The new moon of Adar was just a couple nights ago, and it sure looks like it around here.
This is the slope below LF HQ:
And blooms are well underway in the corralito.
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THE CORE
Fruits & Votes is the Web-log of Matthew S. Shugart ("MSS"), Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
Perspectives on electoral systems, constitutional design, and policy around the world, based primarily on my research interests. Also experiences with growing many varieties of fruit (always organic) and other personal interests. Please see the Mission Statement for more. (There is also an explanation of the banner.) Other "planters" have been invited to contribute. Please check the "Planted by" line to see the author of the post you are reading.
Join the conversation. Comments are always open. Except, that is, when Word Press mysteriously shuts them down, which happens with distressing frequency. Core principles: Henry Droop on the "moderate non-partisan section" Madison on "dangers from abroad" and "the fetters... on liberty" The Head Orchardist's other sites: PRESERVED FRUIT Dikes and Votes: Consensus government and flood control The 2008 candidates on political reform More fundamental than the climate The radical middle in US democracy Canada's dysfunctional electoral system The Hamas sweep: The electoral system did it
orchard blocks
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27 February 2009
Planted by MSS
Planted in: FRUITS Propagation: Seeds & scions (0) 23 February 2009
In a bicameral system, when one chamber proposes to spend two billion on some line item and the other proposes to spend zero, what do you expect the inter-cameral conference to propose? One billion? Good guess, but when it comes to high-speed rail in the recent US “stimulus” bill, that answer is a bit off. The final bill authorized $8b. In case that was too subtle, let me make it a bit more clear: THE STIMULUS LEGISLATION AUTHORIZES EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS FOR HIGH SPEED RAIL!!! We can thank the third, uni-personal, legislative chamber for this: It was something Obama wanted. (Thanks, Barack!) See National Corridors Initiative for details (including chamber comparisons on other rail and transit items, and a nifty map of approved corridors). A tip of the engineer’s (or, rather, the Superintendent’s) cap to Sephen Karlson, whose post on rail in the stimulus has many other good links on this topic). Combined with California voters’ passage of Prop 1A in November, this makes modern train service more real than it has been in a long time. (I know eight billion is not really all that much. But you have to start somewhere!) Finally, to those who would cry ‘pork’ upon knowing of spending on this, or other “pet,” projects advocated by specific lawmakers for their regions, the Washington Post notes that a spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid (who wants a maglev train between Las Vegas and Anaheim or Los Angeles) claims that the transportation secretary “will have complete flexibility as to which program he uses to allocate the funds.” While the delegation of such authority to the transportation department does not guarantee the use of technical (merit) rather than political criteria, it makes it much more likely. In any case, if the bill does not allocate money to specific projects, or require congress or the executive to do so, it is not pork. At least not at this stage. Propagation: Seeds & scions (0) 19 February 2009
Miguel Centellas notes that the new Bolivian constitution makes a few changes in the country’s legislative electoral system. The legislature is renamed the Plurinational Legislative Assembly and, presumably to put that into action, the first chamber electoral system will be required to have seats set aside for indigenous representation. However, Miguel notes that this is not very significant in practice:
The MMP system, in which about half the seats are elected from single-seat districts, remains. This is in spite of earlier proposals from the ruling MAS to move to a system of exclusively single-seat districts. MAS also previously advocated abolishing the Senate. Instead, it will be retained, but with a non-trivial change: the number of seats per department will go from 3 to 4. Currently, these are elected by that Latin American oddity that I refer to as “limited slate” or “limited nominations.” A party may nominate two candidates on a closed list, and the party with the plurality elects both, while the first runner-up elects its first-ranked candidate. (Similar systems are used in the second chambers of Argentina and Mexico.) Miguel notes that the electoral system for the new 4-seat districts is undetermined, but is supposed to be “proportional.” Bolivia’s Senate is really an anomaly: it just might be the most malapportioned chamber in any unitary state. It is not surprising that, politically, it could not be abolished or even that its malapportionment could not be reduced, given conflicts over regional autonomy. Still, as Miguel