The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy, in which the monarch plays a mostly ceremonial role. The power lies with the Parliament, which is bi-cameral (that is, it has a lower and an upper house). The upper house (which is like a Senate) is elected indirectly by members of the country’s provincial legislatures, and it has very limited powers. The legislative power lies within the Lower Chamber which is elected every four years.

In the 19th century, the Dutch elected one politician in every constituency, who was required to have a majority of support. However, this frequently led to conflicts among groups who felt their voice was not heard in politics. In 1917, the country switched to proportional representation, a moment recorded by Dutch history as the “Great Pacification of 1917."

The Dutch have a 150-member House of Representatives elected across the country. During elections, parties put forth lists of candidates to fill in those seats. On Election Day, voters cast their ballot for a candidate on a party list. Their vote for the candidate is automatically counted as supporting that particular party.

The Dutch electoral system is proportional. This means that the composition of the Assembly reflects the percentage of support each party received. For example, if a party receives 35% of the votes, it should receive around 35% of the seats as well.

Once the votes have been tallied, two formulae determine how seats are allocated to parties. First, a quota is determined at the national level as the ratio of total votes cast to the total number of seats (that is, 150). This is called a Hare quota. For example, in 2010, 9,416,001 Dutch nationals cast their ballot. If we divide this number by 150, we obtain a Hare quota of 62,773 votes. The second step is to divide the total votes obtained by each party by this quota (i.e., 62, 773), to determine the minimal number of seats allocated to each party. Each party receives as many seats as the number of quotas it can cover with its total votes. For example, in 2010, if a party got 63,000 votes, then it got one seat, because its total number of votes covers just one quota. However, there are votes which do not amount to a full quota. Therefore in the third and final step, these remaining votes are translated into seats using the D’Hondt formula see our example. At the end of the day, there are two things to remember about the Dutch electoral system. One, to get a seat in the assembly in 2010, a party needed a mere 0.67% of the votes cast in the election. Two, the proportion of votes matches very closely the proportion of seats. You can see it easily if you compare the two columns in the table below, which gives the percentage of votes and the percentage of seats obtained by each party in 2010.