One way to model dictatorship

Says the BBC:

Iraqi politics is still a zero-sum game, and one in which the Sunni Arabs feel themselves doomed to be the losers.

Last week I analogized the situation to repeated games of Chicken.

Iraqi consociationalism woes

Iraq’s Sunni vice president vetoed the hard-won electoral law this week. More about that from Barak Hoffman and Matthew Shugart. The current impasse boils down to the apportionment formula. Sunni and Kurdish politicians think the deck is stacked against them.

So is Iraqi consociationalism coming apart, or is this mundane sectarian brinksmanship?

Iraq is our latest experiment in exporting consociationalism. The Iraqi state is built on explicit recognition and institutionalization of combatant ethnic and sectarian groupings. A closed-list PR system funnels these groups into their respective political parties, and, as we saw this week, governing requires the consent of a member of every ethnic group. Now, Iraq’s constitution is not explicit about this. Articles 66-75 set up a semi-presidential system with a unitary executive whose job is to sign legislation. Then there are the so-called “transitional provisions,” which basically divide the presidency among three people elected by 2/3 vote of the legislature. This all but guarantees that the Presidency Council will include one Shiite, one Sunni, and one Kurd, as it does now.

The problem with consociationalism is that, for it to work, elite politicians have to (1) control the combatant groups they represent and (2) desire compromise. The US constitution’s Framers approached institutional design from the safe assumption that politicians are nihilistic power maximizers. This led them to emphasize checks and balances and to riddle the American political system with veto points. Consociationalism, on the other hand, began as a category of observed behavior.¹ It was not the result of a deductive exercise. If game theory is good for anything, it’s good for designing institutions. We begin with an assumption about the preferences of key players (dictatorship by one’s ethnic group > killing each other > dictatorship of the other ethnic group), we choose a desired goal (violence prevention), and we proceed accordingly. Modeling a situation in this way certainly does not lead us to institutions that depend on mutual good will.

The veto of the new electoral law is entirely consistent with the institutional context. That is, we expect outcomes like this one when we run Iraq’s social profile through the consociational machinery of its democracy. I don’t think we are witnessing a constitutional crisis, at least in as much as “crisis” implies an extraordinarily stressful event. From another perspective, Iraq is in a perpetual state of constitutional crisis.

Let me go out on a limb with some predictions.

First, the election will happen, even if a little bit late. Hashemi’s veto is just another round in the ongoing game of chicken that defines constitutional decision-making in Iraq. Brinksmanship and eleventh-hourism have characterized most moments of important political choice since 2003. Why would preparing for the next national election be any different?

Second, there is nothing “transitional” about the “transitional Presidency Council.” What rational group would agree to give up its veto?

Third, Iraqi democracy will not consolidate any time soon. Recall that a car wreck is one solution to a game of chicken. We are more likely to see a dictatorship or civil war in Iraq than we are a stable, electoral democracy.

1. Ian Lustick has a good article about this.

Iraq’s parliament gets bigger

Under the 2009 electoral law,¹ there will be 323 seats in the Council of Representatives. This is an increase from 275 in December 2005. As in December 2005, most seats will be allocated on the governorate level. In that election, however, there were 45 seats allocated nationally to minority groups and parties failing to meet governorate-level thresholds.² This time, there are only 16 compensatory seats.

And, of course, the new electoral system is open-list proportional representation.

More from Iraq and Gulf Analysis, including the distribution of seats by governorate.

1. Score!
2. These thresholds were not formal, but arose as a function of apportionment.

Open lists for Iraq

Reidar Visser reports. More at Fruits and Votes.

I am surprised. Then again, the political leaders who agreed to this are unlikely to lose their seats under the new system. See MSS’ comment on another post, the essence of which supports my prediction.

I do not know yet whether the lists are fully open or just “flexible.” The lists will be open. Candidates will not need quotas of preference votes as they did in the January 2009 governorate council elections. Voters, however, will have the option of voting for the party’s pre-ordered list.

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.

This is Why the State Department Shouldn’t Control Development Assistance

I read this article in Mother Jones today and, needless to say, it made me a little upset.  There are two main takeaways:

1) State Department should not control development assistance.

