BLOGwith Miklós Bánkuti in Princeton and Zoltán Réti in Budapest*
Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party coasted to a clear victory in last weekend’s Hungarian election, as expected. The governing party got 45% of the vote, but the new »rules of the game« turned this plurality vote into two thirds of the seats in the parliament. A continuing two-thirds parliamentary majority allows Orbán to govern without constraint because he can change the constitution at will. But this constitution-making majority hangs by a thread.
Orbán’s mandate to govern is clear because his party got more votes than any other single political bloc. What is not legitimate, however, is his two-thirds supermajority. Orbán was certainly not supported by two-thirds of Hungarians – nowhere close. In fact, a majority gave their votes to other parties. Orbán’s two-thirds victory was achieved through legal smoke and mirrors. Legal. But smoke and mirrors.
The International Election Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was extremely critical of the election. The election monitors found that in many different ways »[t]he main governing party enjoyed an undue advantage.« They reported numerous violations of international standards, including a failure to separate party and state, a biased media environment, a partisan Electoral Commission, lack of transparency in determining the electoral districts, and a generally un-level playing field. These, too, contributed to Orbán’s success.
In this post, I will explain why a plurality result in the polls turned into a constitutional supermajority and why that supermajority is due more to Fidesz’s self-dealing than to popular will. I will also show that Fidesz’s supermajority was so close that it depends on every one of the new tricks that the party inserted into the electoral system to benefit itself. One seat less, and the supermajority would be gone.
In saying that Orbán’s supermajority is illegitimate, I am not arguing that Orbán simply stole the election. No other party came close to Orbán’s 45% of the vote, though when you exclude the new Hungarian citizens from the neighboring countries – people who don’t actually live in Hungary and probably never have – Orban’s support drops to 43.5% among domestic voters.
The left alliance, a collection of five parties with the Socialists in the lead, received only 26% of the vote. It evidently failed to capture the public imagination and capitalize on the fact that about half of the voters wanted a change of government. Jobbik, a far-right party, won a shocking 21% of the vote, up more than 3% from its already large 2010 showing, making it the 
The depressed turnout and yet the increased success of the two other major parties show Orbán’s weakness despite his huge parliamentary majority. Overall, 37% of voters stayed away from the polls, 35% voted for other parties, and only 28% of Hungarians actually cast an affirmative vote for Fidesz (including the »over the borders« voters).
If you consider only those who went to the polls, leaving aside the possibility that the low turnout is itself a signal of Orbán’s weakness, 51% voted for the three other parties that entered the parliament while 45% voted for Fidesz. And yet 51% of voters will get only 33% of the seats. And Orbán will get his two-thirds.
How is it possible for only 45% of the vote to turn into a two-thirds parliamentary mandate? Orbán’s »two-thirds« was enabled by a series of tricks that were legal, but not fair.
(To follow the analysis, you need to know that Hungarians cast two votes at a parliamentary election, one for a representative from their home constituency and one for a party. Fidesz got 45% of both the constituency and the party votes.)
Orbán’s electoral system had the overall effect of creating a huge disparity in how many votes each party needed to gain a parliamentary seat. If you add all votes (party list and constituencies together) and divide them by the number of seats each party actually got in this election, you can see that not all votes were equal in securing representation in parliament. A simple formula describes how many votes for any other party it would take to generate the representation in parliament that one vote for Fidesz did:
1 Fidesz vote = 2.1 left alliance votes = 2.6 Jobbik votes = 3.1 LMP votes
In short, the Fidesz seats were acquired with many fewer votes the others.
In an earlier set of blog posts, I explained the new election system in detail. Now that we have election results, we can see how the different parts of the remodeled election system worked to generate this two-thirds parliamentary mandate.
In my 
The system is in fact much more biased against left voters than the one it replaced. Calculated using the 2010 districts and voting data, the same model (votes for the left v. # of votes in a district) explained less than 2% of the variance (R-squared = .019), as the figure below indicates.
Five of the parties on the left eventually forged an alliance with each other to overcome the bias against small parties built into the system. The alliance groups squabbled and quite visibly hated working together, which no doubt suppressed the vote they got. Together, they won only 10 of the 106 individual constituencies with their 26% of the constituency vote. But they would surely have lost almost every single constituency if they hadn’t joined together.
As predicted, party fragmentation had huge effects. Had the alliance had managed to attract to its ranks just one more party, the LMP, the number of individual constituencies that a six-party alliance would have gained would have more than doubled – from 10 to 21. Even this small division in the left opposition cut in half the number of individual mandates that the left won. That’s a powerful effect of the system.
