Angola 2022: What (effective) seat product and impact on the outcome?

Earlier this week, in trying to understand the Angolan electoral system, I was unsure whether the allocation of the national list seats was compensatory, or in parallel to the provincial district results. In the comments, Miguel was kind enough to quote the relevant sections of the electoral law, confirming that allocation is parallel.

The results show the ruling MPLA won 51% of the vote and the main opposition UNITA 44%. I will take these as given, and not speculate on whether they are the “real” vote totals or a product of “electoral alchemy.” Rather, I am interested in whether the translation of these votes into seats suggests the MPLA chose a system that would benefit it considerably, or not.

The MPLA has won 124 of the 220 seats. That is 56.3% of the seats, for an advantage ratio (%seats/%votes) of 1.10. How does this compare with an “average” electoral system? I checked my dataset, restricting it to “simple” systems, even though Angola’s is not simple, and to those that are not FPTP or other M=1. The average across 377 such elections is… 1.12.

In other words, if the MPLA was trying to give itself a considerable seat advantage from this electoral system design, it kind of failed.

There is certainly one aspect of the electoral system design that looks like “rigging” via the rules: The provincial tier is highly malapportioned. The 18 provinces vary widely in population, yet each elects five members. See the images with preliminary vote totals in another comment from Miguel or see the CNE site, which also includes seats now. Given the use of D’Hondt at this level and the ample margins in rural provinces, the MPLA won 4-1 in several districts (and 5-0 in one)¹ and 3-2 in all others aside from the three where UNITA was ahead. (UNITA won 4-1 in Cabinda.)

What undermines the MPLA’s own advantage considerably is the nationwide list component, which constitutes just under three fifths of all the seats (and uses Hare quota and largest remainders). If the MPLA had really wanted to create a system to advantage itself, it could have done so by making this tier smaller, or by various other designs.

I do note that UNITA is somewhat underrepresented. Its 90 seats is 40.9%. Given 44% of the votes, its advantage ratio is 0.928. Across a subset of electoral systems fitting the criteria I referred to above, this is quite low. In fact, the average for second parties is 1.075. (Subset because my dataset does not currently have second party shares for all elections; there are 147 elections here.)

In this sense, the electoral system’s design did indeed punish the main opposition. So if this was the MPLA goal, mission accomplished. The malapportionment must be a main cause of this, combined with the parallel (non-compensatory) allocation of the national seats. It should be noted as well, however, that with only two big parties, if one is overrepresented even a little bit (as the MPLA was), the second will probably be more underrepresented than would be the case in a multiparty system more typical of PR electoral systems.

Interestingly, much of the disadvantage to UNITA went to the advantage of smaller parties instead of to MPLA. There were three other parties, each of which won 2 seats. Two seats is 0.91% of the assembly; these parties had from 1.14% to 1.02% of the votes apiece. These small parties won only in the national district, where the only threshold was that a party could not win a seat by remainder unless it had already won a seat.² Given that the national district is 130 seats, it could easily have supported even more parties than the five that won at least 2 seats. The largest party to win no seats had 0.75%. A simple quota for this district would be 0.769%, so this party was below the weak threshold anyway.

The effective numbers of parties were 2.20 by votes and 2.06 by seats–note not much difference there.³ The deviation from proportionality (Gallagher’s “least squares index”) was 4.44%. The latter figure, using again my set of simple non-FPTP systems, is not much different from average (4.87%). So all in all, despite the unusual electoral system, it is not a terribly remarkable result in terms of election indices.

As far as the effective seat product is concerned, for a parallel system I have found the satisfactory method is to take the geometric mean of what we would get if the basic tier were the entire system and what we would get if the system were compensatory. The seat product of the basic tier of this system is straightforward: district magnitude of 5, times tier size of 90 gives us 450. The formula for compensatory based on these parameters (an update and slight modification of a method I have shown here before) would yield an effective seat product of 3844. But because it is actually parallel, we take the geometric average of these values, which is 1315.

