Many countries use a bicameral political system – meaning that they have two chambers in their parliament. These parliaments are comprised of a lower house where the government is formed and day-to-day politics is carried out, like the House of Commons, and an upper house that scrutinises and revises legislation, like the House of Lords. Upper houses are sometimes referred to as second chambers or senates.

But while all lower houses in democracies share broadly similar functions and are elected with an equal as possible ratio of voters to representatives across the country, the same is not true of upper houses. Not only do they vary in terms of powers and functions, from the powerful Senates of Italy or the United States to the weak and overridable House of Lords or Austrian Federal Council, but the methods by which they are chosen differ enormously.

Some Upper Houses are directly elected

One way that an upper house is chosen is through direct popular election, though usually with a different method to that used for the lower house.

A common change in method is a different voting system. Australia, who use the majority-based Alternative Vote to elect their House of Representatives, use the proportional Single Transferable Vote to elect their Senate. While the Czech Republic, Poland, Spain and Switzerland all choose their upper houses with a non-proportional voting system in contrast to their proportionally elected lower house. There are also some, like Italy or Japan, that use the same voting system for both chambers, with some small adjustments.

Many directly elected second chambers, including Australia, Spain and Switzerland, have followed the US’s model of giving subnational units (states, provinces, etc.) equal representation regardless of population. This is designed to give less populous units a stronger voice and prevent their interests from being overridden by more populous areas. But ‘territorial representation’ can be done by other means. The Italian Senate is focused on regional representation, but it is done in proportion to population.

Elections to upper houses usually take place at the same time as elections to the lower house. Some do have longer terms, but it is by no means a universal feature. Many of those that do achieve longer terms by electing only a portion of the chamber at each election as in Australia, the US, the Czech Republic or Japan – though the latter two are elected on a different cycle to their respective lower houses.

The obvious reason for directly electing the upper house is to give it a greater level of democratic legitimacy, which enables it to better assert its own authority. It is thus not surprising that most of the more powerful upper houses are directly elected – especially those that are ‘incongruent’, i.e., have a substantively different partisan make-up to the lower house.

But the legitimacy gained through popular election is often lost through the method of election. Equal representation for subnational territories may give smaller areas parity to larger ones, but it can give a minority of the population a veto over a much larger majority – in the US Senate, small, largely rural states with one-sixth of America’s population have the same representation as the remaining five-sixths. Using a plurality or majority voting system over a proportional one also makes the chamber less representative and thus lessens its democratic legitimacy.

Upper houses that use indirect election

The other common method of choosing upper houses in Europe is through indirect election by subnational political units – often state or regional parliaments (e.g., Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands), but sometimes lower-level bodies like local councillors (France). The purpose of such chambers is often to directly represent and protect the interests of regional governments at the national level.

Although indirectly elected chambers lack the direct mandate of a popularly elected one, they are still chosen by directly elected politicians and, given the design and purpose of such political systems, it is best to think of their mandate as an extension to the one given to the regional parliaments. Most indirectly elected chambers are also appointed proportionally – both in party and population terms – avoiding some of questionable methods used to choose some directly elected upper houses.

Unlike directly elected chambers, which are often relatively powerful, there is little consensus on the strength of indirectly elected chambers. Austria’s Federal Council is very weak – other than on certain constitutional matters, it can only delay legislation as the lower house can simply override it with a simple majority vote. The Dutch Senate, on the other hand, has a full veto over the House of Representatives that cannot be bypassed.

Other Methods

Given the powers and purposes of upper houses vary so much, it is unsurprising that there are some election methods that don’t fit neatly into two categories. There are hybrids – such as the Spanish Senate, which combines direct and indirect election. The ‘unusuals’ – like the Irish Seanad, which is part indirectly elected ‘experts’, part Prime Ministerially appointed, part elected by graduates. Then there’s Germany’s Bundesrat which, although sometimes grouped with indirectly elected chambers, is appointed through state governments rather than state parliaments.

