Fixing Iraq’s party system: Take two

No word yet on what electoral system will be used to elect Iraq’s 18 governorate councils. I want to revisit the point because now is an historic opportunity to be proactive. Using another high-magnitude list system is alarmingly likely to reinforce the zero-sum disaster that is Iraq’s party system.

Last week I argued for open-endorsement SNTV in governorate-wide districts. Under that system, parties would have little control over nominations.¹ Each district would seat several members. Each voter would get one vote. He or she would cast it for a person, not a party.

That system could foster clientelistic constituent linkages. Such linkages would get parliamentarians talking about more than sect. This must be the goal because religious disputes are intractable under democracy.

Ayad Allawi ran a topical op-ed in the NY Times last November.² Mainly because of closed-list PR, Allawi argued, “the vast majority of the electorate based their choices on sectarian and ethnic affiliations, not on genuine political platforms.”

I propose that a new electoral law be devised to move Iraq toward a completely district-based electoral system, like the American Congress, or a “mixed party list” system like that in Germany, in which some representatives are directly elected and other seats are allotted based on the parties’ overall showing. In either case, the candidates must be announced well in advance of the election, and they must be chosen to represent the people in their locality.

Furthermore, a new law should ban the use of religious symbols and rhetoric by candidates and parties — these have no place in democratic elections [...]

This restructuring of the electoral process will be the beginning of the end of the sectarianism that now dominates Iraqi politics and our dysfunctional government [...]

Allawi is onto something in advocating for a large nominal tier. But Iraq does not need to ban religious campaigns. Supplying incentives to talk about something else could suffice. SNTV would do a better job of that than MMP or FPP. Both MMP and FPP would require boundary delimitation that’s impossible given the lack of census data. Both systems moreover would be easy for current parties to game.

Open-endorsement SNTV can generate pork-barrel campaigns. It avoids the districting nightmare. It empowers individual candidates at the expense of the current parties. It could make Iraqi politics about more than religion.

1. Depending on ballot access rules.
2. The original TDP blog post is here.

Allawi: Take my district magnitude, please!

Former Iraqi PM Ayad Allawi has an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times calling for smaller electoral districts. Echoing others, Allawi argues the rushed use of closed-list proportional representation exacerbated Iraqi sectarianism.

Yet due largely to political pressure from the international community, the elections went ahead in January 2005, under a misguided “closed party list” system. Rather than choosing a specific candidate, voters across the country chose from among rival lists of candidates backed and organized by political parties. This system was entirely unsuitable given the security situation, the lack of accurate census figures, heavy intimidation from ethnic and religious militias, gross interventions by Iran, dismantled state institutions, and the use of religious symbols by parties to influence voters.

Accordingly, the vast majority of the electorate based their choices on sectarian and ethnic affiliations, not on genuine political platforms. Because many electoral lists weren’t made public until just before the voting, the competing candidates were simply unknown to ordinary Iraqis. This gave rise to our sectarian Parliament, controlled by party leaders rather than by the genuine representatives of the people. They have assembled a government unaccountable and unanswerable to its people.

The December 2005 elections went ahead with a slightly different system: closed lists in each of 19 governorates with a share of seats reserved for parties that could not muster enough support in any single governorate. The basic logic was the same, however: relatively large districts in which voters voted for party labels.

Adeed Dawisha and Larry Diamond argue in last year’s Electoral Systems and Democracy that both rounds entrenched “the logic of electoral politics as an identity referendum.” Closed-list PR was the rushed result of preoccupation with proportionality and fairness of apportionment in the absence of reliable census data. (Incidentally, the United States didn’t respect “one person, one vote” until the 1960s.) The December 2005 shift to governorates-as-districts was a so-so improvement essentially driven by the same concerns.

In the op-ed, Allawi calls for single-member districts or MMP. The key here is fostering crossover support among groups along other issue dimensions. STV might have been helpful, but as Dawisha and Diamond note, planners thought it would confuse voters. And it would have required planners to grapple with the need for census data – if equal population were that big a deal. After all, if the planners didn’t know how many of who lived where, how could anti-system critics have known?