Redistribution of Provincial Representative Seats in the Islamic Parliament Based on the SECA Model

One of the basic electoral challenges in democratic systems is the allocation of parliamentary seats to provinces and constituencies. In this context, countries act very differently in terms of the ratio of representatives to citizens in the parliament and draw the borders of constituencies based on the criteria included in their electoral laws. Since there are no fixed, standard or universal criteria and rules for allocating the number of parliamentary seats to constituencies that determine the configuration of a national assembly, countries usually do this based on demographic and geographic factors. Therefore, the research question is how one can optimally and fairly distribute the provincial seats in the Islamic Parliament? The main hypothesis here is the unfair and non-optimal distribution of the representative seats of the Islamic parliament in the current situation. In this regard, to answer the question of this research, the SECA optimization method has been used based on the criteria of population, area, number of cities and human development index. According to the findings, the optimal number of representatives of each province in the Islamic Council under two scenarios and two weighting approaches to the four criteria has been precisely determined and compared. These results show that the provinces of East and West Azerbaijan, Isfahan, Tehran, Khuzestan, Fars, Gilan, Lorestan, and Hamedan have a surplus of representatives, and other provinces generally face a shortage of representatives. In other words, the source of injustice in the distribution of seats in the Parliament is the extra seats that have been allocated to provinces.