NY Times to Jack: “Let’s not get too crazy here.”

Tom Friedman thinks “the oligopoly of our two-party system” is keeping sensible policies like fiscal responsibility, education reform, and incentives for invention off the Congressional agenda. His remedy? Adopt independent redistricting to bust gerrymandering and instant runoff voting¹ to empower independents.

My response, posted at 12:39 AM last night:

You could even combine “alternative voting” and independent redistricting into one easy-to-swallow reform. By adopting a modest form of proportional representation (PR), we could obviate gerrymandering and open politics to independent voices. A candidate-based PR system in three-to-five-seat districts would also preserve voters’ ease of use, individual legislators’ accountability, and a largely two-party system.

The moderators have not approved my comment for public view. The moderators approved my comment at 9:40 AM. Maybe Tom will use it in his next column.

1. Which he calls “alternative voting,” likely having read about goings-on in the UK

Tom Friedman steals my idea

At least I’d like to think so. Here’s the key language:

Specifically, the Obama team needs to make sure that Iraq’s bickering politicians neither postpone the next elections, scheduled for January, nor hold them on the basis of the 2005 “closed list” system that is dominated by the party leaders. We must insist, with all our leverage, on an “open list” election, which creates more room for new faces by allowing Iraqis to vote for individual candidates and not just a party. This is what Iraq’s spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is also demanding. It is a much more accountable system.

If we can get open list voting, the next big step would be the emergence of Iraqi parties in this election running for office on the basis of nonsectarian coalitions — where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds run together. This would be significant: Iraq is a microcosm of the whole Middle East, and if Iraq’s sects can figure out how to govern themselves — without an iron-fisted dictator — democracy is possible in this whole region.

H/T to Barak of the thoughtful new blog Democracy & Society.

Update: Ranj Alaaldin at the Guardian is on board, and now is a good time to recall Ayad Allawi’s November 2007 op-ed that effectively called for a more candidate-based system.

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.

Iraqis recognize need for change

According to Reuters, it seems as though many Iraqis have recognized the shortcomings of sectarianism as a basis for political organization due to factors outside of institutionally-determined incentives — namely, the problem of governance and basic administration*:

“Religious parties didn’t keep their promises. They exploited our problems,” said Safaa Kadhim, a teacher in Basra, reflecting anger voiced across Iraq towards the major parties, mostly founded along sectarian lines and seen by many as corrupt and self-serving.

“The voter must be more careful this time, and vote for someone who is deserving,” Kadhim said.

Polling evidence seems to suggest that Kadhim’s sentiment is shared among the broader population:

In an opinion poll by the government’s National Media Centre in November, 68 percent of those questioned rejected the use of religious appeals in the campaign and 42 percent said they favoured secular parties, while 31 percent supported religious parties.

I do not highlight the above to undermine the importance of Jack’s most recent post, which provides a valuable and insightful institutional assessment. I agree with its premise as well as its speculations — institutions matter, and OLPR seems to represent an improvement.

However, I do wish to point out that Jack originally advocated for not just any “candidate-centric electoral system,” but for a specific type of system, SNTV, and I agreed. While SNTV is known to encourage several unsavory consequences over the long term (from highly factional parties to clientilism and political corruption), these appeared palatable in lieu of possible alternatives — whether that meant continuing down the path of CLPR and accepting the long-term institutionalization of sectarianism, or ham-handedly banning religious-based political discourse.

But institutions exist in a world of perceptions, both of which can change over time — the former through decree and the latter through learning, as the Reuters piece illustrates. Perhaps we did not sufficiently consider the speed at which this latter process could take place, particularly amidst Iraq’s dire circumstances (the school of hard knocks, it seems, provides a quick education). If we had, the middle way offered by OLPR — which appears superior to the extent that it does not encourage the same problems of SNTV, avoids some of the pitfalls of CLPR, and can actually be sustained if societal demands for sectarianism are not too overwhelming — might have been more apparent.

I am not sure of the specific ways in which this lesson could be of value in terms of broader application. Recognizing the fact that a dynamic learning process takes place as institutions illustrate their opportunities, advantages and failings over time is one thing; predicting the direction in which this learning process will progress is quite another. At the very least, it serves as a humbling yet necessary reminder that, in our efforts to change the world for the better, we often operate with limited means and in uncertain environments (even those of us as bright as Jack). So, fellow DGers of Georgetown and other future policy shapers, take note, for I imagine it is far more pleasant to gain an understanding of this reality as a student than at any other point hereafter.

*As a side note, while the so-called “surge” and the stability that it has helped bring about seems to have flown under Reuters’ radar, it seems incumbent upon me to point out that this was in many ways an even more basic determinant in leading Iraqi politics away from sectarianism. Falling back on the immediate certainties and familiarities associated with primordial bonds can become an appealing prospect in the midst of chaos, and thus it makes sense that as order is established, this tendency would taper and longer-term priorities (i.e., issues of governance and basic administration) would come to the fore.

