January 17, 2012
A very quick note to point folks in the direction of my post for the NY Times’s Latitude blog this week, which deals with proportional representation in Lebanon. For most of you following the debate, not much of it will come as much of a surprise. For those who have not been following along and would like additional context, see here.
I also recommend Michael Young’s good column on the subject earlier this week, and IFES’s very good overview of the Lebanese electoral system.
December 22, 2011
Graphic courtesy of Election Guerilla. Click to enlarge.
Much has already been said about the very peculiar electoral law proposed by the Orthodox Gathering and endorsed by all of Lebanon’s Maronite leaders. Civil society groups say that it further entrenches sectarianism. Michael Young writes that it deepens Christian isolation. Meanwhile, Ziyad Baroud is hedging his bets.
My biggest problem with the proposal is very simple: it leads to enormous inequalities of suffrage. What does this mean?
Imagine a country with a parliament divided into quotas based on colors of hair. For example, 20% of the seats are devoted to blond-haired MPs, 35% to redheads, 20% to brown-haired people, 15% to salt-and-pepper, etc.
Once upon a time, this proportional arrangement of seats matched the actual hair-color demographics in the country, but over time, the blonds (who, as a rule, tend to have more fun) multiplied more vigorously than the redheads, while an unfortunate epidemic of male-pattern balding eviscerated the once healthy ranks of the brown-haired.
The redheads, however, are insistent upon maintaining the old quotas, even though demographics have changed. What’s more, they insist that districts should be drawn in such a way as to guarantee that redheaded representatives are elected by majorities of redheads. Why? Because, they argue, a blond MP surely would not advocate for a redhead’s rights in the way that a fellow redhead would.
This is where the troubles begin. If you draw districts in such a way as to maintain “chromatically pure” majorities, then certain districts will inevitably have a much higher ratio of MPs to voters than other districts. For example, redheaded districts might have 1 MP per 10,000 voters, while blond districts could have 40,000 voters to each MP.
The only way around this problem would be to draw much larger districts composed of voting populations with all kinds of hair color, but then you’d have redheaded MPs being elected by blond voters, which is a big problem for the redheaded politicians.
So small districts remain, for the time being…until, one day, the redheaded and brown-haired leaders get together and decide that the current system is still problematic. Even in their well-coiffed enclaves, there are odd pockets of blond and gray-haired voters who can help swing an election the wrong way.
And so they propose a different approach, a law that is the apotheosis of the principle of hair-color representation, and it goes something like this:
“Let’s dispense with the hassles of gerrymandering and turn the entire country into a single district. Let’s institute a system of proportional representation whereby each citizen is only allowed to vote for a list of candidates who have the same color hair as their own. So, for example, if there are 22 seats in Parliament reserved for redheads, then each redhead in the country would cast a vote for one of several different lists of 22 redheaded political candidates, and the seats would be divided up between the lists according to a proportional formula.”
Under this proposed system, the problem of unequal suffrage that we witness in the current system with the small districts would become even more drastic, because there would be no little pockets of blonds and black-haired voters to “dilute” the redheaded and brown-haired votes. Under the new law, the ratio of MPs to voters is no longer dictated by districting, but rather by the cold hard facts of hair color demographics. A redheaded voter would have more voting power than a blond, purely because of the color of their hair, and not because of the district they live in.
Graphic courtesy of Election Guerilla. Click to enlarge
This is, in a nutshell, the Ferzli proposal. (For more reading on inequality of suffrage, check out this post I wrote last year on the subject).
Let me just conclude by pointing out the obvious, namely that nobody but Najib Mikati and President Suleiman are actually interested in implementing proportional representation. When I met with several of Hariri’s allies, advisors, and representatives last month, they all basically regurgitated the same set of talking points: “If we adopt PR, Hizbullah will be able to win 10 Sunni seats, while we’ll only be able to take one Shiite seat. We can’t have PR until there’s a level playing field, and our Shiite candidates are not intimidated or threatened by Hizbullah.”
Naturally Walid Jumblatt is completely opposed to PR, as is Nabih Berri. The Christians don’t like it because it will require having larger voting districts (12-14 rather than the current 28 or so), which means that many Christian MPs will be elected by Muslim majorities. (This is what makes it particularly nauseating to listen to Amin Gemayel and Michel Aoun going on about restoring “Christian rights” when the system they are championing is so ludicrously out of step with democratic principles and demographic realities. See the second graphic above for a clear proof of just how good the 2009 law is for Christian representation…)
Therefore, the current proposal from Elie Ferzli is probably being supported by the Christian leadership only to guarantee that the end result of the bargaining process over the electoral law will be the 2009 law, warts and all.
Arabic speakers can read an introduction to the actual law here. I’d also like to thank my good friend Election Guerilla for the very helpful graphics above. As he suggested to me in an email: “The proposed system simply flaunts the inequality of confessional representation (and it is perhaps unsurprising that the most over-represented Christian group under the proposal would be … the Greek Orthodox!”
More on this as the story develops…
October 14, 2011
Lebanon's various electoral maps (courtesy of IFES, see report below)
The Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) has published an excellent primer on Tunisia’s upcoming elections. It is succinct, well-written, and will bring you up to speed on all of the most important players, issues, and questions in about twenty minutes. I highly recommend checking it out (download the PDF here).
Speaking of elections, Lebanon’s Interior Minister Marwan Charbel unveiled a new electoral draft law a couple of days ago. It contains several positive elements, such as a 30% gender quota, pre-printed ballots, and an open-list proportional representation system, but disappoints in other ways — several small districts, no independent supervisory commission.
