Social media posts with hundreds of reactions and likes have claimed that Wales will have the highest number of politicians in relation to the size of its population once the Senedd increases to 96 members next year.
A post published on Facebook says: “I have only just realised that we will be voting for 96 Welsh Assembly Members in May next year. That means Wales as a country with a population of 3.2 million will have 32 MP's [sic] and 96 Assembly Members.
“This puts Wales as the highest number of politicians per population in the World.”
We’ve also seen a screenshot of this post shared on X.
It’s true that the Senedd, the Welsh parliament and the nation’s devolved legislature, is due to increase in size by 60% in May 2026, from 60 Senedd Members (MSs) to 96.
But there’s no evidence that Wales will have the highest number of politicians per head in the world once that’s happened, as the social media posts claim.
Even when combining the number of MSs from next year (96) with the number of MPs elected to the House of Commons representing constituencies in Wales (32) to reach a total of 128 elected parliamentarians, we could find no evidence that the post’s claim is accurate, or of other sources making the claim.
There are many ways of counting the number of politicians in any country, depending on whether you include local, regional and national politicians. But looking at the types of politicians mentioned in the posts, our analysis suggests that several other smaller countries such as San Marino, Iceland and Montenegro will still have more elected national parliamentarians per capita than Wales after the expansion of the Senedd.
How many politicians does Wales have per capita?
The latest available figures show Wales had an estimated population of 3,164,000 in June 2023.
Currently Wales has a total of 92 elected parliamentarians (32 MPs and 60 MSs). That works out as just over 34,000 residents for every elected parliamentarian, or just under three elected parliamentarians per 100,000 people.
Once the Senedd expands to 96 members and Wales has 128 elected parliamentarians in total, that would equate to just under 25,000 residents per elected parliamentarian, or around four elected parliamentarians per 100,000 people. (Though these figures are based on the same 2023 population figures—without knowing what Wales’ population will actually be next year we can’t produce a more accurate estimate.)
What data do we have on other countries?
Finding reliable comparative data on the number of politicians in countries around the world is difficult. However we’ve carried out our own analysis based on the best available data we can find to try and get a sense of whether this claim might be true.
We took as our starting point the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) Parline, a global reference source on national parliaments, which includes a tool which compares statistics on ‘inhabitants per parliamentarian’ for regions around the world.
We then focused our research on a number of countries this tool suggested might have a lower number of inhabitants per parliamentarian than Wales, checking the figures against more up-to-date population data. Our calculations looked at the number of directly elected national parliamentarians in different countries, excluding local council politicians and unelected politicians such as members of the House of Lords, which aren’t mentioned in the Facebook post.
Our analysis was only rough, given the difficulty of relying on data from lots of different sources and in some cases slightly different time periods, and more rigorous research would be required to come up with a reliable ranking of the countries with the highest number of politicians per head.
But our figures did suggest there are a number of other countries which are likely to be higher up that list than Wales. When we double-checked the figures for a sample of countries we identified several which appear to have a higher number of politicians per head.
For example, our calculations suggested the tiny European country of San Marino had far more elected parliamentarians per head than Wales. San Marino’s directly elected parliament has 60 members for a population of around 33,700, according to 2023 World Health Organisation data—around one elected parliamentarian for every 562 residents.
Other countries our analysis suggested may have a higher number of directly elected national parliamentarians per capita than Wales in 2026 include Iceland, Montenegro, Luxembourg, Latvia, Albania and Mauritius—though again it’s worth noting this is not an exhaustive list and only a sample of some of the countries we checked.
These six countries and San Marino, like Wales, also have further representation in the form of locally elected councillors.