In government, several constitutional arrangements use reserved political positions, especially when endeavoring to ensure the rights of women, minorities or other segments of society, or preserving a political balance of power.
Croatia reserves eight seats from the minorities and three for citizens living abroad in its parliament. There are three seats for Serbs, one for Italians, and a few more for other ethnic groups, where a single representative represents more than one group (there is only one representative for both Czechs and Slovaks).[1]
The Republic of Cyprus is full of reserved political positions. Due to its nature as a bi-communal republic, certain posts are always appropriated among Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. For example, the president is chosen from the Greek Cypriot community by using separate electoral rolls, whereas the vice president is chosen by the Turkish Cypriot community, using their own separate electoral rolls. Similarly 70% of the parliament are chosen from Greek Cypriots whereas 30% are chosen by and from Turkish Cypriots. In the Supreme Court, there should be one Greek, One Turkish and one neutral foreign judge.
Albanian is the official language of the majority, but all languages of minorities such as Serbian, Turkish and Bosnian are used, with simultaneous interpretation.
50 seats out of 350 in the Parliament are reserved for women.[4]
China
China's National People's Congress (NPC) includes special delegations for the military of China (the single largest NPC delegation (≈9%)) and Taiwan (a region it claims but does not control). 55 minority ethnic groups are recognized in China and each has as at least one delegate, though they belong to normal region delegations. Additionally, from 1954 to 1974, the NPC included a special delegation specifically for Overseas Chinese who returned to China.
Hong Kong and Macau provide for constituencies which represent professional or special interest groups rather than geographical locations. Voters for the members representing these constituencies include both natural persons as well as non-human local entities, including organizations and corporations.
India has seats in the lower house of parliament, state assemblies, local municipal bodies and village-level institutions reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, better-known as Dalits and Adivasis respectively. The election of Dalit and tribal candidates is by the general electorate. Out of 543 constituencies in India's parliament, a total of 131 seats (24.13%) are Reserved or blocked for Representatives from Scheduled Castes (84) and Scheduled Tribes (47) only. A new law in 2024, Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam proposes 33% reserved seats for women in the parliament and legislative assemblies of India. This is different from separate electorate practiced in other countries. Many Indian states, like have had parliamentary reserved seats for the Anglo-Indian community, as did the Lok Sabha until 2020.
Iran reserves a fixed number of seats in the Majlis for certain recognized non-Muslim ethnoreligious groups. To wit, two seats are reserved for the Christian Armenian community, and one seat each is reserved for the Assyrian and Chaldean Catholic, Jewish, and Zoroastrian communities.
Lebanon specifies the religious affiliation of several of its high officers, such as the President (Maronite), the Prime Minister (Sunni Muslim) and the Parliament's Speaker (Shia Muslim). Every electoral district for the parliamentary elections includes a fixed number of the various religious communities.
Some local legislatures in the Philippines has a reserved seat for indigenous cultural communities called "Indigenous People Mandatory Representation". These are elected by the indigenous people themselves.[6]
The Local Government Code also calls for reserved seats in local legislatures for women, workers, and one from the urban poor, indigenous cultural communities, disabled people and other sectors, but for these seats, no law, except for the indigenous cultural communities, has passed on how these seats will be filled up.
Group Representation Constituency (GRC) was created in 1988. GRC scheme entrenches the presence of minority MPs in Parliament, ensuring that interests of minority communities are represented in Parliament. In a GRC, a number of candidates comes together to stand for elections to Parliament as a group. Each voter of a GRC casts a ballot for a team of candidates, and not for individual candidates. The original stated purpose of GRCs was to guarantee a minimum representation of minorities in Parliament and ensure that there would always be a multiracial Parliament instead of one made up of a single race.[7]
The office of President will be reserved for a particular racial group (Chinese, Malay and Indian/other minority) — if that community has not been represented for five presidential terms.
10 seats out of 105 seats in Parliament are reserved for women.
Rwanda
In the Parliament of Rwanda, a minimum of 30% of elected members of the 26-member Senate must be women. In the 80-member Chamber of Deputies, 24 of these seats are reserved for women, elected through a joint assembly of local government officials; another 3 seats are reserved for youth and disabled members.
Partly resulting from this arrangement, 45 female deputies were elected to the Parliament in 2008, making the country the first and only independent country to possess a female majority in its national legislature.
Tanzania
At least 20% of seats are required to be set aside for women in accordance with Article 66.1(b) of the Constitution. Currently 113 of 393 (28%) are set aside.[9][10]
Uganda
The Ugandan constitution provides for a reserved woman's parliamentary seat from each of the 39 districts.
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Argentina
The Argentine law requires for a 50% quota for female candidates for Congress.
Fiji used to provide for the election of specific numbers of Members of Parliament on the basis of three racially defined constituencies: the indigenous Fijians, the Fijian Indians and the "General" electorate.
There are currently seven New Zealand Parliament constituencies – known as the Māori electorates – that are reserved for representatives of the Māori people. Māori electorates were introduced in 1867, but have undergone several changes since then. Māori may enrol either in a Māori electorate or on the general roll, but not both. Since 1967 there has not been any specific requirement for candidates in Māori electorates to be Māori themselves, and anyone on either the Māori roll or the General roll can stand as a candidate. Technically, therefore, these seats should not be described as "reserved" as there is no legal or constitutional guarantee that the successful candidate will themselves be of Māori descent. So far, however, every MP from a Māori electorate has been Māori. Also to note, is that under New Zealand's mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral system, it is the party vote that is most important. All voters, including Māori, are deemed to be on the same master roll in terms of voting for party lists.
