The Democratic Piece

(This piece has been since been revised for the purposes of clarity.)

Two weeks have passed since the Moroccan elections and, to my surprise, the Interior Ministry has posted the electoral statistics on the Internet. To be sure, this is a step in the direction of transparency. It remains, however, that as world leaders complement the Kingdom for its progressiveness, the stark truth of a flawed electoral process must not be overlooked. It is hardly too early to suggest that these relatively “free and fair” elections have failed to generate a legislature with the capacity to govern responsibly (to put the mis’oul in the mis’ouleen).

In these elections, Morocco demonstrated that rigging elections can be done without stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating voters. Rather, the Interior Ministry ensured a friendly outcome by designing an electoral system that would prevent competing parties from obtaining enough parliamentary seats to exert the institution’s powers and thereby govern. The overall impact of such a “balancing” act is to reinforce societal divisions and, ultimately, the status quo power structures.

For those of us who do not follow Moroccan politics, Morocco has a weak Parliament with few decision-making powers. Since its instillation in the mid-1960s, the Parliament has functioned mainly as a mechanism to divvy up state resources and co-opt potentially threatening political actors. The Parliament also works to ensure that no single social force can muster the credibility to challenge the authority of the King and the makhzen, an elite institution of rules, procedures, and individuals that serve the Monarchy and the extant power structure. While the King has recently expressed his desire for the Parliament to play an increasing central role in the affairs of the state, such a wish is hardly sufficient to reverse what has already been done. The Parliament’s powerlessness and corruption have become institutionalized.

The Moroccan political system features what can be classified as a closed-list proportional representation (PR) electoral system. PR systems of various types are often employed in countries in which excluding particular societal forces can drive these groups to work toward overthrowing the entire political system. By handing out seats in roughly the same proportion to the popular vote attained by each party, PR systems usually emphasize inclusiveness – perhaps even giving the 10^th ranked candidate a seat in the legislature, which allows small parties to compete – over other qualities, such as alliance building.

To curtail the negative effects of a PR system, such as fragmentation, many governments institute electoral features to encourage contrasting behaviors. For example, in Latin America as in many former French colonies, PR legislative elections are often matched with presidential elections. Whereas the former encourages fragmentation, the latter tends to promote coalition formation. The required plurality of votes needed for a candidate to win the presidency emphasizes the building of coalitions as a crucial part of the political game. As a result, candidates with “serious” presidential aspirations are forced to make deals with smaller parties, leading most frequently to two-candidate horse-races (Shugart and Carey show that the winner of 30 Latin American PR elections attained 49.7% of the vote to the runners-up’s 34.9%. Combined, this comes to around 85% of the total vote.).

In Morocco, where such a list PR system is used, there is no president and the King nominates the prime minister. Without a presidential or prime ministerial vote, the Moroccan electoral system is not structured to counteract the fragmenting effect of the legislative elections. Consequently, the country features more than 30 political parties contested the parliamentary elections, 23 of which won presentation.

Another interesting feature of the Moroccan PR system is that the majority of districts feature a magnitude of 4, meaning that each district comprises 4 seats (although there are a few districts with a magnitude of just 2 or 3). According to Professor Matthew Shugart, the elections wizard over at Fruits and Votes, low magnitude PR systems lead to majoritarian outcomes when party identity is strong. But while Morocco features some very old parties, few Moroccans possess strong party allegiances. A product of Morocco’s clientelist system is the continued supremacy of familial and clan-based allegiances, particularly prevalent in rural areas. Compounding this problem, rural areas receive disproportionate representation due to gerrymandering and remain important networks for politicians to buy off through patronage.

While Morocco has adopted a closed party-list system, which puts parties before personalities by forcing voters to vote directly for a party as opposed to an individual[1], it seems to have had little effect on the party system given the following results:

1. Winning 3^rd place in a district of magnitude 3 is just as good as winning 1^st unless the 1^st place party wins by more votes than are received by the 3^rd place party (in the latter scenario, the 1^st place party would get 2 seats). Given the weakness of the political parties and the fact that as many as 30 parties may run candidates for a given seat, the possibility of a single party winning more than one seat in a district is unlikely. In most districts then, a candidate who is not first on his party’s list has little chance of being elected. As a result, the candidate has a greater incentive to run on another party’s list (or to create his own party) where he can be the first candidate on the list. This formation thus encourages further party fragmentation.

2. The low magnitude of each district also advantages local candidates with tribal or familial ties to the district. Ibn Kafka over at ‘Aqoul does a good job of demystifying the phenomenon. While in a closed party-list system the candidate’s name and/or picture is not featured on the ballot, Moroccan political parties are known to vie for the most popular rural chieftains in order to have a shot at winning a seat. Political ideology takes a back seat to political expidency. Again, although some parties have been around since the 1950s, their political programs and ideologies are not well known. Moreover, the reputation of the Parliament for incompetence encourages voters to value patrimony over other considerations. Thus, parties like PPS, a formerly-communist group which broke off from the USFP, retained a number of rural seats in the 2007 elections when its traditional constituency remains in the cities. Meanwhile, Movement Populaire (MP), which has rural Berber roots, ended up winning a number of seats in urban locals. It should not be surprising then that MP is currently fragmenting, with many of its members defecting to Fouad Ali al-Himma’s new party, the Authenticity and Modernity Party. It should also be noted that the election of patronage candidates in the Parliament negatively impacts the quality of Morocco’s representatives, many of whom do not possess the skills and experience to be effective MPs.

3. Not until after the King selects a prime minister is there an incentive for Moroccan political parties to form alliances. And as they negotiate with the prime minister to form a government coalition (kutla), matters of policy tend to take a back seat to questions related to who will get which ministries (an important source of jobs for the party faithful). And because the King retains all decision-making powers, it is important to question what all of this competition is about in the first place; but this is a topic for another essay.

With such an emphasis on inter-party competition and no party able to take more than 13% of the vote, the parties are “balanced” indeed. While this may sound nice, it comes as a critical obstacle to the Parliament’s assumption of political authority. A ruling coalition is sure to combine 4 or 5 parties and suffer from a level of disorganization, incongruence, and corruption that will prevent the improvement of Parliament’s performance over the course of the next 5 years.

A final observation on Morocco’s 2007 parliamentary elections is that a significant number of Moroccans seem to understand that frivolity of such affairs. An abysmal 37% bothered to show up at the polls. Moreover, 19% of ballots cast were either invalid or made in protest, a figure that surpasses the vote total of the top yielding party, the PJD, by nearly 6%. The fact that so many people showed up to cast invalid ballots suggests that there is a sizable population of Moroccans who would be active participants in efforts to force reforms to the Moroccan power structure. While I’m not suggesting that Moroccans are so upset with the state of their country that they are going to actually do something about it, the desire for action is there. But, given the constraints to obtaining credibility embedded in the electoral system and other public processes and institutions, Morocco is likely to continue down its current path for the foreseeable future.