#newelectoralsystem

The numbers are now out. Next month’s ballot in Hungary will have significantly more candidates and party lists, according to the National Election Office, than in the 2010 parliamentary elections.

Voting sheet this year

In 2010, voters chose from 810 candidates running in what were then 176 single-mandate electoral districts. Next month, we will see some 1,577 candidates running in 106 electoral districts.

We’ll see a similar increase in parties on the ballot. In 2010, only six parties qualified with a national list. This year, 18 parties have qualified along with 13 national minority party lists. That’s one short of the peak in 1994, when there were 19 party lists. These are now subject to public review, of course, before placement on the final ballot.

Voting sheet in 2010

Parties that qualify enjoy a range of privileges including, among other things, membership on the national elections committee, advertising time on public service media and participating commercial media, and state financing for the campaign.

There’s more choice this year because the new electoral rules have lowered the bar for qualifying to get on the ballot. It opens up the political contest, makes it easier for newcomers to break in, and it was the wish not only of the governing parties, Fidesz-KDNP, but also of opposition.

Prior to 2010, Hungary’s parliamentary parties agreed on at least one thing: the parliament should be smaller. There were many proposals about how to reduce the number of MPs, but no political group was able to rally enough support to push their proposal forward. Following the 2010 elections, the change was finally made possible with the Fidesz-KDNP majority. When the governing parties consulted the opposition parties on the changes – yes, there were consultations, though the opposition Socialist Party boycotted most of the discussion – one of the requests was to relax the requirements to be eligible as a candidate or party.

In 2012, a think tank called Patriotism and Progress – or Haza és Haladás, affiliated with former Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai – published a paper on the new electoral system. What they said about this relaxing of qualifications was fascinating:

“[T]he [old] system of nomination slips has simultaneously become an overly protective bastion of the status quo for political parties, as well as the unchartered terrain of the political underworld…[We] consider the simplification and easing of the “input side” of the political system a positive development. Furthermore, we do not share the view that in light of eased preconditions everybody is suddenly going to nominate himself / herself. The last couple of years have shown that individual candidates without sufficient social support tend to receive fewer votes than the number of submitted nomination slips. And if the new entrants will prove more popular, then the status quo parties only have themselves to blame.

Hungary’s New Electoral System, Part 7

When you hear talk of the recent changes to Hungary’s electoral system, chances are that the focus is on how voting rights have been extended or how the constituencies have been redrawn. I wrote about those changes in those previous posts.

Today, I am focusing on another detail of the changes that has received much less attention, one that even many of the critics think is a good initiative: the new system allows for direct representation of minorities in the parliament from 2014.

Ethnic Groups in Hungary, 2001 vs. 2011. Source:Wikipedia

Direct representation of ethnic and national minorities in Hungary was a hot topic among political scientists in the early nineties. The Hungarian Constitutional Court even ruled in 1992 (Decision 35/1992) that the old system drawn up at the roundtable talks is unconstitutional because it failed to ensure parliamentary representation for minorities. But despite the early court ruling and a consensus that something needed to be done about minority representation, for nearly 20 years until 2010 nobody took up the issue.

Under the old system, the only way a minority group could get into parliament was by entering into alliance with one of the major parties in exchange for a certain number of seats. That may have worked to some degree but it offered no guarantees that minorities would have a voice. Along with all the other changes, the new electoral law sought to change this by building ethnic and national minority representation into the new system. And with good reason. A survey carried out last April by the Századvég Foundation shows that 58.1 percent of Hungarian voters still think minority representation in the parliament is important.

Under the new system, representatives of minority groups enjoy positive discrimination, getting seats in the parliament based on votes received from voters who are listed on the registry as members of the minority group. Minority representation is awarded once a preferential quota is fulfilled with a specific and relatively small, number of votes. The preferential quota is determined by adding up the total number of votes for national party and national minority lists and dividing that number by 93 and again by 4. The result is then rounded to become the preferential quota. If the preferential quota is reached or exceeded during an election, the top candidate from the national minority list is given a preferential minority seat. If the preferential quota is not fulfilled, the top minority representative candidate can still be sent to the National Assembly as a “minority spokesperson.” This person can collaborate with other representatives in “committees representing national minorities.”

The new Hungarian system for direct representation of national minorities is exemplary when compared to other models internationally, and the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe has recognized that. After nearly twenty years without any real attempts to comply with the court decision and ensure parliamentary representation for minorities, a solution has finally been found.

Hungary’s New Electoral System, Part 6

Hungary’s new electoral system extends voting rights to all citizens regardless of where they live, unlike the former system, which required a permanent residency in Hungary to be eligible to vote. Why the change?

The first reason is that our government believes that the right to vote is an essential right of every citizen and not having a residency in the country should not cause a citizen to lose voting rights. Creating the new system, our goal was to make it more inclusive than the former one, similar to our efforts to advance voting rights for the disabled, this decision was also a step forward.