An effective seat product of 1315 is in the general range of the simple seat product Norway had (1297) before it adopted a small compensatory tier after 1985, or Peru’s in 1980 or 1985 (1296), and also not much smaller than Switzerland’s (1540).⁴

The disproportionality we should expect from an effective seat product of of 1315 would be around three percent; the actual 4.4% is thus not too much higher. The seat share of the largest party in this election is about 1.4 times expectation⁵ from such a seat product and the effective number of seat-winning parties is about 0.62 the expectation. Obviously, this is due to MPLA political dominance. Or perhaps due to unfair vote reporting. That I can’t say. What I can say is that, despite a fairly unusual combination of extreme malapportionment in one tier and a greater than 50% parallel national tier, the impact this electoral system had on the seat allocation and disproportionality was not anything too out of the ordinary.

Finally, an interesting question but one I will not attempt to answer is whether, had UNITA won a narrow plurality of the nationwide vote, could the MPLA have retained a plurality or even majority of the assembly seats? Given the malapportionment and parallel allocation, I will say maybe. However, once again, I will point out that if they had wanted to ensure they could “win by losing,” the design they came up with was perhaps a little too “fair” to really be in their best (presumed to be anti-democratic) interest. On the other hand, if they are open to a gradual transition to democracy, and perhaps losing a fair election in five or ten years’ time, the system isn’t too bad. It plays to the MPLA’s regional strength yet does not overrepresent it greatly, and it creates space for the opposition, both UNITA and other parties, to operate.

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Notes

1. MPLA won 4-1 in Cuanza Sul, Moxico, Namibe, Huíla, and Cuando Cubango. It won 5-0 in Cunene (where the votes split 82.9%–14.4%). It is really striking that most of these strong MPLA districts are in the south, where UNITA was most present in the civil war. Meanwhile, the UNITA pluralities are Luanda (the capital and largest by far), Cabinda (the non-contiguous oil-rich enclave in the far north which has had a separatist movement) and Zaire (also in the northwest).
2. It is not clear to me if this means a party could have won a provincial seat and thus been eligible for a remainder seat in the national district, or it had to have won a quota of nationwide votes. In any case, as all provincial seats were won by MPLA or UNITA, this detail would not have affected the results of this election.
3. If I knew nothing other than that the effective number of vote-earning parties in some election was 2.2, I would expect the effective number of seat-winning parties to be around 1.72, based on logically derived, and empirically supported, formulas in Votes from Seats.
4. By comparison, if we used the “as if compensatory” estimate of 3844, we would be in roughly the range of single-tier systems like Finland (3076 in 2019) or another former Portuguese colony, East Timor (4225). Indonesia is also in this seat-product neighborhood (4134), as was the French PR system of 1986 (3174).
5. A ratio of actual to expected of 1.38 is near the 90th percentile for over a thousand elections, simple and complex, in the dataset (and would be about the same if I looked at just the simple non-FPTP subset).

Angola 2022

Angola is holding a general election today. According to news reports (e.g., BBC) the long-ruling MPLA faces a serious challenge this time from UNITA. I share the skepticism of many observers that the MPLA would actually accept defeat. But I am going to leave that aside, and do what F&V is known for: trying to understand the electoral rules and constitutional structure, in the event the election produces an acceptably fair outcome.

One news story I saw indicated that the voters have only one vote, and that the leader of the party with the most votes becomes president. A Wikipedia article corroborates that, and more importantly, so does the constitution itself, very explicitly (Art. 109). However, the Wikipedia article states that direct election of the president was abolished by the 2010 constitution. That would be an inaccurate portrayal of the provision: If a plurality-winning party’s leader becomes president, even in the absence of clearing 50% of the vote, and need not bargain with other parties to attain the position, that is direct election. More properly it should be thought of as a fused ballot, not indirect election. Similar fused presidential–assembly ballots, with plurality election, have been used in the past in Honduras and the Dominican Republic, for example.

As for the assembly election, the Wikipedia article referenced above says,

The 220 members are elected in two ways; 90 are elected from 18 five-seat constituencies and 130 from a single nationwide constituency. Both constituency types use a closed list proportional representation system : the D’Hondt method in the provincial constituencies and the simple quota largest remainder method in the nationwide constituency. [Links in original; I have not verified them for accuracy.]

