The victory of Moreno Bonilla in the regional elections of Andalusia in 2022 is remembered for the absolute majority of the popular that will allow them to govern alone until 2026. However, this majority in the Andalusian parliament does not exist in the votes.
In those elections, the popular won 53% of the seats with only 43% of the ballots: a premium in seats of almost 10 points.
Is this case the tonic or the exception of the autonomous electoral laws? Are these cases repeated more in some communities than in others? To find out which are the most unfair regional electoral systems, elDiario.es has analyzed the electoral results of the 182 regional elections that have been held under democracy. To measure how unfair each electoral system is, we have calculated the differences between the percentage of seats and the percentage of votes obtained by all the parties that ran in each election.
The data, obtained from the electoral history archive of the Generalitat Valenciana, includes only the parties that obtained a seat or that added more than 3% of the votes in those elections. Which candidacies have won the highest prizes in the last elections?
PSOE, PP and Coalición Canaria are the parties that have benefited the most from the autonomous systems in the last electoral cycle, which began in 2018. A situation that coincides with the fact that they have usually been the parties with the most votes in the elections in which they have run. But the distortions have been repeated for years.
In the autonomous elections of the Canary Islands in 2015, the Canary Islands Coalition was the third force in votes (behind the PSOE and PP) and, nevertheless, it was the first in number of seats. In Galicia, the PP has governed with an absolute majority for four consecutive legislatures (since 2009) although in none of the four elections has it won more than 50% of the votes.
On the other side of the deck, Izquierda Unida, Podemos and Ciudadanos almost always repeat among the most affected. The purples were left without a single seat in the autonomous elections of Castilla-La Mancha (2019), Galicia (2020) and Cantabria (2019) with 7%, 4% and 3.4% of the votes, respectively. But they are not alone. 6% of the voters who decided for Ciudadanos in the Canary Islands in 2015 were left without representation. Neither did the 5% who voted for Vox in Extremadura in 2019.
This distance between overrepresented and underrepresented parties in regional parliaments is more acute in some autonomies than in others. For example, Murcia, Castilla-La Mancha, the Canary Islands and Castilla y León are the communities that most distort the conversion of votes into seats. In these autonomies, the average difference between the percentage of seats and votes for each candidacy is above 3 points, as can be seen in the following graph.
Why do some regional electoral systems distort more than others the votes cast at the polls? Unlike a general election, which uses the same electoral law for the entire national territory, each community uses its own system.
On the one hand, the d’Hondt formula for allocating seats is one of the common elements that all autonomous electoral systems have. This method tends to favor the parties with the most votes in the allocation of parliamentary seats compared to other similar systems such as Sainte-Laguë.
In other words, in all the communities the parties with the most votes tend to be the ones that benefit the most from the electoral system. Madrid is one of the clearest examples: despite the fact that it distributes 135 seats (in 2021, 136) in a single constituency, the relationship between the percentage of votes and deputies is not exact and in all the elections there are parties that benefit more than others.
In some communities, such as Madrid or the Canary Islands, electoral barriers are also key to electoral results. For example, if Podemos in Madrid does not exceed 5% of the votes, it will not enter the distribution of seats. In the Canary Islands, Ciudadanos was left out of the distribution of seats in 2015 since it did not overcome the barrier of 6% of the votes in the entire archipelago or 30% on the island. The new electoral system that was used in the 2019 elections reduced this obstacle to 4% of the votes in the entire Canary Islands and 15% insular and the orange party was able to enter parliament.
One of the main causes of the distortions between votes and seats in each autonomy is in the number of constituencies (each one of the territorial divisions that elect deputies) and their size. In other words, the communities that distribute many deputies in a single constituency tend to be more proportional than those that distribute few deputies in many provinces or islands.
Precisely, the Canary Islands and Castillas are the communities that elect fewer deputies in each constituency. Why is it key? Because it is much more difficult for the third, fourth or fifth parties to get a seat in areas that distribute 3, 4 or 5 deputies.
Often times, these smaller constituencies tend to elect more deputies than their share of population. This distortion in favor of less populated areas and regions is repeated in practically all electoral systems in Spain and serves to guarantee that certain less inhabited areas have parliamentary representation and that public policies do not focus exclusively on large cities with many inhabitants.
Castilla-La Mancha is the community with the fewest representatives by constituency. Since the last reform of the La Mancha electoral law during the Government of Cospedal, each of the five provinces elects an average of 7 deputies to the Cortes.
What are the consequences of these distortions? That sometimes parliamentary majorities can be created that do not exist in the votes. In addition to the absolute majority of the PP in Andalusia, the socialists García-Page and Fernández Vara govern with an absolute majority in Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura with 44% and 47% of the votes, respectively.
From 1980 to the present, the autonomous electoral systems have favored 37 absolute majorities of a single party that did not exist at the polls. That is, candidacies that obtained majorities to govern without the need to agree with other political forces but that did not add up to more than 50% of the votes. Of these 37 majorities, 16 were registered in the last two decades.
These electoral systems will be key in the next regional elections of 28M and could tip the scales for a left or right government in one of the 12 communities that elect the representatives of their regional parliaments.
Already in 2019, two autonomous communities modified their electoral systems to reduce the distortion between votes and seats: the Canary Islands and the Region of Murcia. The result? The representativeness improved a lot.
In the case of the Canary Islands, the main novelty is that a new regional constituency was added that chose 9 deputies. In other words, the Canaries cast two votes to elect their representatives in the Parliament of the Canaries: one for the island and the other for the entire Canary Islands. This new constituency improved the representativeness of the large islands (Tenerife and Gran Canaria), which represented 80% of the population but only elected 50% of the seats until that year.
The Region of Murcia had been autonomous until 2019 with more distortion between votes and seats. Until 2015, in the region the seats were distributed in five constituencies lower than the province (exceptional case with Asturias) that rewarded the parties with more implantation in rural areas. First PSOE and then the PP.
What changed in the last elections? The electoral reform approved by PSOE, Podemos and Ciudadanos in 2015 introduced a single constituency and lowered the barriers from 5% to 3%. The result is in the data: they were the elections with the best relationship between votes and seats in the history of autonomy.
So, which are the parties that have all the cards to be favored by the laws and the electoral system of each autonomy? Find your autonomous community and find out which candidates have benefited and suffered the most in all the regional elections held in democracy.
