Open list PR for Iraqi governorate elections

Iraq’s governorates will elect councils under open list proportional representation on January 31. According to Election Guide’s latest email alert:

Iraqi electoral officials have deemed it safe enough for political candidates’ names to appear on the ballots for the January 31 provincial elections. In previous elections since the 2003 US-led nvasion toppled the late Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime, rampant sectarian and political violence kept candidates and their families at risk. As a result, only candidates’ political party affiliations appeared on ballots…

I didn’t know candidates’ personal security was the deciding factor in using closed list PR for both 2005 national elections.

Dawisha and Diamond’s 2006 Journal of Democracy piece (gated) has become my resource on how these choices were made (emphasis mine):

First, it fit with the power-sharing or “consociational” logic of institutional design that Iraq was moving to embrace. Proportionality had become a basic principle of Iraqi political life with the July 2003 appointment of the Iraqi Governing Council—whose 25 members represented a delicate balance among Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds in numbers approximating their shares of the population (it also included one member each from the Turkoman and Assyrian Christian minorities).4 PR sustained the logic that each group should expect to have a share of power roughly proportional to its weight in society. This expectation—which quickly became an entitlement—was deeply worrisome to some Iraqis and foreign advisors, but once the logic was established it became inescapable.

Second, the leaders of the principal Shi’ite and Kurdish political parties were attracted to party-list PR because it promised to reinforce their weight in the political system and give them tighter control over who would run on their party label.PR also made it easier for the various Kurdish and Shi’ite parties to coalesce into common lists. Finally, advocates of a guaranteed quota for women’s representation in parliament—such as the Iraqi Higher Women’s Council—were drawn to PR because of its greater technical suitability to ensuring women’s representation. International experts estimated, for example, that if parties were required to place women at no worse then every third interval on their ranked lists, it was quite likely that a 25 percent minimum quota of female representatives in parliament—the target written into the interim constitution and retained, at least for a transitional period, in the permanent one—could be achieved, even if PR were conducted in a series of multimember districts. Devising a mechanism to ensure a minimum percentage of women in parliament would be much more difficult and cumbersome in a system of single-member districts, or even in a mixed system.

And there were operational reasons, according to the same. CLPR is ostensibly preferable in the absence of reliable census data for districting, where internal displacement rates are high and where these two factors complicate (1) assignments of voters to precincts and (2) the ability of identity groups to form cohesive parties.

CLPR is generally easy to administer under chaotic circumstances. Print one ballot for everyone (or one for each province, as in the second elections), and count all the votes.

Last year I argued using a candidate-centric electoral system might reduce the emphasis of ethnicity and sect in Iraqi politics. OLPR is such a system. Returning to the EGuide alert, some preliminary evidence:

Confident in the improved security environment, many candidates have felt safe enough to campaign openly and place their photos on campaign posters and banners in their respective cities.

What party systems will emerge after January 31? Will their contours differ from those of the national party system? Will legislative politics at the governorate level focus on sub-cleavage issues? How static will the national party system be going into 2009 national elections?

Another candidate-centric Iraq proposal

Via POMED comes a call by Scott Carpenter and Michael Rubin for MMP in Iraq’s governorates. A candidate-centric system, they argue, could dampen sectarian tension by weakening the party system.

Reforming Iraq’s election system on the national level will be difficult… At the local level, however, there is real opportunity… Iraqis should have the right to vote for the best individuals to administer governorates and sit on district councils. The country need not abandon parties or proportional representation, but lawmakers could explore an open-list system that would allow citizens to vote for people they know. Even better would be a mixed system, such as the one practiced in Germany, which combines party lists with the ability to elect individuals.

More on the rationale:

“[Adopting list PR for national elections] was a fateful decision. Rather than vote for individuals, Iraqis voted for political parties, whose leaders compiled lists of candidates. In descending order, one candidate would enter parliament for every 31,000 votes the party received. Under this system, aspiring politicians owed their future not to voters but to the party leaders who compiled the lists. Instead of encouraging Iraqi politicians to debate security, sewage and schooling, the party-slate system encouraged them to engage in the most extreme sectarian or ethno-nationalist rhetoric to prove their mettle to party leaders. Those who preached tolerance or voiced more technocratic concerns found themselves at the bottom of lists.

I have been making the same basic argument since April. The parties are the problem. Institutional choices made in 2005 largely caused them. Present institutional design efforts in the governorates are an opportunity to work on the problem. The system implemented must be highly candidate-centric.

To make that system work, federalism has to be strong enough to put a premium on governorate elections. And to keep federalism from ripping the country apart, there must be inter-governorate revenue sharing.

I applaud Carpenter and Rubin’s careful thinking about an important detail that most democracy promoters ignore. At the same time, open-endorsement SNTV remains preferable to their proposals.

Open-list proportional representation only mildly puts the candidate ahead of the party. Even though one votes for an individual entrepreneur, co-partisans depend on his or her performance for their own chances at winning seats. Open-list PR does not adequately dampen the incentive to run as a team.

