what order the candidates had on the list.
Depend on country and electoral law ( in Italy our politicians LOVE changing that ).
Usually there is threshold that you must reach ( 4% here ).
After that is either: the party nominates BEFORE the election the list of persons that will be elected OR the people chooses ( very few persons use this option)
There are different systems and hybrids thereoff. The easiest would be closed lists that are decided by the parties. They propose a voting list and the people of the list are elected in the order of the list up to the last one that gets a seat in proportion to the votes. The last ones to be elected according to the list are the so called fighting seats. These lists are sometimes voted for in some sort of party primary, but not always. Sometimes the caucus can vote on individual ranks, sometimes only on the prefabricated list in total. In order to avoid a too splintered parliament many voting systems have a minimum threshold of 3-5% of the total votes to be included into the distribution of seats. Since total proportionality is impossible, because there are no fractions of a representative, there are complicated mathematical distribution methods, like the D‘Hondt system. Sometimes voters can vote individuals that are further down on the list further up. Sometimes there are different lists for the constituency and the national level to attribute all the fractions of a seat that are leftover after the constituency seats have been distributed. There are attempts to personalize the system.
If a seat becomes vacant, it’s easy however. Since the whole list has been elected, you don’t need any recall elections, but the seat goes to the first person that has been left out on the original list.
In Finland the candidates of one party are ranked by the amount of votes they got and are then given a comparison number based on the total votes the party got from all their candidates.
The comparison number is total number of votes divided by the ranking of the candidates and who get elected are based on the comparison number, so the one with most votes gets all the votse, the second gets 1/2, third gets 1/3 and so on.
There are almost as many PR (and near PR) voting systems as there are parliaments.
In Scotland we actually have two different ones: for the Scottish Parliament we use an Additional Member (AM) system (sometimes called Mixed Member Proportional or MMP) where you vote for someone in a constituency and separate party list for a wider region. The party list otder is set by each party and used to top up seats so the final result is more nearly proportional. It is similar to the system used in Germany (but with a slightly different counting system for the lists), and New Zealand amongst others.
For local council elections, Scotland uses Single Transferable Vote (STV) which is a system where you use preference voting in larger constituencies and the order of votes determines who gets elected. Easy to vote but the counting is quite complicated. It has the advantage that parties do not choose orders of candidates but the voters do, and you do not even have to rank all candidates from the same party, which means it is easier for independent candidates to be elected. The system is used for all elections in Ireland, and for the Northern Ireland Assembly and Northern Irish local councils. It is also used in Malta
In Spain you vote for a party list (or list of a group of parties collaborating), for your Province. Easy to vote, easy to count but makes it impossible to mix choices from parties.
Of course in UK general elections, a non proportional system is used, where you vote for one candidate in your constituency.
Personally I support STV as my preferred method as it reduces the power of parties (a bit) but really any PR system beats the highly distorted system used for Westminster elections where it often hands full power and a large majority to one party with under 40% of the national vote and occasionally even hands a majority to the party that came second in the national popular vote. PR nearly always means parties have to work together which IMO is a good thing.
The systems are not strictly proportional, because that would cause decimals, and rounding. You use formulas that allocate seats and are roughly proportional. In my country (Spain) we use the D’Hont formula:
– Rank all parties by votes, whoever has the most gets the first seat
– Divide the votes party you just allocated by two. Rank again and asking the second seat.
– repeat, each time you allocate a seat divide the original votes by 2, 3, 4 etc, until no further seats remain.
You can vote either for a closed list (congress), and each party gets seats in the order they are on the list or for a several candidates, even from different parties (senate).
The voting circunceiption is the province, and each province gets a fixed number of seats based on population.
In general the system is proportional, except for small prices which only have 2-3 assigned.
15 comments
Yes, 16% gives 16%. Depending on the country you might also be allowed to rank/vote for a specific candidate on the parties list. Which will follow the order of peoples ranking or who has the most candidate votes on the list on determining which candidates then actually get a seat.
Depends on the area.
