Guest-blogging in the orchard

Following an invitation from Head Orchardist Matthew Shugart, I am guest-blogging on occasion at Fruits & Votes. Stop by for a visit.

IRV for the United Kingdom?

The British House of Commons yesterday approved a bill authorizing an electoral reform referendum by 365 to 187 votes. That bill now must pass the House of Lords before the present parliament expires. If the Lords do as the Commons have, a referendum on the alternative vote (AV, also known to Americans as instant runoff voting, or IRV) will be due by October 2011.

More from the UK Electoral Reform Society; ERS’ Twitter feed; the Twitter feed of FairVote, ERS’ sister organization in the US; a FairVote blog post; and a spirited discussion in the comments of Fruits and Votes on the merits of AV for minor parties.

Institutionalist observers have speculated a lot on Labor’s self-interested reasons for finally pursuing electoral system reform in the United Kingdom. See, for example, Fruits and Votes once again on earlier, broken promises to do the same. One line of thinking holds AV is a compromise that Labour can use to buy Liberal Democrat support for a minority government after elections this year, which are expected to go badly for Gordon Brown’s government. Another line of thinking sees the potential for preference-trading among LDP and Labor supporters to boost the parties’ shared seat total.¹ ERS’ official position can be summarized thus: it’s not proportional representation, but AV is a step in the right direction.

Notably, according to the BBC, Parliament rejected 476-69 a LDP proposal for an earlier referendum on proportional representation by the single transferable vote.

1. Note, however, that some British observers have projected AV to benefit the Tories instead. What’s more, any such effect would be moot, as electoral system change would come long after this spring’s elections.

US Institute of Peace event on Iran’s Regime and Opposition Movement

The US Institute of Peace will be holding an event on February 1 from 10 am to 12 pm (Eastern) entitled “A Revolution Undone?: Regime and Opposition in Iran. “ It will explore how the evolving clash between regime and opposition affects the stability of the Islamic Republic, on the one hand, and its foreign relations, on the other. It will feature former Iranian parliament member, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, as well as scholars such as Georgetown’s own Daniel Brumberg (Acting Director of USIP’s Muslim World Initiative) and Robin Wright (prominent journalist and author on Iran and the Middle East), among others.

USIP will be webcasting the event while maintaining live chat and Twitter discussions during the webcast. (Twitter hashtag: #usipiran). It promises to be an exciting talk. I’ll be moderating the online discussion and putting questions from the online audience to the panel.

You can find information about the event at: http://www.usip.org/events/revolution-undone

Google and “Chinese norms”

Reporting on Google’s response to a Chinese government attack on Gmail-using democracy activists, the New York Times reported:

It is also likely to enrage the Chinese authorities, who deny that they censor the Internet and are accustomed to having major foreign companies adapt their practices to Chinese norms.

Sorry, but censorship is not a “Chinese norm.” It is a strategy that authoritarian regimes deliberately use to impede collective action for political change. The slippery use of “norm” smacks of a common problem in sloppy cultural argumentation. Sure, culture matters. Culture is useful, for example, when categorizing actors’ exogenous preferences without time to probe them more deeply. Sometimes culture manifests as a norm, or an ‘informal’ rule of interaction (i.e. an institution). Used in this way, “norm” implies that the rule is highly particular – that it has characteristics identifying it with one or another society. But, in China, we are dealing with neither culture nor norm. Plenty of actors in plenty of societies have used censorship and control: President Tandja in Niger, Stalin in Russia, and Woodrow Wilson in our own country.

Hats off to Google for dumping its search query censorship, which the company began in 2006 to curry business favor with the regime. (H/T to the UN Wire.)

Sudanese liberalism

Omar al-Bashir’s government has whipped a 16-year old Christian girl 50 times for wearing a skirt that stopped at her knees.

Make of it what you will, but I am reminded of the effort to hold elections in Sudan. This juxtaposition recalls that liberal democratic institutions are entirely compatible with theocratic tyranny over the human spirit. Just ask Rebecca Nurse and Hester Prynne. Like we did 300 years ago, Sudan has a very long way to go.

One way to model dictatorship

Says the BBC:

Iraqi politics is still a zero-sum game, and one in which the Sunni Arabs feel themselves doomed to be the losers.

Last week I analogized the situation to repeated games of Chicken.

Iraqi consociationalism woes

Iraq’s Sunni vice president vetoed the hard-won electoral law this week. More about that from Barak Hoffman and Matthew Shugart. The current impasse boils down to the apportionment formula. Sunni and Kurdish politicians think the deck is stacked against them.

