Election law and equality principle. The election of national legislative assemblies in German, Belgian and British law

Abstract

The study concerns the election law and the equality principle in three European legal systems, i.e. the Federal Republic of Germany, the Kingdom of Belgium and the United Kingdom. In this framework, the research is structured into two principal questions. I firstly wonder whether the election law guarantees equality among the governed people. Should the answer to that question be negative, I secondly check if the inequality can be legally justified in democratic systems. My thesis is a nuanced answer to these questions. I reckon that election law, considered under the scope of the equality principle, includes two categories of legislations whose effect is opposed: some legal rules tend to distribute equally the faculty to influence the composition of the elected assemblies, while others tend to distribute unequally that faculty. Among the rules of the second category, I argue that the tendency to inequality can be partly legally justified by the purposes of these rules, but is also a mean – hardly justifiable in a democratic system – that helps persons and parties in government to remain in power.