Coup in Mauritania

The AP is reporting that a military coup has taken place in Mauritania. Most people are not familiar with this spacious (about the size of Texas and New Mexico combined) West African nation of 3 million people, but after a coup in August 2005, the military junta called for elections in what was to be the beginning of a transition towards democracy. Here’s some background info:

On August 3, 2005, a coup by elite military forces ended the 20-year-old autocratic regime of President Maaouiya Ould Taya. Promising a democratic transition, the Junta, calling itself the Military Council for Justice and Democracy (CMJD), oversaw elections on the municipal, legislative, and presidential levels, as well as a successful national referendum to reform the 1991 Constitution. On April 19, 2007, Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi became the first democratically elected president of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

Political parties were legalized in 1991, but the political system was dominated by Taya and his political party, the Republican Democratic and Social Party (PRDS), until the 2005 coup. During this period, the Parliament was perceived as highly ineffectual. Parties had a reputation for self-aggrandizement and independents were often empowered in their stead. During the transition, the CMJD signaled its intention to consult with the political parties to set the rules that would lead Mauritania toward democracy. The parties took advantage of this opportunity, for example, by harnessing the power of collective action in order to successfully lobby the CMJD to change aspects of the electoral law.

Mauritania’s institutional design, which is set forth in the French-inspired Constitution, provides a tenuous starting point for a young and fragile democracy. The Constitution calls for a semi-presidential structure featuring a powerful president (term limit: 2/ 5-years) who appoints a prime minister (PM) and cabinet. While the Constitution endeavors to facilitate the interdependence of the executive and legislative branches, the opposition may not be able to exercise these functions if it does not form the majority coalition in the National Assembly (NA; the lower house of Parliament). This unequal distribution of checks and balances renders the political system prone to hyper-presidentialism, whereby a small group of individuals is able to retain executive powers through the selective dissemination of government posts, state resources, patronage, and the like.

Preventing hyper-presidentialism requires strong opposition politics, which, in turn, requires opposition parties to use their collective strength to check the government. However, the electoral system generates incentives that promote contradictory behaviors that make stable alliance formation difficult. Parliamentary elections encourage party fragmentation by pitting parties head-to-head in districts where a candidate must receive a majority vote to avoid a second-round. Since there are no threshold requirements or restrictions on who can win and be sat in Parliament, many seats are filled by local chieftains and family heads, who, due to their privileged position, have little reason to join nationwide political party. Presidential elections, on the other hand, encourage coalition building, but only after first promoting fragmentation. Anyone, party affiliated or not, can run for president, and last year’s election attracted 18 candidates. With so many candidates, a second round, pitting the top two vote-winners against one another, is almost inevitable. These two candidates must then battle for the support of the leading vote-getters who did not make the cutoff, entering a negotiating process that has significant consequences for the form and structure of the governing and opposition coalitions. Such incentives do not make for stable alliances (68 different alliances have been made), particularly in a nascent setting in which political actors do not yet have a grasp of their level of support in society and many actors are still vying for power.

While opposition politicians and parties are aware of the threat of hyper-presidentialism, other, often more pressing, incentives stymie the growth of the party system and the development of government-opposition politics. Politicians’ first priority is getting results. Mauritanians are poor and the current food crisis has made life harder for many. They have high expectations for democracy, stoking fears that they will turn their backs on democracy if their lifestyles do not quickly improve. Moreover, the potential reawakening of the military – if multiparty politics does not function effectively – provides an imminent danger. With these exigencies incentivizing policy to the detriment of process, the opportunity for the government to consolidate its power – either formally or informally – over Parliament is ripe.

To be sure, process has not been ignored in its entirety. Some new laws (like that on political opposition) and laws under consideration (like the Rules of Procedure, which NDI has spearheaded) aim to consolidate government processes and delineate the functions of different branches and agencies. However, serious challenges to the implementation of these laws could render them ineffectual: the paucity of resources and capacity within Mauritania’s public sector.

The public sector lacks sufficient resources to support the obligations of a modern government. The NA is the most underfunded of the government bodies; parliamentary commissions and groups do not have offices, while many parliamentarians and their staffs lack computers, photocopiers, and even phones. There is no parliamentary library or archive, or a translation service for MPs who may speak and read the principle languages of business (Arabic and French) to varying degrees. This scarcity of resources prevents the Parliament from fulfilling its role as a source of legislation, thus depriving it of one of its most essential duties. Instead, most MPs rely on legislation and information passed down to them by the government, thus abetting the power imbalance. For the public administration, the resource deficit facilitates the lax implementation of statutes and policies, allowing the infiltration of politics into its work and the replacement of formal rules that cannot be followed with informal rules that can.

Moreover, the public sector lacks human capacity. Since the CMJD took power, a number of government organs, including independent electoral and human rights commissions, an ombudsman, and inspector general’s office, and regulations, such as a law requiring elected and high-ranking officials to disclose their public assets, have been established. Their intention, at least in theory, is to check the government and ensure a balanced and competitive playing field. However, the staffs tasked with operating these bodies and implementing regulatory policies lack the capacity to implement their mandates. Morale within the bureaucracy is low. For most national level politicians, moreover, tasks like reading budgets and drafting legislation are new. On the local level, a substantial proportion of politicians are illiterate. Support staffs for politicians at all levels of government are similarly inadequately qualified, oftentimes having obtained their positions for reasons other than merit. As a result, politicians oftentimes rely on, for example, the Ministry of Finance, for answers to their technical questions.