says, this reform actually makes the small departments more over-represented. The move to 4-seat districts, however, should counteract that to some degree, as far as partisan representation is concerned, as long as the formula actually is PR and not some continued form of list plurality. Under PR, the second and even third largest party in a department would be better represented than is now the case, which potentially nationalizes the highly regionalized party system a bit more. As for whether Bolivia retains a unitary state, I believe so. An earlier post by Miguel refers to a new “federacy,” a term I understand as within the confines of a unitary state, but with special autonomy status for one or more of several sub-jurisdictions of the state. In short, these changes seem like small improvements. But will they help solve the country’s deep political conflicts? Propagation: Seeds & scions (1) 18 February 2009
Planted by MSS
Planted in: Israel Haaretz:
Isn’t that ironic? One of the MKs in question belongs to the party of Avigdor Lieberman, who campaigned on subjecting citizens to loyalty oaths. A couple of other reactions: First, what could one’s “additional citizenship that is not Israeli” be? Can you be an Israeli-Israeli dual citizen? Second, and rather more substantively, how common are bans on dual citizenship for any given country’s legislators? I don’t think I have seen this issue arise before, although Horowitz is quoted as recognizing it as common and “completely legitimate.” The full news item also contains the interesting trivium that Michaeli is a former Miss St. Petersburg beauty queen. Horowitz is one of a record number of ex-journalists to have been on Knesset lists this year. Finally, digging a bit deeper* about Michaeli: She was previously at no. 44 on the Knesset list of Kadima. Evidently she is not only a dual citizen, but a dual partisan! The last-linked item also notes that “Movement between parties with differing ideologies is common among representatives of Russian immigrants.” (The Kadima candidacy was in 2006, when the party won 29 seats.) But she evidently has more in common with her new party’s leader, having complained on her Russian-language TV program that Israel’s entry into Eurovision 2007 “looks Arab.”) ______ Propagation: Seeds & scions (6) 16 February 2009
With the approval of yesterday’s Venezuelan referendum, not only will President Hugo Chavez be eligible to run again when his current term ends in 2012 (and again in 2019…), but also we have one less country with legislative term limits. The referendum removes term limits on all elected officials, not only the president. Venezuela’s Chavista constitution was among the very few countries where national legislators have (or had) limits on the number of terms they can serve. Mexico has prohibited consecutive terms for legislators since the 1930s, as has Costa Rica since the 1940s. I believe the Philippines still has limits on the number of terms its legislators may serve. Ecuador did at one time, but I recall they were lifted. (Maybe someone knows the details.) Of course, several US states have such limits. But legislative term limits are rare overall. They just became a bit rarer. _______ Propagation: Seeds & scions (2) Bargaining is under way between Hungary’s political parties to change the electoral system and reduce the size of the national assembly, reports Politics.hu. While the parties are agreed on key points, the smaller parties are concerned that their two big counterparts–the governing Socialist Party and the main opposition Fidesz–are attempting to squeeze them out. Currently, almost all of Hungary’s parties are in one of two broad (and mostly pre-electoral) coalitions, headed by each of the big parties. The electoral system is one of the world’s most complex: a mostly parallel form of mixed-member system, but one with some compensation for smaller parties. The single-seat districts are in two rounds, by majority-plurality. Several features of the system, including the partial compensation of the list seats, the two rounds of the SSDs, and the presence of a third-tier national list, provide room for the smaller parties to retain representation despite the overall majoritarianism of the system. (See my previous overview of the system and its majoritarian impact.) The proposed reforms would eliminate the second round. The debate appears to center around whether the national list will be retained and, if so, how many seats will continue to be allocated in it. With 386 seats, Hungary is currently one of a small number of democracies with an over-sized parliament, relative to the cube-root law (see graph). With a population of around ten million (and just over eight million registered voters in 2006, two thirds of whom turned out), the cube-root law would suggest an assembly size of around 200 to 215. “The parties are more of less agreed that the chamber should be cut to around 200 seats,” according to the Politics.hu report. (So how about that!) The reduction of the size of parliament would, even without a change