Unequal Geographic Representation in a Mixed-Member Electoral System: Evidence from the German Bundestag

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a systematic geographic bias in the German mixed-member electoral system. This bias concerns the composition of the individual party groups, and, by extension, the composition of the parliament: The Bundestag is much more urban than it would be under equal geographic representation. The bias is caused by the distribution of list seats across districts: since parties have incentives to give the best list positions to candidates from their strongest districts, regions where the vote is more fragmented systematically get more representatives. Since the vote is more fragmented in urban districts, these districts have more MPs than rural districts. The paper empirically analyses Bundestag elections between 1994 and 2017 and demonstrates that geographic disproportionality has increased strongly with the growing fragmentation of the German party system. This affects substantive representation in terms of leadership positions and voting behaviour in the Bundestag. Unequal representation in the German political system therefore also has a geographic component.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In recent elections, more than 95% of Bundestag members ran as district candidates.

2 Or of none, since safe district winners do not need the list as a fallback option. In its strongest form, this argument thus only holds for parties that do not hold safe district seats (see below).

3 Importantly, these are relative strongholds (compared to the party’s state-level performance) and not absolute strongholds, since the allocation of seats happens on the level of states.

4 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this mechanism.

5 Parties often assign MPs additional districts as so-called areas of service (‘‘Betreuungsbereiche’’). However, since they will only run in their ‘real’ district in the next election, MPs have strong incentives to pay more attention to their ‘real’ districts, Siefken (2016).

6 To calculate the ENP, I use the combined vote share of all parties not represented in the Bundestag per district.

7 As shown in the appendix, results are very similar, but harder to interpret, when I use an ordered logit.

8 For a detailed description of the dataset, see Manow and Flemming (2012).

9 Districts are allowed to deviate up to 25% from the standard district size before they have to be redrawn.

10 In the appendix, I show again that the results also hold when using an ordered logit. Moreover, I show that these results are primarily driven by strongholds of the Greens.

11 Again, results are very similar when I use an ordered logit instead of OLS.

12 Zittel (2014), studies a specific policy outcome: the retrenchment of German military facilities.

13 Based on logit models. Full regression results are reported in the appendix.

14 This analysis extends Kauder and Potrafke (2019) since they only study the behavior of the 223 directly elected conservative MPs. My analysis also includes list MPs that ran in a district.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Lukas Haffert

Lukas Haffert is a senior researcher at the chair for comparative political economy at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on questions of public finance, historical persistence, and urban-rural divides.