Passive suffrage
All Spaniards who have attained the age of majority are eligible to be candidates in a general election, provided that they are qualified to vote and do not meet any of the criteria for ineligibility: members of the royal family, of the Constitutional Court, of the Supreme Court, of the Council of State, of the Nuclear Safety Council, of the military or police (active), of an electoral commission, the Defender of the People, the Attorney General, government appointees, the president of Radio Televisión Española, the governor of the Bank of Spain, judges, prosecutors, and those sentenced to imprisonment by a final conviction, among others. [9]
As of the general-election law reform of 2007, candidate campaigns must present gender-balanced electoral lists, so that each gender, male and female, comprises at least 40% of the list. [10] This reform was appealed by the Popular Parliamentary Group of the Congress of Deputies before the Constitutional Court, which in 2008 affirmed that the reform was constitutional. [11]
Following the general-election law reform of 2011, parties without representation in the Congress or Senate must collect signatures of voters endorsing their candidacies in order to run in the general election, in addition to other requirements. The political parties need 0.1% of the signatures of the voter population of each constitutuency. Groupings of electors need at least 1% of signatures. Each citizen may only sign for one candidacy. [12]
The Spanish Constitution requires that the Congress of Deputies by elected by free, equal, direct, secret, universal suffrage. [13] Deputies are elected via proportional representation (with first-past-the-post voting in Ceuta and Melilla), with closed lists in each electoral constituency. [14] The Constitution specifies that the Congress of Deputies must have a minimum of 300 and a maximum of 400 members. [13] The current number is 350 deputies, by the determination of the Organic General Election Regime Law approved in 1985. [15]
There are 52 electoral constituencies for the Congress of Deputies, which correspond to the fifty provinces of Spain plus the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. [16] According to Spanish electoral law, the number of seats in each consituency can change in each election and it is specified when writs of election are issued. [17] Each constituency is guaranteed a minimum allocation of two seats, and one seat each for Ceuta and Melilla for a total of 102 seats. The remaining 248 seats are allocated proportionally according to population using the Hare quota. [18]
Consequently in the November 2019 general election, the number of deputies in each consistuency ranged from 1 deputy each in the constituencies of Ceuta and Melilla, up to 37 in the constituency of Madrid. [19]
After the holding of a general election, seats are assigned to the electoral lists in each constituency. For that distribution, the D'Hondt method is used in each constituency separately. [20] Also, there is an electoral threshold of 3%, i.e. a party must obtain at least 3% of the valid vote total [note 1] in the constituency in order to select a share of the seats. [21] Regardless, this threshold only has real-life application in constituencies of great size, such as Madrid or Barcelona. In the entire democratic period, this exclusion clause has only been applied once, in 1993 with the Democratic and Social Centre, that had obtained 2.99% of the votes cast in the province of Madrid and would have sent a deputy if the electoral threshold had not existed. [22]
The system of distribution of Congress of Deputies seats to the provinces leads to less populous provinces being overrepresented, because they are assigned more seats than they would receive if seats were distributed strictly in proportion to the population of each province. In the same way, highly populated provinces are underrepresented. [23]
The system also tends to favor the large political parties. [24] Despite the use of a proportional representation system, which in general facilitates the emergence of many small parties rather than a few large parties, the electoral system for the Congress of Deputies in practice favors the creation of a two-party system. There are several reasons for this:
- Due to the great population disparity between the provinces, and despite the fact that small provinces are overrepresented, the number of deputies assigned to each of them is small, and their seats tend to go to one of the two major parties.
- The electoral threshold of 3% only affects provinces that elect more than 30 deputies, i.e. Madrid and Barcelona. In the other constituencies, where fewer seats are distributed, the real barrier to entry into the Congress is significantly greater. For example, the effective barrier in provinces with three seats is 25 %.
- The median number of seats per constituency is one of the lowest in Europe. This is due to the use of Spain's provinces as electoral constituencies, which leads to a large number of constituencies. [25] As a consequence, the number of wasted votes is quite high. That is to say, there are a large number of votes that cannot affect the result, because they have been cast for some small party that does not achieve representation in the constituency where those votes were cast.
- The D'Hondt method used to distribute seats slightly favors larger parties, compared to other electoral methods, such as the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method or largest remainder method. Regardless, the influence of the D'Hondt method in the bipolarization of the electoral system is quite limited.
- The size of the Congress of Deputies is relatively small, [23] which can lead to disproportionality and favor large parties.
