Closed list

Closed list describes the variant of party-list proportional representation where voters can (effectively) only vote for political parties as a whole, and thus have no influence on the party-supplied order in which party candidates are elected. If voters have at least some influence, then it is called an open list.

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Countries using closed-list proportional representation as of 2019

In closed list systems, each political party has pre-decided who will receive the seats allocated to that party in the elections, so that the candidates positioned highest on this list tend to always get a seat in the parliament while the candidates positioned very low on the closed list will not.

However, the candidates "at the water mark" of a given party are in the position of either losing or winning their seat depending on the number of votes the party gets. "The water mark" is the number of seats a specific party can be expected to achieve. The number of seats that the party wins, combined with the candidates' positions on the party's list, will then determine whether a particular candidate will get a seat.