There is also the Canadian Senate, which, being entirely appointed by the Prime Minister, is probably one of the most similar to Westminster’s House of Lords. It does, however, have a fixed size of 105 and a mandatory retirement age of 75, meaning a new Senator can only be appointed when a vacancy arises. New appointments must also be made on a regional basis – with each state holding a fixed number of seats. Though there are still calls for reform, the Canadian Senate is at least not ever-expanding in size and is not dominated by certain parts of the country like the House of Lords.

And there are, of course, some countries that simply choose not to have an upper house, instead opting for a single legislative chamber. This is called ‘unicameralism’, in contrast to bicameralism, and is typically the case in smaller countries, such as New Zealand, where there are no strong subnational identities or powerful regional governments.

All 82 Free Democracies

Parline classification of principal method of delegation of upper house in the 82 countries classed by Freedom House as Free Democracies.

A Democratic Second Chamber for the UK

Around the world, countries have found different solutions to balancing democratic legitimacy and the powers of their second chambers. While the exact way the upper house is filled varies quite significantly from country to country, the one commonality between nearly all Western second chambers is that they are designed in some way to represent subnational units, be they states, provinces or regions, at the national level.

Britain remains the odd-one-out. It lacks the democratic legitimacy afforded by elections, whether direct or indirect, virtually nullifying the extent to which it can successfully exercise its scrutinising and revising functions. And it completely fails to represent the UK in all its diversity, overrepresenting some territorial units (especially London and the South East) to the detriment of the other nations, regions and localities.

Instead of a house of powerful regional representatives, we have an antiquated chamber whose membership is chosen partly by aristocrats, partly by the Church of England and largely by Prime Ministers rewarding donors and allies. We need to reform our upper house so that it can have the democratic legitimacy to do its job properly.

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With pressure mounting on Boris Johnson, it’s looking increasingly possible that Britain could well soon have a new Prime Minister. Who it would be, would be a decision for Conservative MPs and, possibly, Conservative party members. But this isn’t how things would go in every country. So, let’s take a look at how other countries choose a new Prime Minister.

Parties Choose Their Candidates

First, a political party needs a candidate. In Britain, if there are multiple candidates, both main parties choose their leader by a ballot of their party members, though they both have preliminary rounds where potential candidates are whittled down by MPs. But membership elections elsewhere are fairly rare – Canada being one of the few countries where all major party leaders are selected this way. Though this is changing, with membership elections becoming more and more common.

Across Europe, there is significant variation in how a party leader is chosen – both between countries and between parties within them. But the most common method of selection is some form of election by party delegates. While members may have some input, the final decision often rests with party officials and/or elected representatives. However, this is only the case if a vote is needed. In many European countries, it is the norm for there to only be a single candidate – with consensus being reached by party elites without need for an election.

There is also the German model where the position of Chancellor candidate is distinct from that of the party leader. The position is usually chosen by party delegates in the run-up to a federal election and, while it does normally go to the party leader, it gives parties the opportunity to recognise that different skills are required to govern than to lead a party. This has been the case with current Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He is not the leader of the SPD, rather somebody with a history of governing successfully and popularly at the state and federal level.

Positive vs Negative Parliamentarism

But, in many countries, being elected party leader is just the first step, you can’t automatically become Prime Minister just because your party is in power. Unlike in countries like the United Kingdom that operate a policy of ‘negative parliamentarism’, whereby parliamentary support for the incoming government is often assumed, many European countries opt for ‘positive parliamentarism’.

Under positive parliamentarism, a new potential government needs to explicitly prove that it is supported by parliament before it can be formed. This ‘proof’ takes the form of an investiture vote – whereby MPs vote on either the nomination of one Prime Ministerial candidate or between several. Exact rules vary from country to country, but you can’t form a government without winning it. Positive parliamentarism can be found in Germany, Ireland and Belgium, as well as the devolved parliaments of Scotland and Wales.

In Germany, positive parliamentarism is strengthened by the rule of constructive votes of no confidence. There, governments can only be defeated in a vote of no confidence if there is a majority in support of an alternative government. If parliament cannot find an alternative, the incumbent government remains in place. This system has since been adopted by other countries, including Spain, Italy and Poland.

