El Salvador

David Jarman

Blog 7

El Salvador

El Salvador chooses candidates on a closed party list, which means that voters have no effect on the candidates that are chosen for the legislature. They are simply voting for the party not the candidate. There are 84 total seats in the legislature. 64 of the seats go to the 14 departments of the state divided according to their respective populations. The other 20 Assembly members are elected at the level of the national constituency.

El Salvador is an interesting example of a proportional representation system. Historically their system has been dominated by two parties the ARENA and the FMLN. The presidential elections work as a run-off system so that the two these two parties are the only parties that are ever elected to the presidency. As well the majority of the single-cameral legislatureseats are won by these two parties as well. In 2012 the elections looked like this

Party		Votes	%	Seats	+/–
	Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista)	870,418	39.76%	33	1
	Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional)	804,760	36.76%	31	4
	Grand Alliance for National Unity (Alianza por la Unidad Nacional)	210,101	9.6%	11	11
	National Coalition (Concertación Nacional)1	157,074	7.18%	74	4
	Party of Hope (Partido de la Esperanza)2	60,486	2.76%	14	4
	Democratic Change (Cambio Democrático)	46,838	2.14%	1	0
	National Liberal Party (Partido Nacional Liberal)	14,379	0.66%	0	0
	People's Party (Partido Popular)	10,952	0.50%	0	0
	Independents3	14,098	0.63%	0	0

As you can see all of the parties with more than 2% of the vote are represented in the legislature but it is dominated still by 2 parties. Only 20 of the 84 total votes in the legislature went to all the third parties combined.

Duverger’s Law which states that a proportional representation system will bring about a multi-party system is not exactly proven true in this case. Certainly there are other parties in the system that gain votes in the legislature, but even in the United States which is very much a two-party system there are a few legislators of differing parties than republicans and democrats. I do not think that 9% and 7% are a significant amount of votes to be able to prove Duverger’s Law. There are in effect only 2 effective parties.