LMP had its own reasons to stay outside the alliance, and it guessed correctly that it could (barely) get its own parliamentary fraction by doing so. But if it had joined with the alliance, the left opposition together would have gained an additional 11 district mandates instead of the five that LMP got from its list votes, for a net gain of six.
(The individual constituencies where the Alliance + LMP > Fidesz are Budapest districts #1, #2, #4, #6, #12, #13, #15, #18; Baranya districts # 1 and #2; Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg district #1 as you can see here.)
Many mixed electoral systems allow the »unused votes« won by losing candidates to be added to their party-list totals when the list mandates are calculated, so I will call that »normal compensation.« Normal compensation is the tool through which mixed systems become more proportional. But only Hungary has a winner compensation system that throws proportionality to the winds. With winner compensation, the winners of individual constituencies may add difference between the number of votes they received and the number of vote received by the second-place candidate (minus one) to the totals for their party lists for use in calculating party-list mandates. It’s complicated but a simple explanation is here.
With the results in, we can see that winner compensation added six parliamentary mandates to the Fidesz totals, which were essential to the party’s supermajority. We calculated this using the Election Office website data that handily provides the difference in the number of votes between the first- and second-highest vote-getter each district
Parliamentary Mandates with Winner Compensation Party Mandates with winner + normal compensation Mandates with normal compensation only Effect of removing winner compensation (in mandates) Fidesz 37 31 -6 Left alliance 28 31 +3 Jobbik 23 25 +2 LMP 5 6 +1 There was another trick cooked into the legal reforms that we can measure directly from the election results. Orbán’s new constitution gave expedited citizenship, upon application, to ethnic Hungarians who have never lived in Hungary. With citizenship came the right to vote. About 600,000 ethnic Hungarians »over the borders« took out citizenship and nearly 200,000 of them registered to vote. Voter turnout in this group was 81% (much higher than among domestic voters) but 19% of the ballots were disqualified due to errors in the way that the ballots were prepared. Six days after the election, these ballots were finally counted, and Fidesz won 95.49% of the »over the borders« vote. The »over the borders« votes added 122,588 to the party list votes, enough for 1.4 parliamentary mandates. (Since all party list votes and compensation votes are added together before being divided by the total number of mandates available, all votes contribute to the overall pool and therefore particular sources like »over the borders« voters may produce fractions of mandates.) Given how close Orbán’s two-thirds majority was, the »over the borders« voters were clearly essential to achieving it. Every single mandate was necessary to the two-thirds. Since Orbán’s supermajority hangs on the votes of the new »over the borders« citizens, the constitutional majority will depend on a set of voters whose ballots were most open to fraud. My HvG news portal showed voters in Transylvania voting in tents helpfully provided by the Erdély Magyar Nemzeti Tanács. This is a * * * The day after the election, election monitors filed a hard-hitting * * * A note on numbers: These numbers look slightly different from the ones that the world’s press announced the day after the election, when Fidesz had 44% of the vote. The numbers I am using here were updated on 13 April, after the Election Office added several categories of new voters to the tallies, most on 12 April. Nearly a week after the election, the office officially added most of the votes from voters abroad – both those who did not permanent addresses in Hungary and those who did. The office also added in all of the voters who voted in Hungary, but in districts other than the ones in which they were officially registered. Plus the office added in the votes from one precinct per district, a precinct held back from the day-of-election vote counts in case the other last minute votes coming from ex-pats or voters voting outside the district constituted such a small number that secrecy of the ballot would be compromised by adding them late. This meant that about 170,000 domestic voters and 63,000 »over the borders« voters were added to the totals after election day. This analysis includes their votes. Many thanks for assistance with the election analysis go to Miklós Bánkuti who received his MPA in 2012 from Princeton with a specialization in economics and Zoltán Réti who received his PhD in 1994 from the University of Florida in mathematics. This blog post has previously appeared on Paul Krugman’s blog and is reposted here with kind permission by the author.Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party coasted to a clear victory in last weekend’s Hungarian election, as expected. The governing party got 45% of the vote, but the new »rules of the game« turned this plurality vote into two thirds of the seats in the parliament. A continuing two-thirds parliamentary majority allows Orbán to govern without constraint because he can change the constitution at will. But this constitution-making majority hangs by a thread. Orbán’s mandate to govern is clear because his party got more votes than any other single political bloc. What is not legitimate, however, is his two-thirds supermajority. Orbán was certainly not supported by two-thirds of Hungarians – nowhere close. In fact, a majority gave their votes to other parties. Orbán’s two-thirds victory was achieved through legal smoke and mirrors. Legal. But smoke and mirrors. The International Election Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was extremely critical of the election. The election monitors found that in many different ways »[t]he main governing party enjoyed an undue advantage.