However, some ‘negative’ countries do also have investiture votes, just with different rules to positive countries. This is the case in Sweden where a majority of all MPs have to vote against a proposed government for it to be defeated. Last November, Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson (who was unanimously chosen as party leader) was elected PM despite more MPs voting against her than for her. However, as only 49.6% of MPs voted ‘No’, and crucially 21.5% abstained, there was not a majority against her election.

Effectively, under positive parliamentarism a government can only be formed if a majority of MPs have explicitly endorsed it, while under negative parliamentarism a government will be formed unless a majority of MPs explicitly reject it.

2022 is a big year for presidential elections in Europe – with the Italian (24^th January), German (13^th February) and French presidencies (10^th April) all open over the next few months. Of course, these are very different roles – the French President has significant executive powers, while the Italian and German Heads of State are largely ceremonial, performing a similar role to our Queen. But, regardless of their constitutional functions, let’s look at how these presidents will be elected.

How are Heads of State chosen around Europe?

* Not classed as a fully free democracy by Freedom House.

Direct Election

The French President may be unusual in western Europe in being a Head of State with substantive influence over day-to-day government policy, but the presidency does stick to the norm of a popularly-elected president – it is chosen using the Two-Round System. There are a few variations to the rules of the Two-Round System, but the one used for the French President is what you might call the ‘classic’ version: If a candidate wins more than half of votes in the first round, they are elected. If not, the two candidates with the most votes proceed to a second round where the winner will take both a majority of votes and be elected.

Nearly all of Europe’s other directly elected presidents are also chosen using the Two-Round System. Ireland is one of the few to buck the trend – opting instead for the Alternative Vote, still a majority-based voting system, but one that saves them the expense of a second round of election and is in keeping with their tradition of preference voting. Other exceptions are the President of Iceland and Bosnia-Herzegovina’s three Presidents who are all elected by First Past the Post.

You might also like Four ways of electing a president – ranked from worst to best

Indirect Election

However, not all of Europe’s presidencies are directly elected. Some, including Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Latvia, are instead chosen by legislators in special sessions. Rules vary from country to country, but generally, the winning candidate requires the support of at least the majority of national legislators – though higher thresholds and representatives of subnational parliaments, governments or councils are often involved.

The Italian President is elected by a joint session of the Chamber of Deputies and Senate, as well as 58 representatives chosen by Italy’s regional councils (each get three representatives, except the tiny Aosta Valley who only get one). Unlike most elections, there are no explicit candidacies – electors are free to choose any eligible citizen, though parties will often have a preferred candidate. For the first three rounds of voting, a candidate requires two-thirds of votes to be elected, with this being reduced to a simple 50% threshold from the fourth round. Italy’s fractured party system has meant the vote has sometimes gone on for days, with the 1971 election taking 23 rounds of voting before a winner emerged.

Germany’s President is chosen by a specially convened Federal Convention comprising all members of the Bundestag and an equal number of delegates elected by the state parliaments. The election has a maximum of three rounds. In the first two, support from a majority of delegates is required, but this is reduced to a simple plurality for the third. Candidates often receive the formal support of more than one major party – for instance, parties in coalition together usually field a joint candidate. Some, such as the incumbent Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the centre-left SPD in 2017, have even been supported by all four major parties.

The Italian Presidential election will start on the 24^th of January; the incumbent Sergio Mattarella declined to seek re-election, although he was eligible to do so. The German Federal Convention meets on the 13^th of February; Frank-Walter Steinmeier is seeking re-election. The first round of the French presidential election is on the 10^th of April, with the likely second-round pencilled in for the 24^th; incumbent Emmanuel Macron is also seeking re-election.

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In this guest post, Dylan Difford takes a look at Italy’s political system ahead of Sunday’s showdown. While PR-elected governments are the norm in the democratic world – and often more stable than First Past the Post (see Germany, New Zealand and Scotland) – Italy’s politics is unique…

Ahead of the Euro 2020 final on Sunday night, we thought we’d have a look at the country who will be trying to stop football coming home.

For much of the post-war period, Italy used a near-pure version of Party List PR, but in recent decades there have been multiple attempts to rewrite the rules to try and foster something closer to a two-party system. The first change was to the ‘Mattarellum’ in 1993 which saw 75 percent of seats elected by FPTP and 25 percent by Party List PR in a system that was neither truly compensatory, like in Scotland, nor wholly independent.

