Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies (1999) / Chapter Skim
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In addition, the electoral system that is most appropriate for initially ending internal conflict may not be the best one for longer-term conflict management. In short, while electoral systems can be powerful levers for shaping the content and practice of politics in divided societies, their design is highly sensitive to context.
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Institutions, Conflict Management, and Democracy The study of political institutions is integral to the study of democratization because institutions constitute and sustain democracies:2 as Scarritt and Mozaffar succinctly summarize, "to craft democracies is to craft institutions" (1996:3~. Perhaps most important for newly democratizing countries is the way that institutions shape the choices available to political actors.
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(ii) Regardless of how they perform economically, democracies that have more coherent and effective political institutions will be more likely to perform well politically in maintaining not only political order but also a rule of law, thus ensuring civil liberties, checking the abuse of power, and providing meaningful representation, competition, choice, and accountability.
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To be able to make promises and then deliver on them, each political representative needs to be accountable to his or her constituency to the highest degree possible through institutional rules. The extent to which institutional rules place a premium on the representational roles of such figures, or rather seek to break down the overall salience of ethnicity by forcing them to transcend their status as representatives of only one group or another, is central to the scholarly debate about political institutions in deeply divided societies.
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However, the promise of constitutional engineering rests on the assumption that long-term sociopolitical stability is the nation's overarching goal; and the institutions needed to facilitate that goal may not be the same as those which provide maximum short-term gain to the negotiating actors in the transitional period. Thus, institutional choice and constitutional engineering are, in practice, compatible approaches.
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This is why electoral system design has been seized upon by many scholars (Lijphart, 1977, 1994; Sartori, 1968; Taagepera and Shugart, 1989; Horowitz, 1985, 1991) as one of the chief levers of constitutional engineering to be used in mitigating conflict within divided societies.
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as factors influencing democratic transitions, it is more common when dealing with developing countries that the reverse is true: scholars and policy makers alike have typically given too much attention to social forces and not enough to the careful crafting of appropriate democratic institutions by which those forces can be expressed. As Larry Diamond has argued, "the single most important and urgent factor in the consolidation of democracy is not civil society but political institutionalization."6 To survive, democracies in developing countries need above all "robust political institutions" such as secure executives and effective legislatures composed of coherent, broadly based parties encouraged by aggregative electoral institutions.7 We thus return to the underlying premise of constitutional engineering as it relates to electoral system design: while it is true that elections are merely one cog in the wheel of a much broader framework of institutional arrangements, sociohistorical pressures, and strategic actor behaviors, at the same time electoral systems are an indispensable and integral part of this broader framework.
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Given this, is it possible to outline criteria that one might use to judge the success or failure of any given electoral system design? In light of the multicausal nature of institutions, democracy, and political behavior, it would be foolhardy to say with absolute certainty that a particular electoral system was solely, or even primarily, responsible for a change for better or worse in ethnic relations in a divided society.
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This is even more so if we are mindful not to ignore the important lessons of nineteenth-century emerging democracies such as the British dominions (Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand) , with their divisions between and within "settler" and "indigenous" groups, or the multiethnic societies of continental Europe (Belgium, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg)
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In this paper, we seek to develop an analytical framework upon which a contingent theory of electoral system design may be built. When assessing the appropriateness of any given electoral system for a divided society, three variables become particularly salient: (1)
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Clearly, if ethnic allegiances are indeed primordial, and therefore rigid, then a specific type of power sharing, based on an electoral system which primarily recognizes and accommodates interests based on ascriptive communal traits rather than individual ideological ones, is needed to manage competing claims for scarce resources. If ethnic identities and voting behaviors are fixed, then there is no space for institutional incentives aimed at promoting accommodatory strategies to work.
