Thanks to Jack S. (a frequent visitor to the virtual orchard) and his contact, Binio S. Binev (a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Government at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University), we have a clarification to the changes implemented to the Bulgarian electoral system at the recent election.
I am now quoting (with permission, of course) from an e-mail from Mr Binev:
Each voter has two votes – one for a majoritarian candidate, one for a party list. The second vote is for the party, not for the candidates. There are 31 districts, 31 MPs are majoritarian, 209 are from the party lists.
A candidate can be supported by a party or coalition in maximally two multi-member districts.
A majoritarian [nominal-tier-] candidate can run with the support of a party, coalition, or initiative committee in one single member district only. If the candidate is independent, a majoritarian candidate needs 10,000 signatures of people living in the district where the candidate will be running.
A majoritarian candidate can run only in one single member district.
A candidate can be supported by a party or coalition in maximally two multi-member districts.
(Combining the last two, we deduce that a candidate can be registered in 2 districts, but a majoritarian candidate can only be registered as such – a majoritarian candidate – in one district only. I.e., a majoritarian candidate can be a list candidate in a different district.)
This would seem to qualify the system as a two-vote mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system, as I have seen no reference to the list-PR seats being allocated in a compensatory manner. Thus I assume they are allocated in parallel. Obviously there is substantial malapportionment in the nominal tier (the 31 districts of varying population size, each of which elects one member by FPTP), although these seats represent only 12.9% of the total.
It is worth recalling that the first election after the fall of the communist regime was also held under an MMM system (with a more conventional even split in seats between the two tiers, but some malapportionment of the nominal tier). The renamed Socialists won that election, in 1990, but their close call led them to favor a pure Pr system (closed lists) for the 1991, and subsequent elections.
Despite the adoption of PR by the Grand National Assembly (a constituent assembly, with 400 members) in 1991, there was much talk that summer of maintaining an element of representation for “independent” candidates. I was there, as a consultant to the GNA, and my team members and I struggled to propose various not-too-complex forms of PR that would satisfy the “non-party” advocates within the Socialist party. Yet the ultimate result was closed-list PR–for the next 18 years, anyway.
Just as the Socialists’ change to preferring PR in 1991 was based on updated information of their declining popularity, so was their change to a partially nominal system just a month before this election.
Jack had noted, also in an e-mail, that “the SP thought that running local notables in [the nominal] tier would cause voters to tick off the SP in the [list] tier.” There is considerable evidence from mixed-member systems that this is a reasonable expectation. (The literature tends to refer to this as a cross-tier “contamination” effect.) In the event, however, the right-wing coalition won the election, including 30 of the 31 nominal seats. Of course, that does not mean that they didn’t do better with the nominal tier than they would have without it. That would be hard to determine, either way.
One other interesting item from the election is that the opposition won with the help of the “charismatic” mayor of Sofia, Boiko Borissov, as its national leader. It is fairly rare for subnational elected executives to become the leader of a national parliamentary party. Bulgaria’s constitutional format is semi-presidential, rather than parliamentary, although its presidency is relatively weak. In any case, choosing a well known municipal politician looks like a classic case of “presidentialization” of the party, and one that did not go through the institution of the presidency itself. The incumbent president, Georgi Parvanov, is of the Socialist Party. He was elected to a second term in 2006. The next election for that office is not due till October, 2011.
The opposition also exploited the electoral system change, as its leadership also recruited local notable to run for the new nominal seats.
[MSS:
"clar[i]fication”
T]
Seed planted by Tom Round — 15 July 2009 @ 21:11
Title typos are the worst! Something about that bold type makes them harder to see.
Thanks, Tom.
Seed planted by MSS — 15 July 2009 @ 21:27
Actually, Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) won 26 of 31 single-member seats; the remaining five were captured by the mostly-ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS).
Also, the allocation of 209 PR seats is carried out in parallel (and thus completely independent of the FPTP races) by the Hare/Niemayer variation of the largest remainder method, first at the nationwide level among qualifying parties (those polling at least four percent of the vote) and then at the multi-member constituency level on a party-by-party basis; for example, GERB won 90 list seats, and these were then apportioned among the party’s thirty-one constituency lists.
However, under this method some constituencies may end up with an excess number of seats, while others may have unfilled seats, so in every constituency with surplus seats the number of votes polled by each qualifying list is divided by its number of seats, and the lists with the lowest votes-to-seats ratios lose one seat each until no excess mandates remain.
Then, in each constituency with a seat deficit the vote totals polled by each qualifying list are divided by its number of constituency seats plus one, and the quotients for all parties and constituencies are sorted from top to bottom. Seats are then assigned to the highest quotients, but once a party or a constituency has reached its assigned number of seats, its remaining quotients are disregarded for the purpose of allocating constituency seats; this procedure is similar to those in place in neighboring Romania since last year and Norway since 2005, which have been discussed here before.
Bulgaria’s Central Election Commission has a page on its 2009 election results website showing the full distribution of PR seats; it’s in Bulgarian but I had no problem understanding the statistical tables showing the steps even though I don’t speak any Slavic language, Bulgarian included.
In the meantime, my website’s Bulgaria page has constituency-level 2009 election results in English. However, I should note that right now these only show PR vote totals and the sum of FPTP and list seats; I have yet to process vote totals for single-member seats, and then modify the lookup application that presents the results (written for Bulgaria’s previous single-vote PR system) to display the figures accordingly. I had to do this before for Italy (in reverse) when it switched back to PR in 2006, so it’s not too difficult, but it’s time consuming all the same.
Finally, I must say that unlike in Romania, the introduction of FPTP in Bulgaria had a distinct impact on the distribution of National Assembly seats: as I’ve pointed out in a blog posting on Bulgaria’s election published today, GERB would have only won 105 of 240 seats under the old full-PR electoral system, and the party would have been sixteen seats short of an absolute majority instead of just five short. That said, I’m still of the view that as far as parliamentary accountability is concerned, the introduction of 31 FPTP seats amounts to little more than window dressing.
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 17 July 2009 @ 15:24
Manuel, much appreciated!
And something that has bugged me for a while: in what sense is the Hare-Niemeyer different from the regular old simple (or Hare) quota and largest remainders? Some sources I have seen say it is just what the latter is called in Germany. Others say it is a “variation,” but I have never seen that variation spelled out. (I am assuming it is not the procedure for dealing with allocating too many/too few seats. Or is it?)
As for Romania, of course there was not much impact of their reform. It did not have an actual FPTP element, nor was it mixed-member, according to information in a previous thread. In Bulgaria, it seems, there actually was.
Seed planted by MSS — 17 July 2009 @ 19:01
You’re welcome Matthew.
As I understand it, the variation arises from the different formula used to allocate seats, which is nonetheless mathematically equivalent to the traditional largest remainder method procedure. At any rate, Germany switched to the Sainte-Laguë method last year for Bundestag as well as European Parliament elections, and no longer uses Hare/Niemayer.
Now, single-member constituencies exist in Romania as well, but FPTP is compromised there by the requirement that candidates obtain an absolute majority to secure a constituency mandate – only 116 of 452 seats in Romania’s bicameral legislature were filled in this manner in last year’s election – and as I noted in the Romania election posting on this blog, in the end the distribution of parliamentary mandates under the new electoral system there was almost completely determined by PR.
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 17 July 2009 @ 21:34