On behalf of the people. Ukraine requires electoral system reform

A proportional electoral system with open party lists would increase political inclusion and help to  solve another major problem of Ukrainian politics – lack of parties based on ideas.

A proportional representation system is more inclusive than the single-mandate district system, i.e. it leaves fewer voters behind. At the same time, open party lists would prevent trading of spots in the voting ballot. They would create incentives for parties to involve those who already have popular support on the local level. Political parties centered on ideas rather than personalities can emerge as a result. Hence, we believe that the proportional system with open lists should be adopted in Ukraine.

Theoretical considerations

The central element of a representative democracy is a parliament. It determines legislation, i.e. the ‘rules of the game’ which the society must adhere to.

In many countries the parliament also appoints an executive branch (the government). Thus, parliamentary elections essentially determine the course of the country for the next few years, and their outcome affects all the citizens – regardless of their voting or non-voting. At the same time, electoral outcomes are influenced not only by beliefs and preferences of people but also by the voting system design [1]. A prominent example is the last US elections where Clinton received almost 3 million more popular votes and yet lost to Trump.

Obviously, there is no ideal electoral system – each one has its benefits and drawbacks. The most often cited electoral system tradeoff is between representativeness and accountability of the government. The proportional representation system (when voters cast their votes for a party presumably supporting its ideology or program) is more representative, while the single-member-district (SMD) system (when voters of a certain region select one candidate from a list) provides more accountability [2]. Indeed, under the SMD (also called majoritarian) system voters can immediately observe which legislation ‘their’ MP did or did not support. At the same time, this MP may have been elected by the minority of voters in a district [3].

From Theory to the Real World

In practice one rarely observes purely representative or purely majoritarian systems. Representative systems usually have thresholds that a party must exceed to get any seats at all – thus leaving  minor parties behind. Votes cast for those parties can be considered ‘lost’. This lowers representativeness but at the same time makes it easier for the parliament to form a coalition, to appoint the government and to pass legislation.

There are SMD systems in which candidates clearly associate themselves with one of the political parties (e.g. Great Britain). Some countries have mixed electoral systems. For example, the recently adopted electoral law in Italy provides ⅓ of seats to MPs elected via single-mandate districts and the rest of the seats are filled by the proportional representation voting.

A few dozen of countries in the world have electoral systems with open party lists (i.e. when voters not only determine the preferred party but also can influence the order in which candidates are listed by a party and thus the probability of a particular candidate to be elected). These systems vary in their openness, i.e. they have different rules determining how candidates can move up the party list. Some studies [4] suggest that an open list system leads to higher voter satisfaction stemming from a higher sense of fairness.

One important reservation should be made here. Theoretical models are based on two assumptions. The first one is that political parties are ‘classic’ parties, i.e.that  they are based on some set of ideas. Thus representativeness implies that a party speaks on behalf of a certain number of citizens who share its ideas and would like to see these ideas on the national political agenda. Accountability is based on the assumption that voters really care about the laws which an MP elected from their district supported and bother to review her legislative activity. At the same time such accountability may not necessarily be a good thing – it creates incentives for MPs to support populistic draft laws rather than necessary but painful reforms.

Unfortunately, in Ukraine these assumptions do not hold.  In our country, unlike in developed democracies, there are very few ‘genuine parties’ (i.e. those based on ideas for a country development). Ukrainian parties are rather political projects run by people willing to use their parliamentary seats for lobbying [5]. Many parties are just empty “licences” which can be purchased by whoever has interest in this. Thus, as of January 1st 2019, Ukraine had 352 registered parties, although only 3.5% of Ukrainians (or about 1.2 million people aged 18+) were members of some political party. Of 29 parties which participated in the last elections in November 2014, only 6 made it into the parliament.

Besides, we have doubts that many Ukrainian voters closely follow their elected MPs [6] – otherwise the practice of ‘bribing voters’ before the elections would not be so successful.

Drawbacks of Ukraine’s current electoral system

Since 2010 Ukraine has a mixed electoral system where half of the 450-strong Parliament is elected by proportional system with “closed” party lists and 5% entrance threshold and another half is elected in SMDs (see Box 1 for historical perspective).