in the tier structure, tend to reduce the space for smaller parties. Currently the national list accounts for 58 seats (15%) and the regional lists account for 152 seats (39%). The remaining 176 (46%) seats are the single-seat districts. If those proportions were retained in a 200-seat parliament, the national list would have just 30 seats; more importantly, the magnitudes of the regional list constituencies would be sharply reduced, especially in rural counties. While the national list is currently compensatory (relative to the regional list districts, but not to the entire parliament), with lower regional magnitudes and just 30 national seats, proportionality for the smaller partners within the broad blocs could be substantially reduced. The Politics.hu item indicates that the smaller conservative Democratic Forum would like a national list “exclusively.” It is not clear if that means it wants a 200-seat national district, or if it means it accepts a mixed-member system, but without the intermediate regional tier. (In overall context, I assume the latter.) In any case, that party is both small and in opposition, so its voice will not count for much, but it may be indicative of discussions over changing the multi-tier structure. Unfortunately, the story is not clear on details such as whether the parallel vs. compensatory dimension of the mixed-member system is up for debate. In any case, Hungary may be in the process of simplifying its overly complex system and reducing its overly large assembly to match the estimates of the cube-root law. Those would be good developments from the standpoint of the normative dimensions of comparative electoral-systems studies. Propagation: Seeds & scions (4) 13 February 2009
From the J-Post (and quoting the full text):
(My emphasis.) I like to collect stories like this, and I had intended to write before the election about the intra-party controversy over Feiglin and how his presence would push the party’s reputation to the right. This controversy came up before the Gaza war; after that, being seen as “right” (i.e. hawkish) on security was no longer a liability. So maybe Feiglin has a point? Propagation: Seeds & scions (0) 12 February 2009
At the end of a lengthy and very interesting article about the coalition bargaining since Israel’s election, the following paragraphs offer interesting insight into Meretz’s party-list dynamics:
Subsequently, it has been learned that the original seat allocation likely would hold.* If an elected MK resigns, the next available candidate on the same party’s list takes the seat. ______
Propagation: Seeds & scions (9) Update: Robert Elgie has analyzed (and linked to) the text of the amendment referred to below, and concluded “Neither the Cabinet nor the Council of Ministers is responsible to the legislature. So, constitutionally, Zimbabwe remains a presidential system.” Now that the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangarai (Movement for Democratic Change) has been sworn in to the newly created post of prime minister, alongside the president, Robert Mugabe (Zanu-PF), a key question is what the constitutional status of the PM is.
There is much more, but the really crucial constitutional question is what is in the detailed provisions of Amendment 19 (which was actually not passed till after the PM was sworn in). Does it give the parliamentary majority (held by the opposition to Mugabe) the exclusive authority to remove the prime minister and cabinet? Or is the prime minister subject also to the “confidence” of the president? If the answer is the former, the system is premier-presidential. If the latter, president-parliamentary. This is about more than nomenclature; it is about whether the president could unilaterally dismiss the the prime minister. On these points, the provisions are unclear to me. However, one noteworthy clause of the amendment reportedly
Also:
(Source for these last two quotes is a different article in The Zimbabwean.) But if there is no provision for parliamentary confidence, it is not semi-presidential, and if there is no provision for exclusive parliamentary confidence, the president remains in the constitutional driver’s seat. Propagation: Seeds & scions (2) Planted by MSS
Planted in: Presidential & Parliamentary Systems Robert Elgie has begun posting lists of cases of cohabitation in semi-presidential systems. He is going by country, and has just put up Austria. His definition of cohabitation is the same as mine:
It just so happens that I, too, have been collecting a list of cohabitation cases. It seems that cohabitation accounts for about 12.5% of all presidential tenure in semi-presidential democracies since around 1945. Propagation: Seeds & scions (0) If you spend some quality time with Y-net’s interactive map (in Hebrew, color-coded by party if you zoom in), you could come pretty quickly to the conclusion that electoral reform would not make a large difference in the country’s party fragmentation. Even in the very unlikely event that a single-seat district system were plopped down in Israel, many of the smaller parties would remain quite viable. A more realistic reform, such as to a medium-sized district system, probably would not reduce the number of parties by much. For instance, here are the largest few parties’ vote percentages in selected cities, listed more or less from north to south: Kiryat Shmona: Likud 30, YB 22, Kadima 17 (These communities differ widely in population, but only the first two, plus Ariel and Sderot, are under 25,000; Katzrin is quite small.) Haaretz also has tool for looking at the Israeli vote by city or sector (in English), but most of its levels of aggregation are bigger than the Ynet tool. It does, however, show that Ra’am-Ta’al dominated the Bedouin communities, with 80%. Strikingly, almost every party is the largest or second largest somewhere, including some that have less than 5% of the national vote. Certainly, there is no guarantee that all these would survive electoral reform. The largest party is not over 30% in many cases and one or both of the top two parties might be displaced by new alliances of currently trailing parties in any given region. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that any districted electoral system would significantly cut into Israel’s political fragmentation (although if the districts were small enough or if the threshold were raised significantly, it could certainly make for a lot of disproportionality) . The one relatively large party that does not show up in the top two anywhere among the cities listed at Ynet is Labor. It runs third or lower everywhere, except the Kibbutz sector (shown at Haaretz).* So if the objective of electoral reform is to squeeze out Labor once and for all, it might be achievable. If the goal is to make a substantial dent in the country’s fragmentation, quite possibly not. For the national vote and seat totals, see Electoral Panorama. _______ Propagation: Seeds & scions (10) 10 February 2009
Planted by MSS
Planted in: Australia Simon Jackman has two interesting recent posts: 1. Bob Brown [Green] : tough negotiator [not!]
(Simon also includes a pointed comparison to another small-party Senator’s superior negotiating strategy.) 2. “Have we all written off the prospect of buying off a National (or two)? Barnaby?” Propagation: Seeds & scions (10) Planted by MSS
Planted in: Israel Just past 10 p.m. Israel time, noon here… Evidently three different media exit polls suggest Kadima has won a plurality, 30 or 29 seats to Likud’s 27 or so. YB at about 15 and Labor at 13 or 14. All very preliminary, of course. And just exit polls. Even if confirmed it would not guarantee that Livni would be PM, as the right bloc is far ahead of the center-left. (I am watching a live feed on Al Jazeera English over Livestation–I can’t get any of this service’s supposedly available Israeli channels–but it’s live from Jerusalem.) Update: And now there is a Haaretz story up with various exit-poll numbers. Propagation: Seeds & scions (14) Planted by MSS
Planted in: VOTES If only the media could cover elections in normal democracies without saying things like “[party name here] failed to win a majority” or “no party is likely to have a majority.” Majorities of seats are actually not so common in democracies around the world, and majorities of votes are downright rare. What was so distressing this morning is that I heard a line like this about Israel’s election. Yes, Israel, where even a quarter of the seats makes you a big player and the last time a party won over a third of the seats was in 1992. Yet the reporter’s line gave the impression that there might be just this very small chance that someone would get over 50% of seats. Moreover, while I have come to expect this sort of comment from American reporters (few of whom can get past “complex form of proportional representation”), this particular incident was on Deutsche Welle. Yes, from Germany, where no party has won a majority of seats in the country’s history of competitive elections (back to 1871). (To be fair, the reporter sounded British, and Britain is actually one of those oddball cases where a party almost always wins a majority.) Propagation: Seeds & scions (11) Planted by MSS
Planted in: Israel Interesting viewing, at Lisa Goldman’s blog. I agree with Lisa that Livni’s is depressing. And, while my Hebrew is pretty bad, I can actually understand most of Netanyahu’s, because he keeps repeating the same few words over and over. Lieberman sure is proud of his racism. Lisa provides text for the ads, and some of them have subtitles. Propagation: Seeds & scions (0) |
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ORCHARD SERVICES F&V time: This blog's date function is so set as to start a new day at approximately local sunset. (Why, if we have "day" and "night," should a new "day" start in the middle of the night?) FRUITS: Support your local, organic growers; and, plant vines and fig trees and pomegranates for the generations to come...
VOTES: For democratization and full representation, for environmental sustainability, social justice, and peace, always sincerely... |