Mixed-member proportional representation is problematic for theoretical and implementation reasons alike. One, it requires drawing single-member districts. Those presumably need to be of equal population. Even if the census data existed to allow equal population districts – it does not – districting would raise lots of different questions about gerrymandering (Does the way districts are drawn “naturally” advantage certain groups? Are the districts drawn purposely to do so? Et cetera.)

On the theoretical side, the nominal tier would have to be much larger than the list tier. That is, the proportion of seats elected in districts would have to overwhelm those elected from lists. Otherwise the ‘list logic’ of campaigning that the writers identify would again dominate.

Carpenter and Rubin are thinking in the right terms. Their proposal, however, should be more practical and ambitious. SNTV gets around the districting headaches while even more radically “put[ting] the people ahead of the party bosses.”

H/T to POMED’s Andrew Albertson.

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.

Repairing Iraq’s party system

As I write, democracy assistance groups are helping lawmakers develop an electoral system for Iraq’s 18 governorate councils. Some creative electoral engineering could take the sectarian sting out of Iraq’s party system. One proposal worth serious thought is using the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) with open endorsements in governorate-wide districts.

Reuters last week claimed that “Iraq’s local elections could reshape power structure.”

Major players — such as the movement of populist Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Sunni Arab tribal groups — will be competing for the first time and are expected to make gains at the expense of those now in power.

“New alliances will form, old ones will fall. Everything will change. It will redraw the political map of Iraq,” said a senior Shi’ite government official on condition of anonymity.

Really, Reuters means reshaping a balance of power, not an underlying power structure. A party system that continues to revolve around sects will not help consolidate Iraqi democracy. Luminaries from Lipset to Lijphart have taught that stable democratic politics are about more than race, religion or language.¹ The challenge is to get Iraqi elites talking about more than sectarian interest. What candidates need are incentives to cultivate a personal vote. Campaigns need to be about what’s-in-it-for-me: jobs, schools, roads and, as a colleague quipped, a shawarma machine in every kitchen.

Thankfully, beltway rumor has it that the chosen system will be candidate-centric. This is a major step away from the closed-list PR systems that blew open Pandora’s box in 2005.

That leaves us with a few basic options:²

First-past-the-post: As long as parties don’t control who gets on the ballot, this system might work. Yet the number of votes needed to win is fairly high, meaning current parties likely would fare best, unless there were numerous candidates in each district, in which case outcomes would be wildly unpredictable. Ultimately, the lack of reliable census data would make fair apportionment virtually impossible.

Open-list PR: Basically, the system modifies list PR so that voters control who ends up being a party’s most popular parliamentarian. While it gets around the apportionment problem, it is unlikely to change much. The list logic would preserve current parties, the logic of party discipline would remain the same, and we would expect the most popular person under such circumstances to be a sectarian leader.

STV: For all its virtues, this is not appropriate for the context. Illiteracy and innumeracy are likely to cause widespread voter error. The only way to get around the apportionment problem is to use one big district in each governorate. Can we really ask Iraqis to rank up to, say, 200 candidates?

Bloc vote: Two words. Palestine 2006.³

SNTV: With open endorsements, of course. If the parties controlled who got on the ballot, there would be little chance for a shawarma machine in every kitchen. The system would stimulate hyper-personalistic campaigns, party fragmentation and pork-barrel politics at its finest. On one hand, these are ugly dynamics. On the other, they’re just what are needed to break the grip of sect on Iraq’s party system.

Using SNTV in governorate-wide districts would obviate the apportionment problem. If each council were the cube root of its respective governorate’s population, council sizes (and district magnitudes) would hover around 100, meaning each candidate would need about only one percent of votes to win.⁴

Open endorsement SNTV is not a magic bullet. Its efficacy depends on federal-governorate linkages, ballot access rules and the (in)abilities of current parties to coordinate in local contests, to name just a few variables. Iraq nonetheless faces a tradeoff. As long as its electoral rules stimulate disciplined, programmatic parties, sect is likely to be the dominant cleavage. Legislative politics will remain zero-sum with negative implications for the country’s future. On one hand, electoral engineers can reinforce the nasty equilibrium that is Iraq’s party system. On the other, they can try to force it open by stimulating fragmentation and clientelism.

1. ADDENDUM 4/17: Some have read this sentence as my suggestion that the “luminaries” advocate pork-inducing systems in order to activate non-sectarian cleavages. That is not my intention. I drew on the “luminaries” for their emphasis on the importance of such cleavages.
2. Of course, varying factors like endorsement control, pooling, ballot access restrictions, and less feasibly, district magnitude give us far more permutations.
3. For two interpretations of this disaster, see F&V and FairVote.
4. Using data from FairVote.

Iraqi provincial electoral law

I’m keeping an eye out for it. According to a personal contact, the electoral system for provincial elections will be candidate-based. That leaves four likely suspects: STV, SNTV, bloc vote and FPP.

