Manner of Elections

Half of the members of the Bundestag are elected directly from 299 constituencies using the first-past-the post method of election. The other half – another 299 - are elected from the list of the parties on the basis of each Land (the 16 regions that make up Germany).

♤ The people cast two votes: one for a candidate in their constituency and one for a political party. The process is called a personalized proportional representation system. Simply put, Germans vote to decide how the 598 base seats in the Bundestag will be divided among members of Germany’s various political parties.

♤ “The Germans are all about proportion,” said Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “The two votes boil down to what’s their favorite guy who represents them in their districts and what’s their favorite team that will represent them in the Bundestag.”

♤ The first vote, on the left side of the ballot, is a direct vote for a member of parliament in that constituency, similar to Americans voting for a congressional reprentative in their district. There are 299 constituencies in Germany, so direct votes make up roughly half of the seats in the Bundestag.

♤ The second vote, on the right side of the ballot, is for a political party. Parties in Germany’s 16 states put together lists of candidates; the results from the second votes determine which candidates make it off the lists to the remaining 299 seats in parliament. Parties need to receive at least 5 percent of the second votes in a state to qualify for a seat.

The system starts to get complicated when Germans split their votes, meaning they vote for a candidate from one party in the first vote and for a different political party in their second vote. That can throw off the balance of seats in parliament so that one party is more strongly represented than they should be based on the results of the proportionate second votes.

So Germans created “overhang” and “balance seats.” Those are extra seats in the Bundestag that ensure every candidate who was directly elected gets a seat while political parties are still proportionally represented based on the number of votes they received. A German state’s population is taken into consideration when votes are converted into seats.

Reason behind adopting the above Election System

This system is designed to block membership of the Bundestag to small, extremist parties. As a consequence, there are always a small number of parties with representation in the Bundestag.

Comparative analysis of Bundestag

One striking difference when comparing the Bundestag with the American Congress or the British House of Commons is the lack of time spent on serving constituents in Germany.

This is so because:

♤ Only 50% of Bundestag members are directly elected to represent a specific geographical district.

♤ A serving constituency seems not to be perceived, either by the electorate or by the representatives, as a critical function of the legislator.

♤ There is also a practical constraint on the expansion of constituent service in the form of a limited personal staff of Bundestag members (especially compared to members of the US Congress).