Motivated to investigate a bit further after my previous post on Spain's general election results, I decided to check different provinces to find out just how few votes you can get in order to win a parliamentary seat here. The motivation to do this came from all the complaints about how the Basque coalition Amaiur managed to "only" need 47000 votes for each seat won. My bet was that there would be several places where it was possible to elect a representative with less votes than this. I was unaware before carrying out this admittedly slightly geeky exercise just how low that number of votes needed could be. Where a party has won more than one seat in a province I've applied the Amaiur formula by dividing the number of votes by seats won. Starting from the bottom with the name of the province or colonial outpost, the number of votes needed and the party taking the cheapest seat:
- Soria - 16058 - PSOE
- Melilla - 17791 - Partido Popular
- Teruel - 19896 - Partido Popular
- Ceuta - 20981 - Partido Popular
- Avila - 24164 - PSOE
- Segovia - 24711 - PSOE
- Huesca - 29128 - Partido Popular
- Palencia - 29290 - Partido Popular
- Burgos - 30550 - Partido Popular
- La Rioja - 31524 - Partido Popular
- Araba - 31849 - PNV
- Girona - 32834 - ERC
- Zamora - 33936 - Partido Popular
- Cuenca - 34958 - Partido Popular
- Guadalajara - 35641 - Partido Popular
- Lleida - 37229 - Partido Popular
- Ourense - 37991 - Partido Popular
- Huelva - 38499 - Partido Popular
- Lugo - 39962 - Partido Popular
- Tarragona - 40917 - Partido Popular
- Illes Balears - 42115 - PSOE
- Navarra - 42411 - GBAI
- Albacete - 42628 - Partido Popular
- Salamanca - 42786 - Partido Popular
- Gipuzkoa - 43218 - Amaiur
- Almería - 44970 - Partido Popular
- Cantabria - 45663 - Partido Popular
- Caceres - 46175 - PSOE
- Valladolid - 47125 - PSOE
- Ciudad Real - 47618 - PSOE
- Las Palmas - 48132 - Partido Popular
- León - 49547 - PSOE
- Tenerife - 51244 - Partido Popular
- Badajoz - 51775 - Partido Popular
- Castellón - 52181 - Partido Popular
- Jaén - 55031 - PSOE
- Toledo - 55078 - Partido Popular
- Cordoba - 56678 - PSOE
- Cádiz - 58335 - Partido Popular
- Zaragoza - 58749 - CHA/IU
- Murcia - 58919 - Partido Popular
- Granada - 59245 - Partido Popular
- Málaga - 59517 - Partido Popular
- Alicante - 59707 - PSOE
- Asturias - 61057 - PSOE
- Bizkaia - 61303 - Amaiur
- Pontevedra - 66970 - BNG
- A Coruña - 68041 - Partido Popular
- Barcelona - 72567 - PSOE
- Sevilla - 73610 - PSOE
- Valencia - 82514 - Partido Popular
- Madrid - 86531 - UPyD
An incredible variation between Soria and Madrid. I'm aware that this is not a completely scientific study, the way in which the electoral system works means a party could have won a seat by a single vote or by 20000. Nevertheless, I think it demonstrates fairly clearly that the weight of a vote in Spain depends very much on where the voter lives. Leaving aside the special cases of the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the upper ranks of this table are dominated by the sparsely populated provinces of northern Spain. Meanwhile, the big cities are where you really need a lot of votes to elect someone. As for the Amaiur factor, they did best in Gipuzkoa which turns out to be almost the median province in terms of votes needed for a seat.
The explanation of all this variation lies in the fact that the electoral division in Spain is based on the province. Not only that, but there is a minimum guaranteed representation for a province. That's why Soria gets two elected representatives with only 50000 people voting. Some also attribute an influence to Spain's use of the D'Hondt method for distributing seats, because this system tends to favour larger parties. Even so, studies done applying the D'Hondt calculations on a national electoral division rather than a provincial level show the result to be reasonably proportional.
The smaller national parties, like Izquierda Unida and UPyD, don't stand a chance of winning a seat in Soria, Teruel, Avila or Segovia because the number of seats contested is too low for a party winning less than 10% of the vote to compete for. That's why these parties win their seats in larger electoral areas, principally those of the big cities, where the result tends to be more proportional (Madrid, for example, elects 36 representatives). The result of this is that a vote for a minority party in a large part of the country is extremely unlikely to count. That's the reason why UPyD have 1 seat for every 220000 votes they got, and why Izquierda Unida in the previous parliament could claim 450000 votes for each seat won.
It needs to be said again and again for those who refuse to understand it, but the major beneficiaries of Spain's electoral system are the PP and the PSOE. That's also why calls for electoral reform don't tend to get very far. In this parliament we may even get to see a bogus electoral reform disguised as an anti-crisis measure. Inside the PP they have been floating the idea of reducing the number of members of parliament from 350 to 300. Presented as a money saving proposal for austere times, such a move would of course only have the result of reducing even further the representation of the smaller parties in parliament, because it would leave the provincial bias of the electoral system untouched whilst reducing the number of seats in the larger electoral divisions.
2 comments:
And a solution?
Take your pick. In a country where there is no strong constituency-representative link you could move to a single national electoral division. Or as a half-way house, use the autonomous region as the division instead of the province.
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