User:Repp2/Siegfried Geyerhahn

Siegfried Geyerhahn (November 30, 1879, Angern an der March, Niederösterreich, Austria-Hungary – April 30, 1960, New York, NY, USA) was an Austrian lawyer who emigrated to the USA in 1939. While a law student at Vienna University Geyerhahn published a paper in which he designed an electoral system combining proportionality with personalization, which is the earliest paper on the subject.

Life
Geyerhahn studied law at Vienna University 1898/99-1902 and was awarded the doctorate degree Dr. iur. in March 1903. He stayed in Vienna and practiced as a lawyer. Being Jewish and an active member of a Free Mason lodge, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 and detained in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. Released in 1939, Geyerhahn and his family managed to emigrate to the United States where he resumed his profession as a lawyer.

Geyerhahn also served as a liaison person for the American Association of Former Austrian Jurists.

Works
While student Geyerhahn published a paper proposing an electoral system intending to reconcile proportionality and personalization. In his system the parliamentary seats are apportioned among parties according to proportionality; the filling of these seats then is to emphasize personalization. To this end the electoral region is subdivided into constituencies; Geyerhahn suggested to set up half as many constituencies as there are seats available. In the first place the seats of a party are filled with the candidates who garner the most votes in their constituencies. The remaining seats are assigned to the remaining candidates who are ranked by their vote tallies.

Geyerhahn foresaw the possibility that a party wins more constituencies than proportionality would justify; nowadays this instance is discussed under the heading "overhang seats". He felt this event to be no more than a rare eventuality:


 * One will concede that such an event will occur only very rarely, but it can occur and therefore a course of action for this eventuality needs to be devised.

Geyerhahn offered not just one course of action, but two. His first option is to raise the house size of the parliament until all constituency winners are sustained by proportionality. The second option is to incorporate no more constituency winners than seats are provided by proportionality.

Geyerhahns paper is the oldest source of a


 * proportional system that is combined with the election of persons

that after Worldwar II has been adopted in Germany and other countries.