Constituency

A constituency is any cohesive corporate unit or body bound by shared structures, goals or loyalty. It can be used to describe a business's customer base and shareholders, or a charity's donors or those it serves. The most common meaning of constituency occurs in politics and means the group of people or geographical area that a particular elected representative or group of elected representatives represents. The rest of this article deals with this sense of constituency.

Germany

In Germany there are 299 basic electoral constituencies (called Wahlkreise), accounting for half of the 598 nominal seats in the German Bundestag in a "First Past the Post electoral system". The constituencies for the rest of the seats are the federal states, representatives being drawn from the top of their respective electoral lists. The former constituencies are divided so that each has approximately the same number of voters. German electoral law dictates that the deviation from average of all constituencies shall not exceed a certain figure (see for example § 3 Abs. 1 Nr. 3 in German electoral law). Other restrictions prevent abuses such as gerry-mandering.

Related Topics:
Germany - German Bundestag - First Past the Post electoral system - Federal states - Gerry-mandering

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Similar provisions obtain for many of the federal state parliaments, though constituencies are generally smaller and boundaries change more frequently. Representatives to the European Parliament are only elected by party proportion and state.

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