Former Iraqi PM Ayad Allawi has an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times calling for smaller electoral districts. Echoing others, Allawi argues the rushed use of closed-list proportional representation exacerbated Iraqi sectarianism.

Yet due largely to political pressure from the international community, the elections went ahead in January 2005, under a misguided “closed party list” system. Rather than choosing a specific candidate, voters across the country chose from among rival lists of candidates backed and organized by political parties. This system was entirely unsuitable given the security situation, the lack of accurate census figures, heavy intimidation from ethnic and religious militias, gross interventions by Iran, dismantled state institutions, and the use of religious symbols by parties to influence voters.

Accordingly, the vast majority of the electorate based their choices on sectarian and ethnic affiliations, not on genuine political platforms. Because many electoral lists weren’t made public until just before the voting, the competing candidates were simply unknown to ordinary Iraqis. This gave rise to our sectarian Parliament, controlled by party leaders rather than by the genuine representatives of the people. They have assembled a government unaccountable and unanswerable to its people.

The December 2005 elections went ahead with a slightly different system: closed lists in each of 19 governorates with a share of seats reserved for parties that could not muster enough support in any single governorate. The basic logic was the same, however: relatively large districts in which voters voted for party labels.

Adeed Dawisha and Larry Diamond argue in last year’s Electoral Systems and Democracy that both rounds entrenched “the logic of electoral politics as an identity referendum.” Closed-list PR was the rushed result of preoccupation with proportionality and fairness of apportionment in the absence of reliable census data. (Incidentally, the United States didn’t respect “one person, one vote” until the 1960s.) The December 2005 shift to governorates-as-districts was a so-so improvement essentially driven by the same concerns.

In the op-ed, Allawi calls for single-member districts or MMP. The key here is fostering crossover support among groups along other issue dimensions. STV might have been helpful, but as Dawisha and Diamond note, planners thought it would confuse voters. And it would have required planners to grapple with the need for census data - if equal population were that big a deal. After all, if the planners didn’t know how many of who lived where, how could anti-system critics have known?