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of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa found only 3 percent of voters claimed to have based their political affiliations on ethnic identity.~° Intensity of Conflict A second variable in terms of the nature of any given conflict and its susceptibility to electoral engineering is simply the intensity and depth of hostility between the competing groups. It is worth remembering that, although academic and international attention is naturally drawn to extreme cases, most ethnic conflicts do not degenerate into all-out civil war (Fearon and Laitin, 1996~.
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By contrast, under the "open list" proportional representation (PR) system used for parliamentary elections in Sri Lanka, research has found that Sinhalese voters will, if given the chance, deliberately move Tamil candidates placed in a winnable position on a party list to a lower position a factor which may well have occurred in South Africa as well, had not the electoral system used been a "closed" list, which allowed major parties such as the ANC and the NP to place ethnic minorities and women high on their party list.
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Lastly, disputes over territory often require innovative institutional arrangements which go well beyond the positive spins that electoral systems can create. In Spain and Canada, asymmetrical arrangements for, respectively, the Basque and Quebec regions, have been used to try and dampen calls for secession, while federalism has been promoted as an institution of conflict management in countries as diverse as Germany, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland.
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This has considerable implications for electoral engineers: it means that any system of election that relies on single-member electoral will likely produce "ethnic fiefdoms" at the local level. Minority representation and/or power-sharing under these conditions would probably require some form of multimember district system and proportional representation.
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countries, in which members of various ethnic groups tend to be much more widely intermixed and, consequently, have more day-to-day contact. Here, ethnic identities are often mitigated by other cross-cutting cleavages, and even small single-member districts are likely to be ethnically heterogeneous, so that electoral systems which encourage parties to seek the support of different ethnic groups may well work to break down interethnic antagonisms and promote the development of broad, multiethnic parties.
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In recent years, first-past-the-post (FPTP) has facilitated the fragmentation of the party system in established democracies such as Canada and India, while PR has seen the election of what look likely to be dominant single-party regimes in Namibia, South Africa, and elsewhere.
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The impact of the electoral system on the membership and dynamics of that body will always be significant, but the electoral system's impact upon political accommodation and democratization more generally is tied to the amount of power held by the legislature and that body's relationship to other political institutions. The importance of electoral system engineering is heightened in centralized, unicameral parliamentary systems, and is maximized when the legislature is then constitutionally obliged to produce an oversize executive cabinet of national unity drawn from all significant parties that gain parliamentary representation.
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3. The Party Block Vote (PBV)
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Semi-Proportional Systems Semi-Pit systems are those which inherently translate votes cast into seats won in a way that falls somewhere in between the proportionality of PR systems and the majoritarianism of plurality-majority systems. The three semi-PA electoral systems used for legislative elections are the single nontransferable vote (SNTV)
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11. The Single Transferable Vote (STY)
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We will now deal with each of these processes in turn. Colonial Inheritance Inheriting an electoral system from colonial times is perhaps the most common way through which democratizing societies come to use a particular electoral system.
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Huntington's first wave, from 1828 until 1926, saw several examples of deliberate electoral engineering that are now well-established electoral institutions. The alternative vote system introduced for federal elections in Australia in 1918, for example, was intended to mitigate the problems of conservative forces "splitting" their vote in the face of a rising Labor Party.
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The "third wave" of democracy has seen a new appreciation of the necessity for and utility of well-crafted electoral systems as a key constitutional choice for new democracies. In recent years, transitions to democracy in Hungary, Bolivia, South Africa, Korea, Taiwan, Fiji, and elsewhere have all been accompanied by extensive discussion and debate about the merits of particular electoral system designs.
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After expressions of unease that South Africa was promoting PR solely in order to fractionalize the Assembly, the UN Institute for Namibia advised all political parties interested in a stable independence government "to reject any PR system that tends to fractionalize party representation" (see Cliffe et al., 1994:116~. But this advice remained unheeded, and the option of a threshold for representation (one of the chief mechanisms for reducing the number of parties in a list PR system)
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Many fledgling democracies in the 1950s and 1960s adopted copies of the British system, despite consistent misgivings from Westminster that it was "of doubtful value as an export to tropical colonies, to primitive societies in Africa and to complex societies in India." The sorry history of many such choices has underlined the importance of designing electoral and constitutional rules for the specific conditions of the country at hand, rather than blithely assuming that the same "off the shelf" constitutional design will work identically in different social, political and economic circumstances. ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AND CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The comparative experience suggests that four specific systems are particularly suitable for divided societies.
