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.

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.

Colleague blogs from Sierra Leone

Erica Bonanno of our sister Conflict Resolution MA program is in Sierra Leone doing a program assessment for Search for Common Ground. From the first post to Erica’s blog:

My project here is to do an evaluation of the radio program dealing with children and youth issues, called Golden Kids News (here is a description of Golden Kids News on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_lFFJaMc4w). In order to evaluate the impact of this radio program on listeners, I will be spending the next few weeks traveling around the country. I will be spending a week in Kabala, a small town in Northern Sierra Leone where Search has a second office, and then another week in Bo, another rural area where we have our third office in the country. My short time in the offices will be spent talking to the producers of Golden Kids News. I will then spend about a month traveling around to villages where I will be interviewing, holding focus groups (which are pretty much group interviews), and giving out surveys. The rural areas are supposed to be much safer than Freetown. These tools, which I will be designing this week, will help to collect data about how the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of listeners may have changed as a result of listening to Golden Kids News. I will then spend my last few weeks back in Freetown, where I will write up my report and present my findings to the Directors and staff.

Democracy Daily Briefing – 7.4.07

Africa Union Talks Go No Where

A summit regarding the establishment of a single African state ended this week with little accomplished. Few expected any meaningful agreement to arise from the talks and they were not disappointed. The group agreed to set a time table to discuss a future continent-wide agreement. Disagreements exist over whether the pan-African organization should be limited to economic integration or seek a larger political arrangement.

Stores Empty as Zimbabwe Implements Price Controls

Mugabe’s government began to crack down this week on stores and merchants that failed to implement the price controls announced last week. Stores have begun to run out of supplies as people have taken advantage of the artificially low prices. Over twenty shop keepers have been arrested for not complying with the orders. These orders are unsustainable in the long-run and shortages may lead to increased unrest.

Elections in Conflict Areas Are Invalid

Jarrett Blanc of the Council on Foreign Relations and the US Institute of Peace gave an interesting interview to Radio Free Europe about the validity of elections in conflict situations. An important feature that Blanc returns to is the absence of the rule of law in the electoral environment. Furthermore, consideration of the broader context of the conflict and that elections may destabilize or alter the balance in a dangerous manner, especially when the legal institutions necessary for a rule of law are nonexistent. This is a very interesting read.

Who controls the past controls the future. . .

Today’s Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor included a story on Putin’s push to rewrite Russian history. Putin’s recently presented his argument in a speech to a group of humanities teachers and professors attending a conference in Moscow.

Putin’s argument is based around what I like to call his rhetorical “sovereign” framing of issues. He utilizes the term sovereign to combat and belittle what he sees as “western” meddling into Russian affairs. For example, Putin and his coterie have coined the term “sovereign democracy” to simultaneously distinguish his form of “democracy” he is attempting to implement as natively Russian while backhandedly labeling his pro-democracy opponents and those international groups and organizations working to protect dastardly universal values like human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy as violating the sovereignty of Russia. These sovereign term has also entered the Russian lexicon in issues relating to economics, and now history.

Putin argues that the current history curriculum in Russia was developed with funding from “western grants” and reflect Russian intellectuals dancing a polka that others have paid for and writing history books which belittle and foist guilt upon the Russian people for the past actions of the Soviet Union. He announced that in order to fix this bias, the Kremlin would begin to provide funding to academics to develop new Russian authored history books. President Putin also used the speech as an opportunity to minimize the horrors of Stalin and the NKVD (predecessor of KGB) and argued that Russia’s “black pages” are not as bad as some other countries, mainly the United States.

In a creepy sounding show of support, a representative of the Russian teachers announced that he would begin working with his colleagues to develop a “national-patriotic ideology” to assist teachers in the “civic-patriotic education.” I hope that the actual Russian terms translate poorly and have some deeper, less odious connotation but I doubt it. As perhaps a preview to the content of a”national-patriotic ideology” approved history, the representative argued that the Soviet Union did not lose the cold war, but rather unilaterally disarmed. Brilliant.

So Russia gets new Kremlin-financed and approved history books, who cares? This article caught my eye because of an interesting fact I learned in a class last year on Transitional Justice and Rule of Law. Interestingly, more than a decade after the bloody genocide in Rwanda, it is illegal to teach Rwandan history in Rwandan schools. The development of education curriculum and a historical narrative is very important, especially in postconflict societies. However, the process of doing such can be agonizing and potentially destabilizing, but doing so can play a crucial role in acknowledging past turmoil, debunking myths, and facilitating a reconciliation within a society. Besides Rwanda, Cambodia, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Balkans provide some interesting case studies on the subject. (Sidenote: The US Institute of Peace held a meeting last year addressing these issues, and luckily USIP has posted an audio file and some reports from that event. I highly recommend checking them out, as these issues are important and often overlooked.)

Putin’s move is interesting because one would be hard pressed to say that Russia is a postconflict society. More important, Putin’s move to soften the historical image of the Soviet Regime and the carnage and suffering it brought to the Russian people and their neighbors could serve to weaken the general memory of life under authoritarian rule. While the teaching of history can be conducive to resolving conflicts within a society, history can also be used to develop a broad societal idea of victim hood, to minimize past atrocities, to accentuate myths of other’s wrongdoings, and to manipulate large groups of society by playing on these feelings. Judging by terms like “national-patriotic ideology” and Putin’s rhetoric, this further convinces me of Putin’s work to develop a broader authoritarian movement based “legitimacy” by stoking xenophobia and anti-western sentiments.

Every country has black pages and of course the US and the West does as well. What is important though is that we have a system of government that fosters and allows debate. When people in democratic states may and have filled the streets to oppose the actions of their government and have outlets to express views contrary to the state-approved line, but the last few years have showed us that in Putin’s Russia whenever his opponents gather more than five people they are prevented from traveling, arrested, harassed by police or other “civil society” groups, beat, or killed.

While I could end with trite line about the fate of those who fail to learn history’s lessons, I think the second part of George Orwell’s is far more fitting for Putin’s plan:

Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.