What is the point of Germany's 299 "party seats" in the Bundestag?

Question

This question about Bundestag elections (How does the German Bundestag election system work?) does a good job at summarising Bundestag elections. Long story short: 299 directly-elected candidate from local electoral districts, 299 party seats filled from lists on a proportional vote in each Land, and some overhang seats to balance it all off.

The point of the directly-elected candidates is clear: so that people may be represented by someone locally, someone who may be their point of contact and who they can take their grievances to. Fair.

My question is about the other 299 seats: with a system of overhang seats, why do we need them at all? Can we not have more electoral districts (say 400 or 500) and then use the second vote to provide enough overhang seats to ensure proportionality?

In the previous question, a comment said "The list mechanism allows parties to get e.g. their budget expert in even if he or she is no charismatic speaker." Is that all or am I missing something? Putting party politics aside, wouldn't it ideally be better to just have directly-elected seats and the overhang ones (which would indeed become more numerous)? So there would still be seats filled from lists but way less then now, and that would prevent list candidates from having a sure seat in Parliament just because they have the favors of their party.

Answer 1

There are two common electoral systems which are proportional representation and plurality voting.

• Proportional representation:
  • It gives a voice to regionally diverse groups. If ten or twenty percent of the voters support a party nationwide, with no regional concentration, that party gets ten or twenty percent of the seats (after rounding) even if they do not reach a plurality in any one district.
  • It makes it easier for new parties to form. A new party can organize themselves, try to get a couple of percent, and send representatives to parliament who have a voice. The Grüne and the AfD did that, the Piraten failed after some state election successes. This would have been much harder if their votes had been discounted until they reach a plurality in any one district.
  • It helps to encourage coalition governments which represent a broad consensus. For decades before Reunification, it was the FDP with either the SPD or the Union. This kept the socialist tendencies in the SPD and the authoritarian tendencies in the Union in check. This is retained in the German system.
• Plurality voting:
  • It helps to create clear majorities. While it is not universal, it tends to encourage two-party systems, with the "coalition talks" being done before the election when the candidate and party platform is determined. After that, one or the other side wins. This is lost in the German system.
  • Plurality voting gives each district a clear representative. People can call "their" MdB with any complaints they have.

Germany wants all the advantages of proportional representation and still keep some of the advantages of plurality voting. This leads to the current system, which used to work nicely as long as there were two large parties and a couple of smaller ones.

To make this happen, they could do away with the seats "reserved" for party lists, but that would result in a wildy fluctuating size of the parliament. That can be a problem if they want to staff not just a budget subcommittee and one on taxes but also fisheries and culture. Right now the size is also fluctuating, but only upwards and not downwards.

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Follow-up with some numbers:

In the last Federal election the CDU/CSU got 32.9 percent of the proportional vote, but 77.3 percent of the district pluralities.

If there had been 500 districts and none reserved for the proportional representatives, the Bundestag would have to be increased to 1,175 members to reach the desired proportion. A more than twofold increase.

With 299 districts and 299 seats reserved list distribution, the overhang added a bit over 100, which is less than a 20% increase.

Answer 2

The system wasn't created by adding separate “party seats” and isn't described in that way in the law. There is only one sort of seat and they are distributed according to the second vote. Period. That's the driving force behind the composition of the German Bundestag and the most important feature of the system, even if it often gets lost in discussion of a “mixed voting system” and the like. Among those 598 seats, some are filled with the candidates who won a plurality of the vote in their district but their seats are not thought of as a distinct type of seats.

Having a limited total number of seats and directly elected candidates creates situations in which candidates with a plurality of the vote in their district would not have a seat. This is counter-intuitive and feels anti-democratic, hence the overhang mandates. In any given parliament, there aren't that many of them and they do not play a major role in the relative strength of the parties. It's a quirk on top of a mostly proportional voting system. Importantly, overhang seats do not restore the proportionality of the representation, they distort it. So if there were more districts, there would be more overhang seats but less proportionality.

Then, the details of the way the system works (and especially the fact seats are first distributed by province before being allocated to a party) create some paradoxes and, after a court case, the system was altered to add another type of “balancing” seats. This a fix on top of an add-on, historically the system wasn't designed in that way and nobody asked about the point of “party seats” because those were the main seats.

