Election Resources on the Internet: Elections to the Andalusian Parliament

The Autonomous Community of Andalusia held an early parliamentary election on Sunday, December 2, 2018. An overview of the Andalusian proportional representation electoral system is presented here; Andalusia's party system will be reviewed in Part II of this presentation.

In addition, autonomous community- and provincial-level results are available here (and also in CSV format) for the following Andalusian autonomic parliamentary elections:

The Andalusian Parliament consists of a single house, composed of 109 members directly elected by universal adult suffrage for a four-year term of office. Each one of Andalusia's eight provinces - Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga and Sevilla (Seville) - is a constituency entitled to an initial minimum of eight seats; the remaining 45 seats are distributed among the eight provinces in proportion to their population, although no province may have more than twice the number of deputies as any other.

For the 2012, 2015 and 2018 elections, parliamentary seats were allocated in the following manner:

	Province			Seats

	Almería			12
	Cádiz			15
	Córdoba			12
	Granada			13
	Huelva			11
	Jaén			11
	Málaga			17
	Sevilla			18

	Total			109

Otherwise, the Andalusian electoral system is identical to the system used to choose members of the Spanish Congress of Deputies. As such, parties, federations, coalitions and agrupaciones de electores (electors' groups) present closed lists of candidates; electors then cast a ballot for a single list; and seats in each constituency are apportioned according to the largest average method of proportional representation (PR) - the d'Hondt rule - among lists receiving at least three percent of all valid votes cast in the constituency, including blank ballots.

It should be pointed out that the Andalusian electoral system favors sparsely populated provinces - particularly Almería and Huelva - at the expense of Cádiz, Málaga and Seville. For example, in the 2008 parliamentary election, the smallest quotient used to allocate seats was 20,327 votes in Huelva, but in Seville the same figure rose to 53,273 votes. It should noted as well that the three percent barrier is irrelevant: in each and every one of the eight Andalusian provinces, the d'Hondt rule creates a de facto representation threshold which is larger than the barrier set forth by law.