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In a discussion of the proposals for South Africa he noted that STV might indeed be superior for reasonably homogeneous societies, but "for plural
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, South Africa (1994) , Mozambique (1994)
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It is therefore increasingly being argued in South Africa, Indonesia, Cambodia, and elsewhere that the choice of a permanent electoral system should encourage a high degree of geographic accountability, by having members of parliament who represent small, territorially defined districts and servicing the needs of their constituency, in order to establish a meaningful relationship between the rulers and the ruled. While this does not preclude all PR systems there are a number of ways of combining singlemember districts with proportional outcomes it does rule out the national list PR systems often favored by consociationalists.
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Its approach is not to abolish or weaken segmental cleavages but to recognize them explicitly and to turn the segments into constructive elements of a stable democracy" (1977:42~. Consociationalism is probably best seen as a stop-gap measure, the lesser of two evils which keeps the lid on the pressure cooker of a divided society that is about to blow and perhaps manages to turn down the heat just a little.
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, is the need "to make politicians reciprocally dependent on the votes of members of groups other than their own."24 The most reliable way of achieving this aim, according to proponents of the centripetal approach, is to offer sufficient electoral incentives for campaigning politicians to court voter support from other groups. In deeply divided societies, this can be very difficult to achieve.
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. In cases of deeply divided societies, however, policy-based cleavages are usually considerably less salient than ethnic or linguistic identities.
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. AV was also recommended for elections to postapartheid South Africa (Horowitz, 1991)
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, and that "although vote pooling is theoretically compelling, there is simply insufficient empirical evidence at the level of national politics to support claims that subsequent preference voting can lead to accommodative outcomes."25 In fact, there is a considerable range of evidence from PNG, Australia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere which demonstrates centripetalism in action, although much of this material remains relatively obscure (see Reilly, 1998a)
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or, alternatively, the more common scenario of a few large ethnic groups which are widely dispersed and intermixed (e.g., Malaysia, Lebanon, Singapore, Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, etc.~. Both of these social structures, which appear to be particularly common in the Asia-Pacific region, would result in ethnically heterogeneous electoral districts and thus, under AV rules, strong incentives towards accommodative preference-swapping deals (see Reilly, 1998a)
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Arguments in Favor Institutionally, integrative consensus democracy prescribes STV in order to encourage cross-cutting ethnic cleavages, while at the same time ensuring the fair representation and inclusion of minorities in decision making. The argument is that if the institutional incentives embedded within integrative consensual democracy work as hypothesized, they will allow the space for and, indeed, provide incentives for, the growth of multiethnic political parties; but, they will not guarantee that such parties flourish.
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While consociationalism is nearly always based on a list PR system, integrative consensualism requires the use of the single transferable vote to encourage party appeals beyond defined ethnic boundaries. Under this system, segments of opinion would be represented proportionately in the legislature, but there would be a great incentive for political elites to appeal to the members of other segments, given that second preferences on the ballot paper are of prime importance.
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Until the 1998 "Good Friday" peace agreement in Northern Ireland, only two ethnically divided states had utilized STV in "one-off" national elections: Northern Ireland in 1973 (and again in 1982) and Estonia in 1990.
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There have been four distinct approaches which reflect this thinking: the use of communal electoral rolls; the presence of reserved seats for ethnic, linguistic, or other minorities; the use of ethnically mixed or mandated candidate lists; and the use of "best loser" seats to balance ethnic representation in the legislature. Each of these will be described below.
