South Korea held its National Assembly election on 10 April. The result was a strong opposition majority. Given that this was approximately a midterm election, held at about 42% of the president’s term, a strong result for the opposition should be expected from standard electoral cycle effects in presidential systems.
The president is elected for five years, and the last election was in March, 2022. The assembly is elected for four years. Thus the last presidential election was held about two years into the assembly term; it, too, produced an opposition win, with the minority in the assembly seeing its candidate win the presidency, Yoon Suk Yeol of what is now called the People Power Party. (Its main component was known as United Future in 2020.) The 2022 election was close, with Yoon winning 48.6% and the Democrats’ candidate, Lee Jae-myung, winning 47.8%. The Korean presidency is elected in one round, by plurality. Plurality election of the presidency combined with nonconurrent elections is a good recipe for frequent opposition majorities–even more when the assembly electoral system is majoritarian in effect even if not clearly in design. Since 2020, that system has been designed to be more proportional than had been the case for previous elections. But as we shall see, it has not worked that way in practice.
The electoral system, as best I understand it, is a combination of MMP and MMM.1 In addition to the single-seat districts, decided by plurality, there are two sets of list seats, totaling 47 seats. Of these, thirty are elected as compensatory seats (allocated from list votes after taking into account districts won by each party, as under MMP) and 17 are parallel (added on based on proportions of list votes without regard for district results). This was already the system adopted for the 2020 election. If this helpful Twitter thread by Raphael Rashid got it right, then the system seems indeed to be the same as in 2020. In prior elections, the system had a purely MMM design.
Where I could use some help is figuring out the detailed outcome by party and bloc. The table at the Wikipedia page for the election is less helpful than usual. Below is the main part of it as a screenshot. The part I am reproducing should include all the parties that won seats.2 There are many more parties in the original that won no representation.
Rashid’s thread indicates that the two main parties each formed a “satellite” party to exploit the compensatory provision. This sort of behavior by parties has occurred before under MMP3 and is a well known pitfall of the system, if the electoral law or election administrators do not take steps to counter it. A party can win its nominal-tier (single-seat district) seats as usual but not present a party list, while setting up a formally separate party that competes only for list seats. In doing so, its list wing (the satellite) would get its full proportional share of the compensatory list seats without having to deduct the nominal seats won by the main party, given that they are formally separate parties. This was done in 2020 in Korea as well, although as best I could tell it did not affect the majority won by the Democratic Party in that election.
Rashid indicates that for the 2024 election the Democratic Party created a Democratic Union as its satellite while the People Power Party (President Yoon’s party) created a People’s Future as its satellite.
Unfortunately, the Wiki table does not break these out. In fact, it does not even indicate anything called Democratic Union. We see that various partners within “Democratic Alliance”4 won list (“proportional”) and nominal (“constituency”) seats, or both, and that their total is 176 seats, of which 14 were list seats. The combined list votes of these parties is only 26.7% of the total, whereas 176 seats is 58.7% of the total 300. So this certainly has an MMM (parallel) feel to it. In fact, winning a large majority on barely a quarter of the votes is a rather extreme manifestation of disproportionality! (Assuming these numbers are correct; I note the table shows no nominal votes, even though voters get both a nominal and a list vote.)
Those 14 list seats for the various parties of the Democratic Alliance would be about 29.8% of the total 47 list seats. This is again quite consistent with how an allocation would work under a fully MMM system, in that the list seats–as distinct from the seats overall–are themselves roughly proportional to the list-vote share. And that is exactly what the satellite-party strategy does: it effectively converts MMP to MMM for a group of “parties” pursuing this strategy. Note that if all 47 list seats were allocated in a compensatory matter, and the Democratic Alliance were treated as a single party for purposes of calculating seats, it would have won zero list seats, given that its number of nominal seats (districts) won was already (far) above its proportional entitlement, at 162 (54%).
The Wiki table combines People Power and People Future. It shows 36.7% of list votes for this combine, with it winning 18 list seats. That is 38.3%, again almost proportional to the list votes, and these seats are added on to the 90 nominal seats won. Again, just like MMM.
So the satellite-party behavior clearly achieved its intended result, by circumventing the compensatory feature of the 283 seats supposedly allocated via MMP (253 constituencies plus 30 list seats). I wish the breakdown included how many of the two types of list seats each party won (i.e., separating the 17 parallel seats from the 30 supposedly compensatory), as well as breaking down the “real” and “satellite” parties within the blocs. Maybe someone can point me towards an analysis that did so. I tried to locate something of this sort and did not turn it up.
South Korean democracy would probably be better served by a more proportional system. Or by proper enforcement somehow of the intended compensatory nature of the current system (although just ten percent of seats supposedly allocated in that manner is pretty tepid proportionality). It would also perhaps be served better by concurrent elections and a presidential election method other than plurality. Various sources report some degree of backsliding in Korean democracy in recent years, and while possible institutional reforms I mention here would surely not be sufficient to halt such trends, they just might help.
Mixed-member proportional and mixed-member majoritarian, respectively. ↩︎
For some reason the table shows 46 list seats and 254 constituency seats, but this seems to be incorrect. In any case, this small discrepancy barely changes the analysis and puzzles I am writing about. I also wonder why the table indicates two “independents” having won via party lists. ↩︎
See past plantings on Lesotho, and in particular the interesting discussion in the comment thread on MMP manipulation in that country in 2007. It also happened in Albania, and is the main reason why that country became an ex-mixed member case. ↩︎
Likely just a translation variant, but even so, the grouping in the table does not clearly indicate the satellite phenomenon. ↩︎
On 6 April, voters in Slovakia chose Peter Pellegrini for President over Ivan Korčok in a runoff election. Pellegrini is the candidate of Voice-Social Democracy (Hlas-SD) and an ally of current premier Robert Fico. He will replace Zuzana Čaputová of Progressive Slovakia (PS) as president. Because the governing coalition that formed after the 30 September 2023 assembly election already includes the Hlas-SD, this election result will bring to end Slovakia’s current period of cohabitation. Recall that “cohabitation” in a semi-presidential system is defined as a president and premier from opposing parties, and the president’s party not being in the cabinet.
The current cohabitation is post-electoral, in that the fragmented result of the assembly election left more than one viable coalition option, including one in which the president’s PS would have taken part. But the government that formed consists of Direction-Social Democracy (Smer-SD, headed by Fico), Hlas-SD, and the Slovak National Party (SNS), with the PS in opposition. Thus the cabinet meeting the definition of cohabitation was formed through inter-party bargaining after the election and not as a direct product of it, as if a single party or pre-electoral coalition opposed to the president had won the election. Now a president has been elected of a party that is already in the cabinet, ending the cohabitation once Pellegrini is inaugurated in June. (Korčok ran as an independent but was backed by PS.)
Pellegrini supports Fico’s preference for not aiding Ukraine further in its war against Russian aggression and occupation.
Pellegrini1 won 53.1% of the vote in the runoff. In the first round, Korčok had led 45.5% to 37.0%, with a third candidate (an independent, Štefan Harabin) way back on 11.7%. and none of the remaining seven candidates even reaching 3%. So it was already effectively a two-candidate race even in the first round, and yet the initial runner-up, Pellegrini, came from behind, obviously getting a greater share of the votes of trailing candidates than Korčok received.2 Turnout also was higher in the runoff, going from 2.25 million to over 2.65 million, thus almost 400,000 more votes cast than in the first round (based on results posted at Wikipedia).
The presidency of Slovakia has few formal powers. It is a premier-presidential system and even among that subset of semi-presidential systems, has a rather weak presidency. The more important election for Slovak policy orientation was thus the assembly election last September.
I was curious about the Italian name. Thank you, Wikipedia: “His great-grandfather Leopoldo Pellegrini came to Austria-Hungary to participate in the construction of the railway between Levice and Zvolen.” ↩︎
I know nothing about Harabin, but note that Wikipedia says “Harabin stated that if he become the Slovak president, his first international journey would be to Russia, instead of the traditional visit to neighbour the Czech Republic, because of their support for ‘fascist’ Ukraine in the 2022 Russian invasion,” citing an article in a Czech source. So it is hardly surprising that his voters might have preferred Pellegrini and allies of Fico generally. ↩︎
The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has released its latest poll [PDF], taken 5–10 March. I had recently posted several results from their poll from December, 2023, with comparisons to September of that year.
I turned straight to the question about party support, as one would.
Note that declared support for Hamas has dropped since December, from 43% (which was approximately a doubling from 22% just before the Hamas invasion and massacres). It now stands at 34%. Fatah is still doing poorly at 17%. In the West Bank, the March poll says 35% support Hamas, down from 44% in December but still massively above the 12% in September. By contrast, there has been relatively little movement in the place that actually has been ruled by Hamas, and has been exposed to the full consequences of that rule for several months now.
There is another way to ask the question, however, which is explicit about voting intention.
(Note that the breakouts are ordered differently here for some reason.) The declared voting intention for Hamas in the West Bank is very slightly lower than the “support” for Hamas. It is down from 31% to 26% in the West Bank, but this is obviously a smaller shift than the “support” question elicits. Overall, the Hamas list would get 30% if elections were happening now. Recall that it got 44% in the last actual election in 2006. On the other hand, even that decline in support is double the declared voting intention for Fatah.
In another result from the press release (PDF link above, p. 23), 62% in Gaza (but only 45% overall) now say they support “the two-state solution.” In December, the Gaza figure was 35% (and overall it was 34%). This is such a large change on something so fundamental that I really wonder about the quality of the sample or the interpretation of the question.
The poll also contains some interesting questions about wartime conditions asked of respondents in the Gaza Strip. While 55% say that they do not “have sufficient food for a day or two,” 44% say they do (p. 6). And 77% say that can reach a place to get water or food “but with great difficulty or risk” and only 4% say they can not reach any such place. Not to downplay “great difficulty” but this seems somehow inconsistent with various organizations regularly claiming famine is imminent. (Some of these organizations have been claiming that since late October.) It is staggering and horrible to learn that two thirds of Gaza Strip respondents say a member of their family has been injured in the war, and 60% say a family member has been killed. Horrible, but hardly surprising for a war that is being fought–must be fought–in a dense1 urban area because that is the battlefield Hamas prepared for the past 18 or so years. Also of interest to me is the finding that 70% say that aid provided by UNRWA is “discriminatory.”
Among the things that are most troubling would be this:
First of all, it is rather shocking that only 30% of respondents in the Gaza Strip (and only 11% in the West Bank) claim to have watched the videos of the atrocities. It was Hamas operatives themselves who recorded their savage attacks and even rape, because they wanted them publicized. In any case, there is actually a pretty big difference in “belief that Hamas fighters committed atrocities on October 7” among those who did and did not see the videos. But even among those who have watched them, only 17% can bring themselves to identify the recorded acts as atrocities.
In addition, the option selected as best to achieve Palestinian goals is still overwhelmingly “armed struggle” but at 45% it is down a lot from December, when it was at 63%. These are the overall figures. Notably it is only 39% in the Gaza Strip, down from 56% in December (and 51% in September). When you are feeling the full consequences of pursuing “armed struggle” against the IDF perhaps it looks less enticing than when you are watching from relative safety. It is still too high for “two states living side by side in peace” to be a reasonable outcome of the “day after.”
In another result of gruesome interest, fully two thirds of respondents in the Gaza Strip expect to be shot at if they try to cross the fence if Israel enters Rafah2–shot at by the Egyptian army and police, that is. They know they are not welcome to seek refuge in the neighboring Arab state.
Finally, if you are wondering how the PCPSR gets a sample in a war-torn territory, as I was, here is what they say:
Notes
It is dense, even if the common claim that it is “one of the densest places on earth” does not hold up as well to scrutiny as many in the media seem to think it would. ↩︎
The V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute has released its Democracy Report 2024, Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot [PDF]. V-Dem probably has become the most widely used measure of quality of democracy (or democracy’s absence, as in the case of autocracy). It has several strengths over other older measures, and like any index, weaknesses. This planting will not be about reviewing strengths and weaknesses, nor will it delve into the methodology. There are many places you can go for such information. I simply have some questions and concerns, focused on a few specific cases that are surprising to me.
V-Dem establishes several categories of regime, based on threshold values of its various scores. They are: Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, and Closed Autocracy. There is also a “Grey Zone” between Electoral Democracy and Electoral Autocracy.
The report states, ““Notably, Israel lost its long-time status as liberal democracy in 2023.” It goes on (at p. 14):
The story in Israeli politics for the first nine months of 2023 was indeed efforts by the governing coalition to reduce the authority of the judiciary. This effort, however, failed–or at least has been placed on indefinite hold. The effort was essentially dormant already before the 7 October invasion and massacres by Hamas. The bill mentioned on “reasonableness” was the only part of the proposed package that passed. Left unsaid in the quoted statement is why such a measure is a key piece of evidence for descent into a lower category of democracy. And then what happened? The Supreme Court itself invalidated the new law! Between the mass demonstrations against the government’s plans, internal divisions in the coalition that led to multiple postponements of other bills in the package, and the court itself stepping in, one might consider 2023 to have been a stress test of liberal democracy in Israel that the system passed.1
Moreover, the movement the V-Dem measures picked up was pretty small. See the location of Israel at about the middle of the “top 20–30%” group. The grey dots and confidence intervals indicate the score in 2013, while the black indicates the score in 2023. This is hardly a dramatic headline-worthy drop–obviously there is substantial confidence interval overlap–and perhaps indicates a more general problem of translating continuous measures into categories.
As for other countries in this range, the one indicated in blue, Seychelles, is one that moved into the liberal democratic category and was previously an electoral autocracy. As the 2013 to 2023 comparison shows, this is indeed a major movement. Those in orange are “autocratizing.” I will admit to being surprised to see Greece in this category. Note that Israel is not in orange even though the report says it has moved one category down from liberal democracy. Those in orange actually show changes outside the metric’s confidence interval. So why the drama over Israel’s small score change?
The list of countries in the sub-category of “electoral democracy plus” is shown below. Note that Austria and Portugal are also countries that have lost their status as liberal democracy since 2013, according to V-Dem. This is baffling.2 Greece is indicated as experiencing an ongoing “episode” of autocratization,3 whereas Montenegro is improving.
India is classified as an “electoral autocracy” since 2018. This category is defined in the report as a country in which “Multiparty elections for the executive exist; insufficient levels of fundamental requisites such as freedom of expression and association, and free and fair elections.” This seems like an overstatement of the situation in India to me, although I am certainly no expert on India.
Mexico is in the “grey zone” meaning the confidence intervals on its scores overlap the categories electoral democracy4 and electoral autocracy. Here is a comment the report makes about the country: “Mexico has elections scheduled for June 2024, and tensions are high amid the gradual autocratization under President Obrador5 and the MORENA party. President Obrador is now accused of trying to rig the system in favor of his successor Claudia Sheinbaum. Large crowds are turning out to protest and to protect the independence of the electoral authority” (p. 41). Putting Mexico on an autocracy watch could be justified, but calling it in a grey zone where it might be right on the brink of falling out of the ranks of democracy does not seem right to me. Other countries in this grey zone currently include Albania, Botswana, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, and Zambia.
Index-making is hard. Even a flawed index can be valuable. I am concerned that some of these categorizations that I have highlighted here call into question the value of assigning categorical boundaries on this continuous measure. I do not agree that Israel has ceased to be a liberal democracy, have my doubts that Mexico and India are not (or are very nearly not) democracies at all, and am simply puzzled by Greece and Portugal losing their “liberal” status.
Notes
I do not know what to say about that last sentence in the excerpt, other than to doubt there is some actual change in this condition. Perhaps the experts surveyed are reacting to comments by the Minister of National Security (head of the police, among other functions), while failing (as the earlier sentences indicate) to notice that the courts are in fact still functioning as a check (as is much of the rest of the government, including the Prime Minister). In other words, some of this may reflect the hazards of relying on expert surveys. An aside: I was not contacted, although I have participated in expert surveys on other topics regarding Israel and I believe that I have been invited (but declined) to participate for V-Dem on another country in some past year. ↩︎
In a table at the end of the report one can see the component scores and identify which factor has contributed most to the change of category in a given country. For Austria and Portugal it is the “participatory” component that is mostly responsible. ↩︎
“Cyprus and Portugal fell from liberal to electoral democracy in 2023, while Austria and Greece made the same transition in 2021 and 2022, respectively” (p. 15). ↩︎
Electoral democracy is defined as “Multiparty elections for the executive are free and fair; satisfactory degrees of suffrage, freedom of expression, freedom of association.” Liberal democracy as “Requirements of Electoral Democracy are met; judicial and legislative constraints on the executive along with the protection of civil liberties and equality before the law.” ↩︎
Sic. His family name is actually López Obrador. ↩︎
It is day 160 of the war between Israel and Hamas. I want to look at some polling results over recent months among both Israelis and Palestinians. I prepared a series of slides for a recent semi-public talk I gave. I am not sure I will be able to post a recording, so I am posting some of the slides with a brief write-up here.
The frame for my presentation was about the possibilities for the future, by which I mean both short term (how the war might turn out) and longer-term. In the longer term, the questions center around the prospects for a so-called Grand Bargain. The outlines of such a bargain were sketched in an article in the NYT by Thomas L. Friedman in late January.
Friedman went so far as to call this supposed bargain “A Biden Doctrine” and it is, as the NYT headline said, big. It would involve normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and some sort of “path” to a Palestinian state. Do Israelis see it is desirable? Thanks to the Israel Democracy Institute, we have polling conducted in February on that question. Is it possible? This is harder to answer, but spoiler alert–probably not unless that “path” is understood up front by all to be a long and winding one (with some high probability of being a dead end–again). What do Palestinians think about it? Alas, I am not aware of polling on that side that is specific to the Grand Bargain concept, but what we do have about recent public opinion on that side is not encouraging.
In addition to talk about a Grand Bargain and a Biden Doctrine, there are a whole lot of buzzwords flying around the media about the “day after” (itself a buzzword). We hear about a “reformed” or “revitalized” Palestinian Authority (PA), without real definition of what that would entail and how to achieve it. We hear about the formation of a “technocratic government” for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, although the Israeli plan for the latter territory–once Hamas is defeated there–is for some body other than the PA to take over. Perhaps “local officials” or “clan leaders” not connected to either Hamas or Fatah (the organization that dominates the PA). Another spoiler alert: Here there are actual spoilers. It should surprise no one that such leaders who step forward are at serious risk of being murdered by Hamas, such as just happened. The incident shows that they are at risk even for the narrower and humanitarian purpose of distributing aid, let alone being part of a replacement for Hamas for governing the territory.
But before we get to all that, how do Israelis think about the prospects for the current war?
Among the Jewish public, according to polling from the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), confidence that Israel will “win the war” has declined rather sharply between October and February. In the early days following the invasion and massacres by Hamas, it was almost three quarters. By February it is not much more than half.
That seems about right to me. Some aspects of the war are going very well (dismantling Hamas battalions and internal Gaza war infrastructure). But full defeat of Hamas looks difficult to impossible—the terror organization will still exist in some diminished but active form in Gaza, and as we will see, is significantly more popular in the West Bank now than it was before 7 October.
Additionally, releasing/rescuing all the remaining hostages alive may not be feasible, although we can’t yet rule out another short-term pause of the active fighting (of, likely, at most several weeks) that leads to some releases. The goals of (1) defeating Hamas as a governing and military organization and (2) releasing hostages have been in conflict all along, and there is a divide within the Israeli public over which to prioritize. Following are two poll results for slightly different questions, and from different pollsters, about the tradeoff in the war goals.
Note that supporters of this government’s original parties (before Gantz’s National Unity joined after 7 October) tend to prioritize toppling Hamas over bringing home the hostages. (The original government formed after the 2022 election consists of the four parties listed at the bottom of the chart.1) Note also that supporters of Likud, the main party of the current government, and of which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leader, is split, with just half prioritizing toppling Hamas when the question is phrased this way.2
But how you ask the question, and how you divide up the subgroups, matters. The JPPI poll makes the tradeoff clearer in its wording–asking if one of these can happen only at the expense of the other.
According to this poll, almost twice as many Jews prefer Hamas being defeated even if the hostages are not returned as support returning the hostages but leaving Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip.
So now let’s turn to the Israeli sentiment regarding the Grand Bargain. This question may be overly complex, but then so is any Grand Bargain. In any case, it asks whether as part of ending the war, with “long-term military quiet,” US “guarantees,” and peace agreements with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, should Israel agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state?
Arab voters and voters on the Jewish left are pretty solidly in favor! However, they are minorities of the overall population. The Jewish right does not like this bargain at all, and the center is nowhere near being in favor, either. I did not see in the poll write-up the breakdown of Jewish Israelis by political leaning, but we know from recent elections, other surveys, and current polling about the next election that the percentage who define themselves as “left” is small. Any diplomatic plan that leads to a Palestinian state has to convince the Israeli public–that is, the center and at least a part of the right–that this is a good outcome for Israel.
What might help convince Israelis that establishing a Palestinian state is a good idea, or at least a tolerable outcome? Perhaps reform of the PA would do it. What do Israelis think about the prospects for reform?
On this, Israel’s Arabs and Jews broadly agree! They see reform of the PA enabling it to “effectively manage” the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a low-likelihood outcome. If there were such a state “in the foreseeable future” how do people feel about whether terrorism against Israel would increase or decrease, or stay the same?
Among Jewish Israelis, only the left (which, as noted, is a small minority overall) have a majority expecting that a Palestinian state will mean less or no terrorism. On the right, nearly 3/5 think a Palestinian state means more terrorism, and roughly the same share of “centrists” either agree with that or think it will stay the same, while just 29% of centrists think it will reduce terrorism. How does a Grand Bargain, or any other “pathway” to such a state convince Israelis that the future living next door to such a state will be safer than the past–and most importantly ensuring there can never again be another shattering incident like 7 October?
On the Palestinian side, Mahmoud Abbas has begun the 20th year of his 4-year term, having been elected in 2005 with no presidential elections held since. He appoints, and can dismiss, the Prime Minister and cabinet. Current PM Mohammad Shtayyeh and his cabinet announced their resignation in late February—allegedly a step towards “reform” but will changing the personnel near the top of the power structure really change much?
The Palestinian Authority is not a democracy, but it is not a full dictatorship either. There is a respected pollster who surveys opinion in the territories regularly, including since the war started (and including among internally displaced persons in the Gaza Strip). We will look at some results from one recent poll.
The formal governance structure of the PA consists of an elected presidency (long held by Abbas), a legislative assembly, and a prime minister and cabinet. The PM and cabinet are dually responsible to the president and the assembly. In other words, it is a president-parliamentary system (the subtype of semi-presidentialism with the stronger formal presidential powers). However, with no election for president since 2005, and none for assembly since 2006, clearly the actual authority of the leadership of the PA does not come from voters and the formal constitutional structure. Where does it come from? That is a hard question! It is certainly not one I am equipped to answer. But the tentative answer would be that it somehow comes from within the Fatah organization and the bureaucracy itself.3
“Reform” or “revitalization” thus can’t simply mean a new PM and cabinet. The recent resignation of the PM is not sufficient, nor is the intended replacement of the outgoing cabinet with a “technocratic government” terribly meaningful. A serious question is, what is a technocratic government, anyway? You can put highly educated people with specialized training who are allegedly apolitical and uncorrupted in ministerial positions, but still the question remains: where does their authority come from? Who determines their scope of action, and who determines whether they remain in power upon taking difficult decisions that might need to be imposed upon unwilling entrenched interests? Abbas acting unilaterally as President? A legislature that essentially does not exist? From the same bureaucracy and Fatah that put Abbas and his past PMs in power? Not too meaningful, and probably a dead end.
In any case, what are Palestinians thinking? The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (CPSR), directed by Dr. Khalil Shikaki, has done its most recent poll in December 2023. It compares party support with that registered at a poll in September 2023. Thus it conveniently captures both the immediate pre-war period and the wartime period.
The bottom lines are pretty discouraging. Hamas support has nearly doubled between September and December in the Palestinian Territories overall, standing at 43%. It is noteworthy, however, that is has barely increased in the Gaza Strip (from 38% to 42%). It suggests that feeling the full consequences of what Hamas rule can result in, Gazans are not being persuaded. On the other hand, their support of Hamas has not decreased. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, support for Hamas has nearly quadrupled. West Bank Palestinians are mostly cheering from the sidelines, without suffering the consequences, and they like what they see from Hamas. This is depressing. Emotional reactions by your orchardist aside, it does not augur well for a “revitalized” PA that might be able to decrease terrorism stemming from some future state it establishes. On the positive side, it is still not a majority supporting Hamas in either the West Bank or the territories overall.
The support for Hamas looks eerily like it did in 2006, the last time Palestinians voted in a national election.
Party
Party votes %
Party list seats
District seats
Total seats
Change & Reform (Hamas)
44.4%
29
45
74 (56.1%)
Fatah
41.4
28
17
45 (34.1%)
Others
14.2
9
4
13
The table summarizes the results of the January, 2006, Palestinian Legislative Council election. I have written a lot about this over the years–just visit the Palestinian Territories orchard block and scroll. The vast majority of plantings there–all the way back to the pre-electoral period in late 2005–are about those elections. And about the badly designed electoral system that produced a Hamas majority despite just 44% of the party vote.4 Yes, 44%, almost exactly the support level registered in the December, 2023, poll.5
Given such support for a political movement that is, according to its charter and repeated public statements, committed to eliminating the Jewish state rather than living in peace with it, we should hardly be surprised to learn that support among Palestinians for a “two-state solution” is not high.
The percentages who say they support such an eventual outcome actually ticked up between September and December, and are a little higher in the Gaza Strip than the West Bank. However, clearly we are talking about statistically insignificant differences. More to the point, only about a third of Palestinians living in the territories support the idea.
Clearly, if a postwar “revitalized” PA is to hold elections, at the very least they need to be held with a fully proportional system to avoid the exaggeration of extremist support that occurred in 2006! But I don’t see a viable path to holding elections at all as long as Hamas would be involved in any manner. Hamas is an obstacle to building a state, let alone a democracy. The process of building a state–or paving some “pathway” to a state–should not front-load elections. The first task would be to build legitimate (whatever that means) and functioning proto-state institutions and transform the political culture towards acceptance of peace with Israel. That was, of course, allegedly the role the PA was supposed to play when it was set up in the Oslo Accords. Thirty years on, we can probably declare that process a failure albeit not a total one. (The PA governance may be unpopular and corrupt, but it looks after Palestinian social needs better than Hamas has ever even tried to do in Gaza,6 and coordinates on Israeli security needs in the West Bank.)
Building a state is hard. There is a large literature on state-formation. I know only some of this literature and have commented before on its application to Israel and Palestine. Some conclusions can be drawn from such works, even if here I will be doing so overly broadly. Unless based solely on repression, a state needs some sort of conduit to the society it governs, even if it is not a democracy. Typically that comes from a mass party, or from building on existing social, often religious, institutions. The covers of selected books on the topic hint at some of the processes, including how long-term it can be. How might it play out postwar in Palestine?
Could there be a long-term path via “de-radicalization” of Palestinian Islamic institutions, such that perhaps they could form the basis for a peaceful and “legitimate” state? Currently much of this religious and social space is rather captured by Hamas (“the Islamic Resistance Movement”). This is where Saudi Arabia and UAE potentially can help, having tackled extremists within their own religious institutions. For their involvement to work it would probably mean Saudi leadership wants normalization with Israel and a defense pact with USA more than it wants real progress towards a Palestinian state. In other words, it has to be willing to accept a very vague “pathway” because this will take a long time and still might fail.7 Can this sort of grand bargain happen? Maybe, depending on how decisive the defeat of Hamas is, and how desperate the Saudis are for a deal, as well as on whether there is a change of the party composition of Israel’s government. But it would be foolish to bet on it!
I wish I could end on a more optimistic note, but it is hard to do so. We hear various US and EU officials speak regularly of not letting a good crisis go to waste, as if this is finally the opportunity to establish the framework for “two states living side by side in peace.” Normally, when an idea fails over and over, the idea might be cast aside as unworkable. The “two-state solution” has been around a long time–30+ years in the form of the Oslo Accords and nearly a century in the form of various “partition” plans for the old binational and imperially ruled territory of Palestine. No one actually has a clue how to bring it about, and as Israel’s ceremonial president (who is himself from the political left) Isaac Herzog recently said at Davos, “No Israelis in their right mind” are thinking of a “peace process” right now. In the face of public opinion on both sides, such as reviewed above, a two-state solution would have to be imposed. But exactly how do you impose something on people who do not want it? By force. As much as international actors want a “day after” plan now, honestly it has to wait till we see just what that “day” looks like. If Israeli military force were to deliver a genuinely decisive crushing of Hamas, maybe opportunities open up. Maybe, heading down a very long “pathway.” But if the current war ends in a murkier way, as currently looks likely, then I am sorry to say but all talk of “two states living side by side in peace” will sound to large swaths of the Israeli public like how Charlie Brown hears his parents and teachers speaking.
That is not to say the war is a losing effort. It is likely to end (and, yes, only some time after a significant operation in Rafah8) with Hamas no longer the effective governing authority of the Gaza Strip and its battalions and terror infrastructure, including its massive tunnel and bunker network, destroyed. Those are real achievements of the IDF that are well underway, ongoing, and important for future possibilities.9 But a political settlement towards a peaceful two-state “solution” is likely remain elusive.
Notes
Religious Zionism here means the alliance list that went by that name and included both a party with that name (led by Bezalel Smotrich) and Otzma Yehudit (led by Itamar Ben-Gvir). ↩︎
I am somewhat surprised that the two Haredi (ultra-orthodox) parties’ supporters break down so differently on this question, with the Sephardi Shas voters being more evenly divided while the Ashkenazi UTJ supporters lean more towards toppling Hamas than does Likud. Small sample sub-population caveats apply. ↩︎
I am thinking of some form of “reciprocal accountability” that is common in many authoritarian systems, whereby bureaucrats are agents of the political leaders (as in democracies) but the leadership also needs support of key bureaucratic actors in the absence of external accountability such as provided by institutionalized electoral competition in full democracies. But I am not able to claim knowledge of how this works in the PA, or indeed whether scholars have attempted to explain the PA structures of actual authority in this way. ↩︎
As explained in various past plantings, and shown in the columns of the table, half the seats were allocated proportionally across all the PA territories (similar to Israel’s system), and half were allocated in districts in a manner that was highly disproportional. The rule for the districted component was multiple non-transferable votes (MNTV): district magnitude (M) ranging from 1 to 9, with the voter allowed to cast up to M votes for individual candidates. Hamas won more votes than its main rival overall, but its voters also were more likely than those aligned with Fatah to use all or most of their available votes and to give them all to candidates of one party. The result was not because of Fatah having too many candidates (overnomination), as has been claimed by many pundits over the years, and was not mostly due to split voting for independent candidates (although the latter was a small factor). I have addressed these incorrect claims about why Hamas won in several of the earlier entries on the topic at this blog. ↩︎
Fatah support, on the other hand, has tumbled over the past 18 years. ↩︎
Hamas runs an extensive “charity” network, but the government it controls does not provide significant social services to the best of my understanding and the services by the “charity” are delivered on a clientelistic basis to Hamas supporters in the Gaza Strip rather than to the population at large. ↩︎
I am cynical, and I assume the Saudi leadership is no less cynical. I do not believe that they actually care substantively about the Palestinian issue. They would like it to go away. They certainly would love to see Hamas wiped out, even if they won’t say so. (Jordan’s leadership surely feels the same, too.) Saudi leaders mostly want that defense pact and the economic benefits of full relations with Israel (as the UAE already has, and which have held up through this war so far). But they need to seem to have extracted something before they will move. Maybe they will settle for something very vague that lets them sweep the issue under a very large carpet for now. Maybe not. Who knows. ↩︎
Whether “acceptable” on US and other actors’ terms or not. ↩︎
I am not going to mention (aside from this footnote) the highly likely second war–against Hezbollah This is almost surely coming. In fact, it is probably inevitable. The question is when. And if it is not imminent, does the country accept that a de-facto security zone on its side of the Lebanon border will remain depopulated till whenever that war has been concluded, or do people go back home soon and somehow accept that authorities will spot a terrorist invasion like that of 7 Oct. in time, if (when?) it comes? ↩︎
Update: The result ended up at 79 seats for AD, 77 for PS, and 48 for Chega (out of 230). That’s a largest party seat share of 0.343, where the seat product model (SPM) prediction for the electoral system would be 0.378, so 0.909 of expectation. Very low for Portugal, but only a little low for the SPM. See details and explanations below. There are also a few new points added at the end.
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Portugal has held a general election today, 10 March 2024. I will admit I had no idea this was happening, and I had filed away in my mind that Portugal would not have an election for a while, given that the Socialist Party had won an absolute majority of seats as recently as 2022. However, the government resigned after a series of scandals and the President exercised his constitutional authority to dissolve the Assembly of the Republic and call early elections (I am relying on the Wikipedia article’s “background” section).
Results show that the Democratic Alliance (AD) will replace the Socialists in government, but it will be well short of a majority of seats. The far-right Chega has made substantial gains, and is in third place. The AD includes the Social Democratic Party (PDS) which, despite its name, is a center-right party.
When writing about the 2022 election, I noted that the seat majority was reported as “unexpected” but is not a rare occurrence in Portugal. Over time, the mean seat percentage of the largest party in Portugal has been around 48%. The 2022 result was the fifth absolute majority in 16 elections since the establishment of the current democratic regime in 1976. However, I also noted that the country’s electoral system, while a fairly moderate form of proportional representation, should be expected to have higher party-system fragmentation than it generally has had.
Portugal’s electoral system has a seat product of around 2400. This is a modest seat product by standards of proportional representation, stemming from a moderate assembly size, S (currently 230; 250 before 1991), and a middle-range district magnitude, M (currently 10.5 on average), yielding a seat product, MS=2415. For such a seat product, the expected largest party seat share is 0.378, derived from the formula expecting this share to be (MS)–1/8. Thus Portugal’s actual largest party seat share has averaged 1.26 times the seat product model prediction.1 This indicates that while Portugal’s electoral system is not expected to produce a high degree of fragmentation (38% of the seats is a decent sized largest party2), actual Portuguese politics supports a more de-fragmented party system–at least so far–than what its electoral system could sustain.
As for votes, the associated formula of the seat product model implies we should expect the largest to have 35.4% of the votes, but the average has been 41.8% instead.
In this year’s election, the leading party (or alliance, AD) is at 29.5% of the votes,3 with Socialists at 28.7%, and Chega at 18.1%. (In 2022, Chega had only around 7%.) That is about as much on the low side of expectation as the former average was on the high side. It is noteworthy that the votes in this election are more fragmented relative to the SPM expectation than the seats are. In other words, the increased vote fragmentation is not fully reflected in the seat outcome. Perhaps this is due to the modest seat product overall (by PR standards, as noted) being made up of a few very large-magnitude districts and many rather small ones. Put another way, Portuguese voters may have voted–in this election–as if their system were more proportional than it really is.
All in all, this election has resulted in an assembly that is a little closer than the country’s average past election to the expectation from the seat-product model, given Portugal’s electoral system, albeit somewhat on the low (more fragmented) side. Whether vote fragmentation will continue to increase or will stabilize to match the (modest, as noted) assembly fragmentation will be an interesting thing to watch. How this turns out may depend to some degree on how the AD manages a minority government, how much influence Chega is seen to have in this parliament, and how much the growth in Chega support can be reversed in the future. Portugal has always been an interesting case of PR to me, but it has just become more so.
Precisely because of the importance of this question of how much cooperation there will be (if any) between AD and Chega, Vicente Valentim (on Twitter) suggests the post-election period could be a “defining moment” for the country.
Notes
The mean actual largest party seat share in a sample of 634 simple electoral systems is only 1.048 times the model prediction; for PR systems the model is even better, with a ratio of 1.033. So a ratio of 1.26 indicates a strong degree of politics being needed in addition to institutions to explain an outcome. Less than a quarter of PR elections have ratios that high or higher. ↩︎
The mean largest party seat share for the sample of 280 PR elections in parliamentary (or semi-presidential) democracies that I am working with happens to be 38.2%. ↩︎
That includes the list in Madeira that ran under a “Madeira First” label but included the PSD as its main component, as did the AD elsewhere. ↩︎
Writing in Time, Amanda Carpenter and Beau Tremitiere suggest that a “fusion” strategy could save democracy by allowing anti-Trump Republicans to vote for whichever major party was closest to aligning with a pro-democracy agenda. The argument they advance is that Nikki Haley’s voters would be drawn towards a coalition backing Joe Biden by such a strategy.
As the authors note, this strategy is more viable if ballots permit electoral fusion (of the “disaggregated” form). In other words, if a major party candidate can appear on more than one party’s ballot line.
There is a problem with the logic that underlies this, however. It rests on the assumption that the sort of voter who voted in a GOP primary for Haley would gladly vote for Biden if only the voter could choose this hypothetical “Moderate Party”1 line for him instead of the Democratic one.
That may be a stretch.
Most likely some Haley voters will indeed vote for Biden even if in doing so they have to hold their noses and vote for the Democrat. Others will not vote at all, a few will vote for some third-party ticket. Others–most likely the majority–will vote for the all-but-certain nominee of their party, Donald Trump. The pro-democracy agenda rests on just how much that majority can be whittled down by voters taking one of the other options.
It seems unlikely the bloc of voters who can be swayed to Biden’s side only by the existence of the fusion option represents a chunk of the electorate large enough to be decisive even in a closely contested state like Michigan or Arizona. At the end of the day, either the Democratic or the Moderate selection is a vote for Biden and I assume voters would understand that.2 The argument the authors are making is, essentially, that the set of Haley primary voters who would go to Biden is greater when both Moderate and Democratic options are on the ballot than when only the Democratic one is.3 Should we buy the claim?
The argument for a fusion option makes somewhat more sense if this is a real party that is contesting (and ideally winning) other races around the country for House and Senate. Then it’s an actual party whose ability to have delivered the margin needed to Biden at least plausibly could have some policy influence after the election. Otherwise our Moderates are just a vote funnel to a second Biden term. I doubt there are many Haley voters who genuinely prefer that outcome to the Republican–even Trump–winning.
As I have said before, fusion has some promise for fostering (a limited degree of) multipartism and for providing more nuanced information on voter preferences. But we should be careful not to overstate its benefits.
My term, not that of the authors. I just found it convenient to give it a name, and this seemed like the right one for the article’s premise. I don’t actually think of Haley as “moderate” other than in the sense that she has been willing to criticize Trump. ↩︎
After all, the entire premise of this type of fusion is to make that obvious: Vote for Biden by marking the ballot here or vote for him by marking it over here instead. ↩︎
The logic seems to rest on assuming voters are sufficiently party-oriented that they look for that Moderate line and are happy enough with whichever candidate it is backing, even if some other party that they normally dislike also has nominated that candidate. Given that Haley was never identified with this hypothetical “Moderate” Party, it may be a stretch that her primary voters would go for it. ↩︎
Vanuatu will conduct its first-ever referendum on 29 May, on two proposed constitutional amendments regarding party-switching.
The first proposed amendment (Article 17A) provides that if a Member of Parliament resigns from a party, or is removed from that party under that party’s constitution, their seat will become vacant. The second proposed amendment (Article 17B) provides that an independent Member or a Member elected as the only member of a party must join a party with more than one member within three months of being elected: they would then become subject to the provisions of 17A, if that amendment is approved.
The full text of the amendment is available here. As passed by Parliament, the amendment also included a prohibition on no-confidence votes twelve months after a Prime Minister is elected. This provision is not required to be subjected to a referendum, and is presumably already a part of Vanuatu’s Constitution.
As I’ve posted about before, Vanuatu’s single non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system has tended to produce highly fragmented parliaments, with the 2022 snap election proving no exception; seventeen separate parties won at least one seat, with the largest two parties winning only seven seats each, giving an effective number of political parties (in terms of seats) of 12.2. Since that election, Vanuatu has had three Prime Ministers and a brief constitutional crisis surrounding a no-confidence vote.
Against this backdrop, it’s unsurprising that constitutional amendments to reduce party-hopping and no confidence votes would be favoured. These amendments, which came out of a constitutional review process from 2016 (I have not found a copy of the report from this process, if anyone has seen it let me know in the comments), seem to have passed Parliament unanimously, and based on a cursory look at social media the Yes campaign seems to be well organised.
However, at the same time, it seems possible that the amendments will fall short of their promise. Neither the party-hopping changes nor the ban on no-confidence votes strikes at the root cause of instability – the highly fragmented legislatures. Governments will still need the support of a wide constellation of parties, even if those parties will hold greater control over their legislators. The twelve-month period where no-confidence votes are suspended will likely have more effect, but even in countries like Papua New Guinea where such provisions are in effect the underlying fragmentation still creates political instability.
California’s first-round of election is 5 March, concurrent with the presidential primaries. Note that I do not consider the votes in California for US Senate, House, and state legislative seats to be a “primary,” despite that name being used officially. The parties hold genuine primaries for president–actually, of course, contests among slates of delegates for candidates seeking each party’s nomination. However, for other offices, we have a two-round top-two system. This March election is the first round–the rules do not advance the top vote-winner in each party to a general election contest, as in a primary for a single-seat office (like a US Senate seat). Instead the top two advance even if they are from the same party–and only the top two, meaning no minor parties on the November ballot (unless one happens to have cracked the top two in some contest).
I have been consistent in saying this was an undesirable system, and represented an abolition of partisan primaries, ever since it was just a proposal on the ballot on June, 2010. This year’s contest for the US Senate seat has really demonstrated the sense in which it is not a primary as we usually understand the term, primary. There are three current US House members who are Democrats and are running for the US Senate seat. (It is the seat opened up when Dianne Feinstein died.) The leading contender of these three, Adam Schiff, has been running ads that totally bypass the “primary” and tell voters why they should not vote for Steve Garvey (yes THAT Steve Garvey), a Republican. Schiff is not even pretending to be running against the other Democrats (Katie Porter and Barbara Lee). In fact, one suspects he wants to ensure Garvey is his opponent in November rather than prolong the intra-party contest to the runoff. Garvey seems to have a fairly invisible campaign. I say that anecdotally, and only because I see TV ads for Schiff and Porter regularly, but have not seen one for Garvey (or Lee). In fact, the way I learned Garvey was a candidate was from Schiff constantly hammering the point that Garvey is too conservative for California. Schiff surely has done an excellent job raising Garvey’s profile as a Senate candidate.
This is, of course, a perfectly sensible strategy to follow when your electorate is solidly Democratic and the rules could give you a Democratic opponent in the final round. That might be a tougher contest to win than one against a Republican. To be clear, he is not running as “the candidate best qualified to defeat Garvey.” He is running against Garvey as if this were the general election and there were no other candidates.1 And my point about this electoral system all along has been that it is–it’s the first round of a two-round general election.
Garvey, in addition to being basically invisible as far as campaigning goes, looked totally lost in the portion of a multi-candidate debate that I saw. I mean, it was pretty embarrassing. However, I will give him credit for at least attempting to stake out moderate positions, by the standards of today’s Republican Party. Pretty much the only way a Republican can win statewide here is by being perceived as moderate, and it helps to be a political novice with a celebrity reputation to build on. Call it the Schwarzenegger model. It is, however, far less likely to work in a contest for Senate than for Governor, and Garvey’s celebrity reputation is surely not what it once would have been, given that his baseball career ended in 1987.2
The media are kind of playing along with Schiff’s strategy. Consider this headline: “Schiff, Garvey in ‘statistical tie.'” The item in the SF Chronicle is reporting on a poll by UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies from a few days ago showing Garvey actually in the lead, with 27% and Schiff with 25%. Of course, this contest is one for two places–in the runoff. So the relative vote shares of the top two are hardly relevant. What’s relevant is the contest for the second place. You have to read through a bit of the Chronicle article to find out how big the gap is over the next candidate. Porter is at 19%. She has slipped a lot, relative to Schiff. The same pollster back in November had Porter and Schiff close for the top slot (17% and 16%), Garvey at 10%, and Lee at 9%.3 And the USC Dornisfe poll from early February had Schiff in the lead but a close race for that second runoff slot between Porter and Garvey. We can’t attribute all this movement in the polls to Schiff’s ads, of course. But if he was trying to make himself and Garvey the top two instead of himself and Porter, mission accomplished.
I don’t normally make endorsements of candidates on this website, but I will say that I will be voting for Schiff. The two leading Democrats in this contest are not dramatically different in their overall records.4 However, all three differ on one issue I care deeply about, especially right now–standing with Israel. Lee is terrible on this issue (calling for a “ceasefire” from the beginning), and so I am glad to see her struggle in the polls. Earlier in the campaign I thought I would vote for Porter in the first round, mainly to postpone the choice between her and Schiff till November. Schiff has been consistently supportive of Israel, and in mid-February issued a statement calling for passage of the bill to aid Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan that has been held up by the far right wing of the House Republican majority. Porter has taken some good foreign policy positions (e.g., on Iran last December), and her earliest statement after 7 Oct. was good. However, a more recent one (in December) was not so good. It was not offensive, and did not call for Israel to cease its war against Hamas. In fact, it was pretty typical mainstream peace process stuff, for a bilateral ceasefire and negotiations for a “democratic Palestinian state.” Sure, sounds good. But the solution she is talking about will be hard enough even if Hamas is decisively defeated; it would be impossible as an outcome of a negotiated ceasefire of the sort she is dreaming of. If Porter were the only mainstream Democrat in the running, this statement would not keep me from voting for her. But we have a better one. Schiff has my vote.5
Finally, kudos to the pollsters for USC for including this crucial question in their poll in early February:
_____________
In fact, while the candidates I have mentioned are the only ones that could be considered “serious,” there are 27 candidates for the full term, of whom eleven indicate their “party preference” is Democratic, ten Republicans, and one each from American Independent and Libertarian (the rest have no declared party affiliation). There are seven candidates running for the partial/unexpired term, which will last only several weeks. The rules require that there be an election concurrent with the full-term one to fill the remainder of this one (with the seat being held by a gubernatorial appointee, who in this case is not a candidate, until a winner of the partial term race is certified). ↩︎
I remember in his playing days, or shortly after, there were rumors he would enter politics. But maybe three dozen years was a little long to wait. ↩︎
Per their DW-NOMINATE scores, Porter is the most moderate, Schiff is somewhat to the left, and Lee far to the left. Their scores and percentiles (of the whole House) are: Porter –0.224 (53), Schiff –0.35 (70), Lee –0.677 (99). Source: VoteView. ↩︎
I will add that Garvey is the only one of these candidates with a prominent statement on his campaign website about Israel. And I like it. So maybe I should vote for him. But I can’t quite bring myself to do that, even just this once, in the first round.
Lee’s website indicates, if you click on her link for Global Peace and Security, that she is “the only candidate to call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza.” Schiff’s site does not seem to have a section on foreign policy, but his views as a Representative are well known. Porter also has little to say on her Senate campaign site; I found the above-linked statements on her House site. ↩︎
I am not sure why the still view in the embed is that particular screen well into the video. It would be nicer if it was the opening view. Click and see that–and the rest, about six minutes long.
Several more trees have begun blooming since Monday when I shot the video. In fact, every stone fruit now has blooms or swelling buds indicating blooms are coming in days. Even the Canadian White Blenheim apricot, which is usually very late. But this year it looks like it will begin blooming while the Royal Rosa (my earliest blooming apricot) still has flowers. The overall bloom season looks to be much more compressed this year than usual. That is good for ensuring cross-pollination for those varieties that need it (a category that includes the Canadian White).
Elections for the European Parliament will be held in early June. The provisions for the elections now require thresholds in high-magnitude electoral districts.
All Member States must use a system based on proportional representation. In addition to the voluntary threshold for the allocation of seats of up to 5% at national level, Council Decision (EU, Euratom) 2018/994 established an obligatory minimum threshold of between 2% and 5% for constituencies (including single-constituency Member States) with more than 35 seats. This requirement must be met in time for the 2024 European elections at the latest.
Currently, the following Member States apply thresholds: France, Belgium, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, Croatia, Latvia and Hungary (5%); Austria, Italy and Sweden (4%); Greece (3%); and Cyprus (1.8%). The other Member States apply no threshold, although Germany tried to do so, but in two decisions of 2011 and 2014, the German Constitutional Court declared the country’s existing thresholds for EU elections (which were first 5%, then 3%) to be unconstitutional.
Most European member states use a single statewide district. These range in magnitude from 6 (Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Malta) to 96 (Germany1). The others that have district magnitude of 35 or greater are Spain (61) and France (81). Aside from the case of Germany mentioned in the quote above, Spain is the only remaining state that did not already have a legal threshold, or one in the stipulated range.2
The mean magnitude of the single-constituency cases is 24. Four states divide their territory into multiple constituencies: Belgium, Ireland, Italy and Poland. The mean district magnitude for this latter group of countries is just under 8. Overall, there will be 47 districts for 720 seats, making a mean district magnitude of 15.3 and thus a seat product of 11,016.3
(Please note various clarifications and corrections offered by readers in the comments section.)
There is an interesting twist on the single German district: “Seats are apportioned [sic–“allocated” would be better] to parties nationally. A party can choose to only stand in some of the 16 states and have its national seat count be subapportioned to those states. Only the CDU and the CSU have done this in previous elections.” (Quoted from a footnote at Wikipedia.) Also, if I understand other footnotes correctly, the seats parties win in Italy and Poland are determined nationally, despite their being “districts”; apparently a two-tier compensatory system. This is a level of complexity that calls into question the mean magnitudes I report below, but I am not going to attempt to adjust for this factor. ↩︎
It is interesting that Spain had no threshold despite the high magnitude. After all, Spain applies a district-level legal threshold (3%) in elections to its national parliament, which has real impact only in the two districts that have 30 or more seats. ↩︎
Whether the seat product model “works” or should even be expected to work for a supra-national parliament is not something I have ever entertained. ↩︎
This is a post about a local ballot measure. But it is also a post about a bigger puzzle–hinted at in the title. If you want to skip the stuff about the measure, just go down to where I bolded the word, puzzle. In addition, it is also a post that is (briefly) about the misrepresentation of scientific information.
There is a ballot proposition, known as Measure M, on the ballot for voters in the City of Woodland, California, in the March election. The Daily Democrat (local newspaper) did a pros/cons article recently. I do not live within the city limits, so I do not get a vote on it. But there are yard signs–nearly all against–about M even near me in this unincorporated area, so I decided to look into it.
The measure would build a new levee and drainage canal across the northern part of the city. The idea is to protect the city from a potential flood. There is a creek that runs roughly west-to-east not far north of the city limits. The land between the city limits and the creek is mostly agricultural, and the measure includes various mitigation measures to avoid backup of floodwaters onto agricultural land and compensation for specifically affected properties. The general area in which the city is located does indeed flood–here is a picture I took in 2017. The area depicted here is just beyond the northeastern edge of the city. These floodwaters did not reach the city itself, and this is a “bypass” meant to hold floodwaters.1 But it takes little imagination to see how this could find its way into the city with just a few more storms in a sequence like the one we had that winter (and the sequences we had again in 2022-23).
The construction costs for the project proposed under Measure M would be 99% covered by a grant from the State of California. The City of Woodland would be responsible for the other 1%. It seems like a pretty good deal to me. Yet there is an active, and evidently well funded, movement against it. The map of the project shows the flood risk the project is meant to mitigate.2
I will not delve deep into the arguments for and against, as my best estimate of the number of Woodland voters who will read this blog post is somewhere between zero and a small single digit. However, I will say that the YES claims are far more logical and straightforward than the NO claims. The NO side is so disingenuous that I find it hard to believe that they have an actual serious argument.
The biggest puzzle that I hope readers might have some thoughts on is this: What is so bad about a Floodwall? I ask because the campaign against the measure repeatedly calls the project the Floodwall. Yes, always with a capital F. The word, floodwall (capitalized or not) does not appear in the official description. It appears only in the NO side’s writings. Is there something menacing and disturbing about a Floodwall?
The project is officially the Lower Cache Creek Flood Risk Management Project. As I noted earlier, it is what would be conventionally called a levee and a canal. The opponents must have some reason to believe that “Floodwall” is good branding for their side, but I am at a loss to understand why.
Other disingenuous claims include one (see the DD link, above) stating that the future of California is likely to be one of prolonged drought, so there is no need to worry about flooding.3 This is false and dangerous. Future climate scenarios are that both periods of extended drought and periods of major flooding are becoming more likely. That is, climate change is not making California drier. It is making its already volatile cycles of dry and wet more volatile. The so-called ArkStorm scenario is getting more, not less likely to occur as the climate warms. (Perhaps I should be pleased that the NO side does not deny climate change entirely, but I am not pleased at all that they misrepresent what the research says about impacts here.)4
The NO side also says (in an email I received for some reason) that it is just a “pork” project. My initial reaction was, so what? Why would that be inherently bad? But the characterization is not accurate. The state money will come from grants, based on merit, and not be directed to the city at the behest of elected representatives to curry political support.5 So by definition it is not pork.
Well, I guess it is obvious that I would vote YES, if only I could vote at all on this measure.
The Yolo Bypass is an area meant to flood, designed mainly to protect Sacramento and West Sacramento, which are on the Sacramento River, from being flooded. Cache Creek flows into the Bypass (and River) just to the northwest of where the picture is taken. The specific flood risk Measure M would deal with is that in a major wet period, some of the Creek’s water would not make it to the Bypass but instead would end up in the city. ↩︎
The area depicted on the map as the Cache Creek Settling Basin is partly shown in the photo above. If I understand the project goals correctly, its completion would divert more flood water here (where it is meant to be) instead of into the designated flood-risk areas in the city. ↩︎
They also claim that Woodland has never flooded. This may be stretching the definition of what “not flooded” means, as the city has numerous and notorious low areas, but I shall not entertain the historical claim further here. ↩︎
They also say that the extreme rain of last season was due to El Niño, as if that would be somehow a reason not to worry about flooding in future winters. But that is not even correct. The 2022-23 winter was not an El Niño and neither was the extremely wet one of 2016-17. The current El Niño had not yet developed at the time of the heavy rains (and flooding in some parts of the state) experienced in early 2023. Yes, El Niño tilts odds towards higher rainfall in most of California, and an extreme flood scenario is likelier in an El Niño than outside that oceanic condition. But their claim is seriously misleading and plain wrong. ↩︎
I subscribe to email alerts from various organizations within the US electoral reform movement. One of these organizations sent me an email last week that said, in part:
Yesterday, the Republican Party in the Virgin Islands became the first Republican state or territorial party to use ranked choice voting (RCV) in its presidential primary!
Please pardon me if I am not quite so excited. Not because it is the Virgin Islands and only four delegates were at stake. But because the way RCV was used is hardly a significant advance, and was quite irrelevant given the nature of the contest in the territory. (NB: It was a caucus, not a primary, but that does not change any of the argument I am making here, and probably would not temper the organization’s excitement.)
The ranked choices are used to determine a single winner. Thus the Virgin Islands GOP is using a “winner take all” system despite there being multiple delegates. This is hardly the sort of advance I would expect a pro-preform organization to be trumpeting.
The email further told me that this procedure ensured that, unlike in the New Hampshire primary earlier in the month, this RCV primary meant votes were not wasted. It allowed ‘voters to decide among the full field, instead of party elites pushing candidates out lest they “play spoiler” or “split the vote.”’
With multiple delegates at stake and more than one candidate, arguably votes not cast for the front-runner were indeed wasted, as that candidate got 100% of the delegates despite being well below 100% of the votes. Further, if the objective is to keep competitors in the contest longer,1 there is an obviously superior solution: allocate the delegates proportionally. This is the procedure used, with large reservations, in all Democratic Party presidential primaries and in some states by the Republican Party. If the GOP contest this year were in a setting in which every delegate counted (like the Democrats in 2008 or at the earlier phases in 2020), it might be good to let someone other than the front-runner come out of the Virgin Islands, or any other contest, with a delegate or two. Instead, the front-runner got all four.
Moreover, that front runner won two thirds of the (first-preference) votes. In other words, the transferring was quite irrelevant in this specific contest, given that it is a winner-take-all rule in force. By having over half the votes, he was going to get all four delegates regardless of anyone’s second choices.
Had proportional representation (PR) been in place, the vote distribution likely would have meant the front-runner getting three of the four, as–depending on the specific rule–Nikki Haley’s 20.6% should have been sufficient for one of the four.
In the actual transferring from distantly placed candidates, Haley gained 12 votes and the front-runner gained 8. (This being a caucus with evidently rather less excitement on the ground than in certain reform circles, there were only 253 total votes cast, 246 of which remained with choices marked to the end.2)
Another way RCV could be used–which would be similar to how a few Democratic Party contests now work–would be to use eliminations and transfers only for (first-preference) votes cast below the share needed3 to win a delegate. In the initial count, for example, Ron DeSantis started with 5.9% (15 votes), even though he had already suspended his campaign. His voters could not have allowed Haley to reach two delegates even if the four available were allocated proportionally after transferring non-viable candidates’ votes. However, because she ended just over a quarter of the votes after full transfers, the final “two-candidate preferred” surely vote would have guaranteed a delegate for Haley even if the specific rule in place had not been favorable to her winning one delegate on her first preference votes.4
Such use of RCV in a presidential nominating primary or caucus would be far superior to simply using it to determine who gets all the delegates. I will concede that if the front-runner had well under 50%, RCV might hand the full slate of delegates to someone other than the plurality candidate, demonstrating how “voters can identify a consensus, majority nominee in a multi-candidate field,” in the phrasing of the organization’s email. But in such a case, given multiple delegates at stake, would it not be that proportional allocation (whether or not combined with RCV) is obviously even more superior? One would think so. But people will get excited over whatever floats their boat, and some pro-reform organizations have developed something of a fetish over RCV.
Finally, it is kind of ironic, but the Republican Party in the Virgin Islands is actually violating party rules by holding a winner-take-all event prior to March 15!5 But, hey, they used RCV!!!
Never mind that by the time this contest happened, it was well publicized that only two candidates were still active. ↩︎
As of December, there were 2,107 registered Republicans in the territory. That is a turnout of around 12%. ↩︎
Whether due to being too low to qualify based on the proportional formula in use, or due to a legal threshold (e.g., 15% in Democratic Party contests). ↩︎
The delegate primaries that use “proportional” allocation in US currently often use non-standard rules. What if, for example, the requirement were a full Hare quota (1/4 of votes)? Then Haley would have won a delegate only if preferences for other candidates aside from the top two were transferred before making the delegate allocation. ↩︎
The penalty for this is that they got just those four delegates to the convention whereas it otherwise would have been nine. ↩︎
Below is a graph lifted from Wikipedia showing polling trends for existing parties in Israel since the 2022 election. I marked it up with labels for the parties and a summary box of some alternative government coalition scenarios if the polling average at the end of January were translated into actual seats at an election.
It remains as of now that it would be possible to form a coalition that would consist of none of the original partners in the right-wing/Haredi government formed after the last election. Also possible is a government consisting of the two main centrist parties and the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties (UTJ and Shas). Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party is far ahead, as it has been since immediately after the Shemeni Atzeret invasion and massacre.1 NUP had already pulled ahead earlier in the year, during the protests against the government’s judicial overhaul, but their lead increased dramatically after the war initiated by Hamas.
Although it is not possible to say for sure from such aggregate data, it appears NUP’s initial gains in 2023 came about as much at the expense of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid as of Likud, but evidently more from Likud since the war started. At the end of the plotted sequence, there is some decline in NUP and recovery by Likud. This will bear watching, but it would take a lot to reverse the trends we have seen over the past four months.2 As I pointed out as early in the war as 13 October, Israelis have shown how a public can rally around the flag without rallying around the leader. No doubt PM Benjamin Netanyahu thinks he can recover and preserve his political career. But it does not look good for him as of now.
Note down at the lower right of the graph how Otzma Yehudit (OY, appropriately enough) has grown sharply during the war. Superficially, this seems like a surge for the far right. However, it appears to be only a reshuffling of existing far-right voters. In November, 2022, OY ran on an alliance list with Religious Zionism (RZ). This list won 14 seats. On current polling, OY has 9 seats but a list of Mafdal3 and RZ is barely making it into the Knesset at 4 or 5 seats.4 So as a combined force they are actually level or down a seat (assuming RZ clears the threshold, or the two again run on an alliance list).
The left (as distinct from center-left) is doing terribly. On current polling, Labor would fall well below the threshold and Meretz would barely make it, at 4. Presumably they will run as an alliance, but even combined they might win only 4 or 5 seats.5
Note that not only could a government be formed without any of the governing partners arising out of the 2022 election result, but also without the Islamist Ra’am (which backed the 2021-22 “change” government), as well as without the left. My best guess, based on this polling, would be a more classic Israeli oversized coalition that would include the Haredi parties and maybe Labor/Meretz (if they make it in) and maybe also Ra’am. The important point is that Gantz would have multiple options for either a narrow centrist coalition or an oversized one, putting him in a very strong bargaining position.
There is thus a strong centrist tendency in terms of parties, with no evidence of hardline wartime sentiment fueling the far right, and Likud still reeling even if there appears to be a small uptick as of late January.
CAVEATS. It is very important to consider some caveats to all of this. First, obviously we are still far from knowing how the war will end, whether there will be an additional full-scale war with Hezbollah soon, and how the security situation in months’ time might affect these trends. Second, it is highly likely that there will be new right-wing parties and maybe new parties elsewhere in the spectrum that will enter once it is clear there will be an election. There are various scenario polls with specific leaders of either new or existing parties that are also being done by various polling firms. These are not considered here, and I think they mean relatively little as long as they are polling hypothetical party options. (But part of the point is that this current set of options is itself hypothetical! The party system of Israel has been known to be somewhat fluid.) Third, and a very big caveat, is that no election is due till late October, 2026. It is nearly impossible to imagine this government and Knesset lasting that long, but at the moment there is no clear path to an election in 2024. That may change.
The most likely way that an early election could come about remains a split in Likud, creating a new right-wing party with 5 or more current Likud MKs [but see further CAVEAT!]. I am not suggesting that is likely to happen any time soon. It simply is likelier to trigger an early election than any other scenario, in my assessment. The second most likely way is Itamar Ben-Gvir pulling his OY out. He has 6 of the 14 seats won on the list with RZ, and his defection would deprive the original narrow right-wing/Haredi coalition, formed after the 2022 election, of its majority. Ben-Gvir regularly threatens to leave over the government not being hardline enough. Would he really pull the plug? I do not think it can be ruled out, but it seems more bluff than reality. Perhaps at some point he will decide that the only way to preserve his polling gains (as noted, mainly at the expense of the other far-right party, RZ) is to be seen as the one who ended the current “too soft” government. As for the main other way the government could fall, on the current composition of the Knesset there is no path to a no-confidence vote, which would take 61 votes for a specific new government (“constructive vote”).
For the time being, the government is probably more stable than it looks. But that certainly could change, and clearly the public in the aggregate wants a change, based on what it is telling pollsters about voting intention.
Gantz and his NUP joined the government shortly after the massacres by Hamas. ↩︎
It is possible that Prime Minister and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s constantly claiming that only he can prevent a Palestinian state is working. It is my assessment that the forces that have so far prevented the formation of such a state are the lack of a plausible agreement that both sides would consider acceptable, the deep intransigence of the Palestinian side, and the existence and threat of Hamas. But politicians like to claim credit for stuff, and Bibi has been PM during a long period in which a Palestinian state indeed has not happened–continuously since 2009, aside from the brief “change” government of 2021-22. It is not as if an alternative government now would be quick to agree to a two-state “solution,” and I have my doubts that this issue can save Bibi and Likud. But, as I often say, I never make predictions about Israeli politics! ↩︎
Mafdal is what remains of the venerable National Religious Party. One of its recent reincarnations was as Bayit Yehudi, formerly led by Naftali Bennet, who would go on to lead the “change” government but heading a different list at that time (Yamina). The various pieces of Israel’s “right of Likud” have really shuffled around a lot in recent years! ↩︎
The legal threshold is 3.25% of votes, which means no list will win fewer than 4 seats if it wins any. ↩︎
The last time that they ran together (2020), they did considerably worse than the sum of their previous parts. One or both will tend to lose votes to other parties for being allied with each other. ↩︎
Fruits and Votes 