Congressional district allocation is not proportional representaton

Nebraska is one of two states allocating its electoral votes by congressional district, not statewide. In an article on the still disputed status of the electoral vote corresponding to NE-2, the New York Times gets it wrong:

Unlike every other state but Maine, Nebraska allocates its five electoral votes proportionally. The winner does not take all. So even though Mr. McCain won the statewide popular vote, it looks as if Mr. Obama was able to carve out a piece of the state, the Second Congressional District, for himself. The district includes most of metropolitan Omaha. [emphasis mine]

Colorado is the most recent state – if not the only – to have considered and defeated allocating its electors in proportion to candidates’ vote shares. Maine and Nebraska do not. In those states, the statewide winner gets the two electors corresponding to the states’ Senators, and the elector corresponding to each congressional district goes to the candidate winning that district.

The conflation of PR and single-member districts is relatively unique to American political culture. I believe it is a legacy of our founding.

When the Framers met in 1787, the debate over legislative representation was framed in terms of apportionment. Would all states receive equal numbers of seats (New Jersey Plan), or would apportionment be proportional to states’ populations (Virginia Plan)? The Connecticut Compromise, of course, gave us both: equal delegations in the Senate and “proportional” delegations in the House. A search of the Federalist Papers for the string “proportional representation” returns references, but all mean proportional apportionment by population of the seats each state will elect – not proportional allocation by vote share of a state’s seats to parties. To this day, the Wikipedia article for New Jersey Plan cited above still calls proportional apportionment “proportional representation.”

This is not surprising. Proportional representation as framed today, of parties by vote shares, did not exist until two generations later, when Thomas Hare articulated and J.S. Mill popularized the concept. (See also a later essay by Henry Droop.)

Had PR existed, of course, the Framers likely would have opted for it. PR is consistent with the views in Federalist No. 10 on “controlling [faction's] effects.” By multiplying the factions represented, one reduces the likelihood that a tyrannical majority will emerge.

A fundamentally majoritarian system in which seats are allocated to states in proportion to their populations can deliver proportionality of seats to votes more or less by accident, but that is not a proportional representation system.

Who supports PR in Cincinnati?

This is a very clear discussion of the Cincy PR campaign. It looks like a radio broadcast.

In the battleground state of Ohio, it should be an especially high turnout year. Do you think this coalition can tip the balance?

Former City Councilman Chris Smitherman says he expects Republicans, independents, Libertarians and Greens will vote in favor of proportional representation, because PR could break up Democratic control of the council.

PR-STV on the ballot in Cincinnati

The Hamilton County, OH Board of Elections yesterday certified a petition by the Cincinnati NAACP to put proportional representation on the November ballot.

If the measure passes, voters will use the single transferable vote to elect a nine-member city council, renewing a 30-year good government experiment that ended in a vitriolic 1957 repeal effort:

The single transferable vote had allowed African Americans to be elected for the first time, with two blacks being elected to the city council in the 1950s. The nation was also seeing the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement and racial tensions were running high. PR opponents shrewdly decided to make race an explicit factor in their repeal campaign. They warned whites that PR was helping to increase black power in the city and asked them whether they wanted a “Negro mayor.” Their appeal to white anxieties succeeded, with whites supporting repeal by a two to one margin.

I have tried recently to focus on international democracy assistance, but this could be a major development in the history of American democracy and world of electoral systems.

Today only Ireland, Northern Ireland, Australia, Malta, New Zealand, Scotland (h/t to James) and Cambridge, Mass. use STV (of the multimember variety) for governmental elections, so Cincinnati would add a case to that family.

Cincinnati is the next page in a long and underexposed history of election reform in America. From the Progressive Era through the Civil Rights movement, 22 US cities (or 24 depending on definitions) used PR-STV for local elections, many of which were in Ohio. The second to last experiment ended in 2002 with the disbanding of New York City’s school board.

While system performance varied by city and indicator, STV’s overall record was positive:

On the whole, from the available evidence, proportional representation seemed to have a beneficial effect on the cities that adopted it. It clearly produced more representative government and, where voters wanted it, a more diverse party system. Large increases in the number of effective votes were also enjoyed in these cities. It may not have resulted in the substantial increases in voter turnout that proponents predicted, but neither did it produce the increases in voter alienation that critics feared. And finally, even though PR city councils were often more diverse politically, this did not seem to impair their political efficiency or effectiveness.

Good sources for more specifics are Doug Amy’s site linked above and Robert Kolesar in Proportional Representation and Election Reform in Ohio, Kathleen Barber ed., OSU Press 1995.

STV seeks proportional results and maximizes ‘votes that elect’ by transferring votes in excess of a quota to voters’ next-ranked choices. With nine seats in Cincinnati, it will take 10 percent of votes to win each. There are different ways to transfer surplus, and Cincinnati would use the quasi-random “Cincinnati method.”

Who cares? American reformers, for one, but the ends they are pursuing should not be lost on the international democracy assistance community, which has engaged in electoral engineering from Afghanistan to Nepal over the past few years.