You could perhaps contrive a system where you add many balancing seats to get some specific proportion to the various political parties without specifying the number of seats beforehand but it's difficult to see how that would work or be desirable. You still need party lists to fill up all those balancing seats and you still need people to cast two votes, lest the results be strongly biased by the first-past-the-post logic of the so-called first vote. Furthermore, the fact that the number of elected members of parliament is not set before the vote (and can change during the mandate as rules on their replacement differ depending on how they were elected) does not seem like a very desirable feature. Your idea would just worsen this consequence as well.

There is something to be said for directly elected members of parliament of course but then you end with something like the British or French systems, with a strong bias in favor of the largest parties. From that perspective, they are more seats than districts in Germany to ensure the representation is (roughly) proportional and overhang and balancing seats to fix the paradoxes arising from the direct election of some candidates. On the other hand, the question of why you need “party” seats never arose, they are the most important feature of the system.

Answer 3

The problem is the overhang seats to ensure proportionality, and how large you want the German Bundestag to be. The current design is to ensure at least 598 total seats of which exactly 299 are constituency seats. But the total can be higher due to the overhang seats.

In the 2021 elections, the Christian Social Union won 45 constituency seats and 6.03% of the party vote (all in Bavaria). To ensure almost exact proportionality, this would suggest an overall total number of seats of at least 45/0.0603 about 746.3. Things were not quite like this because about 7% of the national party vote went to parties and independents which did not get any representation, but after all the state and party proportionality calculations were done together with a revote in Berlin, there were 735 total seats required.

If there had been more constituency seats, it is likely the number of CSU constituency victories would have been similarly higher: if there had been 100 or 200 extra constituency seats nationwide, there may have needed to have been total numbers of members of the Bundestag of around 980 or 1225.

This is an excessive number: the chamber would not have space for them (the back rows today look a bit bare with no desk or microphones for the added chairs squeezed into the back corridor) and there would not be enough office space for them or their staff.

You could have more constituency seats without enlarging the chamber excessively if you were prepared to abandon some of the proportionality and adjust the overhang rules, but this would require constitutional change in Germany. The whole German system also looks vulnerable to decoy lists or substantial tactical vote splitting between constituency and party votes, but this has not yet happened on a major scale there.

Answer 4

It helps to look at the German voting system by considering German history rather than comparing it directly to other modern systems like the English first past the post.

In the second empire of 1871, elections to the Reichstag indeed followed the majority vote system; however, a candidate required a 50 % share of the votes to be elected and if nobody reached that in the first round a runoff was held. Throughout the second empire, there were calls to introduce a proportional vote but that was never implemented.

In the Weimar Republic from 1919, a proportional vote was instead introduced. In the interest of brevity I will merely describe it as follows: the number of votes a party achieved divided by 60,000 and rounded according to standard rules pretty much equalled the number of seats the party would get. (There were restrictions that resulted in the USPD not gaining a single seat from its 235,145 votes in 1924 but these would be too much for this question.)

After the war, the constitutional convent of the western occupied zones decided to, in principle, stick to proportional representation but with a fixed-size parliament rather than a varying-size one as in the Weimar era. Thus, in principle only the national vote share determines how many seats of the currently 598 a party receives. To ensure regional representation and distribution across the states (federalism), the national vote share is broken down to a state vote share and the seats are actually filled on a state level.

However, representation at state level does not ensure representation of all parts of the country in parliament—a feature automatically implemented in the British system where each MP directly represents exactly one certain bit of land, all of which together add up to the UK (ignoring Sinn Fein and the likes). Thus, it was decided to make a certain part of the seats directly elected ones with voting districts. While voting districts are still much larger than their UK counterparts (but smaller than their US counterparts) each part of the country has exactly one locally elected MdB (Mitglied des Bundestages, member of the Bundestag) that e.g. local businesses or citizens can address with any issues they have.

Thus, in a nutshell the full chain of thoughts is:

• 598 seats in parliament for proportional representation
  • 299 of which are designated for regional representation in a first past the post system.

It might be worth mentioning that the overhang seats in the current system only exist because a strictly proportional representation (as is desired) cannot be achieved with directly elected candidates only. There will always have to be some seats filled by some other mechanism. How to achieve this is a political discussion, the current system is Germany’s current answer.