The big debate over the law will focus on the question of how many electoral districts to include. Unless the districts are large, proportional representation will not generate the major benefit that its advocates ascribe to it, namely a diverse representation of political parties. For some background reading on the subject of electoral districting in Lebanon, here is another excellent primer, this one by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (whose work we have highlighted on many occasions).
Thoughts on electoral reform issues are welcome in the comment section.
September 21, 2011
I recently read an interesting profile of ex-Minister of the Interior Ziad Baroud in Al-Akhbar English (which, by the way, you should all be reading on a daily basis). The last two paragraphs, in particular, caught my eye:
As part of his interest in electoral law, Baroud is in contact with Bahij Tabbara, a former Lebanese minister. Together they are preparing a proposal on proportional representation, an electoral system many believe would undermine the current sectarian structure governing Lebanon. Baroud says their proposal “is not about a political party, tendency, movement or coalition,” but simply a campaign calling for proportional representation and hoping to raise awareness about the issue. Baroud confirms that they have not gone into the project’s details, but he feels that Tabbara is an intelligent person who will help move the project forward.
Although Baroud hopes to see proportional representation implemented in Lebanon, he is pessimistic about its acceptance among Lebanon’s political elite. He predicts that the prevailing political groups will never agree to such electoral reforms, because their direct or indirect interest are heavily vested in the status quo.
Is this true? Baroud is right that many of the bigger parties have no interest in changing the existing majoritarian system, but I think that a few important players would be far better served by proportional representation (PR), while at least one major party is probably agnostic on the issue.
In particular, Prime Minister Mikati would stand a much better chance of increasing the size of his legislative bloc if majoritarianism were to be replaced by a proportional scheme for the 2013 elections. With Hariri’s political relevance being depleted by the day, in fact, all of Lebanon’s “independent” Sunni politicians (particularly Mikati and Safadi) would seem to have a good shot at making inroads into Mustaqbal’s share of Parliament under a PR system.
On the other hand, any party that anticipates winning its seats by a margin short of a landslide is probably going to be against PR. This applies not only to Hariri’s Future Movement but also to Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and the rest of the Christian parties. All of these groups (as I argued in an article from a couple years ago) won their seats in the 2009 elections by decent margins (in the 55%-65% range) but not by total landslides. This means that under a PR system, they would likely lose seats in those same districts to their opponents. (See also this post for more reading on electoral districting in Lebanon and PR).
Meanwhile, if Hizbullah’s support in 2013 is anything like it was in 2009, they would have very little to lose from a PR system. In fact, they might even gain seats under this scheme, by running resistance-friendly candidates against Hariri’s people in the districts that the latter won by a narrow margin.
(Note: the same could be said of Aoun. While losing seats in districts like Jbeil and Kisrawan, the FPM might pick up seats in Beirut and elsewhere, particularly given all the new political capital that has accrued to the party as a result of its visible successes in the areas of telecommunications and energy.)
In sum, I’m not particularly optimistic that PR will be implemented in time for 2013, but my lack of optimism has less to do with the fact of entrenched political interests as it does with political inertia. Still, it would be nice if it happened.
February 19, 2011
Michel and Saad, during their honeymoon phase.
Apologies for the brief posting hiatus. The last time I sat down to write something on this blog, Hosni Mubarak was still president of Egypt. Maybe I should take these breaks more often.
So, what’s happening in Lebanon? It appears that Najib Miqati will not be able to throw together a technocrat cabinet as effortlessly as some had supposed. I don’t imagine that the current stalemate will last as long as the 2009 edition, but at least for the time being, there is no solution in sight. What is interesting to me is that the same politician whose intransigence led to much of the delay the last time around is the one causing problems today: good old General Aoun. (For a brief recap of his role in the 2009 cabinet formation process, see here and [for some comic relief] here).
As much as I’d like to blame the General for the current crisis, however, I believe the real culprit is the Lebanese Constitution. As I’ve tried to argue in the past (here and here):
It should be obvious to all of us that this game they call governance is being played with an unsatisfactory rulebook. In the absence of clear and established procedures, we have to resort to deal-making through public offers and quid pro quos. This is just not sustainable. Nowhere in the Lebanese Constitution does it say anything about cabinet veto powers. Nor, for that matter, does it explain what rules should govern the formation of any cabinet. As far as I can tell, the coalition that wins a majority in parliament could technically put together a cabinet consisting of seven fried won-tons, a shrimp springroll, and nine fortune cookies, without violating the Constitution.
In 2009, Aoun argued that each bloc’s share in the cabinet should be proportionally equivalent to its share in Parliament. Today, he argues that March 14th should not be granted a blocking third in the Miqati cabinet because he does not want the government to be mired in the legislative gridlock that (he helped ensure) plagued Saad Hariri’s cabinet. Hypocritical? Of course. But can you blame him? He’s simply exploiting the ambiguities of the current system to maximize the power of his own bloc.
I argued in 2009 that President Sleiman should have refused to sign any cabinet formation decree without insisting that the principle used to form that cabinet be enshrined in the Constitution (whether it was proportional representation or the unilateralist whims of a majoritarian prime minister). That way, I suggested naively, “we won’t have to watch this movie again four years from now.”
Well, it has barely been a year since Hariri formed his government and we find ourselves in the same position again. This time, we can’t blame the failure-to-launch on the Doha Accord, the Syrian-Saudi reconciliation, or the imperatives of a national unity formula. None of those conditions apply anymore, and the Lebanese politicos still can’t figure out how to divvy up the spoils. Something needs to be done.
So here’s my crowd-sourcing challenge of the day: How is the cabinet formation process managed in other multi-party parliamentary democracies? I presume a constitutionally mandated time limit would go a long way to helping the process along, but there are probably more efficient ways to do this. What are they?
Go forth, find out, report back, and make me smarter.
What I’m reading…
