Underrepresentative democracy: why Turkey should abandon Europe's highest electoral threshold.

• Published date: 22 March 2011
• Author: Alkin, Sinan
• Date: 22 March 2011

It is Election Day: you go to the polls, wait in line, and cast your ballot. You have been evaluating all the parties for months, and you are confident in the decision you have finally made. You vote for a party that is extremely popular in your corner of the country. Watching the returns, you see that your party is polling at around 45% in your province, easily defeating its competitors. Unfortunately, your party is not so popular nationally. To your dismay, you find out that your three representatives in the legislature combined for less than 23% of the vote in your province.

This scenario was the unfortunate reality for many voters in the province of Sirnak during the 2002 national elections in Turkey. (1) Since the current Turkish Constitution was introduced in 1982 following the 1980 military coup, (2) the electoral system has often faced criticism. The electoral threshold, which mandates that a political party must obtain at least 10% of the vote in a national election to be admitted to Parliament, has been a focal point of these criticisms and the subject of court cases in the Turkish Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, as well as numerous legislative reform efforts.3 While the threshold has withstood many challenges, commentators have raised concerns about the threshold's effects of forming unrepresentative governments and keeping minority and regional parties out of the Grand National Assembly. (4) As evidenced by the results of the 2002 election which disenfranchised approximately 45% of the nation's voters, (5) these concerns are well-founded, and this Note argues for Turkey to reform its election law to create a more democratic system. Recently, there has been a push in Turkey toward major constitutional reform,6 and commentators have suggested that reform to the electoral threshold should be included. (7) A constitutional reform package submitted on March 30, 2010, by Turkey's majority party, AKP, did not include changes to the electoral threshold, (8) This reform package was adopted, without any mention of the electoral threshold, after a referendum on September 12, 2010 passed with 58% approval. (9)

This Note suggests that a threshold of 5%, which is in line with European averages, would drastically reduce the amount of "wasted" votes and would allow for representation of more viewpoints, including important regional and minority parties. Part I of this Note provides the context for the electoral threshold and an explanation of how it works. First, the parliamentary system is explained, as well as the concept of electoral thresholds. Second, the Turkish parliamentary system is explored, as well as the legal and historical basis for the threshold. Part Ii of this Note addresses Turkish electoral history since the implementation of the threshold. Part III of this Note examines the opposition to the threshold, both from within Turkey and from the international community. Part IV of this Note examines the European Court of Human Rights decision Yumak and Sadak v. Turkey, which addresses the legality of the threshold under the European Convention on Human Rights. Part V provides a discussion of alternatives to the current threshold, including systems used in other European states, as well as alternatives proposed specifically to address the threshold in Turkey.

The final section, Part VI, offers the author's recommendation that Turkey adopt a 5% threshold, and includes an explanation for that recommendation.

I. PARLIAMENTARY PRINCIPLES AND THE TURKISH SYSTEM

A. Basic Parliamentary Principles

The majority of legislatures in Europe ate elected by way of a proportional representation system. (10) Unlike the plurality system employed in the United States, in which single-seat districts are won by candidates obtaining the highest share of votes, or the majority vote system employed in the United Kingdom, (11) proportional representation systems seek to allocate legislative seats in multi-seat districts by correlating the allocation of seats with the result of the vote. (12) Most modern democracies have adopted the proportional representation system of electing legislatures (13) because it leads to results that are more representative of popular opinion than the plurality system. (14)

Some proportional representation systems utilize election thresholds. These thresholds generally achieve a greater degree of stability in the formation of governments in parliament. (15) Many governments have considered these thresholds necessary because proportional representation can increase the difficulty of forming stable governments when a large number of parties are voted into the legislature. (16) By ensuring that only parties achieving a certain percentage of the national vote are seated, thresholds can prevent severe fragmentation in parliament, (17) Therefore, if a government set the election threshold at five percent, only parties polling at five percent or greater would be seated. The level at which the electoral threshold is set varies from state to state, and it can have a significant impact on the political landscape, with the conventional logic being that higher thresholds increase stability while decreasing representativeness. (18)

