MPs who go home: Spain's closed lists, constituencies and a radical-centre plan for accountability

Among the ideas in Miriam González's launch speech for Democracia 21, on 10 October in Madrid, one sounds almost homely. MPs, she said, should go back to their constituencies at least every two weeks and answer to the people who elected them. The Objective reported it as forcing parliamentarians to go home and do their job every fortnight; Infobae as obliging them to account to their voters at least that often. It sits next to the two-term limit and the cut in party subsidies, in the part of the speech about a politics where people come to serve.

We like the instinct, and we'd make it work by changing what the visit is for. A Spanish deputy who spends every other Friday in Soria or Cádiz listening to people still owes the seat to whoever drew up the list. The fortnightly visit needs a reason to matter, and in Spain that reason lives in the electoral law. We'll come back to the whole speech through the week; this is the representation piece.

How a Spanish MP gets the seat

Article 68 of the Constitution makes the province the constituency and asks for proportional representation. The electoral law (LOREG) fills in the rest. The Congress has 350 deputies; each province starts with two, Ceuta and Melilla get one each and the remaining 248 are shared out by population. Inside each province, parties need 3% of the vote, and seats are allocated with the D'Hondt divisors. Article 163 then says seats go to candidates in the order in which they appear on the list.

That order belongs to the party. Article 96 makes a ballot void if the voter has added, crossed out or reordered names. Lists are closed and blocked. In practice, a deputy's career depends on the place the party gives them, which gets decided in Madrid or in the regional headquarters. Visiting the constituency is good manners. Pleasing the people who draw up the list is how you keep your job.

Spain already runs a different system in the same elections. For the Senate, LOREG says candidacies are individual for voting purposes, and voters can mark up to three candidates in each province, from any list. The Consejo de Estado looked at this in its 2009 report on electoral reform and found that very few voters make their own mix, and that results differ only slightly from what closed lists would give. Fully open lists, in other words, don't change much when people find them complicated.

The same report made a recommendation that is still the best place to start. It called it more prudent to unblock the lists through a preference vote, suggested trying it first in European or regional elections, and rejected fully open lists. In February 2016 the PSOE–Ciudadanos agreement also included unblocking the lists, along with more proportionality. Ten years later nothing has moved.

Hirschman's lesson for the fortnightly visit

Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) is about how organisations learn that they are getting worse. Members can leave, which is exit, or complain and organise, which is voice. Hirschman's point, which we covered in our explainer, is that voice works best when the organisation has a reason to listen, and the most demanding members tend to leave first when it doesn't.

Spanish voters who feel unheard have mostly used exit: abstention, new parties, a vote held with the nose. A fortnightly visit adds a channel for voice. On its own, the deputy listening in the town hall has little reason to act on what they hear. Give voters a say over which candidates on the list get the seats, and every one of those conversations starts to count.

The radical-centre plan

Each tradition brings a piece. The left insists that every citizen deserves a representative who hears them, and that power should answer to ordinary voters before it answers to party machines. The right and the liberal market tradition want candidates to compete on their own record, and voters, as individuals, to choose the person as well as the brand. Hirschman gives the piece that fits neither camp: voice works when it carries consequences. Put together, they give us a short plan.

One preference mark. Keep the provinces, the 350 seats, D'Hondt and the threshold. Seats are still shared among parties exactly as today. Add one optional tick next to a candidate on the list you vote for. Sweden does this: voters can tick one candidate, and anyone ticked by at least 5% of the party's voters in the constituency moves up the list. Proportionality stays intact, the ballot stays simple, which matters given what the Consejo de Estado found about the Senate, and the party keeps the default order for voters who don't tick. Following the Council's advice, try it first in European or regional elections and measure what happens.

Constituency weeks in the calendar. The Congress already publishes a plenary calendar with weeks marked without plenary sittings. Make one week in each month a constituency week by rule, the way Democracia 21 wants, and protect it from committee scheduling.

A public record. Each deputy publishes, on the Congress website, where they held open meetings and which questions or amendments came from them. Voters and journalists can then judge whether the visits are real. The preference vote gives them a way to act on that judgement.

Germany's mixed system, where the first vote picks a constituency candidate and the second vote, which decides the share of seats, picks a party, is the other model people mention. It would mean redrawing Spain's map of 52 constituencies and a much bigger reform of the Constitution's provincial rule. A preference vote gets most of the gain for a change to one law.

There is a risk the Consejo de Estado named too: personal votes can feed clientelism, with candidates competing to hand out favours. That is a real concern in a week when we're writing about clientelism and growth. The answer is the record and the rules on spending that come with it: transparent campaign accounts per candidate and the same limits for everyone on the list. An MP who comes home every fortnight to listen, and knows that the people listening back can move them up or down, is the representative González describes. The law can make that MP the normal case.