This was then replaced by the ‘Porcellum’ in 2005 – a ‘bonus’ system that guaranteed the winning electoral coalition 54 percent of seats, with those remaining allocated proportionally. This was then judged unconstitutional in 2013 and replaced by the ‘Italicum’, a two-round majority bonus system that was also judged unconstitutional and never used.

The current system, the ‘Rosatellum’, was introduced in 2017 and is a form of Parallel Voting – whereby some seats are elected using FPTP and some using List PR, with the two calculations being entirely separate.

The Rosatellum

The Italian Chamber of Deputies currently comprises 630 members, largely elected in two overlapping levels. 231 deputies are elected in single-member, FPTP constituencies and 386 are returned via 27 multi-member electoral districts that correspond to the Italian regions, but with the largest split. Unlike in Scotland and Wales, the two levels are independent of each other – the number of constituency seats you win has no bearing on the number of regional seats you are entitled to.

There are, however, two exceptions to the main system – the largely autonomous Aosta Valley returns only a single deputy and is not covered by an electoral district, and there are 12 deputies elected by Italian citizens living abroad.

Unlike in most mixed-member systems, Italians only cast one vote which is counted for both a party list and its associated constituency candidate. The main parties will all file their own lists, but many do so as part of electoral coalitions that field only one candidate for each FPTP constituency. Typically, the government is then formed by the coalition with the most deputies. While somewhat reminiscent of Scandinavian two-bloc systems, Italian electoral coalitions are more ad hoc and less solid.

The Italian Senate is elected by a near-identical method at the same time, though it only returns half as many members.

Counting the votes

In the FPTP seats, the candidate with the most votes takes the seat.

The regional seats are allocated via the Hare-Largest Remainder method of List PR using a calculation done partly at the national level and partly at the regional level. To be eligible for these seats, an electoral coalition has to win 10 percent of the national vote and an individual party needs 3 percent, though those representing linguistic minorities are exempt. For coalitions, seats are then allocated to the parties within the alliance using the same method.

The 12 seats for Italians living abroad are elected via the same method as the regional seats, in four electoral districts (Europe, North America, South America and the Rest of the World).

Who takes the seats?

The regional seats use a closed list, meaning that candidates are elected according to their position on a list predetermined by the parties. Combined with the FPTP seats, where each coalition or party only gives voters a single choice, parties hold a lot of power over who is elected to parliament.

Italy does, however, have electoral quotas for women, with parties obliged to ensure that no more than 60 percent of their candidates are from one sex and to alternate their party lists between men and women. Not adhering to these rules will result in a party losing some state funding.

Parties and government

For a long time, Italian politics was dominated by the catch-all Christian Democrats, who were in government continuously from 1946 to 1994. While sometimes governing alone without a majority, coalitions with some combination of the Socialists, Republicans, Liberals or Social Democrats were the norm. This arrangement largely existed because of both the dominance of the Christian Democrats over the other mainstream parties and a large chunk of parliament being taken up by controversial parties – the Communists, who often took at least a quarter of seats, being shunned due to Cold War pressures and their links to the Soviet Union, and the smaller neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) being excluded for more obvious reasons.

In the early-90s, corruption scandals embroiled all the establishment parties and, within just a few years, the old party system effectively disintegrated. Very few new parties have lasted long, with the Italian party system of today being one of constant splits, mergers and reformations.

Presently, Italy is being governed by a partly technocratic ‘national unity’ government, headed by the non-partisan former president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi and comprised of nearly all the current major parties, including the anti-system populist Five Star Movement, the regionalist turned right-wing populist League, the centre-left Democratic Party and Silvio Berlusconi’s right-of-centre Forza Italia. The current government is the third formed since the last election of 2018 after the Five Star-League and Five Star-Democratic Party coalitions fell apart.

While many of the recent Italian electoral reforms were designed with the intention of creating a more stable politics, none so far have been able to assuage Italy’s reputation for political instability – suggesting that its causes go far deeper than the voting system.