2) Credible commitment is crucial to success.

On the first point, the article makes it quite clear that the State Department in Baghdad was too concerned about developing good relationships with corrupt officials to bother rooting out corruption.  Salam Adhoob, an Iraqi putting himself, his family and his friends in danger to fight for the future of his country and root out corruption met with stiff resistance at the State Department when he sought their help in doing his job – prosecuting instances of corruption.

Even more disconcerting is that State actively worked against Adhoob’s attempts to claim asylum in the U.S. after he became the target of death squads for his work in Iraq.  Have we sunk so low that maintaining a few good contacts in government outweigh the importance of protecting those that stood up with us to rebuild the Iraqi state?  Perhaps I’m more of an idealist than I thought.

Regardless, if the State Department is willing to overlook systemic government corruption in order to maintain amicable relations with their counterparts, what else are they willing to overlook for the sake of contact?  My feeling is that anything is on the table.

That leads to my second point that credible commitments towards pursuing development are crucial to success.  When the State Department makes it clear through its action that rooting out corruption is less important than cordial relations and contacts in government, development aid will only fuel more government corruption – as this article demonstrates.  When applied to other facets of development – democratic governance, for instance – the same applies.  If the State Departments actions suggest to their counterparts that reform is less important than good relations, then the government will manipulate funding to pay off their supporters and punish opponents.
Said another way, if governments know that they can use development aid for private gain and still receive more funding, the incentive is to embezzle, steal and enrich friends, family and political supporters…not to use the funding to advance societal, economic or political reform.

The news article essentially explains how we’re creating perverse incentives for Iraqi government officials.  Our actions are incentivizing corruption (by ignoring it, even the most egregious cases) while simultaneously making anti-corruption work within the Iraqi government harder by turning our backs on people such as Adhoob who stood up against the corrupt government officials.  The refusal of the U.S Government to protect, or to force the Iraqi government to protect, a civil servant such as Adhoob when he executes his mandates and prosecutes corrupt government officials will lead to the atrophy of the anti-corruption office.  While it will legally have jurisdiction and authority to pursue and prosecute corruption, the informal system will render it, at best, a paper tiger and, at worst, a tool of the state to attack political opponents.

To take the conversation to the macro view, the opportunity for such large scale corruption and personal enrichment actually also increases the likelihood of violence in Iraq, or, at the very least, threatens to incentivize the creation of patronage networks that undermine the integrity of democracy.  Allow me to explain.  If winning a seat in government also offers the possibility of enriching yourself and those around you, it is worth taking more risks to “win” that seat – for you and those who support you.  In a multi-ethnic society with a history of ethnic grievances, the likelihood of violence to achieve financial security for “your people” increases, especially when the alternative candidate is from a rival ethnic group.  This is precisely the type of system, where resources are concentrated at the top, which Iraq needs to avoid.  Deeper decentralization, similar to the system currently in place in India, will reduce tensions among groups competing for the national level by reducing the “perks” of national power.

Right now, a piece of an $18 billion dollar pie is the “perk” for “winning” national power…

Sadly, that’s only the amount Adhoob knew about because the crimes were so blatant.  I’m sure there’s plenty more.  To paraphrase Lawrence Fishburn in the Matrix, do we want to see how much farther the rabbit hole goes? The State Department has already answered that question.  How about the rest of the USG?

Iraqi governorate elections: thank the open lists

Widely lauded gains for secular forces in Iraq’s provincial elections last month were largely a function of the candidate-centric, open list proportional representation system used.¹

Following the certification of results today, Michael Allen for the NED writes:

People voted on the issues rather than according to identity, and for individual candidates rather than anonymous lists. The poll represents an important step towards consolidating the country’s fragile democracy, but the real test will come with national legislative elections later this year.

And:

Iraqis voted strongly against religious sectarian parties widely perceived to be corrupt and to have failed to deliver security and basic services. “No party in the elections ran with the slogan ‘Islam is the Solution’ since voters were much more interested in who could actually provide services at the local level,” writes the Washington Institute’s J. Scott Carpenter.