In Spain, there are candidates lists, closed lists, you just grab the list (there’s a bajillion quantity in the voting building). When results are done, each lists gest a certaing quantity of seat and those are asigned in other to the people inside the list that got that result,
Here in Spain, there are 350 seats in the lower chamber (Congress) which are apportioned per province, as the province is the electoral circumscription: each province gets a minimum of 2 representatives, and the rest are distributed proportionally to population.
My province, Coruña, has got 8 representatives. With the electoral results, the 8 seats are distributed among the political parties using the D’Hondt method, which avoids having to round up or round down.
In the elections, we vote for a closed list of candidates, which is to say we pick one ballot with the name of the party we prefer, which contains the list of candidates in order. So, if the party you voted for gets three of the seats, then the top three names of that list become reps.
How does one end on a party’s list, and on its higher section? Basically, backstabbing, conspiring, and bootlicking within the party.
CGP Grey has bunch of pretty good videos about voting systems. Check out e.g. [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU)
Germany has closed lists on federal parliament elections: the party defines the order of candidates on the party list.
Cyprus has open lists in parliamentary elections: the voter can influence the order of the party list they are voting for by boosting specific candidates inside that list. The party has the option to select one candidate to be the list leader, and that candidate gets the first spot regardless of the preference votes Most but not all parties use this option.
Depends on the country probably.
At least in the Netherlands a party makes a numbered lists of candidates. The party leader is at spot number 1, then you have number 2, number 3, number 4, all the way down the list. How many candidates a party has depends on the type of elections (there’s generally more seats up for grabs in national elections than local elections, so lists for national elections are longer) and on the party itself. The largest parties will usually have the largest number of candidates.
How the order on the list is decided depends on the party. Usually people who are active in the party get put into the top spots likely to actually be elected, and the rest of the list is often filled up with people from local politics and the occasional well known person way at the bottom who’s just there to attract some extra voters.
For election results they divide the total number of votes cast in an election (say for example, 8 million) by the number of seats to be divided (150 for parliamentary elections). So 8m/150=53,333 votes will equal one seat.
Let’s say party A has 4 million votes, party B has 2.5 million votes, and party C has 1.5 million votes.
4m/53,333=75
2.5m/53,333=46.88
1.5m/53,333=28.13
Party A will get 75 seats, with people on spots 1-75 on the list getting seats in parliament.
Party B will get 46 seats, with people on spots 1-46 getting seats in parliament.
Party C will get 28 seats, with people on spots 1-28 getting seats in parliament.
That’s 149 seats in total, and there’s then some calculations as to who gets the remaining seats based on the total number of remaining votes. In this case party B has the most “left over” votes so they’ll get the remaining seat which will go to the person who was number 47 on the list.
Of course this is just a simplified example, since in actual elections there’s usually at least two dozen of not more parties vying for seats (for national elections anyway, for local elections usually still at least a dozen) so you’ll have a lot more leftover seats as well as parties who got votes but no seats. And there’s also preferential votes where people lower down the list can still get a seat if they got a certain % of individual votes.
Edit: also here you vote for a candidate, not a party. For example I might vote for A. Smith who is number 32 on Party A’s list. And all the votes for candidates on a party’s list get added together to get the total number of votes for that party.
In Turkey, basically if a province will have a total of let’s say 10 MPs, each party also proposes 10 MPs in an ordered list. If they manage to get 1 seat for that province, only the first candidate of that party list gets elected.
You can’t really give exact proportional seats in this case because let’s say some party get 16%, and if the province has 10 MPs, that party would get 1.6 seats which is impossible and cannot be rounded up without messing with other parties. So, the D’Hondt system is used which is basically a simple algorithm which is proportional enough to work out.
Depends on the country, Germany has two lists: one where you vote only for a party, and it picks its representatives, and one for people directly; if the latter votes cause an imbalance compared to the results of the first, additional seats are added to the house (so technically, the Bundestag doesn’t have a set number of reps)
For the Polish Sejm, the nation-wide results are only important when it comes to the 5%/8% threshold; each district then grants seats depending on how many votes a party got, and then which of their candidates got best results. It more or less evens out, but outliers happen (2015 was horrid because 1/6 of votes went to the bin)
Scotland 🏴
We use a ridiculously complex hybrid system for Holyrood in order to have both (a) specific MSPs for constituencies, and (b) a PR-like overall outcome.