« They reported numerous violations of international standards, including a failure to separate party and state, a biased media environment, a partisan Electoral Commission, lack of transparency in determining the electoral districts, and a generally un-level playing field. These, too, contributed to Orbán’s success. In this post, I will explain why a plurality result in the polls turned into a constitutional supermajority and why that supermajority is due more to Fidesz’s self-dealing than to popular will. I will also show that Fidesz’s supermajority was so close that it depends on every one of the new tricks that the party inserted into the electoral system to benefit itself. One seat less, and the supermajority would be gone. In saying that Orbán’s supermajority is illegitimate, I am not arguing that Orbán simply stole the election. No other party came close to Orbán’s 45% of the vote, though when you exclude the new Hungarian citizens from the neighboring countries – people who don’t actually live in Hungary and probably never have – Orban’s support drops to 43.5% among domestic voters. The left alliance, a collection of five parties with the Socialists in the lead, received only 26% of the vote. It evidently failed to capture the public imagination and capitalize on the fact that about half of the voters wanted a change of government. Jobbik, a far-right party, won a shocking 21% of the vote, up more than 3% from its already large 2010 showing, making it the But these new citizens were not eligible to vote in 2010 so we should compare Orbán’s support in 2010 and 2014 without them. Among domestic voters, Orbán received only 2.1 million votes this time, losing 21% of the voters that had supported him in 2010. His party list vote slipped by 9% in this group as well. Fidesz lost more than one fifth of its domestic voters overall in part because of the lower turnout, but the far-right Jobbik party and the left alliance both gained voters, as the chart below indicates. If you consider only those who went to the polls, leaving aside the possibility that the low turnout is itself a signal of Orbán’s weakness, 51% voted for the three other parties that entered the parliament while 45% voted for Fidesz. And yet 51% of voters will get only 33% of the seats. And Orbán will get his two-thirds. How is it possible for only 45% of the vote to turn into a two-thirds parliamentary mandate? Orbán’s »two-thirds« was enabled by a series of tricks that were legal, but not fair. (To follow the analysis, you need to know that Hungarians cast two votes at a parliamentary election, one for a representative from their home constituency and one for a party. Fidesz got 45% of both the constituency and the party votes.) Orbán’s electoral system had the overall effect of creating a huge disparity in how many votes each party needed to gain a parliamentary seat. If you add all votes (party list and constituencies together) and divide them by the number of seats each party actually got in this election, you can see that not all votes were equal in securing representation in parliament. A simple formula describes how many votes for any other party it would take to generate the representation in parliament that one vote for Fidesz did: 1 Fidesz vote = 2.1 left alliance votes = 2.6 Jobbik votes = 3.1 LMP votes In short, the Fidesz seats were acquired with many fewer votes the others. In an earlier set of blog posts, I explained the new election system in detail. Now that we have election results, we can see how the different parts of the remodeled election system worked to generate this two-thirds parliamentary mandate. In my There’s another aspect to the gerrymander that we can also see clearly. In the old parliament, more mandates were determined by the list votes than by individual constituencies. (The pre-2014 system was also disproportionate, but less so.) List votes which are distributed over a set of candidates are more proportional than individual constituencies which are generally more disproportionate because only one candidate can win. In the new parliament, the relative proportions of list and constituency mandates are reversed, so that now 106 of the seats are determined by the individual constituencies and 93 come from the party lists. This makes the effect of the gerrymandered districts bigger in the overall calculation of parliamentary mandates. Fidesz won 45% of the votes in the individual constituencies in 2014 and yet got 88% of the seats. The effects of the gerrymander, even on the rough analysis above, assisted massively in producing such a disproportionate effect. Recall that Fidesz unilaterally set the boundaries of all of the districts in a law requiring a two-thirds vote, and did so without allowing the opposition to have any input at all. As the international election monitors noted in their post-election report, »The process of delimitation of constituencies was criticized … for lacking transparency and inclusive consultation.« While the election law required that districts vary by no more than 15% above and below the national average, the election observers noted that districts still fell outside this wide margin. As we can see, that gave more room for the gerrymanderers to play with the district composition. While gerrymandering is probably the single biggest trick that converted Orbán’s plurality to a supermajority, Orbán’s supermajority is built from many different sleights of vote. In my here.) Many mixed electoral systems allow the »unused votes« won by losing candidates to be added to their party-list totals when the list mandates are calculated, so I will call that »normal compensation.