2019 Elections remake

What’s new in this version of the law?

In the new version of this law, there will be a threshold of 5% on the percentage that each list should obtain to qualify for seats in the parliament, in the current law, this threshold is null, but what deos it mean and what is it meant for?

The threshold in this context is simply a qualification condition to be assigned a seat in the parliament, the logic behind it is that not matter how much vote a list obtains, if it doesn’t obtain X% of the total number of votes in its jurisdiction, it cannot have a seat in the parliament. Another reason for adopting a threshold is that the least reminder method does not usually provide a clear majority if left without such a requirement the elevates the barrier to entry to the parliament. To dive in more details you can check this amazing post from Bawsala Association.

What can this threshold change in the upcoming parliament?

To answer this question we need first to look at the current parliament, and the polls of how an upcoming parliament should look like.

The current parliament of 2019 elections:

As I mentioned above, I used data provided by Cahiers de la Liberté, though I wrote my own code to simulate the current and amended electoral law, you can find all of that in this repo.

After cleaning and processing here’s the complete data of current parliament with a detailed table where we can pinpoint how much each party benefited from the largest remains system:

Before we dive into the the results with the threshold, Id like to pin point, that Outsider_1 and Outsider_2 are simply independent lists I didn’t have time to check the proper names for, but I trust the data collectors in this regard.

Concerning the the table above however, the clearest observation is that the top 6 winning parties had at least 45% of their seats distributed by the largest remains system, while the rest of the lists obtained all of their seats distributed by the same system instead of direct votes(also referred to by quota seats).

Given the notes above, the idea of the threshold is simply distributing the largest remains seats on less lists, which will relatively help declare a winner with clear majority(109 seats). Let’s dive into how the parliament will look like if a 5% threshold is established using the same data:

Looking at the table above its doesnt seem that we have a major change in the proportion of largest remains seats comparing to direct voting seats for the top 6 winners, however, the list of winners did shrink indeed by few parties(7 to be precise) counting for 33% of the previous list.

In case you are more interested(or not, am not asking, you need to check this out) you can check this lovely dashboard I wrote to illustrate the potential changes in the elections results have we changed the threshold. Check it out in this link.

You can check the code of the above dashboard in this repo