{"id":610,"date":"2014-02-26T17:34:42","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T17:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie?p=610"},"modified":"2014-02-26T19:32:47","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T19:32:47","slug":"europes-kaleidoscope-of-electoral-systems-for-electing-meps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/?p=610","title":{"rendered":"Europe’s kaleidoscope of electoral systems for electing MEPs"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is based on a press briefing I made in the European Parliament in Brussels last week. For video footage, see here<\/a>. The contents of this post will be updated as further\u00a0details emerge on the member state electoral systems.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Simon<\/a><\/p>\n

The European Parliament (EP) elections occur between May 22 and 25 this year.\u00a0 Hundreds of millions of voters are eligible to vote (though far less actually will) for the 751 MEPs from 28 member states, making this the one of the largest exercises in representative democracy in the world, and certainly the most ambitious in terms of the range of countries involved.<\/p>\n

A detail not often appreciated is that \u2013 despite the passing of legislation on \u2018uniform electoral procedures\u2019 in 2002 \u2013 there continues to be a very wide range of variation on the different electoral systems used across the various member states.\u00a0 This can have important implications for who gets elected, for how they get elected, and for what they do once elected.<\/p>\n

The following Table gives a sense of the range of variation in electoral system design for EP elections.<\/p>\n

\"ep<\/a><\/p>\n

There are two key things to focus on \u2013 proportionality (affecting who gets elected) and personalization (affecting how candidates run for office and how MEPs represent voters).<\/p>\n

Proportionality<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, the final column reports the electoral thresholds, which give a useful indication of the minimum proportion of votes that parties must secure of their to win seats in the EP.\u00a0 These come in two forms: legal<\/em> and effective<\/em> thresholds. Legal thresholds are what they say on the tin \u2013 legally set minimum vote percentages that a party must secure.\u00a0 Under the 2002 legislation a country is allowed to set this at any level they like as long as it is no greater than 5%.\u00a0 If a country chooses not to set a legal threshold, it is possible to work out approximately what the actual threshold is \u2013 referred to as the \u2018effective threshold\u2019.<\/p>\n

As we can see, more than half of the member states (15) set a legal threshold. The German government has just been banned from doing this as the result of a constitutional court judgement earlier today (see here).\u00a0 As a consequence, the effective threshold for being elected a German MEP this May will be less than 1% of the vote.\u00a0 This has important implications for smaller parties.\u00a0 The smaller the threshold the easier it is for them to win seats.\u00a0 We can expect therefore a lot more small, even micro, party candidates to pick up seats in Germany in this EP election.\u00a0 The other countries where small parties can be expected to do well (based simply on the low electoral thresholds; those of 4% or less) include: Austria, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Ireland \u2013 North and South \u2013 are the outliers: they both have the highest electoral threshold (18.7% and 16.3%), making life very difficult for small parties.<\/p>\n

Personalization<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other main feature of electoral system variation is over how voters get to vote in the election.\u00a0 Here the main focus is on the ballot structure (though the nature of the electoral district does also have a bearing).\u00a0 The following Figure (which is likely to have some errors, but is the best I can do based on the information to hand) gives a sense of how ballot structure can vary.<\/p>\n

\"fig\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The EP electoral systems can be grouped into three main types: \u2018open<\/em>\u2019 systems, where voters have a lot of say over which individual candidates are elected; \u2018closed<\/em>\u2019 systems, where the parties determine which of their candidates are elected based on the overall proportion of votes received by the party, and in the middle, \u2018ordered<\/em>\u2019 systems, where voters \u2013 to varying degrees \u2013 can have some limited influence on the electoral fate of individual candidates.\u00a0 There is plenty of research that shows how these variations in ballot structure can impact on how candidates campaign and how MEPs represent citizens, but most of this is behind a paywall (e.g. see here<\/a>).\u00a0 For a useful LSE blog post that covers some of this, see here<\/a>.\u00a0 The basic point is that as you move up the scale from closed to ordered to open systems the tendency is for candidates\/MEPs to focus less on their parties and more on their own individual constituencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is based on a press briefing I made in the European Parliament in Brussels last week. For video footage, see here. The contents of this post will be updated as further\u00a0details emerge on the member state electoral systems. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[43,42,44],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-spire-research","category-opiniondebate","tag-electoral-systems","tag-european-parliament-elections","tag-meps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":639,"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions\/639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/politicalscience.ie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}