Electoral law: Bundestag needs citizens' advice
How are millions of votes turned into a parliament? In Germany, the rules are decided by the very people who are themselves affected by them: the political parties and their MPs. They have been arguing about the electoral system for years. A citizens’ assembly could offer a way out. Experts support the idea – and other countries have already asked citizens to deliberate on the rules of their democracy.
Rules are important
When people cast their votes in a German federal election, they are deciding which parties and which MPs will sit in parliament. But the way those votes are subsequently translated into seats is anything but simple. Germany’s electoral law has been amended repeatedly over the years – and has repeatedly ended up before the Federal Constitutional Court.
These are not merely technical details. The rules can determine which candidates enter the Bundestag, how strongly the parties are represented there and how large parliament becomes. Changing the electoral system therefore also changes the distribution of political power.
Two votes – but which one decides?
In a German federal election, voters have two votes. With their first vote, they choose a candidate in their constituency. With their second vote, they choose a party’s state list.
The second vote is generally decisive in determining a party’s strength in the Bundestag. For a long time, however, another principle also applied: whoever received the most first votes in a constituency entered parliament directly. If a party won more constituencies than the number of seats to which it was entitled on the basis of its second-vote result, this produced overhang seats. Additional compensatory seats were then added to restore the proportional balance between the parties. As a result, the Bundestag kept growing.
630 seats – and an unusual consequence
The electoral reform adopted in 2023 was intended to stop this growth. The number of MPs was capped at 630. As a result, the principle now applies more consistently that a party receives only as many seats as it is entitled to on the basis of its second votes.
This has an initially surprising consequence. A candidate can receive the most first votes in a constituency and still fail to enter the Bundestag. In the 2025 federal election, this happened in 23 constituencies.
When the players make the rules
In 2024, the Federal Constitutional Court largely upheld the new system but ruled that the way the five-per-cent threshold had been designed at the time was unconstitutional. Following the 2025 federal election, the CDU, CSU and SPD established another commission on electoral law. It, too, failed to agree on a common position. The dispute continues.
There is a simple reason for this: electoral law is never an abstract question for political parties. One electoral system may give a party more constituency seats, while another may strengthen the role of party lists. Even if everyone involved is trying to create the fairest possible electoral system, they also know what consequences a change might have for their own party.
“Electoral rules are questions of power”
Political scientists Hubert Buchstein and Michael Hein therefore speak of a “neutrality deficit” when parliament makes decisions about electoral law. As early as 2017, they proposed entrusting electoral reform to a randomly selected, politically independent citizens’ assembly advised by experts. As they put it: “Questions of electoral law are, as is well known, questions of power.”
When parliament itself decides on electoral law, the anticipated advantages and disadvantages for the parties can influence the decision. Put simply: the people making the rules are also playing the game.
Why not ask the voters?
Buchstein considers political deadlock precisely the kind of situation in which sortition can be useful: “Randomly selected bodies make sense when there are political blockages. In Germany, for example, developing a new electoral law would be an appropriate task.” Electoral-law experts Florian Grotz and Friedrich Pukelsheim have also advocated a citizens’ assembly on electoral law.
Such a citizens’ assembly would not mean asking a randomly selected group to write a new federal electoral law without preparation. Participants would be given time to understand the complicated subject. Experts could explain different electoral systems and their consequences, while political parties and civil-society organisations could present their arguments. The randomly selected citizens would then deliberate together and develop recommendations.
No seats of their own to defend
The crucial difference from the Bundestag is that randomly selected citizens would not have to consider whether a particular rule might give their own party three more or three fewer seats at the next election.
That is the idea behind the proposal. It is not that citizens automatically know what the best electoral system is, but that their interests in making this decision differ from those of political parties and MPs.
Canada has tried It
British Columbia in Canada shows how this can work. In 2004, the province established a citizens’ assembly with 161 members. The process was unusually thorough. First, members spent twelve weeks learning about different electoral systems. They then took the discussion to the wider public. Citizens were able to express their views at more than 50 public hearings, and another 1,603 written submissions were received.
