Albania goes proportional
Albania this week scrapped its mixed-member system in favor of proportional representation. According to the IHT (above, as well as PressTV and Balkan Insight), the new system looks like some form of list-PR with seats allocated at the regional level. There are 12 administrative regions.
According to ACE Project, the old system was MMP with 100 single-member districts and 40 seats in the proportional tier. The IPU says a two-round system was used in the single-seat districts. PR seats were allocated to parties clearing 2 percent in the first round.
On the other hand, Freedom House says the PR thresholds were 2.5 percent for parties and 4 percent for coalitions.
All reports above cite opposition by small parties who think this reform (among others) is intended to force them out of parliament. Similar reforms in Ukraine had that effect in the 2006 election. Whether the same will happen in Albania depends largely on the magnitude of each district and the formal threshold. No details yet on either.
MSS on 30 Apr 2008 at 11:03 am #
The nominal (single-seat-district) tier was plurality. (It would be a very weird MMP system that would have two-round majority for the nominal tier, not that weirdness is a necessary hindrance to electoral-system designers.)
Not sure about the threshold.
As for small parties, the claim is weird. In Albania, only 2 nominal-tier seats in 2005 were won by parties other than the two big ones. That is quite different from Russia or Ukraine, which were MMM (parallel) systems (not MMP/compensatory) in which a majority of the nominal-tier seats tended to be won either by independents or regional parties that could not clear the list-tier threshold.
Fruits and Votes » Prof. Shugart's Blog » One less MM system on 30 Apr 2008 at 11:11 am #
[...] Jack notes that Albania has joined the growing (but still small) set of countries to abandon a mixed-member electoral system. [...]
daniel on 10 May 2008 at 2:25 am #
@ weird system? … In 2001, Albania used a MMP system (mixed compensatory system) with a two-round majority rule for the single-seat tier.
@ weird opposition claims? … Possibly, the opposition is less sceptical about the change from a mixed system towards pure PR than about district magnitude in the new PR system. I can only speculate. As far as I understand, the size of the parliament will be kept constant at 140, what means that the average district magnitude with 12 districts would be 12. Unfortunately, I could not yet find any precise information about the rules in detail. The natural threshold of exclusion would probably be around 8%. In the mixed system, the PR seat allocation was national, and there was only a 2.5% threshold.
Among the smaller parties in the 2005 elections, the largest one, LSI got some 8% countrywide, but the vote is not perfectly homogeneous throughout the country, so that (provided it keeps the same electoral potential) it might lose representation in several of the 12 districts.
Other smaller parties, such as the Human Rights Union (de facto the Greek minority party), have even less chances. The Human Rights Union got some 4% of the vote - and it might only win parliamentary seats if it is lucky in its strongholds. In the 1990s, the Human Rights Union could regularly win a few seats from single-seat districts too.
daniel on 10 May 2008 at 2:33 am #
PS: Apparently, the ACE information is from 2001, the IPU information dates from the 1997. Freedom House (2.5/4% threshold) seems to be correct for 2001 and 2005.
MSS on 20 May 2008 at 1:44 pm #
Daniel, thanks for that info. Apparently the runoff provision represents yet another tinkering with Albania’s MM rules.
It looks to me as if it was indeed two-round majority in 2001 but plurality in 2005. At least that is the inference I draw from the results that Adam Carr posts. It is not entirely clear, but it looks like his constituency-level results for 2001 show only the decisive round (i.e. he shows some multi-candidate races in which one candidate has a majority–clearly a first/sole round) and some two-candidate races (which could be runoffs). For 2005, there are several district races shown where there is a candidate identified as winner, but with less than 50%.