I suspect it will be either SNTV or bloc vote with sectarian quota. Reuters implies the institutions are designed to provide some level of minority representation:

New alliances will form, old ones will fall. Everything will change. It will redraw the political map of Iraq,” said a senior Shi’ite government official on condition of anonymity.

And:

Washington says the elections will foster national reconciliation, focusing on how they will boost the participation of minority Sunni Arabs in politics. Sunni Arabs, who boycotted the last local polls along with the Sadrists, are under-represented in areas where they are numerically dominant.

Bloc vote systems with gender and/or sectarian quotas are common in the Arab world. STV is rarely adopted, most likely due to numeracy and implementation concerns. SNTV (or some other limited scheme) would provide minority representation. It might also weaken parties at the local level, which one could consider a virtue in light of the strong sectarian parties that formed around Iraq’s federal closed list PR system.

The Iraqi cabinet apparently transmitted a draft electoral law to parliament yesterday. According to the Voice of America, this law was forthcoming when the Presidential Council on March 21 issued a Provincial Powers Law, which calls for elections by October 1. The body rejected a first draft on February 26.

For every lie, a touch of hope

The Center for Public Integrity, in what appears to be a liberal conspiracy to stop our politicians from lying, has created a new website for tracking Bush administration officials’ pre-Iraq war statements and their intra-Iraq war veracity.  It appears that the cite is being bombarded by “folks… who are interested… in this.. kinda… thing [read with best Bush accent],” so I have not yet been able to test it out.  According to the New York Times’ John H. Cushman, Jr., who now deserves to be listed as one of the top enemies of freedom,

Warnings about the need to confront Iraq, by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and two White House press secretaries, among others, can be combed line by line, and reviewed alongside detailed critiques published after the fact by official panels, historians, journalists and independent experts.

There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war. Muckrakers may find browsing the site reminiscent of what Richard M. Nixon used to dismissively call “wallowing in Watergate.”

Of course, such tools cannot help us determine the intentional lies from their unintentional counterparts.  While I do believe that we went into Iraq for the sake of convenience (Iran was too big and too difficult, even though the Iranians have clear links to terrorism, unlike Saddam, who was more likely to be assassinated himself by terrorists than to work with them.), I also believe that our officials really thought that Saddam had WMD, just as Saddam thought he was on route to obtaining them.

Yet, it will be interesting to see what type of impact efforts of this nature will have on our political system, and in particular, such events as the presidential primaries.  I’m a ‘newby’ to the web in regards to the primaries, mostly because I don’t need to listen to people like Hillary and Barak toss recriminations back and forth in order to determine who I will vote for.  But even in the few minutes that I do sit down and watch them bitch, it’s quite difficult to determine who is bitching with more accuracy.   One site that I have found useful is the Washington Posts’ Fact Checker.  Perhaps we at the Democratic Piece can create a list of some of our top fact checking websites… (your welcome, Jack).

Iraq and Afghanistan

I don’t know how many of our readers follow the events in Afghanistan and Iraq, but here is a great article about the developments (and potential problems forces still face) in both these countries. The stories linked within the article are also great briefings on the individual situations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I highly recommend reading all three articles

As it’s finals season, I don’t have the time to give a thorough analysis of the piece. I disagree with a few of their conclusions and recommendations, but the facts they present alone are worth spending the time working through the articles.

Enjoy.

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?

Democracy Imposed?

The Washington Post today included an article today by Sankar Vedantam on a new paper written by Professors Andrew Enterline and J. Michael Greig from the University of North Texas. The actual paper is available here. I have not actually finished reading the whole paper, but the article states that Enterline and Greig argue that democracy imposed by an outside force has a very poor track record. The paper uses a case set of 41 instances of democratization over the past 200-years. In the graph presented in the article (shown), it shows that Enterline and Greig make a distinction between “strong democracies” and “weak democracies.” The Post article does not indicate how strong democracies differ from the weak ones. Apparently, some imposed democracies can be strong democracies, at least according to Shankar Vedantam’s depiction of the paper and the graph. Germany and Japan are given as examples of strong democracies, even though they are imposed.

Enterline and Greig argue that after twenty-five years, strong democracies are likely to last. Meanwhile, the survival rate of weak-democracies deteriorates quickly. By the authors’ measurements, seventy-five percent of weak democracies fail in the first thirty years and around ninety percent fail in the first sixty years.

According to Vedantam, Enterline and Greig identify four criteria that lead to successful imposition of democracy: (1) large occupation forces, (2) clear message of sustained, long-term occupation to back new state, (3) ethnically homogenous society, and (4) democratic neighbors.

If Enterline and Greig are correct in their analysis, things do not look well for Iraq and Afghanistan. I am still interested to learn how they define strong and weak democracies. There seems to be a missing link between Vedantam’s presentation of the paper’s argument and the graph. What makes a strong or weak imposed democracy? Is it an institutional explanation? Just the four criteria cited above? Is it the commitment of leaders and elites to a new democratic order? I’ll provide an update as I finish the paper, but I recommend everyone check out the article on their own.