We believe that at the current stage of Ukraine’s democratic development, such system poorly fits our country needs due to important drawbacks of both proportional and SMD components.

While enabling for good representation of voters, the proportional component with closed party lists  paves the wave for political trading. Since Ukrainian parties are often consolidated not around values but around their leaders, proportional system with  ‘closed’ party lists enables party leaders to trade spots on the lists and hence seats in the parliament. MPs who ‘bought their ticket’ to the parliament tend to focus on their own agendas (trying to ‘recover’ their contributions) rather than develop policies foreseen by a party program. Often these MPs don’t vote [7] along with their party or leave the faction altogether. During 2000s party-switching has become so common  that even a special term (literally translated as ‘carcasses’) to define party-switchers emerged in the Ukrainian politics. And although today formal party-switching is problematic since a switcher can lose the mandate, trading or exchange of votes is still in place.

However, even more drawbacks are associated with the SMD component. Candidates in single-mandate districts quite often focus not on systemic problems of their region or the country but try to ‘bribe’ voters either by making minor amenities such as park benches or children playgrounds, by providing food or money to voters just before the elections or by channeling state subsidies to their districts and snipping ribbons on the objects constructed for the central budget funds. Thus, a better funded candidate or someone with better connections in the central government is more likely to win. Then she may use the position in the parliament to ‘recover’ money spent on elections. Sometimes it is unclear which parliamentary faction this candidate will join when elected.

Also, powerful candidates from single-mandate districts may have administrative power over local election committee members who often are public employees (teachers, librarians, etc.), which increases the probability of violations during elections in favour of such candidates.

Finally, the key argument used to establish an SMD component in the first place no longer holds. Initially, a single-district component was included into the electoral system in order to ‘give voice to regions’. The analogy was the Senate in the US. Indeed, people used to complain to ‘their’ MPs about local issues, and those MPs used to lobby higher budget spending for respective districts. However, with the decentralization reform progressing since early 2014, regions are becoming much less dependent on the central government, and local governments have obtained both more resources and powers to take care of local issues (schools, roads etc). This allows the parliament to concentrate on the national issues. It also sets the scene for growth of ‘grassroot’ leaders from local into national politics.

To sum up, current system encourages trading of seats in the Parliament and makes it  very difficult to get into politics without substantial investment, close connections to incumbents or sponsorship. Clearly MPs who somehow paid their way into the parliament would represent not their voters but rather those people who provided them with resources to cover the ‘entry fee’.

Which system would fit Ukraine better?

What would be the desirable features of an electoral system besides representativeness, accountability and government efficiency discussed above? Simplicity for voters is also good. However in today’s Ukraine perhaps the most important is creating incentives for formation of ideas-based as opposed to personality-based parties. We argue that a completely proportional system with open party lists fits this goal best. In addition, it preserves the benefits of a current mixed system and enables to avoid its major drawbacks.

First, proportional system with open party list increases representativeness. Using 2014 elections as an example, we demonstrate in Box 2 that the number of “lost” votes may have reduced to 27% under fully proportional system, from actual 43%. At the same time, when a voter gets to choose not only the party but also a specific representative of this party, parties have incentives to promote popular candidates (those who served their communities well either within local government or in the non-governmental sector) rather than candidates who can pay to the party leader either with their loyalty or with cash.

Second, this system preserves the MPs accountability imminent in the SMD system. Voters would still have an opportunity to track legislative and other activity of an MP elected from their region. However, knowing in advance the party which this candidate belongs to, voters can form expectations about the agenda which this person would pursue if elected. This would reduce incentives for MPs to vote for populistic laws in order to get reelected.

Finally, open list system would create incentives for parties to recruit local politicians or civil activists popular in specific regions. In their turn, these people would have incentives to promote not only themselves but also their parties. This synergy will lower the ‘entrance fee’ from local to the national politics and create competition within parties. Intra-party competition requires a stronger foundation for a party which is ideology rather than a leader’s personality since in the presence of the intra-party competition party leader may eventually be replaced. It will also raise the institutional quality and sustainability of parties.

