Current opinion

Elections: not whether but how

by Bernard KENNEDY

The months of July and August provide a break from politics for many in the northern hemisphere. Elections have been few and far between around the world since the restless pendulum swung back towards the Socialists in the Albanian and Bulgarian parliamentary polls at the end of June and beginning of July. But with the arrival of September, the calendar has filled up rapidly. A presidential election has been held in Egypt and parliamentary elections have been taking place in several countries including Japan, Norway, New Zealand, Afghanistan, Germany and Poland.

In many of these countries, the election was called ahead of schedule due to political crises. The Egyptian presidential was the first ever to be held with multiple candidates. The Afghan poll has been postponed more than once, and the contribution which it will make to hopes for stability in the country is open to question. However, since Afghanistan has a presidential system, there is no question of a complete change of government as in the other countries listed.

The timetable for September alone is sufficient to illustrate the universality of the practice of electing national political executives and legislatures through universal adult suffrage. There are few countries which do not stage elections regularly for national political office, and the few that have not done so to date are seeking to do so. In October, Argentina and Tanzania will be staging parliamentary and presidential ballots respectively, although the October 30 Cote d’Ivoire general election is in doubt.

Limits of cynicism

The election process is overwhelmingly regarded as the first sine qua non of democracy. Nevertheless, the very ubiquitousness of elections – from Cuba to Singapore; from Iran to the United States - creates doubts about their value for defining the political regime. Cynicism about elections based on the view that they merely legitimise the existing order (one of their benefits, according to some political scientists) is common among ordinary people. Here and there, participation in elections falls to surprisingly low levels.

Liberal democrats assess the democratic credentials of elections on the basis of issues such as the way in which candidates are nominated and the extent to which they are permitted to present their cases without risk of physical or legal obstruction, within a context of legal freedom of expression. The left analyses private campaign funding, control of the media and more broadly the financial and ideological influence of national and international economic forces.

Within the liberal democratic context, those who believe elections are not functioning efficiently as an opportunity for the people to choose or reject certain policies tend to seek the cause in the political party system, the way in which individual political parties are organised or the relationship between government and opposition. They may deplore the dominance of politics by individuals or by bureaucracies, and call for more direct democracy, or for more involvement in decision-making for non-government organisations. Nobody proposes abandoning elections, but from time to time reforms of electoral systems are proposed.

Choice of systems

While elections are held almost everywhere, the rules governing the definition of constituencies, the content of ballot papers and the way in which raw votes are converted into winners and losers vary widely. For example, the single-member constituency, first-past-the-post system of the United Kingdom, unmitigated even by French-style run-offs between leading candidates, is in striking contrast to the various forms of proportion representation (PR) applied in most continental European countries.

The UK system favours large and/or regionally-concentrated parties at the expense of smaller parties support for which is geographically even. It leads many to vote for their second-choice candidate for fear of wasting their votes. It almost always produces a “strong” or “stable” single-party government, which is in line with, and prolongs, a confrontational party system. Systems like the Dutch, where the whole of Parliament is elected in proportion to the percentage of votes cast nationally for each party, are in line with, and prolong, a tradition of accommodative politics. Each vote is counted equally and there no type of party is systematically discriminated against. Arguably, however, the swing of votes and the changes in the make-up of the governing coalition may not always parallel one another, and the voter may be denied the chance to hold an unpopular prime minister and ministers to account.

PR systems based on party lists tend to concentrate power in the national party organisations which determine candidate lists, and to weaken the link between voters and their individual representatives. By way of fine-tuning, some systems, including the Dutch and German, enable voters to vote for an individual candidate or candidates as well as a party list. The seats in Parliament are divided among the parties according to the votes cast for the party lists. But the candidates who take up the seats allotted to a given party are determined at least in part by local-level voter preferences. In the light of its own experiences, Japan has evolved a system where some members of each house of Parliament are elected by PR in large constituencies and others by first-past-the-post in single-member constituencies.

How Turkey does it

Not all PR systems are equally fair. Debates about how exactly to translate the various percentage of votes cast into percentages of seats available (D’Hondt system, Niemeyer system etc.) into seats in the legislature are largely of academic interest, but can become critical when PR is conducted within small constituencies, and when there is an election barrier or threshold – a minimum percentage of the vote which must be won before a party or candidate even enters the calculations. Parties securing less that 5% of the national vote cast for party lists in Germany are not normally able to claim a share of seats in the Bundestag.

Turkey has altered and debated its election system more than most countries, generating its own jargon of “national remainders”, “contingent candidates” (a corollary of the largely defunct practice of determining candidates through primary elections), “constituency barrages” and “Turkey deputies”. Currently, each constituency (normally a province) elects between two and 23 members of Parliament. Voters cast a single vote, usually for a party list. As for fine-tuning, Turkey experimented with “preference voting” – voting for candidates as well as party lists – in 1991, but abandoned the scheme in 1995, since it benefited rich candidates and led to indiscipline within parties. Voters may, however, vote for a single independent candidate instead of a party list, and since independents are not subject to thresholds, several enter Parliament at each election.

Most controversially, parties which do not achieve a high 10% of the national vote are disregarded. Thus with a view to ensuring strong government and minimising the assumedly disruptive impact of small parties, Turkey has transformed its PR system into an electoral mechanism no more equitable than the UK system. A single-party UK government was elected earlier this year on 35% of the national vote. The single-party Turkish government was elected in 2002 – with about 65% of the parliamentary seats - on 34%.

Chance to change?

Despite the goal of strong government , coalition governments ruled continuously between 1991 and 2002, reflecting the fragmentation of the party system. The same outcome was avoided in 2002 only because as many as five parties received between 5% and 10% of the vote. In all, 46% of votes cast went to parties disqualified by the “10% rule”. Late last year, Speaker of Parliament Bülent Arınç made clear that he regarded the unrepresentative nature of the assembly as a factor detrimental to its popular reputation. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also hinted at a possible change in the Elections Law.

In the past, ruling parties could bend the election rules at the last minute to suit their own interests. In 2001, however, a clause was inserted in Article 67 of the Constitution under which changes in the Elections Law do not apply to elections held within one year. If the election due in November 2007 is to be held under an altered regime, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) needs to make up its mind within the upcoming legislative year.

The EU would like to see electoral reform. But EU influence may be limited by tense Turkey-EU relations, by the UK example and by perceptions that Brussels is motivated by the hope of seeing today’s most unwanted small party, the Kurdish nationalists, take seats in Parliament. What Arınç had in mind was reducing the national threshold to 7% or 8%, whereas Kurdish nationalist DEHAP came sixth with 6% in 2002.

Token solution?

Meanwhile, the AKP fully expects to be the most popular party across the country again at the next election and must logically oppose a fairer system which could cost it its overall majority in Parliament. If the AKP becomes serious about improving parliamentary representation and/or ensuring Kurdish nationalist representation, the party leadership will search for a way to enable just a token handful of MPs from small parties to enter Parliament. Alongside the present system, for instance, a limited number of extra seats could be divided among the various competing parties in proportion to the number of votes cast nationally, without regard to the threshold (or subject to a much lower threshold). As a potential first step, one of the many draft constitutional amendments mooted by AKP deputies would increase the number of members of Parliament, currently 550.

Any change in the Elections Law could be challenged in the Constitutional Court on the grounds that it does not, as foreseen in the same article of the Constitution since 1995, “reconcile the principles of fair representation and stable administration”. It is unclear what electoral rules will be in force, but it is for sure that the elections will take place.

(DIPLOMAT  -  September 2005  -  Ankara)