And by extending the right to vote to our citizens outside the borders, we’re by no means alone. Other countries, especially those with significant numbers of their people living outside their borders, have done the same. Croatia has 400,000 Croatian citizens living abroad who are registered on the electoral roll. Even the United States, where the issue of national minorities living outside the borders is not as important historically as it is in Europe, has voting provisions for citizens living abroad. In 21 states and the District of Columbia, even those who have never lived in the United States (but have voting rights derived from their parents) are allowed to cast ballots.

But of course, for Israel and many countries of Europe, where ethnic minorities have found themselves residing in a different country following a major conflict and changing borders, the issue has a special significance.

Hungarian population in Europe, outside Hungary. Source:Wikipedia

Hungary has some 10 million residents, but the number of people who identify themselves as Hungarian reaches approximately 15 million. Many of these live far away, fleeing Hungary during terrible periods of the 20th Century such as World War II and the quashing of the 1956 uprising, but even more Hungarians live in neighboring countries due to the Trianon Treaty of 1920. As a result of the treaty, millions of Hungarians found themselves suddenly living outside their country’s borders.

Trianon is a delicate topic, and I’m not going to get into it here (if interested, Wikipedia offers a useful background). The point is, the reason for extending voting rights is simple: many of these Hungarian citizens were stripped of their Hungarian citizenship after the treaty and their situation has been a hot topic of public discourse really only since people have been allowed to talk about it again, after 1990.

So, on May 26, 2011, the National Assembly passed an amendment on Hungarian citizenship (part of Act LV of 1993) that creates a simplified, fast-lane for people like this to regain citizenship. After citizenship, voting rights flow naturally to ensure there are no first- and second-class citizens.

Of course, it is technically impossible for citizens who do not have a residence in Hungary to vote for one of the constituency candidates, but from now on, they can cast a vote for a national list, after registering to be on the electoral role at least 15 days before the election, by mail or the Internet.

Critics say this is a ploy by the governing parties to shore up more votes to ensure re-election. But that’s flimsy. First of all, no one really knows who these voters will vote for. There is no opinion poll that measures their party preference. Secondly, it is impossible to predict the participation rate of these new voters.

In any case, in its opinion (no. 662/2012), the Venice Commission concurred, emphasizing that it is congruent with good practice and follows the recommendation made by the advisory body. Enough said.

By granting voting rights to all Hungarian citizens under the new law, the voting system in Hungary has become more inclusive, therefore, in our opinion, more democratic.

Hungary’s New Electoral System (Part 2)

Hungary has seen some big changes since 2010, and among the most important is the new electoral system. With this series of posts on the new electoral laws, my aim is to explain why the changes were necessary, describe some of the problems in the old system and show how the new system addresses them.

In part one of this series, I offered a look back at the old electoral system, referred to as “one of the most complicated in the world,” and some of its problems.

Those interested in more detail on the whole issue should have a look at the study recently published by the Hungarian think tank Századvég entitled, “The New Hungarian Electoral System” (available here in English).

The focus of today’s post is the electoral districting under the new system. The electoral constituencies drawn up for the first democratic elections in 1990 were a compromise solution, intended to be temporary, that created an outsized parliament. Those districts posed thorny problems, and despite the intention to fix them, had remained untouched since their invention in 1989.

Part of the problem was the inequality of the constituencies. Take, for example, the 6th electoral district in Veszprém (in western Hungary) with 27 thousand voters and the district in Gödöllő (just east of Budapest) with 67 thousand voters. Both of these districts elected just one member of parliament. That stood in serious contradiction to one of the most basic principles of modern-day elections – that is, the principle of equality of votes. Every vote should have equal or similar weight.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) clearly affirms this principle of equality of vote as does the electoral code of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. But that’s not all: The Constitutional Court of Hungary ruled in 2005 that it is unconstitutional to have the number of voters in one electoral district double that of the number in another district. The Court ruled that the districts should be made more balanced. But nothing was done about this problem until the current parliament was elected in 2010.

The new electoral system allows no more than 15% difference in district size and has redrawn the districts to meet that requirement. The Orbán Government requested an opinion from the Venice Commission on the re-balancing of the districts, and the Commission issued an opinion saying that the law should go even further, that it should establish a 10% limit. However, considering the huge inequalities, sometimes 200% or more, that existed under the old system, this was a huge step forward in improving the equality of vote.

The other side of the story is that in 1989, as I mentioned above, the compromise struck at the round table talks created a terribly complicated system that produced a huge parliament of 386 members. Other European countries of a similar size had parliaments of around 200 representatives, almost half the size.

Bringing the parliament down to size, shrinking the voter-to-representative ratio to something more reasonable, was another one of the main reasons for re-drawing the districts.

According to the new system, the parliament elected in 2014 will have 199 members. Out of that total, 106 will be elected directly from the new districts (the rest will come from party lists). Formerly, 45.6% of the representatives were elected directly from the districts. The number has increased to 53.3%.