Finally:

“Iraq was once defined by sectarian tensions pitting Shiite against Sunni,” writes Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy. “Now, intra-Shiite competition may take greater precedence.”

In sum, personalistic campaigns revolved around everyday governance issues, and there was competition among members of the same sectarian groups. The thread uniting each of the points above is the electoral system. Iraqis did not suddenly take governance to heart. We can assume voters were as concerned with service delivery in 2005 as they were last January. The open list proportional representation system, however, freed candidates to campaign on governance and reduced the costs for Iraqis of voting on those issues.

As this insightful paper points out, moving from closed to open list PR fundamentally changes campaign dynamics.

The 2005 national elections proceeded under closed lists, and sectarian parties dominated. There are institutional reasons for this. First, candidates in closed list systems must curry favor with party leaders for high ranks on party lists. Second, since voters choose among labels and not people, party leaders have incentives to appeal to sect and ethnicity in order to maximize vote (and therefore seat) shares. Third, because the combination of social division and party-centric electoral rules politicizes identity, voters who would have voted on governance issues instead support the party representing their group. After all, what if the other group captures the state? The outcome of the 2005 elections was consistent with these incentives: a system of disciplined parties organized around religious affiliation.

Open lists change the game entirely. A candidate’s prospect for winning depends on his personal level of popularity.² He or she has an incentive to campaign against co-ethnics or co-sectarians. Such a campaign is likely to focus on issues ‘below’ the level of the group. Therefore, it is more likely to focus on “who could actually provide services at the local level,” in Carpenter’s words.

Unless the system changes, national elections later this year again will use closed list proportional representation. It will be interesting to see whether the secular organizations emerging from provincial elections reproduce their gains nationally, or whether Iraqis get another “national identity referendum.”

1. Questions nonetheless remain about the finer details of that open list system.
2. Depending on the way personal votes contribute to the party’s total, or “pool,” a candidate’s success may even depend on being more popular than fellow co-partisans, with more personal votes raising his position on the party list.

Voter choice in the Iraqi provincial vote

Early voting is underway in Iraq’s provincial elections. Financial Times offers evidence that the set of candidates is much more diverse that which contested both national elections in 2005:

Yet today, it is as if they have been injected with a new lease of life as they stand plastered with colourful posters that highlight both the different faces of Iraqi society and the battle hotting up for tomorrow’s provincial elections. Alongside images of austere looking bearded men in clerical robes are headshots of women in brightly coloured veils and businessmen in western-style suits, each vying for a seat in Basra’s regional government.

And:

For war-weary Iraqis, fed up with corruption, mismanagement, killing and kidnappings, the polls offer a glimmer of hope that a new generation of politicians may emerge, with a focus on people’s needs rather than the corrupt and sectarian politics that have dominated in the post-Saddam era.

This happy development is due in part to the so-called “open list” system Iraqis are using to elect governorate councils. Greg is right to point out that institutional change does not change voters’ preferences. Electoral systems do affect actors’ strategies, however. This new candidate-centric system has enabled candidates to run on a wider set of platforms.

Unfortunately, information on the details and politics of this electoral system have been impossible to track down. Is it really open list proportional representation, or is it single non-transferable vote? Going by a photo of a ballot (slide number five) at Financial Times, it doesn’t look like either.¹ Who held the bargaining advantage in choosing the system: the legislature, activists, or the occupying forces? As of this writing, there is no record of the law on the Council of Representatives’ English-language legislation page.

The question of who decided is the more interesting one. If it was the Council of Representatives, Iraq’s party system would appear in flux. Recall that Iraq used closed list PR in 2005 because that’s what clerics wanted. They knew it would give them control of access to office. Now someone is undoing that arrangement? If American pressure explains “open lists,” on the other hand, we have evidence of successful, post-conflict electoral engineering. If you can help answer either question above, please leave a comment!

Whether institutions are driving or only enabling the apparent sectarian de-alignment, the outcome is good for democratic consolidation in Iraq.

1. I do not read Arabic. Someone who does may have a better idea about what’s going on in the photo. Are those names of people or parties? If they’re of people, this looks like SNTV.

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.