National remnant

Turkey
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National remnant (Turkish Ulusal artık or milli bakiye) was a former election system used in 1965 elections in Turkey. In 1965 Turkey had 67 electoral districts all of which were provinces of Turkey. The system was developed to support smaller parties which were unable to gain enough votes in an electoral district to gain a seat.

History

The system was enacted on 13 February 1965 by the act no 533. The purpose of the system was to equalize the vote percentage and the seat percentage of a party. The system was repealed on 20 March 1968 by the act no 1036.[1]

The system

In each province, the total number of votes is divided by the number of representatives of the province. This figure, also known as the Hare quota, is the election quota of the province. The votes of each party was divided by the quota and the whole number quotient is the number of representatives each party gained. But there is always a remainder and usually the addition of the representatives of the parties is less than the number of representatives of the province.

The remainders of all the provinces are added to form a national remainder. The difference between the total number of representatives and the number of representatives elected by the quota is known as the missing representatives. Now the electoral district is the national electoral district. The remaining seats are then allocated using the largest remainder method and the Hare quota.[1]

A similar system was used in Italy from 1946 to 1993. However, the Hagenbach-Bischoff quota was used to allocate seats in the districts, with the Hare quota being used to allocate seats in the national electoral district [2]

Example

A province has 8 representatives. The votes are:

Party A: 200,000
party B: 150,000
Party C: 75,000
Party D: 25,000
Total number of votes: 450,000
Election quota: 455,000 / 8 = 56,250

The number of MPs for:

Party A: 200,000 / 56,875 = 3 MPs + 31,250 remainder
Party B: 150,000 / 56,875 = 2 MPs + 37,500 remainder
Party C: 75,000 / 56,875 = 1 MP+ 18,750 remainder
Party D: 25,000 / 56,875 = No MP+ 25,000 remainder.

As shown above, 6 of the 8 MPs are directly elected. The contribution of the province to the national electoral district is 112,500 votes and the remaining two MPs are to be elected by the national remainder.[3]

1965 elections

In the 1965 elections the total number of representatives was 450 and the total number of valid votes was 9,304,563. The nationwide result was;

Party Vote percentage Seat percentage
Justice Party52.953.0
Republican People's Party28,729.7
Nation Party6.36,8
New Turkey Party3.74.2
Workers Party3.03.1
Republican Villagers Nation Party2.22.4

(3.2% of votes were received by various independent candidates.)

As seen above, the maximum deviation between the vote percentage and the seat percentage of the parties was 1%. The election also scored a low 2.32 on the Gallagher index of proportionality. However, in the next election in which the system was abandoned, the deviation increased. For example, the Worker's Party of Turkey received 2.7% of the votes, but only received 2 seats (which corresponds to 0.4% of the seats.)

References

  1. 1 2 Prof Hikmet Sami Turks's paper (Turkish)
  2. ↑ Electoral System Change in Europe-Italy summary
  3. ↑ Election systems blog by Serkan Öztürk(Turkish)
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