It does not say whether this national component is compensatory or parallel. This could be important, as the basic tier evidently consists of equal-magnitude districts based on provinces that are quite unequal in population. I know nothing about the political geography of Angola, other than that when it was still a rebel movement, UNITA tended to be stronger in the south.

On the other hand, whether the system is parallel or compensatory and the degree of malapportionment may not matter greatly given that the national component is 59% of the total assembly. Parallel PR systems are rare, but have existed in various places at times (including Guatemala and Niger). Compensatory two-tier PR is fairly common, of course (e.g., Denmark or South Africa). There is a link in the Wiki page to what seemed would be the election law at the Aceproject. Unfortunately, it is not the full text, just introductory material regarding the law’s taking effect. The constitution itself sets out the two tiers, but not other key electoral rules, other than stating it must be proportional representation (Art. 143-4).

As to the executive format, it appears from my reading of the constitution to be pure presidential. There is no mention of a prime minister, the term is fixed, and the president has legislative powers, including a veto requiring two thirds of the assembly to override and the authority (Art. 124) to “issue provisional Presidential legislative decrees whenever, for reasons of urgency and need, this measure proves necessary in order to defend the public interest” (126). The cabinet (Council of Ministers) is defined as a mere “auxiliary body serving the President of the Republic” (134).

Here’s hoping the exercise in learning about Angolan political institutions matters, whatever the free choice of Angolan citizens.

Tunisia power grab: And a challenge to claims that premier-presidentialism avoids ‘perils’

Add Tunisia to the list of countries with events that likely qualify as an autogolpe. The elected president, Kais Saied, has undertaken a power grab in which he “froze” parliament, dismissed the prime minister, and announced he would rule by decree.

Tunisia’s system of government, since the emergence of democracy following the fall of the dictatorship in 2011, is premier-presidential. This is the subtype of semi-presidential regime that is generally thought to have good institutional safeguards against presidential over-reach. The elected presidency of Tunisia has constitutionally limited power. It is worth quoting some of the constitution’s provisions that pertain to presidential authority. For instance, Article 70:

In the event of the dissolution of the Assembly, the President of the Republic may, with the agreement of the Head of Government, issue decree-laws which shall be submitted for ratification to the Assembly of the Representatives of the People during its next ordinary session.

The Assembly of the Representatives of the People may, with the agreement of three-fifths of its members, authorize by law for a limited period not exceeding two months, and for a specific purpose, the Head of Government to issue decree-laws of a legislative character, to be submitted for ratification to the Assembly immediately after the end of the period of authorization.

The electoral system might not be amended by decree-laws.

Note that the Head of Government (prime minister) must agree to decrees that occur during dissolution, which in any case must be submitted to the assembly. However, in the current case, the president has already dismissed the PM and dissolved (“suspended”) the assembly. The second paragraph allows for delegated degree powers, but not to the president, and only by a super-majority.

What about dissolution power? Article 77 includes within its list of presidential powers:

Dissolving the Assembly of the Representatives of the People in accordance with provisions of the Constitution. The Assembly shall not be dissolved during the six months following granting confidence to the government, or the six months following legislative elections, or during the last six months of the presidential or parliamentary terms.

The dismissed PM had been appointed in February, 2020, so more than six months ago. Thus perhaps a dissolution could be permissible. However, does the president have authority to dismiss the PM? Articles 97 and 98 govern the process of government termination, and do not give the presidency any unilateral dismissal authority. The government depends on the exclusive confidence of the assembly majority. This is why I class it as a premier-presidential system. Moreover, per Article 89, the president has almost no discretion in who will be appointed prime minister. The process is quite “parliamentary” in that the leader of the largest party must be tasked first, and if that leader fails, then the “person judged most capable to form a government.” If after four months there is no government approved by the assembly majority, then there may be a dissolution and call for early elections. In other words, the president has no unilateral parliamentary dissolution power just as he has no government dismissal authority.

What about emergency power? Article 80 allows for a state of emergency “In the event of imminent danger threatening the nation’s institutions or the security or independence of the country, and hampering the normal functioning of the state… after consultation with the Head of Government and the Speaker of the Assembly of the Representatives of the People and informing the President of the Constitutional Court.” The article goes on to restrict the president’s powers under a state of emergency, including that “The Assembly of the Representatives of the People shall be deemed to be in a state of continuous session throughout such a period.” Obviously, this article has not been followed.