« Normal compensation is the tool through which mixed systems become more proportional. But only Hungary has a winner compensation system that throws proportionality to the winds. With winner compensation, the winners of individual constituencies may add difference between the number of votes they received and the number of vote received by the second-place candidate (minus one) to the totals for their party lists for use in calculating party-list mandates. It’s complicated but a simple explanation is here. With the results in, we can see that winner compensation added six parliamentary mandates to the Fidesz totals, which were essential to the party’s supermajority. We calculated this using the Election Office website data that handily provides the difference in the number of votes between the first- and second-highest vote-getter each district
Parliamentary Mandates with Winner Compensation Party Mandates with winner + normal compensation Mandates with normal compensation only Effect of removing winner compensation (in mandates) Fidesz 37 31 -6 Left alliance 28 31 +3 Jobbik 23 25 +2 LMP 5 6 +1 There was another trick cooked into the legal reforms that we can measure directly from the election results. Orbán’s new constitution gave expedited citizenship, upon application, to ethnic Hungarians who have never lived in Hungary. With citizenship came the right to vote. About 600,000 ethnic Hungarians »over the borders« took out citizenship and nearly 200,000 of them registered to vote. Voter turnout in this group was 81% (much higher than among domestic voters) but 19% of the ballots were disqualified due to errors in the way that the ballots were prepared. Six days after the election, these ballots were finally counted, and Fidesz won 95.49% of the »over the borders« vote. The »over the borders« votes added 122,588 to the party list votes, enough for 1.4 parliamentary mandates. (Since all party list votes and compensation votes are added together before being divided by the total number of mandates available, all votes contribute to the overall pool and therefore particular sources like »over the borders« voters may produce fractions of mandates.) Given how close Orbán’s two-thirds majority was, the »over the borders« voters were clearly essential to achieving it. Every single mandate was necessary to the two-thirds. Since Orbán’s supermajority hangs on the votes of the new »over the borders« citizens, the constitutional majority will depend on a set of voters whose ballots were most open to fraud. My HvG news portal showed voters in Transylvania voting in tents helpfully provided by the Erdély Magyar Nemzeti Tanács. This is a * * * The day after the election, election monitors filed a hard-hitting * * * A note on numbers: These numbers look slightly different from the ones that the world’s press announced the day after the election, when Fidesz had 44% of the vote. The numbers I am using here were updated on 13 April, after the Election Office added several categories of new voters to the tallies, most on 12 April. Nearly a week after the election, the office officially added most of the votes from voters abroad – both those who did not permanent addresses in Hungary and those who did. The office also added in all of the voters who voted in Hungary, but in districts other than the ones in which they were officially registered. Plus the office added in the votes from one precinct per district, a precinct held back from the day-of-election vote counts in case the other last minute votes coming from ex-pats or voters voting outside the district constituted such a small number that secrecy of the ballot would be compromised by adding them late. This meant that about 170,000 domestic voters and 63,000 »over the borders« voters were added to the totals after election day. This analysis includes their votes. Many thanks for assistance with the election analysis go to Miklós Bánkuti who received his MPA in 2012 from Princeton with a specialization in economics and Zoltán Réti who received his PhD in 1994 from the University of Florida in mathematics. This blog post has previously appeared on Paul Krugman’s blog and is reposted here with kind permission by the author.
These numbers mask the even more dramatic decline in Orbán’s popularity at home because they include new citizens in the neighboring states to whom the 2012 Fidesz constitution granted citizenship. The new citizens who voted for the first time this year are a formidable force since they voted 95% for Fidesz.The depressed turnout and yet the increased success of the two other major parties show Orbán’s weakness despite his huge parliamentary majority. Overall, 37% of voters stayed away from the polls, 35% voted for other parties, and only 28% of Hungarians actually cast an affirmative vote for Fidesz (including the »over the borders« voters).The system is in fact much more biased against left voters than the one it replaced. Calculated using the 2010 districts and voting data, the same model (votes for the left v. # of votes in a district) explained less than 2% of the variance (R-squared = .019), as the figure below indicates.
The old districts were much more unequal in size (which was a problem) but they were not nearly as politically biased, as the nearly flat regression line shows. The new districts are still highly unequal in size. But now they are strongly biased against the left. This is what a gerrymander looks like.