A single constituency

One thing Icelanders commonly cite off their laundry list of solutions to "fixing parliament" is to make the whole of Iceland a single constituency.

When questioned though, few people seem to have a firm grasp of how of the current electoral system works. This in itself may be a red-flag as representational systems of government are built on trust and one can only trust a system as far as one understands it.

The question is, what exactly would this change solve? The idea is that disparity of population in the current constituencies introduces an unfair bias. One way to solve this is to move seats between constituencies, and in fact the Icelandic Constitution addresses this to some extent. Another way would be to abolish partioning altogeather.

These charts explore what would have happened to the four major parties in past elections if there were only a single constituency. The coloured bars represent the number of seats each party got and the grey bars represent allotted seats had the country been a single constituency.

This ignores all indications that the number and size of constituencies may affect the number and size of the parties the live in it.

It is noteworthy here that, historically, the Progressive Party (Framsóknarflokkur) has the most obvious bias. Their strongest constituency by far is North-East, which has the lowest voters-per-seat. This may go some way to explain the phenomenon explored in Predictions vs. Elections.