Tentative conclusions on democracy & governance
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Iraq’s endogenous institutional inertia
Reidar Visser of the Iraq democratization website historiae.org has an excellent post on his supplemental blog about electoral reform in Iraq. Until the close of legislative business on Friday, prospects were ostensibly good for a reformed electoral law including open-list proportional representation (OLPR) for Council of Representatives elections. Lo and behold, it increasingly looks like the sectarian forces occupying parliament will not gore their own ox by relinquishing control over their party lists to voters. Visser’s title captures the point: “A Closed Assembly Will Produce a Closed List.” I want to discuss the origin and likely impact of that “closed assembly.”
Prospects for OLPR looked good because Iraqis literally took to the streets to advocate for it last weekend. They were following cues from Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini Al-Sistani, whose advocacy of the system began last summer and who suggested he might boycott closed-list elections, as well as from other political leaders initially opposed to but who later claimed to support the proposal. Successful OLPR elections for governorate councils last winter fueled proponents’ empirical case, and reform looked likely when Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki joined the choir of supporters.
As Visser notes, however, the reform clamor belies parliamentary leaders’ secret preference for the status quo. Despite the apparent public agreement on candidate-based elections, lawmakers adjourned for the weekend on Friday without taking action. Not having a new law means the old closed-list one will remain in force. One could hope that they come back Monday to vote for a new law, except that the Iraqi Independent Electoral Commission said October 16 was the last possible date to make changes in time for January 16′s polls. Moreover, lawmakers’ inaction has a precedent; the same thing happened last summer.
Why would open lists be a reform? An argument I have made often on this blog concerns candidate-based electoral systems as treatments for divided societies. When transitional elections are run under voting systems that induce disciplined, ‘programmatic’ parties – especially closed-list PR, which has been the treatment in an overwhelming share of post-conflict interventions since World War II or so – the emergent party system is likely to reflect the divisive religious or ethnic cleavages that fuel conflict in the first place.
Skeptics of the treatment argument suggest that institutions are unlikely to alter or mute divisive cleavages because powerful actors in the underlying society will choose democratic rules that reinforce the preexisting power structure. Put differently, institutions are endogenous to social context. Either actors will choose institutions that benefit them, or they will ignore the incentives presented by imposed institutions just as a sickly host rejects a nonetheless needed organ transplant. If the social conditions are bad for democracy and stability, the electoral behavior arising from them also will be. By implication, institutional design is not an effective scope for democratizing interventions.
While aspects of the point about institutional treatment are fair to concede, it overemphasizes the durability of social context. The fatalism of this perspective with respect to electoral rules risks blocking outcomes otherwise auspicious for democracy. Any elections held amidst violent, sectarian conflict are likely to generate a congruent party system, regardless of the electoral system chosen. Four years later, though, Iraqi political discourse has become more secular, more national, and more about government performance.1 That was the lesson of January’s provincial elections, and, as Visser notes, a trend likely to persist into national elections next year. The difference between last and next January’s elections is that, while electoral rules in the former allowed voters to seat performance-oriented candidates, closed-list PR in the latter will not. Institutions eventually do matter, and regardless of the population’s shifting preferences, January’s national legislative elections are likely to be another polarized, sectarian census.
This is unfortunate because something could have been done to prevent it. Namely, occupying powers could have done more to impose a candidate-based electoral system on Iraq in January 2005. We instead granted sectarian actors’ wishes for a system shoring up their power to set the Iraqi legislative agenda, both then and into the future.2
Notwithstanding public demonstrations and party leaders’ pronouncements in favor of more voter choice, Iraq is on track for more of the same: another national election under closed-list electoral rules. If this is what happens, it will be the path-dependent outcome of a fateful choice made four years ago. Now in place is a feedback between social polarization and restrictive elections. Closed assembly, closed list.
- Or private access to public goods, the developmental pathology called clientelism. How to deal with that is a big question for another post, but clientelism is present in all societies in varying degrees. For now, I will claim that the developmental challenge is twofold: generalizing clientelism while increasing aggregate wealth in order to sustain the generalized clientelism we call a welfare state.
