2. The Electoral System and Layers of Government

The Netherlands has been a unified monarchy since 1815 and a constitutional monarchy since 1848, when King Willem II avoided revolution by asking prominent liberal Johan Thorbecke to draft a constitution, promising to relinquish his decision-making powers to the parliament. The current head of state is Queen Beatrix, who began her reign in 1980.

There are four main layers of government in the Netherlands: local, provincial, national, and European. There are 12 provinces and over 400 councils. There are also 27 water management boards, which seem to have been around in one form or another for centuries and criss-cross over council and provincial boundaries. Given that half the country is either below sea level or less than one metre above sea level, the careful management of water is crucial to the survival of the Netherlands.

It is probably worth pointing out now that the Dutch provincial governments are not comparable to state governments in places like Australia or the US. Provinces mainly concern themselves with planning, water and environmental management. Councils actually have quite a bit of power, as they are the providers of welfare and numerous social services. While this is all done within a national framework, the services a council provides varies significantly across the country.

The one thing that members of the provincial parliaments do which is unusual is electing the Senate, or Eerste Kamer (First Chamber), which has 75 members. In this way, voting at the provincial level is also indirectly voting for the First Chamber, given that provincial MPs almost always vote for someone of their party.

At all levels of government, the Dutch use a variant of the d’Hondt system using the Hare quota to count votes cast. This was first introduced in 1918. In every day terms, the system is one of proportional representation where the percentage of votes received by a party is almost directly proportional to the number of seats they receive. For example, if a council consisting of 9 seats holds an election where 9,000 electors cast a valid vote, the quota for a party to win a seat is 1,000. This means that it is fairly easy to win a seat in the Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber), the Dutch House of Representatives, which has 150 seats and therefore a quota of 0.66%.

At all elections, votes are counted and presented at council level, but are tallied at the level of government being elected, which means that parties can win seats regardless of whether their vote is concentrated in one particular area, or spread out across the electorate. This is why there are ten parties in the Second Chamber, and there have been more in the past.

Candidates are elected from a list compiled by each participating party, where the first person on the list, known as the lijsttrekker (literally, list-puller) will almost always be the party’s parliamentary leader, and the last few people on the list are lijstduwers (list-pushers) - usually well-known party members who do not wish to be elected. This can happen because if a party wins say, 8 seats, the first 8 candidates on its list are elected, regardless of how many votes these candidates have received individually. The only exception to this is if a particular candidate has received 25% of a quota for a seat, they replace the candidate lowest on the list who would otherwise be elected. Example: Party A wins 7 seats. Normally, candidates 1-7 on the list would be elected, but candidate 12 has polled more than 25% of a quota in their own right. They therefore are elected by preference votes and replace the candidate at number 7 on the list. 

More psephologically-inclined readers will by this point be wondering how the Dutch deal with the remaining few seats where no party has enough votes left to pick up a seat. This is where lijstverbindingen (literally: list-connections, but I’ll call them list alliances) come into play. Each party may agree to a list alliance with one other party only. The alliance means that when the final seats are being distributed, the two allied parties combine their lists as though they were one party, so obviously alliances are only made with a like-minded party. The highest averages method is then used to determine the outcome.

Voting has been voluntary since 1970 and turn-out depends heavily on the perceived importance of, or interest in, the level of government. In recent years, council elections have had a 50-60% overall turn-out, provincial has been at 40-50%, national at 75-80%, and European between 30-40%.

Now, keen as I am to start describing the various parties, in order to put all this into context and explain why such a system manages to work as well, if not better, than other electoral systems, it helps to have an understanding of Dutch political culture, which I will discuss in my next post.

Advertisement