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Representatives from these reserved seats are usually elected in much the same manner as other members of parliament, but are often elected by members of the particular minority community designated in the electoral law. Instead of formally reserved seats, regions can be overrepresented to facilitate the increased representation of minority groups.
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Ethnically Mixed Lists Some countries use variations on a block vote to ensure balanced ethnic representation, as it enables parties to present ethnically diverse lists of candidates for election. In Lebanon, for example, election is dependent, at a practical level, on being part of a mixed list.
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, in general most multiethnic societies need political institutions which help to break down the salience of ethnicity rather than predetermining it as the basis of electoral competition.
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The systems we concentrate upon, as integral parts of the four "engineering packages" we identified in the section on Electoral Systems and Conflict Management are: list proportional representation (e.g., Belgium, Switzerland, and post-apartheid South Africa) , the alternative vote (e.g., Papua New Guinea 1964-1975, and Fiji since 1997)
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. The exception to this rule has been the use of STV for various elections in Northern Ireland which is clearly a deeply divided society and where inter-ethnic vote transfers have not historically been a factor in conflict management (see Elliott, 1992~.
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It is no surprise, then, that countries with a few large, geographically concentrated groups (Belgium, Switzerland, South Africa, much of post-Dayton Bosnia) have typically chosen PR electoral systems,
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African minorities, for example, have been found to be more highly concentrated in single contiguous geographical areas than minorities in other regions, which means that many electoral constituencies and informal local power bases are dominated by a single ethnopolitical group (Scarritt, 1993~. This has considerable implications for electoral engineers: it means that any system of election that relies on single-member electoral districts will likely produce "ethnic fiefdoms" at the local level.
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For one thing, almost all of the "extreme" intensity conflicts from Table 3Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, and Lebanon suffered a breakdown in democracy under the specified system, which serves as a sobering reminder of the limits of constitutional engineering. Second, there is a clear regional concentration of electoral system choices: virtually all the countries of continental Europe, whether ethnically divided or not, use list PR systems (which are also common in Latin America and Southern Africa)
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As Table 4 suggests, advocates of different approaches can point to democratic successes and failures among divided societies. It is also the case, however, that countries such as Fiji, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and others have persisted with (or reintroduced in modified form)
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By contrast, the priorities of a consolidated democracy may be more concerned with crafting a system which gives rise to minimal winning coalition or single party governments, is accountable in both geographic and policy terms, and allows the voters to "throw out" a government if it does not perform to their satisfaction goals that are enhanced by a system based, at least to some extent, upon small geographically defined electoral districts that does not entrench oversize coalition governments. South Africa, which successfully conducted its transitional 1994 election using a national-list PR system and a mandated "Government of National Unity," has moved away from power-sharing measures and may change to some form of constituency-based PR system for its next elections in 2004.
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· Minimize areas of conflict · Simple to run Transparent "Grand" or"oversized" coalition governments .
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While Fiji's constitution-makers saw fit to make communal representation part of this new system, in general the comparative evidence to date suggests that explicitist approaches ethnically mandated lists, communal rolls, racial gerrymandering, and the like may serve artificially to sustain ethnic divisions in the political process rather than mitigating them. For this reason, we would counsel against their use in all but the most extreme cases of ethnic division.
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1996. "The Eclipse of Consociationalism in South Africa's Democratic Transition." Democratization 3:420434.
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1991. A Democratic South Africa?
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1991. "The Alternative Vote: A Realistic Alternative for South Africa?
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Election '94: South Africa An Analysis of the Results, Campaigns, and Future Prospects.
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14For example, South Africa used a classically proportional electoral system for its first democratic elections of 1994, and with 62.65 percent of the popular vote the African National Congress (ANC) won 63 percent of the national seats.
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23Connors argues that in South Africa consociationalism "rather than mitigating ethnic conflict, could only wittingly or unwittingly provide a basis for ethnic mobilization by providing segmental leaders with a permanent platform" (1996:426~. 24Horowitz, 1990:471 25Sisk, 1996:62.
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