May 16, 2026
Democracy might be the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time, but within that worst form of government there are a number of choices. The Dutch system is purely proportional, so growing up I naturally assumed that this was the right way; if a party has 3% of the vote, they should have 3% of the seats.
But there's something about district systems too. Democracy is mostly representative and not direct and who represents you is rather important. The Nth person on the party list is not somebody you can call up. Somebody representing your district is. But that of course leaves the question, how do you pick that person.
Anglophone countries tend to go with first past the post. Whomever has the most votes, even if it is 20% wins the district. Francophone countries often use a top-2 run off: if no candidate gets to 50%, the top 2 candidates go again. Then there are a few countries and regions that do something more subtle like ranked choice voting.
This got me thinking: could we simulate what the Netherlands would look like under these other systems? We have the data. The 2025 election results are public and broken down by gemeente — 343 municipalities, ranging from Amsterdam's 420,000 votes down to Schiermonnikoog's 1,500. Pretend each is a single-member district, take the same ten million ballots, and count them under British rules, French rules, Australian rules. So I built a thing that does that.
The most striking thing is what happens to PVV. Under proportional representation they got 26 seats out of 150 in the actual election. Under first-past-the-post they win 158 out of 343 gemeenten — a near-majority — because in a fifteen-party field even a 25 percent plurality is enough to take a district, and PVV had the most votes in a lot of places. Wilders would look like he had won in a landslide.
Under instant-runoff voting that collapses to 39. Each round the smallest party is eliminated and their voters' second preferences are redistributed. PVV sits on the far right with only FvD as a natural neighbour, so as the rest of the field competes for those transfers, VVD and D66 and CDA hoover up the seats. The standard property of ranked-choice systems is that they pull toward the median voter, and the median-voter rule itself takes that to its limit: sort the gemeente's voters left to right, see who the 50th-percentile voter prefers. In a 1-D Chapel Hill model that's almost always VVD. PVV wins exactly one district, somewhere in Limburg.
A 1-D left-right axis is obviously too simple for real politics. The simulation softens this a little by redistributing only 80% of an eliminated party's votes to spectrum neighbours, with the other 20% spread proportionally across all surviving parties — modelling voters whose preferences aren't purely ideological.
Going to 2-D would be more faithful, but it's not obvious which second dimension should dominate. Pick the wrong one and you get nonsense: add the cultural axis from Chapel Hill and CDA voters' second choice ends up being PVV, which is the opposite of what they actually do. I left it at 1-D — the multidimensional version is a problem for a political science student.
What the project actually shows is not a forecast. It's how much the rules of the count shape the country that results. The same ten million ballots can produce a near-majority for the largest single party under FPTP, a centrist consensus under ranked-choice, a one-party landscape under the median-voter rule, or our actual fragmented fifteen-party parliament under PR. Democracy by another word.
Live at douwe.com/projects/ranked_choice_nl — five maps, the seat allocations, and the source for all of it.