Publication | Report/Paper

Georgia's Parliamentary Electoral System

The term ‘electoral system’ is used to describe the structure by which votes cast in an election result in legislative seats (or executive offices) won by political parties and candidates. The most common methods used in elections for legislatures are plurality/majority, proportional representation or mixed systems.

Under Georgia’s current legal framework, the 150 members of the national parliament are elected with half from a single national constituency based on proportional representation to allocate mandates from political party candidate lists, and half from single-mandate constituencies based on plurality outcomes. This system is clearly a product of some of the historical factors described in the quotation above, particularly a post-Soviet model. The result is an electoral system that provides neither equality in the ‘weight’ and influence of each citizen’s vote nor fair distribution of parliamentary seats to competing political movements in Georgia.

This paper is intended to assist ongoing discussions of electoral reforms in Georgia, by exploring concepts for revising Georgia’s electoral system and introducing some new ideas and perspectives for consideration.

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