Iraqi governorate elections: thank the open lists

Widely lauded gains for secular forces in Iraq’s provincial elections last month were largely a function of the candidate-centric, open list proportional representation system used.¹

Following the certification of results today, Michael Allen for the NED writes:

People voted on the issues rather than according to identity, and for individual candidates rather than anonymous lists. The poll represents an important step towards consolidating the country’s fragile democracy, but the real test will come with national legislative elections later this year.

And:

Iraqis voted strongly against religious sectarian parties widely perceived to be corrupt and to have failed to deliver security and basic services. “No party in the elections ran with the slogan ‘Islam is the Solution’ since voters were much more interested in who could actually provide services at the local level,” writes the Washington Institute’s J. Scott Carpenter.

Finally:

“Iraq was once defined by sectarian tensions pitting Shiite against Sunni,” writes Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy. “Now, intra-Shiite competition may take greater precedence.”

In sum, personalistic campaigns revolved around everyday governance issues, and there was competition among members of the same sectarian groups. The thread uniting each of the points above is the electoral system. Iraqis did not suddenly take governance to heart. We can assume voters were as concerned with service delivery in 2005 as they were last January. The open list proportional representation system, however, freed candidates to campaign on governance and reduced the costs for Iraqis of voting on those issues.

As this insightful paper points out, moving from closed to open list PR fundamentally changes campaign dynamics.

The 2005 national elections proceeded under closed lists, and sectarian parties dominated. There are institutional reasons for this. First, candidates in closed list systems must curry favor with party leaders for high ranks on party lists. Second, since voters choose among labels and not people, party leaders have incentives to appeal to sect and ethnicity in order to maximize vote (and therefore seat) shares. Third, because the combination of social division and party-centric electoral rules politicizes identity, voters who would have voted on governance issues instead support the party representing their group. After all, what if the other group captures the state? The outcome of the 2005 elections was consistent with these incentives: a system of disciplined parties organized around religious affiliation.

Open lists change the game entirely. A candidate’s prospect for winning depends on his personal level of popularity.² He or she has an incentive to campaign against co-ethnics or co-sectarians. Such a campaign is likely to focus on issues ‘below’ the level of the group. Therefore, it is more likely to focus on “who could actually provide services at the local level,” in Carpenter’s words.

Unless the system changes, national elections later this year again will use closed list proportional representation. It will be interesting to see whether the secular organizations emerging from provincial elections reproduce their gains nationally, or whether Iraqis get another “national identity referendum.”

1. Questions nonetheless remain about the finer details of that open list system.
2. Depending on the way personal votes contribute to the party’s total, or “pool,” a candidate’s success may even depend on being more popular than fellow co-partisans, with more personal votes raising his position on the party list.

Voter choice in the Iraqi provincial vote

Early voting is underway in Iraq’s provincial elections. Financial Times offers evidence that the set of candidates is much more diverse that which contested both national elections in 2005:

Yet today, it is as if they have been injected with a new lease of life as they stand plastered with colourful posters that highlight both the different faces of Iraqi society and the battle hotting up for tomorrow’s provincial elections. Alongside images of austere looking bearded men in clerical robes are headshots of women in brightly coloured veils and businessmen in western-style suits, each vying for a seat in Basra’s regional government.

And:

For war-weary Iraqis, fed up with corruption, mismanagement, killing and kidnappings, the polls offer a glimmer of hope that a new generation of politicians may emerge, with a focus on people’s needs rather than the corrupt and sectarian politics that have dominated in the post-Saddam era.

This happy development is due in part to the so-called “open list” system Iraqis are using to elect governorate councils. Greg is right to point out that institutional change does not change voters’ preferences. Electoral systems do affect actors’ strategies, however. This new candidate-centric system has enabled candidates to run on a wider set of platforms.

Unfortunately, information on the details and politics of this electoral system have been impossible to track down. Is it really open list proportional representation, or is it single non-transferable vote? Going by a photo of a ballot (slide number five) at Financial Times, it doesn’t look like either.¹ Who held the bargaining advantage in choosing the system: the legislature, activists, or the occupying forces? As of this writing, there is no record of the law on the Council of Representatives’ English-language legislation page.

The question of who decided is the more interesting one. If it was the Council of Representatives, Iraq’s party system would appear in flux. Recall that Iraq used closed list PR in 2005 because that’s what clerics wanted. They knew it would give them control of access to office. Now someone is undoing that arrangement? If American pressure explains “open lists,” on the other hand, we have evidence of successful, post-conflict electoral engineering. If you can help answer either question above, please leave a comment!

Whether institutions are driving or only enabling the apparent sectarian de-alignment, the outcome is good for democratic consolidation in Iraq.

1. I do not read Arabic. Someone who does may have a better idea about what’s going on in the photo. Are those names of people or parties? If they’re of people, this looks like SNTV.

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?