Jack writes at The Democratic Piece:
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…
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. The challenge is to get Iraqi elites talking about more than sectarian interest. What candidates need are incentives to cultivate a personal vote.
SNTV certainly does that, and I thank Jack for the link to a previous F&V planting on those incentives. I would, however, take exception to Jack’s suggestion that political science “luminaries” have said that
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.
The case can be made that such a politics oriented around individual legislators’ credit-claiming is a salve to sectarian tensions in countries where party-oriented politics necessarily means sectarian-oriented politics. I am just not aware of that argument having been made by any of the scholars Jack alludes to.
Hmm… If they want to avoid the rigidity of party lists, and if they think that Iraqis are not as proficient as Irish, Maltese or Tasmanians with the intricacies of STV, then IMHO limited vote - multiple limited vote, that is, not single non-transferable - might be better. Of course, this would require larger district magnitudes to ensure the same degree of minority representation (2 votes for 8 seats rather than 1 vote for 4 seats, and so on).
Ben Reilly has noted that, in Jordan,, restricting voters to ticking one single candidate meant they usually polarised around the ones closest to themselves tribally. Whereas when Jordan used block vote, candidates had extra votes to “give away” magnanimously to candidates outside their immediate circle (c/f AV in Papua New Guinea).
Of course, block vote (7 votes for 7 seats, and so forth) can lead to undesirable winner-take-all results if there are any parties (or other discernible factions), but multiple limited vote (2 or 3 votes for 7 seats) allows a degree of minority representation (if not actual proportionality, but then, SNTV may not either) while still encouraging electoral pacts among competing candidates. It avoids either zero-sum among candidates (unlike SNTV) or zero-sum among competing teams of candidates (unlike block vote).
Taagepera, may his name be ever honoured among us, proposed that the maximum number of votes be the square root of the number of seats, rounded up. Either that, or “Two votes, plus one extra vote for every whole [five] seats” - eg 1-4 seats 2 votes, 5-9 seats 3 votes, etc. That way, a single-seat race is more Condorcet-efficient, and a two-seat contest is winner-take-all (2-seaters arre not good under any form of PR, unless you are actually wanting to institutionalise bipartisan veto), but with larger magnitudes, it approaches PR.
(If uniformity is not a constraint, you may as well say “… if there are fewer than 2 seats, just use Approval Voting anyway. Tick as many or as few candidates as you want”, since that won’t make the result less proportional).
Multiple Limited Vote could also be combined with runoffs. With, say, 3 votes for 7 seats, a candidate would need the support of both [say] 10% of those voting and 5% of the total enrolled electorate, to be safely elected on the first round. On the second round simple pluralities should suffice (there would be fewer seats left and so a higher threshold anyway).
Seed planted by Tom Round — 17 April 2008 @ 18:35
Clarification: the “salve” case is the one I’m trying to make. I drew on the literature for its emphasis on non-sectarian and/or “cross-cutting” (a la Dahl) social cleavages.
Seed planted by Jack — 17 April 2008 @ 19:05
I suppose the key sentence in there is Muqtada al-Sadr’s party is expected to do well. Deputies elected to get pork for the tribe are more easily “influenced” than ideologues, right?
Seed planted by Dermot — 18 April 2008 @ 02:31
The case Jack is making is one that I have made in some of my work, though perhaps too obliquely, because I am rather unsure of it.
Perhaps Iraqis and their advisers who are looking at the MNTV principle would like Iraq to become more like Pakistan, where a recent comment by Wilf quotes a critic as saying:
“Yet another flaw in our [FPTP] electoral system is the introspective approach of our electorate, which tends to vote on issues of personal concern like electricity, gas supply, roads and other local requirements, rather than issues of national importance.”
As for Lipset and Liphart on politics needing to be “about more than race, religion or language” I take that to refer to cross-cutting cleavages in the sense of alternative dimensions of programmatic issues, but not to pork-barrel and local politics.
Seed planted by MSS — 18 April 2008 @ 13:12
First of all…hi Matt. Happy Passover.
Not sure if cultivating personal vote is all that SNTV does: it provides a great deal of advantage to the “faction” in control of the state machinery–a la Cox (1996). The mechanism of the election may be “personalistic,” but how you get there is through the politics of the state.