The president claimed he was acting within the constitution. I am not a constitutional lawyer nor any sort of authority on Tunisia. But as I read the constitution, he is lying about respecting institutional order, and has carried out a coup against the government and legislature.

In many of my own writings I have been quite favorable to premier-presidential constitution designs, on the grounds that they provide clear restrictions on the powers of the president, and give presidential aspirants strong incentives to build parties or links to parties in order to sustain an allied government in office. Tunisia now is an example that strains this argument. This president is an independent, elected with 72.7% in the second round on 13 October, 2019, after having secured only 18.4% in the first round on 15 September (his nearest opponent had 15.6% and the third candidate 12.9%–both runners-up were party-backed).

The last assembly election was on 6 October, 2019. Aside: Is this only case ever in which an assembly election has been between rounds of a presidential election? In the assembly election, the largest party was the Islamist party, Ennahda, on only 19.6%. (Their candidate finished third in the presidential first round.) Ennahda won 52 of the 217 seats (24.0%). The second largest party, Heart of Tunisia, won 14.6% and 38 seats; this was the party of the other presidential runoff contender. No other party broke 7% of the vote. The effective number of seat-winning parties is presumably in excess of 8.0.*

Thus we have here a case of extremely high party-system fragmentation, combined with a president lacking party ties. This is the classic Linzian “perils of presidentialism” combination. However, premier-presidential systems are supposed to overcome these perils (although Linz himself had his doubts). One case does not disprove a thesis, and maybe Tunisian democracy would have broken down even if there were no directly elected presidency. Nonetheless, the precise means of breakdown–an autogolpe carried out by an outsider nonparty president–should give us pause about the claim that premier-presidentialism is an antidote to the perils of presidentialism.

____

* I can’t say precisely because the source I am using–Wikipedia–groups 12 seats under “independent lists” which obviously should not be treated as a single party; if it were a single party, the effective N would be 7.85.

Term limits for a prime minister?

Lots of presidents have term limits–either one term or two, typically (and with variations in whether an interim out of office permits a later return). But terms limits on prime ministers are rare. The only cases that come to mind are Botswana and South Africa. Just to confuse things, those countries call their chief executive “president”; however, they (together with their cabinets) are responsible to the majority in the assembly, and thus these are prime ministers in the sense of heads of government whose political survival depends on parliamentary confidence.

Given the small number of cases, there may not be much of a literature in political science or law about term-limiting prime ministers. I am wondering if readers are aware of anything that one should read to understand the implications and possible motivations for term limits on assembly-responsible executives.

The question of term-limiting the prime minister comes up now and then in Israel, including in the current campaign, where New Hope Party leader Gideon Saar has said the first bill he would advance if he becomes Prime Minister would set a term limit of eight years. The idea has come up also in the past. Once upon a time, apparently even none other than Benjamin Netanyahu thought it was a good idea; this was, of course, before serving 2009–21 (and perhaps beyond) in the position. The issue comes up at times elsewhere as well (such as Grenada and St. Kitts and such a measure was passed, controversially, in Iraq). (Edit: in a comment, JD notes that Belize and Thailand have term limits in their prime ministers.)

I would generally suspect that the logic of term limits (prevent one person from monopolizing power) fits poorly with the logic of parliamentarism (the head of government serves at the pleasure of the assembly majority). But apparently any such poor fit does not prevent the idea surfacing here and there. It would be especially challenging to formulate a workable term-limit provision in a country that often has early elections–sometimes very early and frequent ones–like Israel.

South African vote and census data

The following is not my post. It is a comment by Manuel on an earlier post. It is so interesting in its detail, that I thought it deserved to be “promoted” to a central place in the virtual orchard.

A few weeks ago I finally included on my website’s South Africa page the results of last May’s election; I also took the opportunity to run some correlations between the election results and South African census data. Initially I worked at the level of the country’s 213 local municipalities, where I found a very high inverse correlation (-0.90) between the DA share of the vote and the black African percentage of the population in the 2011 census; that figure remained at -0.88 when census figures were substituted with data from the 2016 Community Survey.I also found a very high correlation at the municipal level of 0.90 between the share for the right-wing VF+ (whose vote increased noticeably in the election) and the percentage of Afrikaans-speaking whites over the total population in 2011 (0.91 when using 2016 Community Survey data).

In fact, the municipal-level results of last May’s election showed that in municipalities where the population is 95%+ black African (on average 98% black and 1% white), the DA vote came down to about 5%, behind EFF and even IFP, while ANC remained far ahead with 70% of the vote; the exact figures vary depending on whether 2011 or 2016 population figures are used for the analysis.

However, for good measure I ran the correlations at the electoral ward level – the lowest level for which both election results and 2011 detailed population statistics are readily available (the 2016 Community Survey data doesn’t go below the local municipality level). There are currently a total of 4,392 wards in South Africa, and at this level the inverse correlation between the DA share of the vote and the percentage of black Africans was even stronger, standing at -0.93. Meanwhile, the correlation between the VF+ share of the vote and the percentage of white Afrikaners over the total population remained at 0.90.

In addition, clear voting patterns emerged when wards were grouped by race majority (or plurality): DA won handily in majority white, Coloured or Indian/Asian wards, but dropped to single digits and came behind EFF in majority black African wards, where ANC won a sweeping victory (95% of black South Africans live in majority black wards, while 74% of Coloureds and 61% of whites reside in majority Coloured and white wards, respectively; the majority black wards are 93% black, while the majority Coloured wards are 75% Coloured and the majority white wards are 63% white; the majority Indian/Asian wards are 64% Indian/Asian, but only account for 38% of that group’s overall population).

Separately, I also tested a fifth, “no race dominant” category (no racial group over 50% and second largest group at or above 25%), but I found it made little difference in the results for the other groups. Overall, the “no race dominant” category was plurality black with a sizable white minority not far behind, as well as substantial numbers of Coloureds and Indians/Asians. In the election that additional category went solidly for DA, although by considerably less than the combined non-black majority (white-Coloured-Indian/Asian) wards, while ANC didn’t do nearly as well as the increased percentage of blacks (relative to the non-black group) would have suggested; on the other hand the EFF vote appeared to be largely in line with the increase in the percentage of blacks.

Speaking of EFF, in an earlier comment I had compared its result with that of the far-right HNP in the 1981 white House of Assembly election. However, after going over ward figures grouped by race on a province-by-province basis that assessment needs to be qualified. Even just looking at the majority black wards, EFF remained at best below 20% and nearly fifty points behind ANC; by contrast, in 1981 many National Party MPs were horrified to see their HNP challengers – who usually polled in the single digits – rack up 30% of the vote, and in some cases even more. As such, EFF isn’t quite yet as strong a challenger to ANC on the left – even among blacks – as HNP was to NP on the right among Afrikaners back in 1981, but that could change in the years ahead.

In fact, a far more apt analogy with the rise of HNP in 1981 among Afrikaner voters would be precisely the substantial vote increase for VF+, which had its best showing in majority white wards, where it won 11% of the vote; it fared poorly elsewhere, polling just 2% even in Coloured wards, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact it had Peter Marais, a former Cape Town mayor, Western Cape premier and notorious party hopper as its Western Cape candidate for premier (Mr. Marais has switched parties over half-a-dozen times in the past twenty-five years). In fact, the low VF+ share in Coloured wards was strongly correlated (0.84) to the 6% white minority (mostly Afrikaners) living in those wards. Moreover, within the majority white wards there was a wide gap in VF+ support between wards where whites were predominantly English-speaking, and those where they were mainly Afrikaans-speaking: VF+ polled just 3% in the former but reached 15% in the latter. The latter figure rose to 23% and 24% in the white majority wards of the North-West and Limpopo provinces (25% and 23% in the provincial ballot), where the white population remains overwhelmingly Afrikaner. This turn of events may well be a South African manifestation of the worldwide surge of the populist right, but also the recurrence of a historical phenomenon among Afrikaners, or a combination of both. In any event, earlier this summer VF+ went on to win by a landslide (albeit on a low turnout) a municipal by-election in a Stilfontein (City of Matlosana) ward where it had narrowly outvoted DA in the May provincial ballot.