B. The Turkish System

The Turkish Grand National Assembly forms the national legislative body of the Republic of Turkey. It is a single chamber consisting of 550 members, each elected for four years. (19) Each of Turkey's eighty-one provinces is represented by at least one deputy, while more heavily populated provinces may be split up into multiple constituencies. (20) Parties must obtain ten percent of the national vote in order to seat members in the Grand National Assembly. (21) This threshold is established by Law No. 2839, Section 33. (22) For parties passing the ten percent threshold, seats ate allocated using the D'Hondt method of proportional representation, which is a widely used mathematical formula for allocating seats in proportional representation systems. (23)

The current Turkish electoral system is a result of a bloodless military coup in 1980 that followed a period of volatility and violence. (24) The Turkish military blamed the instability of the 1970s on the inability of the parties in parliament to form a stable government. (25) No party was able to gain a majority in the legislature in either the 1973 or 1977 election. As a result, this period saw many changes in government, with one coalition dissolving and being replaced by another. (26) It was this instability that prompted the military to include an electoral threshold in the Turkish system. (27)

Turkey's electoral threshold is the highest amongst European democracies. (28) The average threshold in Europe (excluding Turkey) is 4.6%, and of the twenty-four countries in Europe that have thresholds, nineteen have thresholds of 5% or lower. (29) The five countries that have thresholds higher than five percent are Turkey (10%), Liechtenstein (8%), the Russian Federation and Georgia (7%), and Moldova (6%). (30) All other states either employ the threshold system with thresholds of five percent or lower, (31) or they do not use thresholds at all. (32) In addition, many states attempt to "broaden participation" with exceptions to the threshold requirement, (33) while Turkey does not. (34)

II. TURKISH ELECTORAL HISTORY

Since the threshold became law, Turkish elections have consistently disenfranchised a significant percentage of voters. In most of these elections a significant portion of the electorate voted for parties that did not pass the ten percent threshold. (35) Of the eight elections since the coup, three produced coalition governments and five yielded single-party governments. (36) Prior to the coup, proportional representation without a threshold had been used since 1960. (37) In the four elections in that period, two resulted in coalition governments and the other two resulted in single-party governments. (38) These results suggest that Turkey's electoral threshold has not made elections significantly more likely to produce single-party governments, which are regarded as more stable. (39)

A. The 2002 National Elections

The 2002 national elections demonstrated that the 10% threshold can produce unrepresentative election returns in the Grand National Assembly. While eighteen parties participated in the elections, only two passed the threshold. (40) The Justice and Development Party (AKP) won 363 seats, accounting for 66% of the seats in Parliament, despite only polling at 34.26% of the national vote. (41) The Republican People's Party (CHP) won 178 seats, accounting for 33% of the seats in Parliament, despite only polling at 19.4% of the national vote. (42) Several other parties polled between 5% and 9.5% of the vote, but were not awarded seats in Parliament because they failed to pass the national threshold. (43)

The 2002 election is widely considered the least representative in Turkey's history, as approximately 45% of voters cast their ballots for parties who did not win a single seat in Parliament. (44) Numerous factors have been posited as explanations for the unusually high fragmentation of the vote, with so many voters casting their ballots for parties polling under 10%. (45) Regardless of which explanations hold true, the results would have been far more representative if the threshold had been set at a more reasonable level. (46) The end result of the elections was the formation of a government with the AKP holding an absolute majority, despite polling at less than 35% nationally. (47) Thus, a party for which 65% of the population did not vote ruled as if majority-elected. (48) A system where this is possible could lead to bizarre and undemocratic policies. (49)

The province of Sirnak is a prime example of a failure to represent the voting populace in the 2002 election. There, DEHAP was the highest polling party at 45.95% but was not allocated any of the province's three...