Politically, it was designed to prevent any one party gaining an overall majority, though this happened anyway in 2011 in a landslide victory for the SNP.
As one of the handful of people in Scotland who understands it I can try to explain it if anyone cares 🤣
We use the D’Hondt method with **open** lists in Finland, so it’s straightforward… Voters vote directly for individual candidates, not for party lists. Once a party is allocated seats (depending on the party’s total votes), those seats then go to the party’s most-voted individual candidates. It doesn’t matter what order the candidates had on the list.
Depend on country and electoral law ( in Italy our politicians LOVE changing that ).
Usually there is threshold that you must reach ( 4% here ).
After that is either: the party nominates BEFORE the election the list of persons that will be elected OR the people chooses ( very few persons use this option)
There are different systems and hybrids thereoff. The easiest would be closed lists that are decided by the parties. They propose a voting list and the people of the list are elected in the order of the list up to the last one that gets a seat in proportion to the votes. The last ones to be elected according to the list are the so called fighting seats. These lists are sometimes voted for in some sort of party primary, but not always. Sometimes the caucus can vote on individual ranks, sometimes only on the prefabricated list in total. In order to avoid a too splintered parliament many voting systems have a minimum threshold of 3-5% of the total votes to be included into the distribution of seats. Since total proportionality is impossible, because there are no fractions of a representative, there are complicated mathematical distribution methods, like the D‘Hondt system. Sometimes voters can vote individuals that are further down on the list further up. Sometimes there are different lists for the constituency and the national level to attribute all the fractions of a seat that are leftover after the constituency seats have been distributed. There are attempts to personalize the system.
If a seat becomes vacant, it’s easy however. Since the whole list has been elected, you don’t need any recall elections, but the seat goes to the first person that has been left out on the original list.
In Finland the candidates of one party are ranked by the amount of votes they got and are then given a comparison number based on the total votes the party got from all their candidates.
The comparison number is total number of votes divided by the ranking of the candidates and who get elected are based on the comparison number, so the one with most votes gets all the votse, the second gets 1/2, third gets 1/3 and so on.
There are almost as many PR (and near PR) voting systems as there are parliaments.
In Scotland we actually have two different ones: for the Scottish Parliament we use an Additional Member (AM) system (sometimes called Mixed Member Proportional or MMP) where you vote for someone in a constituency and separate party list for a wider region. The party list otder is set by each party and used to top up seats so the final result is more nearly proportional. It is similar to the system used in Germany (but with a slightly different counting system for the lists), and New Zealand amongst others.
For local council elections, Scotland uses Single Transferable Vote (STV) which is a system where you use preference voting in larger constituencies and the order of votes determines who gets elected. Easy to vote but the counting is quite complicated. It has the advantage that parties do not choose orders of candidates but the voters do, and you do not even have to rank all candidates from the same party, which means it is easier for independent candidates to be elected. The system is used for all elections in Ireland, and for the Northern Ireland Assembly and Northern Irish local councils. It is also used in Malta
In Spain you vote for a party list (or list of a group of parties collaborating), for your Province. Easy to vote, easy to count but makes it impossible to mix choices from parties.
Of course in UK general elections, a non proportional system is used, where you vote for one candidate in your constituency.
Personally I support STV as my preferred method as it reduces the power of parties (a bit) but really any PR system beats the highly distorted system used for Westminster elections where it often hands full power and a large majority to one party with under 40% of the national vote and occasionally even hands a majority to the party that came second in the national popular vote. PR nearly always means parties have to work together which IMO is a good thing.
The systems are not strictly proportional, because that would cause decimals, and rounding. You use formulas that allocate seats and are roughly proportional. In my country (Spain) we use the D’Hont formula:
– Rank all parties by votes, whoever has the most gets the first seat
– Divide the votes party you just allocated by two. Rank again and asking the second seat.
– repeat, each time you allocate a seat divide the original votes by 2, 3, 4 etc, until no further seats remain.
You can vote either for a closed list (congress), and each party gets seats in the order they are on the list or for a several candidates, even from different parties (senate).
The voting circunceiption is the province, and each province gets a fixed number of seats based on population.
In general the system is proportional, except for small prices which only have 2-3 assigned.