So is Iraqi consociationalism coming apart, or is this mundane sectarian brinksmanship?

Iraq is our latest experiment in exporting consociationalism. The Iraqi state is built on explicit recognition and institutionalization of combatant ethnic and sectarian groupings. A closed-list PR system funnels these groups into their respective political parties, and, as we saw this week, governing requires the consent of a member of every ethnic group. Now, Iraq’s constitution is not explicit about this. Articles 66-75 set up a semi-presidential system with a unitary executive whose job is to sign legislation. Then there are the so-called “transitional provisions,” which basically divide the presidency among three people elected by 2/3 vote of the legislature. This all but guarantees that the Presidency Council will include one Shiite, one Sunni, and one Kurd, as it does now.

The problem with consociationalism is that, for it to work, elite politicians have to (1) control the combatant groups they represent and (2) desire compromise. The US constitution’s Framers approached institutional design from the safe assumption that politicians are nihilistic power maximizers. This led them to emphasize checks and balances and to riddle the American political system with veto points. Consociationalism, on the other hand, began as a category of observed behavior.¹ It was not the result of a deductive exercise. If game theory is good for anything, it’s good for designing institutions. We begin with an assumption about the preferences of key players (dictatorship by one’s ethnic group > killing each other > dictatorship of the other ethnic group), we choose a desired goal (violence prevention), and we proceed accordingly. Modeling a situation in this way certainly does not lead us to institutions that depend on mutual good will.

The veto of the new electoral law is entirely consistent with the institutional context. That is, we expect outcomes like this one when we run Iraq’s social profile through the consociational machinery of its democracy. I don’t think we are witnessing a constitutional crisis, at least in as much as “crisis” implies an extraordinarily stressful event. From another perspective, Iraq is in a perpetual state of constitutional crisis.

Let me go out on a limb with some predictions.

First, the election will happen, even if a little bit late. Hashemi’s veto is just another round in the ongoing game of chicken that defines constitutional decision-making in Iraq. Brinksmanship and eleventh-hourism have characterized most moments of important political choice since 2003. Why would preparing for the next national election be any different?

Second, there is nothing “transitional” about the “transitional Presidency Council.” What rational group would agree to give up its veto?

Third, Iraqi democracy will not consolidate any time soon. Recall that a car wreck is one solution to a game of chicken. We are more likely to see a dictatorship or civil war in Iraq than we are a stable, electoral democracy.

1. Ian Lustick has a good article about this.

STV in Tonga?

Not yet, but if plans to shift power from the monarch to parliament go forward, it’s possible. Matthew Shugart blogs.

A small handful of countries have experience with preferential voting systems in Oceania (e.g. LPV). Maybe this is due to an Australian diffusion effect or even election assistance from Oz.

Tonga would add to a set of several current, governmental STV implementations (not including IRV implementations):

1. Malta – legislature
2. Ireland – legislature
3. Australia – upper house, several state and local assemblies
4. Northern Ireland – legislature, local assemblies
5. Scotland – local assemblies
6. New Zealand – some local assemblies
7. United States – some local assemblies (Cambridge, MA and, pretty soon, Minneapolis, MN)
8. European Union – some countries’ EU Parliament delegations
9. India – upper house (indirect)

And that list does not include historical implementations (e.g. briefly in Estonia, for decades in at least 2 dozen US cities, Nepal’s upper house before the republic).

If you don’t know how STV works, watch this video, focusing on the determination of threshold and the count. (Then, if you want to know more, watch a more specific video like this one.)

Iraq’s parliament gets bigger

Under the 2009 electoral law,¹ there will be 323 seats in the Council of Representatives. This is an increase from 275 in December 2005. As in December 2005, most seats will be allocated on the governorate level. In that election, however, there were 45 seats allocated nationally to minority groups and parties failing to meet governorate-level thresholds.² This time, there are only 16 compensatory seats.

And, of course, the new electoral system is open-list proportional representation.

More from Iraq and Gulf Analysis, including the distribution of seats by governorate.

1. Score!
2. These thresholds were not formal, but arose as a function of apportionment.

Open lists for Iraq

Reidar Visser reports. More at Fruits and Votes.

I am surprised. Then again, the political leaders who agreed to this are unlikely to lose their seats under the new system. See MSS’ comment on another post, the essence of which supports my prediction.

I do not know yet whether the lists are fully open or just “flexible.” The lists will be open. Candidates will not need quotas of preference votes as they did in the January 2009 governorate council elections. Voters, however, will have the option of voting for the party’s pre-ordered list.