Moreover, if a person is clearly associated with some party and publicly supports its ideas, party-switching would damage her reputation and reduce incentives of other parties to recruit this person. Thus we expect reduced party-switching under the proposed electoral system.

In fact, Ukraine has already experimented with a modification of an open list system. In elections to local (city, rayon, oblast) councils political parties must nominate no more than one candidate per each voting district. This resembles the British system (only that self-nomination is not allowed) which can be considered an extreme case of an open list proportional system – with only one candidate on a party list in each region.

In the last local elections there were cases when parties successfully cooperated with local activists to get the representation in local councils. As an illustration, consider elections in Irpin, a town near Kyiv. On the last elections to the municipal council in 2015 Svoboda party attracted local activists respected in the community and managed to get 4 of 36 seats (11%) in the town council whereas its main electoral base is in the West of Ukraine, and in 2014 parliamentary elections it received 6.25% of votes in electoral district #95 to which Irpin belongs. Thus, the party improved its image in the region while the activists received organizational support of the party in their local activities. This is exactly the kind of synergy one would expect from the open list electoral system.

Analysis of ‘lost’ votes in 2014 parliamentary elections

Recent changes of networks in the society provide an additional argument in favor of the completely proportional system. Some twenty years ago, with low Internet penetration, intraregional ties where extremely powerful and important. Today, many people have much stronger interregional connections. In the pre-Internet era people would mostly communicate with friends living next door, while now they often spend more time in social networks talking to people who physically are hundreds kilometers away. As a result, today many people have more in common with their social network community than with their neighbours. These people would rather have a deputy in the parliament representing their facebook community (which is possible under a representative election system) than somebody who promises to defend the interests of their region before the central government.

As a hypothetical example, if 10% of voters are highly dispersed geographically (say, 0.4% of them live in each of the 25 regions of Ukraine) but share some common values, a political party representing these values would get 10% of parliamentary seats under the proportional system and zero under the SMD system.

Concluding remarks

Existing open list proportional systems have different designs. They differ in the number of candidates a voter can select from a party list, the share of votes a candidate has to get in order to move up the list, and other parameters. The electoral system design currently passed in the first reading (Box 3) is quite simple. And although it differs from the system suggested by Dr. Myerson in his recent interview, we believe it can create incentives for political parties to recruit local leaders – those mayors, hromada, raion or oblast heads or civic activists who have served their communities well. This recruiting would strengthen between-party competition. And presence of ‘grassroot’ politicians willing to advance their careers among party members would boost within-party competition. This would raise overall quality of political parties in Ukraine.

A proportional representation electoral system with open party lists would also raise political inclusion – fewer votes would be lost, while the interests of minorities would be better represented in the parliament.

Design of the electoral system passed in the first reading

P.S. Is the adoption of the new electoral system likely?

Usually, changes in the electoral system are driven by the desire of incumbents to retain their political power rather than to improve voters’ representation. A rational MP would vote for an electoral system which at least does not worsen her chances to get into the next parliament. In the current parliament, 51% of MPs elected via SMDs were nominated by some party. We expect that they would like to repeat this experience and run for elections again – either with the same party or with a different one. Many of self-nominated deputies probably can be recruited by some party which would also provide them with organizational support during the campaign. Thus, somewhat counterintuitively, we expect the majority of SMD members of parliament to support the reform since they are likely to win from it. Some MPs were recruited into party lists in 2014 from the pool of well-known civil activists. Many of them genuinely support the proposed reform. They are also likely to win from it if ‘their’ parties include them into their regional lists. Unambiguous losers in case of the proposed electoral system reform are those who were included into party lists either for monetary contributions or for their loyalty to  party leaders. The latter would probably not favor the change either. Overall, the chances of the reform adoption are rather low but non-zero.

Authors

• Oleksandra Betliy
• Olena Bilan
• Volodymyr Bilotkach
• Tymofii Brik
• Kateryna Dronova
• Yuriy Gorodnichenko
• Veronika Movchan
• Zoya Mylovanova
• Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy
• Oleg Nivievskyi
• Olena Nizalova
• Denys Nizalov
• Nataliia Shapoval
• Ilona Sologoub
• Oleksandr Talavera
• Dmytro Yablonovskyi
• Oleksandr Zholud

Notes