Canadian voters know the dilemma: Should I vote for the candidate I like best or the one with a realistic chance of winning?
The Canadian electoral system, first-past-the-post (FPTP), divides the country into 338 individual constituencies, and the candidate with the most votes in each constituency gets sent to Ottawa. The party with the most seats in parliament then forms the government. While the FPTP system has many advantages – Loewen mentions robustness against democratic breakdown, responsiveness in government formation, and direct accountability of individual politicians to the electorate – its inability to map the national party results proportionally onto parliament is a significant shortcoming as Milner points out.
For instance, the Liberal Party won 32.6% of the popular vote but almost half of all seats, while the Conservatives won more votes than the Liberals (33.7%) but only 35% of the seats. The Bloc Quebecois (BQ) won about half the votes of the NDP, but its regionally concentrated support allowed it to win more seats.
Some critics of the Canadian system point to Germany’s ‘mixed-member proportional’ electoral system as the magic bullet: it combines FPTP local representation with proportionality. Germans cast two votes: one for a constituency-based candidate and one for a party. In past elections, the constituency vote was used to elect a local representative for each of the 299 electoral districts in Germany, while the party vote was used to allocate additional seats to ensure that the overall composition of the parliament reflected the percentage of votes received by each party. This system had some unintended consequences, such as the increase in the size of parliament, which last month led to a bombshell electoral reform bill.
On March 17, lawmakers introduced a bill in which only those parties enter parliament that reach 5% of the vote or more. While this rule existed before, previous exceptions to it based on party candidates entering parliament through winning some constituencies (but not 5% nationwide on the list-vote) are now effectively abolished. Instead, a candidate’s chances to enter parliament depends on their constituency results per party when this party wins more than 5%. Those with the best constituency results are prioritized within the party. This can result in situations where constituency winners and even constituencies may not be represented in parliament.
The new law could have severe consequences for meso-sized parties like CSU, which is predominant in Bavarian constituencies but won only 5.2% nationwide in 2021. If the proudly Bavarian CSU – legally unable to join a list of other parties – wanted to exist independently on the national level, it would either need to awkwardly contest elections in non-Bavarian regions or endorse independent candidates, which remain excluded from the 5% requirement. Ironically, the latter would seriously distort the proportionality of the parliament. If CSU just ceased to exist on the national level, it could alienate parts of the Bavarian electorate, an electorate that historically has flirted softly with separatism.
Fighting for their political survival on the national level, CSU and the Left Party (which is equally dominant in the urban East, but polling at about 4-5% nationwide) announced they would contest the Law in front of the Supreme Court.
Why should Canada care?
First, the Canadian public debate around electoral reform often focuses on proportionality, overlooking the potential negative and unintended consequences of electoral reform or the strengths of the current system. Second, context matters. Canada is a weakly integrated, regionalized polity. Electoral reform may bare the risk of unintended state-managerial consequences, as the challenges around Bavarian alienation under the new system show. Third, in aspiring to pair proportionality and local representation, Germany’s electoral system may have never been as ideal as portrayed given its described challenges, and there are serious question marks if the new electoral system will change that.
