Iraq and Proportional Representation

Iraq's first comprehensive national election was a year ago, on January 30. Not surprisngly, the Shia majority won the lion's share in the new 275-seat national assembly.

However, Shia opinion is not a monolith; there is disagreement between those Shia who favor a religious government and those who prefer a secular approach, and the new assembly has representatives of both, divided by party affiliation. In addition, because the Iraqis adopted the U.N.'s suggestion that the legislature be constituted according to the rules of proportional representation rather than the sort of winner-take-all system we use in this country, the Shia constitute a majority in the national assembly, but do not have a monopoly. Sunni, Kurdish, secularist, and other parties are represented proportional to the numbers of votes they collected in the general election.

Writing on the Washington Posts's editorial page in July of 2004, political science Professor Andrew Reyonolds of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill answered charges by U.N. critics Michael Rubin (in the Washington Post) and Richard Perle (speaking at the American Enterprise Institute) that proportional representation was the wrong system for Iraq. Both claimed that compromising the dominance of the Shia majority will lead to more instability in the country.

Reynolds responded, "(P)proportional representation will avoid the anomalies that are prevalent when single-member districts or some variant thereof are used in emerging democracies. In 1998 the Lesotho Congress for Democracy won all but one seat in parliament with 60 percent of the vote; rioting and state collapse ensued. In the 2000 Mongolian elections, the ruling party took 95 percent of the seats with 58 percent of the vote. In Iraq such a system would most likely give a significant "seat bonus" to Shiite parties, to the detriment of Sunni-based groups and embryonic multiethnic movements."

Reynolds's point is that proportional representation may enable Iraq to avoid the continued violence that would certainly result if the country's minorities -- the Sunni and others -- were frozen out of the new legislative assembly.

What he didn't say, but what Americans need to reflect on, is that proportional representation would be a better system for the United States than the winner-take-all system we use now, which assures that the two biggest parties are able to maintain their lock on Congressional seats and campaign funding, without any serious competition.

If we had proportionl representation here, this year's elections for the House of Representatives would produce a very different kind of Congress than the one we've grown used to seeing. If the Vegetarian Party won one percent of the vote nationwide, they'd get four representatives in the House. If the Gay Party won two percent, they'd get eight; if the Greens won seven percent, then the House would seat the top 28 or 29 Green Party candidates from that party's national ticket.

Proportional representation is not going to solve all of Iraq's problems. It may or may not have a beneficial effect on the chaos and violence there. But it would certainly help the United States to become a more democratic country if it were instituted here. A wider spectrum of interests would be represented, and the strangle hold of the Republican and Democratic parties, with their ties to big money and big business, would be considerably loosened.

That's probably why we're not likely to see it here in the conceivable future, and why war-torn Iraq, with all its disasters, has ironically ended up with a more effective democracy than the country that forced it to adopt democracy.