You may have read some of the accusations that have been thrown around, claiming that the new districts have been seriously gerrymandered to favor the ruling parties. Below are two maps. The first one is the map of the old districts and the second map shows the new districts.

Election districts in Hungary and Budapest before and after 2014. (Source)

You don’t have to be an elections expert to see that the new electoral districts look more unified and are more evenly distributed. In contract, they most certainly do not look like Illinois’s 4th district. In order to prevent further governments from being tempted by the gerrymandering game, the new rules require a two-thirds majority in parliament to agree on a change in the district map.

Hungary has seen some big changes since 2010, and among the most important is the new electoral system. Just a few months from now, in the spring of 2014, we will have parliamentary elections according to these new rules. We’ve seen some chatter in the international discourse about the new system, some critics charging that the ruling parties behind Prime Minister Orbán have rewritten the rules in their own favor. The informed reader has learned to be skeptical of such claims, but what’s really behind the changes and how will they alter the way Hungary elects its next parliament and government?

A conservative-leaning Hungarian think tank, Századvég, has prepared a detailed study on the changes to the electoral system entitled, “The New Hungarian Electoral System” (download here in English). It offers a great foundation for discussion, and that’s what I aim to do in the coming weeks. In a series of posts, I plan to launch a discussion of the new system, counter some myths and misconceptions, shed some light on why the changes were necessary and explain how the new system will work. The idea is a smaller, more representative parliament, elected on the basis of a more inclusive, more open, less expensive and somewhat more majoritarian electoral system.

With this first post, let’s look at why the changes were necessary.

The electoral system that was in effect in Hungary through the elections of 2010 was, like the previous constitution, handed down to us from the so-called round table talks in 1989 that negotiated the transition from communism to a multi-party democracy. Participants in those talks included only communist party leadership and an exclusive set of leaders of the emerging opposition parties and civic groups, so there was little democratic legitimacy to the constitution and electoral system they produced. That’s the reason that most of these documents and rules were intended to be temporary – as the preamble of the former, 1989 Constitution explicitly states. The idea was to strike a temporary compromise in the interest of moving forward with a peaceful transition and then change things later through a democratically elected parliament with a strong mandate from the voters to consolidate the transition.

Participants at the Round Table Talks. Source: MTI Archives

So what we got as an electoral system was just what you might expect: a lowest common denominator compromise. On one side, the communists were leery of calling open elections and the possibility that they might be voted out of the new parliament entirely. On the other side, the opposition doubted their own prospects in the face of what was, in the communist party, still a massive, nation-wide organization. So they drew up a plan that would acquiesce everyone’s concerns and not completely satisfy anyone.

As a result, they produced a complex, two-round, mixed electoral system that was, in the words of elections expert Dr. Kenneth Benoit, “one of the most complicated in the world.” It elected a huge parliament comprising 386 members. Out of the 386, 176 were elected in single-member electoral districts (i.e., the voter cast a ballot directly for an individual candidate), 152 were elected on a party list and 58 from the so-called “compensation” votes.

It had several problems.

Few really understood how it worked, certainly not the average voter. Secondly, it was far too big. Hungary had a parliament of 386 members for its approximately 10 million citizens. Compare that to the Czech Republic, which has 10.5 million citizens and a 200-member parliament. France has 66 million people and 577 deputies in the National Assembly. Germany’s parliament has 620 members for 80.2 million.

In the lead up to the 2010 elections, the current ruling parties, Fidesz-KDNP, made an explicit commitment that, if elected, they would drastically shrink the size of the parliament.

That’s not all. The old parliament was too large and the system too complicated, but the 176 electoral districts were also unequal. The 6th District in Veszprém, for example, elected one representative for 27 thousand voters, while the district in Gödöllő elected one representative for 67 thousand voters. There were many examples like this, and that violates one of the fundamental principles of good electoral law, and an EU directive, that each vote should have equal weight.

Furthermore, the former system made it difficult for minority groups, or any independent candidates or small, political movements, to be represented in parliament. It was difficult to meet eligibility requirements to become a candidate on the ballot and the only way that minorities or independents could have a chance to be elected was in alliance with one of the major parties. And Hungarian citizens living outside the borders of Hungary were largely disenfranchised.

Fact is, every government since 1990 has wanted to change the system somehow. But other than some adjustments to the minimum threshold for forming a parliamentary group, little had been done.

So what we were left with in 2010 was an oversized parliament, poorly apportioned electoral districts, a system disadvantageous to new parties or political players, a lack of direct minority representation, and many disenfranchised Hungarian citizens.

That’s what the renewal of the electoral system – the new laws – set out to change. In future posts in this series, we’ll take a look in more detail at some of the more significant changes like the new districts, the rules for eligibility to be placed on the ballot, minority representation and more.