Only then did the citizens’ assembly develop its recommendation. It proposed replacing the existing first-past-the-post system with the Single Transferable Vote. Voters would have been able to rank candidates according to their preferences.
57.7 per cent was not enough
The entire electorate was then given the final say. A total of 57.7 per cent voted in favour of the citizens’ assembly’s proposal. But an unusually high threshold had been set beforehand: at least 60 per cent had to vote in favour. The proposal therefore failed.
British Columbia nevertheless became a model. In the Canadian province of Ontario, another citizens’ assembly deliberated on electoral reform in 2006–07. Its members voted 94 to 8 in favour of a mixed system combining elements of plurality and proportional representation. However, the proposal failed to win majority support in the subsequent referendum.
Why the wider public matters
For Canadian public-participation expert Peter MacLeod, a crucial problem was that the wider population had too little connection with the citizens’ assembly. “The strongest correlation with a yes vote was not knowledge of the particulars of the voting system, but familiarity with the citizens’ assembly,” he explained.
This points to an important lesson: running a good citizens’ assembly is not enough. If the entire population is subsequently asked to vote on its recommendation, people also need to know who the members were, how they were selected and how they reached their conclusions.
From Yukon to the Netherlands
The approach has also been tried elsewhere. In Canada’s Yukon territory, a citizens’ assembly recommended a change to the electoral system in 2024. In a non-binding public vote in November 2025, 56.1 per cent voted in favour of electoral reform.
The Netherlands had already convened a citizens’ assembly of 140 randomly selected members to consider its electoral system in 2006. Over ten weekends, participants first learned about different electoral systems, then gathered views from people across the country and finally developed their recommendations.
Giving voters more influence over individuals
The Dutch citizens’ assembly recommended a system of proportional representation that would give voters greater influence over which individuals actually entered parliament. The government at the time did not adopt the recommendation. Years later, a parliamentary commission returned to the proposal, but it ultimately failed to win a majority in parliament as well.
The international examples therefore illustrate both the possibilities and the limits of citizens’ assemblies. Randomly selected citizens can learn about a subject as complicated as electoral law and develop concrete reform proposals. Whether those proposals are subsequently implemented remains a decision for the relevant democratic institutions – or for the electorate in a referendum.
What should a good electoral system achieve?
In Germany, too, a citizens’ assembly would not have to start with a blank sheet of paper and invent an entirely new electoral system. It could begin by considering which objectives a good electoral system should fulfil.
How important is it for every constituency to be represented in the Bundestag by the candidate who won there? Should the second vote determine the strength of the parties in parliament as precisely as possible? How large should the Bundestag be? How should smaller parties be treated? Should the voting age be lowered to 16? And how could more equal representation of women and men be achieved?
Not all objectives are compatible
There are conflicts between these objectives. An electoral system can be highly proportional but become more complicated as a result. Guaranteeing a seat to every constituency winner can strengthen the personal link between constituencies and parliament, but may require other rules to prevent the Bundestag from growing again.
A citizens’ assembly could make these trade-offs visible and weigh them against one another, rather than allowing the debate to be shaped from the outset by the interests of the political parties.
The Bundestag would still decide
Such a citizens’ assembly would not take the decision on electoral law away from parliament. After an extensive learning and deliberation phase, its members could make recommendations. Any amendment to the Federal Electoral Act would still have to be decided by the Bundestag.
That could be precisely where the value of the process lies. MPs would receive recommendations from people who neither have a parliamentary seat to defend nor need to improve a party’s prospects at the next election.
No need to worry about re-election
Buchstein and Hein put the idea this way: an independent and politically neutral body could ensure “that considerations about one’s own chances of (re-)election play no role.”
A citizens’ assembly would therefore not eliminate the political conflict of interest surrounding electoral law. But it could introduce a perspective that has so far received surprisingly little weight: the perspective of the people whose votes are counted according to those rules.
The rules of their own democracy
Behind all the arguments about seats, party lists, constituencies and percentages lies a simple question: What rules should determine how citizens’ votes decide who represents them in parliament?
There is a strong case for involving citizens themselves in answering that question.