- Accurate understanding of the choice of closed lists has been a casualty in recent coverage of the reform debate. See, for example, this typical article by the WSJ where the personal security of candidates is cited as a reason for closed lists. Other arguments have included the simplicity of voting and administration with CLPR ballots. I am more inclined to believe this logic – CLPR is a fast, easy and cheap way to run an election mid-conflict – but not that it mattered more than the preferences of sectarian leaders.
7 responses to to “Iraq’s endogenous institutional inertia”
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After much deliberation, I thought we had concluded (over at Fruits & Votes) that the regional assembly elections were not held under open lists, but rather under (minimally) “flexible” ones. That is, that the pre-electoral party list order usually prevailed over the preference votes.
Was that conclusion wrong?
Did (some) Iraqis take to the streets over the choice of open vs. flexible lists?
Also, I do not consider OLPR to be a “candidate-based” (or what I term “nominal”) electoral system. And I think the discussion we had earlier implied SNTV, which is a purely candidate-based system (party votes being literally non-existent). In an open list, on the other hand, the list is the first criterion in allocating seats, and only afterward do the candidate preference votes come in to play. That is, of course, an enormously important distinction relative to closed (or flexible) lists. However, the basis of allocation under OLPR is still that candidates pool votes and a preference vote for one candidate may help the election of another of the same list. Thus it is meaningfully a “list-based” system far more than a “candidate-based” one.
I am not aware of any evidence that suggests that list type affects the extent to which the party system reflects ethnic cleavages. SNTV would tend to allow the representation (whether in a larger party or a micro-party) of very small (for a given district magnitude) ethnic divisions. But I see no reason to expect that the distinction between open, closed, and flexible lists affects the overall relationship of the party system to the cleavage structure. It might do so, but it is not immediately clear how, and I certainly do not think the political science research on this question is clear (yet).
I would also be very skeptical of claims that open list PR allows voters to select “performance oriented” candidates. Typically the margins between winning and losing candidates on a list are so small–at least if M is greater than about 6–that any connection between performance and winning is likely somewhat nebulous.
Finally, security of candidates was certainly a reason given back in 2005 for closed lists. And closed lists are clearly simpler to vote and count, though I actually find that one of the least compelling arguments in their favor.
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[...] discussion of list type for Iraq’s upcoming national election. And I offer some comments. At The Democratic Piece. [...]
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1. Wilf Day determined at your blog that the lists are flexible. This English translation of the governorate electoral law confirms what Wilf found at Reidar Visser’s website. The law is a little vague, but I see nothing indicating that a candidate needs a minimum share of preference votes to move around the list (i.e. “the candidates shall be re-ranked based on the number of the votes obtained by a candidate”).
2. I do not know the extent to which party orders prevailed over preference vote-driven reorderings. I am trying to find more detailed election returns to determine, at the least, the extent of preference voting.
3. My claim about the undesirability of CLPR is based on the intuition that, in the presence of popular party leaders apt to make ethnoreligious campaign appeals, electoral rules reinforcing those leaders’ control of campaign dynamics create security dilemmas for voters. Even in divided societies, not every voter’s first choice is the party most representative of his ethnoreligious identity. Call the performance-first voter Voter X. When Voter X has reasonable expectations that an ethnoreligious party representing another group may capture state power and use it to the detriment of people from his own group, he has an incentive to abandon his first choice for the party most likely to protect his own group.
I realize this is a working hypothesis that needs testing. I am thinking about that.
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[...] Democratic Piece has published an blog discussing the slow death in Iraq of reformed electoral laws including open-list proportional [...]
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[...] Jack Santucci, alum of the MA in Democracy and Governance program, has a good analysis of Iraq’s electoral system at the Democratic Piece. [...]
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Jack, that is a hunch well worth pursuing. The impact of list type on these sorts of outcomes is an under-researched area, for sure.
(‘Hypothesis’ is just an overly fancy Greek word for English ‘hunch’!)
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[...] Jack Santucci, October 16, 2009 [...]
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