As Donald Horowitz, Ben Reilly and others have noted, STV (and its single-winner cousin) can benefit divided societies through the incentive it presents to campaign for second- and third-choice support outside one’s group. Because it’s a proportional system, STV prevents exclusion of significant minority groups, especially as the number of seats to elect increases. As a candidate-centric system, STV emphasizes entrepreneurial campaigns over party labels. Finally, as a system based on multimember districts, it reduces incentives to gerrymander.

Not all contexts would benefit. Innumeracy can be a barrier to a method based on ranking, and places with highly fragmented party systems probably need stronger incentives for cohesion. These caveats notwithstanding, democracy promoters should embrace the wealth of lessons learned – and to be learned – about the growing number of STV cases at home and abroad.

Albania goes proportional

Albania this week scrapped its mixed-member system in favor of proportional representation. According to the IHT (above, as well as PressTV and Balkan Insight), the new system looks like some form of list-PR with seats allocated at the regional level. There are 12 administrative regions.

According to ACE Project, the old system was MMP with 100 single-member districts and 40 seats in the proportional tier. The IPU says a two-round system was used in the single-seat districts. PR seats were allocated to parties clearing 2 percent in the first round.

On the other hand, Freedom House says the PR thresholds were 2.5 percent for parties and 4 percent for coalitions.

All reports above cite opposition by small parties who think this reform (among others) is intended to force them out of parliament. Similar reforms in Ukraine had that effect in the 2006 election. Whether the same will happen in Albania depends largely on the magnitude of each district and the formal threshold. No details yet on either.

The case for Nader

Ralph has decided to run again, and he’s getting a beating for it. The argument goes like this: Green-leaning candidates “take” votes away from Democrats. This particular election is so critical that “we” can’t afford to lose. Nader therefore should do the “right” thing and withdraw.

I want to make the case for Nader’s candidacy. This is not an endorsement of the man or his program. His decision to run urges consideration of structural ‘democracy problems’ in America. 2008 may be more critical than 2004, 2000, 1932, 1896 or even 1796, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore our democracy problems. Run-of-the-mill condemnation of Nader reflects a choice to do just that.

The Democratic Party would benefit from three reforms that Nader’s run brings to mind. A direct election for President would decrease third party “spoiler” impact by taking the emphasis off battleground states. Remember Florida 2000. Second, instant runoff voting would translate most votes for Greens into votes for Democrats. Third, proportional representation would undo the conservative bias in Congressional elections that inheres in the nexus of our partisan geography and winner-take-all elections. In a sense, PR would unpack the packedness of those population-dense districts Democrats tend to inhabit.

The absence of each reform is a democracy problem. The electoral college¹ silences voters in “safe” states and sometimes crowns the wrong winner. Plurality elections force voters to support candidates they don’t like and candidates to pay lip service to those voters, lest they defect to a spoiler like Nader. And the only real diversity of opinion in our two-party Congress comes from members’ personal predispositions. These old institutions diminish democracy for everyone.

If bad institutions hurt more people than Democrats, why the concern with Democrats? They are the likely agents of change. Politicians don’t improve institutions out of commitment to democracy. Reforms are self-interested. Nader’s candidacy underscores Democrats’ overall vulnerability in the present party system-cum-electoral system. As the vulnerable camp, with majorities in both houses and a prospect for united government in 2009, Democrats are best positioned to effect electoral reform.

Yet they don’t take their vulnerability seriously. Hence the case for Nader.

Two scenarios confront the Democratic Party. One is to learn the hard way. Nader costs the Dems another election, they make the institutions-outcomes connection, and they become a party of reform. The other option: skip step one, make the connection, and become a party of reform.

To blame Nader is to shoot the messenger. The conversation should be about lasting solutions. Browbeating Greens to depress their turnout, if doable at all, is not a lasting solution.

1. No caps; it’s a common noun.

Pakistan elections

The (federal) Islamic Republic of Pakistan will elect its National Assembly on February 18, 2008. Georgetown Democracy & Governance students and faculty are en route to monitor the vote.

Originally scheduled for January 8, officials postponed the election after PPP leader Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on December 27, 2007.

Assuming the vote is free and fair, 342 National Assembly members will be elected under a parallel or MMM system.¹ 60 seats are reserved to women, and 10 are reserved to minority groups.²

Single-member districts are apportioned to each province by population. It seems like The proportional tier relates only to the election of women and minorities.³ Seats are allocated to those groups from each province in proportion to their respective parties’ province-wide seat shares.⁴

If this is correct, 242 seats are elected under FPP rules, and the 70 remaining seats make up the proportional tier.

100 senators are indirectly elected by territorial and provincial assemblies using the single transferable vote. Terms are six years, staggered.

1. IFES calls it list PR, and IDEA, via ACE Project, calls it parallel. Since parallel systems usually include a list PR component, I’m going with IDEA on this one.
2. The “minority” quota is according to IFES. The Pakistan Election Commission refers instead to “technocrats.”
3. See Pakistan Election Commission for district magnitudes and quotas.
4. Election Laws, Vol. I, pp 20-21 of PDF document, “Number of seats in the National Assembly,” http://www.ecp.gov.pk/content/docs/volume1.pdf