Countries formerly applying reserved political positions
Afghanistan
During the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the constitution guaranteed at least 64 delegates to be female in the lower house of the bicameral National Assembly ("The elections law shall adopt measures to attain, through the electorate system, general and fair representation for all the people of the country, and proportionate to the population of very province, on average, at least two females shall be the elected members of the House of People from each province."), while Kochi nomads elected 10 representatives through a single national constituency. Moreover, "one third of the members (of the House of Elders) shall be appointed by the President, for a five-year term, from amongst experts and experienced personalities, including two members from amongst the impaired and handicapped, as well as two from nomads. The President shall appoint fifty percent of these individuals from amongst women."[19]
While the Palestinian Authority makes no reservations within the Palestinian Legislative Council (there were reserved seats for Christians and Samaritans in the electoral law for the 1996 Palestinian general election), certain positions in local government are guaranteed to certain minority groups, in order to retain particular traditional cultural influence and diversity. For example, the mayor of Bethlehem is required to be a Christian, even though the city itself currently has a Muslim majority.[citation needed]
Syria
Syria enjoyed an electoral system like Lebanon's, at least for the parliamentary elections, up to 1949, when the subdivisions among each religion were suppressed, then there were only reserved seats for Christians up to 1963, when the Ba'athist regime suppressed free elections.[25][26][27]
Historically, Zimbabwe reserved 20 of the 100 seats in Parliament for the white minority, until these seats were abolished by constitutional amendment in 1987. Currently, 60 of the 270 seats in the House of Assembly are reserved for women.
Algeria reserves eight of its 382 parliamentary seats for expatriates, many of whom reside in France.
Cape Verde has three overseas seats reserved for expatriates
Colombia reserves one overseas seat to represent all expatriates
Croatia reserves no more than six seats in parliament for expatriates. The number of seats assigned to emigrants is based on participation rates in the election.
Portugal's Assembly of the Republic has four seats reserved for Portuguese living abroad, two for those living in Europe, the other two for those living in other parts of the world.
Floating reserved seats
In Mauritius, the National Assembly consists of 70 members, 62 elected for a five-year term in a constituency in which 3 are elected in the constituencies of Mauritius (mainland) and 2 are elected in the constituency of Rodriques. From 4 up to 8 additional members, known as "best losers" appointed by the Electoral Supervisory Commission "with a view to correct any imbalance in community representation in Parliament".[28]
New Zealand reserves a proportion of its parliamentary seats for the representation of persons electing to register on a separate Māori roll. The number of seats depends upon the number of people on the roll — there are currently seven seats. See Māori electorates.
Exemption of the election threshold
In several countries, political parties representing recognized ethnic minorities are exempted from the election threshold. Examples are listed below.
Iraq held its first post-Saddam parliamentary elections in January 2005 under an electoral law providing for compulsory integration of women on the candidates lists, like several European countries with a proportional electoral system.
↑ Hale, Erin. "'Always campaign time': Why Taiwan's indigenous people back KMT". www.aljazeera.com. Retrieved 25 June 2020. Since the 1970s, indigenous people have had reserved seats set aside for them in parliament - an arrangement that has continued into the democratic era. On Saturday, indigenous people will be able to vote for the president and a "party list" - MPs chosen based on the share of votes their party receives - like everyone else in Taiwan. But unlike the rest of the population, they will not get to vote for their district representatives. Instead, they will either vote for three "mountain" representatives or three "plains" representatives depending on the classification of their indigenous group.
↑ Rosser, Ezra (7 Nov 2005). "The Nature of Representation: The Cherokee Right to a Congressional Delegate". Boston University Public Interest Law Journal. 15 (91): 91–152. SSRN842647.
↑ "Maine House of Representatives". legislature.maine.gov. Retrieved 25 June 2020. The Maine House consists of 151 individuals, (88 Democrats, 56 Republicans, 5 Independents, and 1 Common Sense Independent). and currently 2 Vacancies). Plus seats for three nonvoting members representing the Penobscot Nation, the Passamaquoddy Tribe and the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians.
↑ Fannie Fern Andrews, The Holy Land under mandate, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company - The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1931, 2 vol. (ch. XIV - Building a Jewish corporate life, vol. II, 1-32)
↑ Moshe Burstein, Self-government of the Jews in Palestine since 1900, Tel Aviv, Hapoel Hatzair, 1934
↑ ESCO Foundation for Palestine, Inc., Palestine. A study of Jewish, Arab and British policies, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1947, 2 vol. (The growth and organization of the Jewish community, vol.II, 404-414)
↑ Jacob C. Hurewitz, The struggle for Palestine, New York, Norton and Company, 1950 (ch. 3 - The political structure of the Yishuv, 38-50)
↑ Albert H. Hourani, Minorities in the Arab World, London, Oxford University Press, 1947 ISBN0-404-16402-1
↑ Claude Palazzoli, La Syrie - Le rêve et la rupture, Paris, Le Sycomore, 1977 ISBN2-86262-002-5
↑ Nikolaos van Dam, The Struggle For Power in Syria: Politics and Society Under Asad and the Ba'th Party, London, Croom Helm, 1979 ISBN1-86064-024-9
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In New Zealand politics, Māori electorates, colloquially known as the Māori seats, are a special category of electorate that give reserved positions to representatives of Māori in the New Zealand Parliament. Every area in New Zealand is covered by both a general and a Māori electorate; as of 2020, there are seven Māori electorates. Since 1967, candidates in Māori electorates have not needed to be Māori themselves, but to register as a voter in the Māori electorates people need to declare that they are of Māori descent.
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