Who would have thought that some Austrian elections would be discussed in the Romanian public space? And so it happened! Domestic commentators were quick to “accuse” that Chancellor Nehammer’s attitude towards Romania’s accession to Schengen has a pre-election purpose. In the first stage, Romanians were led to believe that in 2023 there would be a general election in Austria. Later, some started saying that these are local elections. Be that as it may, there seems to be a Romanian stake in this election. Citizens with anti-Austrian sentiments have reason to be satisfied. The chancellor’s party, ÖVP – Österreichische Volksparteiin the polls shows worse than two months ago, when it started to worry us¹. It is almost certain that, although he will win, he will lose his slim majority in parliament after the election on Sunday 29 January (Diet) lands of Lower Austria (Niederösterreich). It seems to be decreasing slightly in two other states where elections will be held on March 5 and April 23: Carinthia (where the ÖVP is and will remain in third place, after the SPÖ – Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs and FPÖ – Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) and Salzburg (where he is in first place, but without a majority).

But I don’t want to talk about such political trifles, but about some “technical” details, which, I know, are not interesting, but I think they should be.

First of all, at the risk of offending readers, I will say that Austria has a federal organization, like the United States, like Germany, etc. True, we are talking about a weaker federalism than in the case of the latter, that is, the Austrian states, of which there are nine, have less “power” than the American and German states, but still more than “subjects”. Therefore, even if the 2023 elections are not general, they are also not local in our sense. They are purely geographically local, since they concern only certain territories of the federal land of Austria, but for these territories they are legislative. State elections usually translated into English, ca State electionsso we can tell them state elections.

For the general election, that is, for the election of the lower house (National Council) parliament, Austria uses a three-tier proportional system, which is considered “complex with subtle effects”². for state electionsi.e. for the unicameral parliaments of the lands (which, in turn, elect the upper house – Bundesrat – federal parliament) use similar systems (with minor differences introduced by the legislation of each land), only on two levels, which brings them closer to the system of parliamentary elections in Romania. For now, I will only talk about the state of Lower Austria, the largest in every respect, if we leave aside the city-state of Vienna. The population is approx. 1.7 million, of which approx. 1.3 million with the right to vote (you can vote, as everywhere in Austria, from the age of 16).

For the election of 56 members Dietdivide the territory into 20 electoral districts (Wahlkreis), which mainly corresponds to administrative districts (Verwaltungsbezirk), each of which has a number of seats (from 1 to 6) proportional to the population from the last census. From the outset, it is intuitive that with so many constituencies for so few seats, it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve proportional representation (in comparison, the other 56-seat states, Upper Austria and Steiermark, have only 5 and 4 constituencies in accordance). Also, let’s clarify that out of 20, 5 have only one mandate, which automatically makes them the majority. And yet the system as a whole is proportional!

That’s why³! The ballot paper (see Figure 1) shows the full and abbreviated name of the parties that can be voted for by simply ticking a box with a pen. Printed below for each party are: (1) lists of candidates at ground level (landlord – white in Figure 1), the same in all electoral districts; (2) lists of candidates at the district level (Wahlkreisliste – yellow in Figure 1), different from one electoral district to another. You can (not necessarily) vote primarily for both, that is, indicate a specific candidate from each list by placing a check mark next to the name.

The law is very lenient about how to vote. The whole point is to clarify the choice for a particular party and/or candidate. For example, simply marking a name on a local list counts as a vote for that party both at the local level (with a preference) and at the land level (without a preference). But you can’t put ticks in the lists of different parties.

After counting the votes, the distribution of mandates is quite simple. At the first stage, at the level of each district, the total number of valid votes is divided by the number of mandates + ​​0.5, establishing the electoral coefficient (Wahlzal) (rounded). This is a deviation from the method Harenatural coefficient (vote/mandate, practiced in Romania, as well as in Austria, in various other elections), plays the role of facilitating the distribution of mandates in the first stage, especially in the case of small constituencies. However, a reasonable addition (you can use the Drup method, that is, the number of mandates + ​​1) also shows a desire not to allocate too much, saving mandates for a higher stage. Each party receives the number of mandates, which is the result of dividing its total number of votes in the respective district by the electoral coefficient (rounded down). For example, in 2018 in the capital of St. Pelten, a district with 6 mandates, there were 97,514 votes; so the share was 97,514/6.5 = 15,003. ÖVP had 44,660 votes which, divided by 15,003, won 2 seats directly⁴.

Note that in single-member constituencies, dividing the valid vote by 1.5 means that either party requires 2/3 of the vote to win a mandate, effectively dooming the citizens of these territories to not electing their representative directly.

The preference order of the individual candidates, while arithmetically impressive (and requiring a lot of space to explain), seems to play a rather small decisive role, generally remaining a pre-established party order.⁵.

At the second stage (see Table 1), at the level of the entire land, for all votes of each party that exceeded the 4% barrier, the d’Ondt method is applied (sequential division by 1, 2, 3. 56 – except for rare cases when the mandates obtained directly in the constituencies of parties that did not reach the pass barrier at the ground level should be deducted). This determines how many seats each party has for the whole of Lower Austria. Those who have already won in electoral districts are subtracted from them, and the difference is provided from the land list. For example, in 2018, the ÖVP won a total of 29 seats. But he already got 19 in the constituencies, so from the land list he got only 10. Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro