Reserved Seats
Reserved seats are one way of ensuring the representation of specific minority groups in parliament. Parliamentary seats are reserved for identifiable ethnic or religious minorities in countries as diverse as
- Jordan (Christians and Circassians),
- India (scheduled tribes and castes),
- Pakistan (non-Muslim minorities),
- New Zealand (Maori),
- Colombia ('black communities' and indigenous peoples),
- Croatia (Hungarian, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian, Ukranian, German and Austrian minorities),
- Slovenia (Hungarians and Italians),
- Taiwan (the aboriginal community),
- Western Samoa (non-indigenous minorities),
- Niger (Taurag), and the Palestinian Authority (Christians and Samaritans).
Representatives from these reserved seats are usually elected in much the same manner as other members of parliament, but are sometimes elected only by members of the particular minority community designated in the electoral law. While it is often deemed to be a normative good to represent small communities of interest, it has been argued that it is a better strategy to design structures, which give rise to a representative parliament naturally, rather than through legal obligation. Quota seats may breed resentment on the behalf of majority populations and shore up mistrust between various cultural groups.
Instead of formally reserved seats, regions can be over-represented to facilitate the increased representation of minority groups. In essence this is the case in the United Kingdom, where Scotland and Wales have more MPs in the British House of Commons than they would be entitled to if population size alone were the only criteria. The same is true in the mountainous regions of Nepal. Another possibility is the 'best loser' system used in Mauritius, in which some of the highest-polling losing candidates from a particular ethnic group are awarded parliamentary seats to balance overall ethnic representation. Electoral boundaries can also be manipulated to serve this purpose. The Voting Rights Act in the United States has in the past allowed the government to draw weird and wonderful districts with the sole purpose of creating majority Black, Latino, or Asian-American districts; this might be called 'affirmative gerrymandering'. However, the manipulation of any electoral system to protect minority representation is rarely uncontroversial, see US: Ethnic Minorities and Single-Member Districts.
Communal Representation
A number of ethnically heterogeneous societies have taken the concept of reserved seats to its logical extension. Seats are not only divided on a communal basis, but the entire system of parliamentary representation is similarly based on communal considerations. This usually means that each defined community has its own electoral roll, and elects only members of its 'own group' to Parliament. In some cases, however, such as Fiji from 1970-1987, electors could vote not only for their own communal candidates but for some 'national' candidates as well.
Most communal-roll arrangements were abandoned after it became clear that communal electorates, while guaranteeing group representation, often had the perverse effect of undermining the path of accommodation between different groups, since there were no incentives for political intermixing between communities. The issue of how to define a member of a particular group, and how to distribute electorates fairly between them, was also strewn with pitfalls. In India, for example, the separate electorates, which had existed under colonial rule - for Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others - were abolished at independence, although some reserved seats remain to represent scheduled tribes and castes. Similar communal-roll systems used at various times in Pakistan, Cyprus, and Zimbabwe have also been abandoned. Despite a controversial history of use, Fiji continues to elect its parliament from separate communal rolls for indigenous Fijian, Indian, and 'general' electors.
The one predominant example of a communal-roll system left among contemporary democracies is the optional separate roll for Maori voters in New Zealand, see New Zealand: A Westminster Democracy Switches to PR. Maori electors can choose to be on either the national electoral roll or a specific Maori roll, which elects five Maori MPs to Parliament. The results of New Zealand's first PR elections in 1996 could, however, be said to have weakened the rationale for the communal system: twice as many Maori MPs were elected from the general rolls as from the specific Maori roll. Fiji is also moving away from its communal roll system to more open electoral competition to encourage the development of a multi-ethnic political system.
Reproduced by permission of International IDEA from Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook © 2005 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance The electronic version of this publication is made available under a Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the publication, and to remix and adapt it, provided it is only for non-commercial purposes, that you appropriately attribute the publication and that you distribute it under an identical license. For more information on this licence see: