Electoral Systems:
Beyond Proportionality

The most careful work on the South African electoral future has been done by a non—South African, Arend Lijphart.^[12] Lijphart has advanced a full-blown consociational plan for South Africa, which I have commented on in Chapter 4. Here I want to focus on the electoral system he recommends, because it is assuredly the best-thought-through elec-

[12] Arend Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Institute of International Studies, 1985).

toral scheme for South Africa and because his plan has had considerable attraction for South Africans in quest of answers to their problems. Above all, it is addressed to the problems that will likely haunt the South African future; the plan does not wish those problems away. As I shall show, however, the comparative evidence is heavily against it.

Lijphart argues for proportional representation as an integral part of a consociational constitution, according the segments of a divided society a proportional say in the running of that society. In Power-Sharing in South Africa , the principal justification he provides for proportional representation on specifically electoral grounds is that it is fairer than first-past-the-post.^[13] Whereas plurality systems typically exaggerate the number of seats won by the largest contenders, artificially diminishing minority representation, PR can be designed so that the number of seats reflects faithfully the number of votes each party has obtained. This is true as far as it goes, but it seems a curious rationale, if that is all there is to it, for Lijphart's plan is also to give minorities—even "relatively small groups"—an "absolute veto on the fundamental issues, such as cultural autonomy, and a suspensive veto on non-fundamental questions."^[14] Moreover, he wants chairs of the executive to rotate, that is, a rotating prime ministership.^[15] In the face of these arrangements, small disparities in representation would seem less important than they might otherwise be.

But Lijphart has a further reason for advocating PR: it allows the constituent elements of a plural society to form into political parties. "The beauty of PR is not just that it yields proportional results and permits minority representation—two important advantages from a consociational perspective—but also that it permits the segments to define themselves ."^[16] This is an important argument in South Africa, where the government has decided what the categories of group membership are and who belongs to each, but it should not obscure the fact that first-past-the-post and most other electoral systems also permit self-identification and self-organization. PR is not superior on these grounds.

In a later paper, Lijphart expands upon his justification for PR and argues for a specific variant: party-list-system PR, which he juxtaposes to the single transferable vote version of PR.^[17] There he prefers PR be-

[13] Ibid., p. 8.

[14] Ibid., p. 81.

[15] Ibid., p. 80.

[16] Ibid., pp. 68–69 (emphasis in the original).

[17] Arend Lijphart, "Choosing an Electoral System for Democratic Elections in SouthAfrica: An Evaluation of the Principal Options," Institute for the Study of Public Policy, University of Cape Town, Critical Choices for South Africa series (September 1987). As indicated above, I shall say more about these varieties of PR later in this chapter.

cause of its tendency to encourage many parties, so that each group can have its own party if it wishes. List-system PR is better than the single transferable vote, because it generally provides closer proportionality of seats to votes and obviates the need for unduly large constituencies to avoid ethnic gerrymandering. All of this is generally true,^[18] but what does it mean for a severely divided society like South Africa?

On this point, Lijphart is clear. He assumes that, with a receptive electoral system, there will be a plurality of parties in South Africa and that they will need to form a coalition in order to govern,^[19] hopefully, in his view, a "grand" coalition representing all the groups.^[20] This is made clear in his book on South Africa. Commenting on Zimbabwe, he says: " . . . when one ethnic group comprises a majority of the population, PR can obviously not prevent this majority from gaining a majority of seats."^[21] So the assumption is that Black voters in South Africa will not be cohesive enough to form a Zimbabwe-like majority and a coalition will be necessary, once each party has gathered the support of its own group at the polls.

Even under PR, I am not certain that this would be the outcome in South Africa after the first universal suffrage elections. Given the history of White domination and the likely magnitude of the immediate post-election White threat, it is possible that Blacks, even if somewhat divided, might nonetheless line up behind a party sufficiently to give that party more than half the seats so it could form a government alone. This is what Robert Mugabe and the Shona managed in Zimbabwe, despite opposition from the disproportionately represented Whites and from Joshua Nkomo and the Ndebele. For reasons I shall explain in Chapter 7, a plurality rather than a majority of votes seems likely to me as well, but this is not a foregone conclusion.

More to the present point, there is already in existence an example of list-system PR imposed to induce fragmentation of a majority into its

[18] But see Michael Gallagher, "The Political Consequences of the Electoral System in the Republic of Ireland," Electoral Studies 5, no. 3 (December 1986): 253–75, at 258.

[19] "Here we have another reason to prefer proportional representation to plurality for segmented societies: proportional representation encourages multi-partyism which in turn encourages coalition government." Lijphart, "Choosing an Electoral System for Democratic Elections in South Africa," p. 5.

[20] See Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 25–31.

[21] Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa , p. 20n.

component groups so as to break its electoral hold and facilitate coalitions. The example comes from the Guyana elections of 1964, shortly before independence. The British imposed list-system PR in the hope, among others, that the majority East Indians would divide into Hindus and Muslims. British expectations were utterly disappointed. Confronted with a strong challenge from other groups, Hindus and Muslims stayed together in the party with which they had previously aligned, and the parties induced to proliferate because of PR all made such a poor showing that together they obtained 1 percent of the vote and no seats. List-system PR does assure a good measure of proportionality, but it does not guarantee party proliferation or the fragmentation of majority groups.^[22]

But let us pass this point and suppose Lijphart is right that list-system PR will produce party proliferation in South Africa so that no party has a majority of seats. What motivates the formation of the coalition? Will it produce the democratic stability postulated by the consociational model? Will the need for the coalition induce the compromise Lijphart envisions as a result of the need to coalesce?

We already have clear, discouraging answers to these questions. Political parties in newly independent countries often had to form coalitions after elections, even though the elections were frequently conducted under first-past-the-post. The reasons lie in ethnic pluralism, which produced several ethnically based parties and a division of seats that left no party with a majority. The elections in Nigeria in 1959, in Uganda in 1962, in Benin (then Dahomey) several times between 1957 and 1965, and in the Indian Punjab in 1967 and 1969 all involved three main parties, and all resulted in the need to form coalitions. I have examined these elections in detail elsewhere.^[23] I have called the resulting coalitions "coalitions of convenience," because they were arranged merely to aggregate the number of parliamentary seats to more than 50 percent, in order to form a government—and for no other purpose, such as interethnic compromise. No compromise took place in any of these cases.^[24] The coalitions were short-lived, they fell apart over a divisive

[22] I have discussed the Guyanese election of 1964 in Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 643–46. For a fuller treatment of electoral engineering in conflict-prone societies, see ibid., pp. 628–51.

[23] Ibid., pp. 369–78. See also the discussion of the dissolution of the Guyanese coalition that had been fostered by list-system PR. Ibid., p. 318.

[24] These were not coalitions of the moderate middle. Proximity of policy positionshad, if anything, a negative role in their formation. Parties that had some ethnic policy positions in common and that had competed with each other for some part of the same voting clientele tended not to be part of these coalitions. After all, it would be difficult to justify to party activists the need to form a coalition today with yesterday's electoral competitors. The result is that lack of electoral overlap was more likely to induce formation of a coalition. As a consequence, coalition partners had opposite views on the most serious ethnic issues that divided the society. Accordingly, there was no prospect for compromise but plenty of opportunity for issues to split the coalitions apart.

ethnic issue, and they left ethnic conflict worse than it was when they took office. Unless there is an incentive to compromise over ethnic issues, the mere need to form a coalition will not produce compromise. The incentive to compromise, and not merely the incentive to coalesce, is the key to accommodation.

As a matter of fact, the need to pool seats will not alone produce interethnic compromise in a severely divided society, even under conditions much more favorable to compromise. Northern Ireland has been down this road and shown where it leads. The election to which I refer took place in March 1973, after the British parliament provided for a return of self-government to Northern Ireland. It is worth recounting in some detail.^[25]

It is well known that Northern Ireland contains a Protestant majority fearful of the Catholic minority. Both of these groups were represented by more than one party, so that the party proliferation envisioned by Lijphart for South Africa was already present in Northern Ireland by 1973. More than that, Northern Ireland had something there is no guarantee South Africa will have—a small but significant party of the middle, drawing votes from both major groups, polling just under 10 percent of the total vote, and expressing an aspiration for accommodation. This party was called the Alliance.

The 1973 elections were scheduled by the British parliament at a time when Britain was actively seeking compromise and even making mutual concessions on Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic. More important, the British specified that no post-election government would be permitted to take office unless it were committed to "power sharing," defined, not merely as an aspiration to interethnic accommodation, but in terms of the actual participation in government of Catholic-based parties as well as Protestant-based parties. To complete the list of favorable conditions, the election was held under the single transferable vote system of proportional representation. Like other PR systems, this

[25] The account here is based on Richard Rose, Northern Ireland: Time of Choice (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1976).

was thought conducive to party proliferation, so that coalition government would be necessary.^[26]

The STV system, however, has one other advantage, not possessed by list-system PR. Voters cast their ballots for candidates, not parties, in order of preference. In a multimember constituency with four seats but ten candidates, a voter might cast up to ten preference votes. This at least opens up the possibility that some of a given voter's votes might be cast for candidates across the ethnic divide. By contrast, list-system PR requires that votes be cast for a single party list. Where parties are ethnically based, there is no way to transfer votes across ethnic lines. A voter is locked wholly within his ethnic party.^[27]

Under the Northern Ireland system, a quota of votes is computed by dividing the number of seats plus one into the total number of votes cast and adding one to the quotient. Any candidate who attains more than this quota is deemed elected. It should be noted that the quota for election may be far below a majority of votes cast, depending on how many seats are at stake. If there are four seats in a constituency, a candidate could win with about a fourth of the vote. That is why STV is so different from a winner-take-all system and so conducive to proportionality. Once a candidate receives a quota and is elected, his "surplus vote"—that is, his vote above the quota—is "transferred in proportion to its size to the candidates who stand next in preference among his supporters. Once this is done, the candidate with the lowest total of votes is eliminated, and his votes are transferred to those ranking next in the preference of his supporters."^[28] Second and third preferences are therefore likely to count. Protestant voters may allocate them to Protestant candidates or to Catholic candidates, as they see fit, and vice versa.

In this respect, STV permits a measure of interethnic vote pooling

[26] Ibid., pp. 77–78.

[27] This statement is not always literally true, but it is true as a practical matter. Under the Swiss version of list-system PR, a voter may make choices across party lists. In a severely divided society, however, where parties are ethnically based, this option is entirely hypothetical. The lists of different parties compete in every way, so that a vote for Party A is a vote against Party B. Voters of ethnic group B will not cast such ballots, and the two parties will not be able to reach an agreement for such vote transfers. As I shall explain below, the situation is different where voting is preferential (that is, under STV or AV), for then voters are casting ballots for second and subsequent choices, to be counted only if their first choice is eliminated (or, under STV, if their first choice does not need their vote to make his quota). It is entirely possible for parties of different groups to agree to exchange such lower-order preferential ballots, and voters can be induced to cast them.

[28] Rose, Northern Ireland: Time of Choice , pp. 76–77.

that list-system PR completely precludes. Voters of one group could provide the margin of victory for a candidate of another group, who might then be responsive to their concerns. If vote pooling of this kind occurred as a result of agreements between parties, the basis would be laid for interethnic policy compromise.