This is a guest post from Dylan Difford who has recently completed an MA in Politics at the University of Essex, focussing on party and voting systems in Britain and Europe.

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On Thursday last week, Italy’s Constitutional Court rejected a request by the far-right League Party to hold a referendum to impose Westminster style First Past the Post (FPTP) for elections to both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, saying it would have been ‘excessively manipulative’. The referendum proposal was submitted by eight regional councils, all led by a right-wing coalition, and would have changed Italy’s electoral law by abolishing the proportional element of the current mixed system, while keeping only the majoritarian, First Past the Post element.

Italy has a long history of debating and changing its electoral system to try and solve government instability and fragile coalitions. The ‘First Republic’ – the period between 1948 and 1994 – was characterised by the dominance of the Christian Democrats in government, hyper-multipartyism, corruption, centrism and ideological polarisation, with – for example – the Italian Communist Party winning a vote share of 34.4% in the Chamber of Deputies in 1976. At the height of the Cold War, no party would let them into power, reducing the options for coalitions.

The fall of the republic, as a consequence of the Tangentopoli/Mani Pulite corruption scandal, led some to think that it was the pure proportional system the country had used since the end of the Second World War that was at the root of the country’s political turmoil. Hence the move to the ‘Mattarellum’ system in 1994, where 75% of seats were chosen under FPTP and 25% through PR with a 4% threshold. Since then there have been continued attempts at introducing some FPTP element into the electoral system.

Since 2017, Italy’s ‘Rosatellum’ system has 37% of seats being elected through First Past the Post and 61% through Closed List PR with a 3% threshold (the remaining 2% of seats are for Italians resident abroad). Unlike in the Scottish Parliament, the list seats don’t compensate for the disproportionality of the First Past the Post seats.

Moving to First Past the Post would have increased the chances of the far-right League Party winning a disproportionate majority at the next election, given that the party is currently polling at around 31%-33% nationally. The League’s attempts to move to FPTP highlight how majoritarian systems are able to hand any party, however extreme, absolute power on a minority of the vote. Indeed, once a party reaches a ‘tipping point’ of electoral success, First Past the Post may allow it to quickly gain seats – something which the League appears to be well aware of and is interested in capitalising on.

Moving to First Past the Post would have increased the chances of the far-right League Party winning a disproportionate majority at the next Italian election Click To Tweet

Though a move to First Past the Post would have had “devastating effects on our democracy” as one Italian MP put it, Italy’s current electoral law is seen as imperfect by many.

Italy’s ‘Rosatellum’ was used to elect the current parliament in March 2018. Though it seeks to combine FPTP and PR, this system fails to gain the purported benefits of either system. Each First Past the Post constituency covers a large area as most of the seats are allocated through parties’ closed lists. Unlike other, more open proportional systems such as the Single Transferable Vote, voters cannot express a preference for which candidates from within each party list should be elected or rank them preferentially. As voters only cast a single vote – either for the party’s closed list or an individual candidate – they cannot kick out a constituency MP from a party they like, without hurting them nationally, as would be the case with AMS in Scotland.

The ruling Five Star/Democratic Party coalition recently proposed a new electoral law – the ‘Germanicum’ (as it’s a bit like Germany’s system) – which would create a more proportional outcome with a 5% threshold. In addition to attempting the referendum route, the League is also proposing a return to the ‘Mattarellum’ (the electoral law in force between 1994 and 2005) or some variation thereof.

But PR is not the cause, but rather a symptom, of Italy’s political and constitutional problems, which are much more deep-rooted and linked to a variety of historical and contextual issues, such as high regional inequality between north and south, clientelism, and corruption.

Switching to First Past the Post or returning to a primarily majoritarian way of electing its representatives will not solve these problems, it will merely restrict democracy, reducing voter choice and leaving many citizens unrepresented.

Creative Commons image via Flickr. Credit.

Of the 43 countries most often considered to be within Europe, 40 use some form of proportional representation to elect their MPs.

The UK stands almost alone in Europe in using a ‘one-person-takes-all’ disproportionate voting system. If we exclude the authoritarian state of Belarus – “Europe’s only remaining outpost of tyranny” – France is the only other European country to use a ‘one-person-takes-all’ system (the Two-Round System).

