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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

EIU, Spread of Democracy Has Halted

EIU’s second annual democracy index concludes, unsuprisingly that the spread of democracy has halted. Their index has more statistical detail than Freedom House…have a look

Is Japan Ripe for Democracy Assistance?

Freedom House rates Japan as “Free.” But reading yesterday’s New York Times, I can’t help but wonder if even free countries might be able to put a little democracy assistance to good use.

Since its founding in 1955, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has been out of power for all of 11 months. But this may be about to change. The party’s favorability rating has dropped to 26.8%. You might think the main opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan, would have reason to celebrate. But you’d be mistaken. Their approval rating is only 28.3%. Something is obviously wrong.

Both parties have multiple internal factions; The Times points out that neither party has anything resembling a coherent ideology. And Japanese voters may indeed want to “throw the bums out,” but they have little confidence in an alternative that is strikingly inexperienced in governing.

Both parties need to get back to basics, and find out what is important to voters in the here and now. It’s a safe bet the economy is on their minds. CNN reports that that the Japanese economy is at its worst since the end of World War II. So a winning Japanese party will need a good plan for that.

But no one is against economic recovery, so they’ll also each need a distinguishing message. This is where polling and focus groups could come in. Who’s tough on crime? Who will fight corruption? Who can work well with international partners? Who can promise their finance minister won’t be tipsy on “cold medicine” during overseas press conferences? On a more serious note, some Japanese want to engage in a public debate about whether or not to retain the country’s peace constitution, Article 9 of which renounces war as a sovereign right. Certainly this is something that should be subject to vigorous and meaningful public discourse.

And you can be sure that grassroots party activism is suffering when the most popular party can only summon the support of 28.3% of the people, so while we’re at it, the democracy assistance community might have something useful to say about energizing party grassroots.

Of course, this suggestion is a little tongue-in-cheek. But why throw all the D&G money at hopeless cases? Our friends might be able to use a little help, too.

Conference: Globalizing Autocracy, US Foreign Policy, and Democracy Assistance

Wednesday, December 10, 2008
2:00 to 5:00 PM
National Press Club, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, DC

Democracy is in decline. More troubling, authoritarian regimes are coordinating to suppress political freedom at home and abroad. What are the implications of these strategies for U.S. foreign policy and democracy assistance programs?

Conference Agenda:

2:00-3:20: Causes and Consequences of Authoritarian Globalization

• Dan Brumberg, Georgetown University and US Institute of Peace
• Larry Diamond, National Endowment for Democracy and Hoover Institution
• Tom Melia, Freedom House
• Ambassador Gérard Stoudmann, International Foundation for Electoral Systems

3:20-3:30 Refreshments

3:30-5:00: Challenges for Democracy Assistance Programs

• Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Michelle Dunne, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Gerald Hyman, Center for Strategic and International Studies
• Carina Perelli, International Foundation for Electoral Systems

Please RSVP. Space is limited.

Institutions Mute Ethnic Tension?

There was an interesting column yesterday in the Washington Post from M. Steven Fish and Matthew Kroenig about the on going crisis in Kenya.

In brief, their argument is that the main cause of the crisis in Kenya is a weak legislature, not necessarily ethnic tension. They argue that many multi-ethnic societies are largely peaceful and that the ethnic tension only arises when the interests of ethnic groups are not well represented in the government institutions. The ethnic tension and violence beind displayed now is a result of an incredibly weak legislature in Kenya relative to the executive. Because the legislature is weak, losers of the presidential election are relegated to virtual powerlessness and are subject to the whims of the ethnic group that controls the executive branch. Therefore, the presidential elections have served to be a zero-sum situation which can provide incentives for leaders to escalate tensions to rally support based on ethnic lines. Thus, the authors argue that the ethnic tensions are not necessarily inherent to the society, but are instead a result of an unbalanced political system that provides for all the power in a single branch that can be seized by one ethnic group.

Fish and Kroenig recommend that US democracy promoters should focus more attention institutional aspects of countries when considering their work. I think that they make a good case for the importance of considering institutional factors when designing democracy assistance. However, there are two weaknesses to this piece I think they over look. I recognize this is a quick column written for a newspaper, but I hope they at least consider these items outside.

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