Under STV, moderate Catholic parties or candidates might have made interethnic vote-pooling agreements for the second and third preferences of supporters of moderate Protestant parties or candidates; and, of course, such agreements would be reciprocal. Presumably, such agreements could only be consummated between interethnic moderates, and therefore such agreements should also foster moderation. If the choice for a divided society is between list-system PR and the single transferable vote, STV is a far better choice than list-system PR.

Notwithstanding these conditions—which were certainly more favorable to accommodation than those envisioned by Lijphart for South Africa's first universal suffrage election—the results were a defeat for accommodation. In the first place, a new Protestant party sprung up to oppose power sharing; it and other Protestant parties that were opposed to an interethnic coalition together secured 35 percent of the vote, compared to 27 percent for the Protestant party committed to power sharing.^[29] When the power-sharing cabinet was inaugurated, even the Protestant party committed to power sharing, fearful of erosion of its support, rejected the arrangement, dooming it to a short life.

A United Kingdom election, coincidentally held the next month, confirmed the erosion. In Northern Irish constituencies for the British parliament, Protestant parties opposed to power sharing gained an outright majority of votes and seats. A survey of Protestant opinion showed only 28 percent strongly in favor of power sharing. Under Protestant protest, the Northern Ireland government fell.^[30] The accommodating Protestant party was vulnerable to accusations of sellout by the other Protestant parties on its flank.^[31] By 1975, the accommodating party was down to 7.7 percent of the vote.^[32]

Significant vote pooling across ethnic lines did not take place, either in 1973 or in subsequent PR elections.^[33] The reason, explained by Richard Rose, is straightforward: "The electoral system offered parties no

[29] Ibid., pp. 29–30.

[30] Ibid., pp. 30–31.

[31] Ibid., p. 82.

[32] Ibid., p. 97.

[33] Ibid., pp. 78, 93.

incentive to seek votes across the religious divide, because the chances of winning an extra seat by adding a few votes from the other community were much less than the chances of losing votes by appearing 'soft' on the issues that were of central concern within the party's home community."^[34] No vote-pooling agreements were made in advance by the parties because of the same fear of a negative net result.^[35] Without such agreements, the parties were never forced to confront and compromise their differences. Even with the possibility of vote pooling and a certain amount of good will at the top, plus the participation of the small Alliance party, committed to accommodation, the coalition ended up as a coalition of convenience, just like the Nigerian, Ugandan, Beninese, and Punjabi coalitions described above.

None of this is an indictment of vote-pooling incentives as a strategy of fostering accommodation. On the contrary, that is the way to do it. The Northern Ireland incentives, however, were insufficient because they permitted parties to take a share of seats and even enter government, whether or not they had pooled votes. Since a fraction of the total vote was enough to reach a candidate's quota, the incentives were weak. As we shall see, there are stronger incentives to vote pooling that are possible and that promise better results.

The Northern Ireland elections are a refutation of the notion that PR can simply deliver coalitions and compromise in severely divided societies. If there are examples of this phenomenon from severely divided societies, they have yet to emerge. As the African and Asian examples show, coalition alone (based on pooling seats alone) is no assurance of compromise. As the Northern Ireland case shows, even weak vote-pooling incentives in a favorable milieu may not be enough to induce accommodation.

Lijphart, who is very clearheaded about these matters, does not say that coalition formation alone is enough. He wants coalitions in tandem with other consociational arrangements.^[36] In 1986, the KwaZulu Natal Indaba, a standing conference of citizens of the two territories, took his advice and proposed a consociational scheme to govern the two regions if they should merge into a single administration.^[37] The proposals em-

[34] Ibid., p. 78.

[35] Ibid., p. 93.

[36] "Choosing an Electoral System for Democratic Elections in South Africa," pp. 3–4.

[37] KwaZulu Natal Indaba, Constitutional Proposals Agreed To on 28 November 1986 (Durban: n.p., n.d.; pamphlet).

body mutual vetoes, mandatory group representation in the cabinet, consensus decision making in the executive, cultural councils, and a bicameral legislature. The upper chamber is to be elected largely on the basis of racially reserved seats, with overrepresentation of the minorities. Both chambers are to be elected by list-system PR, the lower chamber by constituency lists and the upper chamber by treating the entire merged province as a single constituency.

