Open list PR for Iraqi governorate elections

Posted on January 12th, 2009 Jack No comments  Print This Post

Iraq’s governorates will elect councils under open list proportional representation on January 31. According to Election Guide’s latest email alert:

Iraqi electoral officials have deemed it safe enough for political candidates’ names to appear on the ballots for the January 31 provincial elections. In previous elections since the 2003 US-led nvasion toppled the late Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime, rampant sectarian and political violence kept candidates and their families at risk. As a result, only candidates’ political party affiliations appeared on ballots…

I didn’t know candidates’ personal security was the deciding factor in using closed list PR for both 2005 national elections.

Dawisha and Diamond’s 2006 Journal of Democracy piece (gated) has become my resource on how these choices were made (emphasis mine):

First, it fit with the power-sharing or “consociational” logic of institutional design that Iraq was moving to embrace. Proportionality had become a basic principle of Iraqi political life with the July 2003 appointment of the Iraqi Governing Council—whose 25 members represented a delicate balance among Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds in numbers approximating their shares of the population (it also included one member each from the Turkoman and Assyrian Christian minorities).4 PR sustained the logic that each group should expect to have a share of power roughly proportional to its weight in society. This expectation—which quickly became an entitlement—was deeply worrisome to some Iraqis and foreign advisors, but once the logic was established it became inescapable.

Second, the leaders of the principal Shi’ite and Kurdish political parties were attracted to party-list PR because it promised to reinforce their weight in the political system and give them tighter control over who would run on their party label.PR also made it easier for the various Kurdish and Shi’ite parties to coalesce into common lists. Finally, advocates of a guaranteed quota for women’s representation in parliament—such as the Iraqi Higher Women’s Council—were drawn to PR because of its greater technical suitability to ensuring women’s representation. International experts estimated, for example, that if parties were required to place women at no worse then every third interval on their ranked lists, it was quite likely that a 25 percent minimum quota of female representatives in parliament—the target written into the interim constitution and retained, at least for a transitional period, in the permanent one—could be achieved, even if PR were conducted in a series of multimember districts. Devising a mechanism to ensure a minimum percentage of women in parliament would be much more difficult and cumbersome in a system of single-member districts, or even in a mixed system.

And there were operational reasons, according to the same. CLPR is ostensibly preferable in the absence of reliable census data for districting, where internal displacement rates are high and where these two factors complicate (1) assignments of voters to precincts and (2) the ability of identity groups to form cohesive parties.

CLPR is generally easy to administer under chaotic circumstances. Print one ballot for everyone (or one for each province, as in the second elections), and count all the votes.

Last year I argued using a candidate-centric electoral system might reduce the emphasis of ethnicity and sect in Iraqi politics. OLPR is such a system. Returning to the EGuide alert, some preliminary evidence:

Confident in the improved security environment, many candidates have felt safe enough to campaign openly and place their photos on campaign posters and banners in their respective cities.

What party systems will emerge after January 31? Will their contours differ from those of the national party system? Will legislative politics at the governorate level focus on sub-cleavage issues? How static will the national party system be going into 2009 national elections?