One might say using SNTV could bode well for creating cross-confessional/ethnic coalitions to create that one big party. I’m skeptical whether that’s necessarily the only possibility: once the coalition is in place, will those in power want to expand the coalition any further? The original LDP (the original Kishi-version) was a disciplined, hardcore conservative party in which PM Kishi, through control of particularistic benefits, was able to goad even the moderate Dietmen to toe the hardline conservative stance in order to beat down the Socialists.
If Iraq goes SNTV, I’d suspect two of the three main groups…or, perhaps even all the different groups of the Sh’ia–might band together like the LIberals and the Democrats, and try to beat up the rest like the LDP did to the Socialists in 1960. It won’t be pretty…and that’s assuming it works.
Seed planted by Henry Kim — 23 April 2008 @ 00:05
Thanks, Henry. I certainly will not argue with your addendum, but how much of the advantage to control of the state is inherent in SNTV, and how much is attributable to other factors?
(Far be it for me to say that the electoral system doesn’t explain all!)
Seed planted by MSS — 24 April 2008 @ 17:38
MSS in #4: As for Lipset and Liphart on politics needing to be “about more than race, religion or language†I take that to refer to cross-cutting cleavages in the sense of alternative dimensions of programmatic issues, but not to pork-barrel and local politics.
This is what concerns me about Jack’s proposal. It may be true that localism is one alternative to deep divides based on religion. But is it really the alternative we want to promote?
Seed planted by Bob Richard — 25 April 2008 @ 22:32
I think Bob alludes to two questions. One, can institutional designers activate other cleavages? If they can, what are the prospects once another, strong set is already active?
It looks to me like the party system is fairly locked in. On that assumption, I prescribed a party-weakening reform.
Seed planted by Jack — 26 April 2008 @ 18:25
I am also skeptical that you’d really have candidates talking about things other than religion, even under SNTV, if that is what voters and their leaders really care about.
Religious organizations are powerful enough to command their followers to divide their votes among multiple candidates of their sect, thus there is no necessary reason why SNTV would have to introduce ‘pork’ and local constituent servicing into campaigning at the expense of sectarianism. (Leaving aside whether that might be a good idea, which I am unsure of, but am willing to concede could be so.)
(This comment was also placed at The Democratic Piece, in response to a “Take two” post by Jack on this same theme.)
Seed planted by MSS — 30 April 2008 @ 13:18
Cross-posting my reply to this notion:
“And on the inability of SNTV to raise the salience of cross-cutting cleavages, I don’t disagree. I suspect Iraq’s party system is more locked-in than not. STNV (open-endorsement) at least holds out the possibility of bringing non-religion issues to the table in a meaningful way.”
Iraqi voters probably do care about more than their sects. If my water still were not running five years later, I would.
But I admit the potential for the emergence of a viable turn-on-the-water party is low, especially at this late date.
Seed planted by Jack — 04 May 2008 @ 16:58
For this fall’s provincial elections the choice seems to be between closed list or open list. But what is Condoleezza Rice talking about here?
“we obviously favor and everybody favors if it can be done, proportional representation by district. Proportional representation, constituency representation. But not a list system. We are pushing for that. But it’s just technically hard to do. It’s not so much that people don’t want to do it. They had electoral districts under Saddam, but whether they’re accurate or not I think is questionable.”
Rice is pushing for MMP?
Seed planted by Wilf Day — 21 June 2008 @ 13:27
Alas, I suspect that Condi - like most US politicians when talking about “proportional representation” - mean “equal single-member districts, based on population or enrolled voters”. As opposed to “equal numbers of seats per state/ province/ county without regard to population.”
One of the Sunnis’ (self-inflicted) complaints against the last Iraqi election was that they were under-represented per capita. Well, duh, they (mostly) boycotted the election, and under nationwide party list this meant the Sunni parties won well under 20% of the seats. Having population-based one-seaters is supposed to rectify this injustice by ensuring the Sunni strongholds elect 20% of the national assembly even if Sunnis represent less than 20% of the national turnout.
(Never over-estimate how well most politicians and even journalists understand electoral systems. In 2005, both the Wall Street Journal and The New Republic published articles urging “local” (ie, single-seat) districts replace nationwide at-large because… that would help liberal minorities. The analogy was used that, eg, Barney Frank would never get into Congress if the whole US voted as one district. Well, uh, no, not if it used block vote like the US does, of course not. But Iraq doesn’t use block vote. My forehead was purple from repeated thudding that week.)
Seed planted by Tom Round — 21 June 2008 @ 16:07