This is, of course, a bold attempt to meet the problems of ethnic diversity and to foster conciliation. It is almost unkind to criticize such a plan. Nevertheless, many components of the proposals boil down to guarantees of group rights and would be vulnerable to the objections I have already stated with regard to such schemes. The electoral system would do nothing to foster vote pooling and accommodative coalitions; it would certainly not provide electoral disincentives for the strongest party or parties to dismantle the minority protections. Even if one were to favor a group rights approach, it would be necessary to design an electoral system that gives politicians electoral reasons to be supportive of their entrenchment.

Nothing I have said, of course, vitiates the importance of coalitions. Coalitions should be the centerpiece of accommodative arrangements. But not any coalition will do, only a coalition likely to produce compromise rather than perpetuate conflict. Absent incentives, politicians will not engage in intergroup compromise in a severely divided society. List-system PR may or may not produce enough party proliferation to require a coalition in South African conditions. Even if it does, list-system PR contains no incentives to vote pooling or compromise and will produce only coalitions of convenience that will dissolve. If politicians can, by inducing aisle-crossings or other methods, elbow coalition partners out of the coalition and govern alone, sharing the spoils with no other parties and having no longer to justify the coalition with ethnic opponents to their own supporters, politicians will prefer to govern alone.

Pooling seats, then, is not enough to provide the appropriate incentives. If, however, popular votes are actually pooled, compromise may follow, as I suggested in Chapter 4 with respect to Malaysia. Unfortunately, so far as I know, no one working on or in South Africa has emphasized the distinction between mere seat pooling and vote pooling. Vote pooling, which is the engine of compromise, has been left out of account altogether. Lijphart, for example, is opposed to presidential systems of government, because, he says, the president, being one per-

son, "is bound to represent one particular segment to the exclusion of other segments."^[38] Never does he pause to ask how a president is to be elected. Never does he note that the president of the Nigerian Second Republic, although a rather parochial Northern politician, was elected under a formula that provided him with an incentive he could not resist (if he wished to win election) to accommodate members of groups other than his own. As a candidate, he responded to the incentive to pool votes; later, as an officeholder, he responded to the desire to be re-elected on pooled votes.

The emphasis here is not on statesmanship alone, but on incentives. In that respect, there is a fundamental difference of approach from consociationalism. Politicians, consociational theorists suggest, are motivated by notions of the common good. "If these leaders were exclusively or mainly motivated by a desire to survive politically, it would be much more to their advantage to fan the flames of intersegmental antagonism than to engage in the risky enterprise of striking compromises with rival segmental leaders."^[39] Exactly so. Consociationalism and its electoral component come down to statesmanship, not electoral incentives. If the experience of severely divided societies shows anything at all, it is that statesmanship alone, statesmanship without tangible reasons, statesmanship without rewards, will not reduce conflict. Without incentives, statesmanship will be in short supply.

In such societies, it has been argued,^[40] there is a need to choose between majoritarian democracy and consociational democracy. I do not believe this to be an accurate statement of the choices. The need is merely to choose between two kinds of majoritarian democracy: a majoritarian democracy that will produce racially or ethnically defined majorities and minorities or a majoritarian democracy that will produce more fluid, shifting majorities that do not lock ascriptive minorities firmly out of power. That is why Lijphart is right to oppose first-past-the-post in single-member constituencies. The winner-take-all assumptions of such electoral systems generally (though not always) degenerate into ascriptive majority rule. But PR alone—PR without vote pooling across group lines—will not prevent that result.

[38] Power-Sharing in South Africa , p. 60. See also ibid., p. 80; Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies , pp. 178, 187, 210.

[39] Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa , p. 107.

[40] Ibid., p. 109.