Proportional voting systems used for lower house national elections in Europe

Source: Inter-Parliamentary Union, Parline Database, https://data.ipu.org/

What type of proportional system do European countries use?

Party List PR

Party List proportional representation is the most widely used form of PR in Europe – 28 countries use it to elect their MPs.

In Party List systems, constituencies are bigger than under First Past the Post and voters elect a group of MPs, rather than a single person. In this system, voters get MPs roughly in proportion to how many people voted for each party.

Party List systems differ in the extent to which citizens can choose which individuals get elected. In ‘closed’ list systems, parties decide who their candidates are and voters can only mark their support for a party (some point out that first past the post is a closed party list of one) Parties decide which candidates fill the seats they have won in the election.

In ‘open’ list systems, each party presents a list of candidates, and citizens can choose which candidate to vote for (or – in some systems – they can choose to vote just for the party if they want). A vote for a candidate is counted as a vote for that candidate’s party.

Semi-open list systems are a mix of the above: voters have more choice in who they can vote for, but – generally – parties can decide the order in which candidates are elected.

Single Transferable Vote

Ireland and Malta use the Single Transferable Vote (STV) to elect their representatives.

As with Party Lists, voters elect a small group of representatives in bigger areas, like a small city or county, as opposed to a single MP in small constituencies as we do in Westminster.

STV gives voters maximum choice on who to vote for. Each elector has one vote. Voters number candidates in order of preference, with a number 1 for their favourite – they can rank all candidates or just vote for their preferred candidate.

To get elected, a candidate needs to reach a set amount of votes. This quota based on the number of seats to be filled and the number of votes cast (read our explanation to find out more about how votes are counted).

If your favourite candidate already has enough votes to win or stands no chance of winning, your vote is transferred to your next choice based on how you ranked candidates.

Under STV, voters can choose between candidates from the same or different parties, which incentivises parties to stand candidates who reflect the diversity of society. Electors can also vote for independent candidates, without worrying about ‘wasting’ their vote.

Mixed Member Proportional Representation

Germany elects their representatives with Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP). Which is similar to the Additional Member System (AMS) in the UK.

MMP is a mix of Westminster’s First Past the Post system and Party List PR – the goal is to provide a proportional parliament but also keep a single local MP.

Voters have two ballot papers. On the first is a list of candidates who want to be the local MP. Like a Westminster election, the voter marks their preferred candidate with a cross and the candidate with the most votes wins and gets a seat, even if most people didn’t vote for them.

On the second ballot paper is a list of parties who want seats in parliament. Each party publishes a list of candidates for these elections, a vote for a party is a vote to make more of their list of candidates into MPs. Seats are allocated in proportion to the votes a party received in the election, taking into account how many ‘first vote’ seats they obtained.

Other systems

The remaining countries (Andorra, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Monaco, San Marino and Ukraine) combine a number of voting systems – mainly First Past the Post and List PR. These tend to be less proportional for a number of reasons.

In Italy, for example, the distribution of the List PR seats does not take into account seats won under the First Past The Post section. While in Greece, the party with the most votes receives a bonus of up to 50 seats, in addition to those they are entitled to on a proportional basis. This makes it likely that a party that receives 40% of votes would achieve an overall majority of seats in the Hellenic Parliament.

Conclusion

The UK is unique among European countries in terms of its electoral system – and not in a good way. It’s the only democracy that uses the outdated, one-person-takes-all First Past the Post system. Westminster is even unique within the UK, as the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, as well as the Northern Ireland and London Assemblies all use forms of proportional representation.

While the List PR systems commonly used in Europe can create parliaments that closely reflect the opinions of their countries, there is often a weaker constituency link.

This is why the ERS favours the Single Transferable Vote: this system enhances voter choice and guarantees a strong link between MPs and voters, while also distributing seats in parliament in a way that is fair and reflects how people voted. Rather than throwing votes on the electoral scrapheap as ‘wasted’, STV helps ensure every vote counts and people’s voices are heard.

It’s time that we caught up with the rest of the world and changed the way we elect our parliament so it finally reflects public opinion.

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