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.

Why don’t they add seats to the House?

As the 2010 US census nears, redistricting and reapportionment enter the news. CMC’s Rose Institute has pulled together a handful of snippets concerned with redistricting reform. For others, the apportionment question is equally interesting. How will 435 House seats be reshuffled among states whose relative populations have changed?

A spirited Pennsylvanian call for ‘fair’ redistricting touches on the problem:

With most of the nation’s population growth taking place in the South and West, Pennsylvania is on track to lose another congressional district — dropping to 18 — when reapportionment takes place after the 2010 census.

The Burnt Orange Report cites some projections from the Swing State Project on who’s likely to get what: four more for Texas, one or two for Florida, two for Arizona and one each for Georgia, Nevada, Oregon and Utah. Expected losers are mostly in the midwest and northeast.

The partisan desire to guard marginal advantage is strong. Majority parties fight independent redistricting initiatives tooth-and-nail. A modest reform like 3-seat STV is pie-in-the-sky.

But the House sets its own size. Why wouldn’t incumbents facing the axe move to add seats?

Bipartisan gerrymandering could shore up every incumbent. Increasing the size of the House could make new seats the battlegrounds, allaying fears about freezing a status quo.

I suppose it’s possible in theory.

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?