There were also fairly evident voter turnout differences among the four ward groups: white majority wards had a far higher turnout rate (78%) than black- or Coloured-majority wards (65% in each case) or Indian/Asian majority wards (68%).

Finally, the ward-level election results show two very different South Africas co-existing side by side: one comprised by wards where black Africans constituted at least 95% of the population (on average over 99%), in which ANC swept the election on a 63% turnout with 73% of the vote, far ahead of EFF (13%), IFP (5%) and DA (4%); and another made up of wards in the rest of the country, where black Africans constituted 49% of the population, Coloureds and whites 22% each and Indians/Asians 6%, and where DA prevailed over ANC, 42% to 38%, with EFF polling 8% and VF+ 5%, on a 70% turnout rate.

Handbook chapter on the South African electoral system available free (for now)

Via Molly Balikov, of Oxford University Press (on Twitter), comes this good bit of news:

With the upcoming South African election, the chapter by Karen Ferree in the Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems (co-edited by me) is free to access on line.

Party lists for South Africa 2019

South Africa’s general election is approaching–8 May. Parties are releasing their lists. EWN reports the names of the top 20 candidates on the national list of the Democratic Alliance (and has a link to the rest of the lists).

Meanwhile, africanews reports that the African National Congress has been criticized for having “tainted politicians” who were close to former president Jacob Zuma on its list. For instance,

Zuma allies Nomvula Mokonyane, the environment minister who was recently implicated in graft at a corruption inquiry, and Bathabile Dlamini who was at the centre of a benefits payments fiasco, are named among the top 10 candidates on the list.

As a political analyst, Ralph Mathekga, is quoted as saying: “The ANC list is very revealing.”

Perhaps so, and that is a reminder that it is not true (as critics of closed lists often claim) that candidates do not matter when the list is closed and thus voters are unable to vote for specific candidates. In fact, the set of candidates a party selects, especially in top and thus safe ranks (for a major party) do provide clues about the party’s priorities. In the ANC’s case, presumably one of the priorities is to keep the different wings of the party within the tent, even if that means potentially diluting its message of having tackled corruption by ousting the previous incumbent leader, thereby allowing it to enter this election with a new incumbent at the helm. Beneath that level, of course, it is the same party.

Other parties, like the DA and the Economic Freedom Fighters, will use the slate of candidates against the ANC. The candidates do matter–even on closed lists! Or at least opposition parties may act as if they do. Whether voters will vote against a ruling party because they do not like specific candidates in various ranks is, of course, another matter.

Zimbabwe, 2018

The Zimbabwe election results were finally announced. Presumably to the surprise of few, the incumbent President Mnangagwa of ZANU-PF has “won” and the party will have a two-thirds majority of the assembly (elected by FPTP and with high malapportionment).

Amazingly, Mnangagwa won just enough to not require a runoff! Yes, I am being cynical.

The official results apparently show ZANU-PF getting more votes for assembly than for presidency. That would be unusual for a major party in a presidential system, but here’s assuming that the gap was even greater than officially reported. Either that, or the assembly election was even more rigged than the presidential.

Also unusual–and for me a strong indicator that things were being cooked–is that the assembly result was released days before the presidential. I do not have actual records on these things, but I believe such a sequence is highly unusual. Usually they either come out together, or the presidential result gets announced first.

Another indicator of fraud is that the reported turnout went down between an earlier announcement and the final one. It is not hard to imagine that sufficient opposition votes were discarded to ensure Mnangagwa had over 50%.

Not much more to say, really. But if you want to have your say, here’s the space.

I highly recommend this post at On Elections:

Zimbabwe: another doubtful and deadly election result

Sierra Leone 2018

[See caveat in comments about the electoral rules of the earlier elections. For now, I am not changing the post, even though I should re-do it with averages only from the FPTP elections.]

On Sunday, Sierra Leone held its presidential runoff. Sierra Leone is one of those examples of a relatively rare combination: presidentialism with an assembly elected by plurality in single-seat districts. Some of the other examples of this combo are also found in West Africa, including Ghana and Liberia. In this entry, I will consider the effects of Sierra Leone’s institutions on the party system, applying some of the logical models of Votes from Seats.

The runoff rule used for the presidency is even rarer (unique?). A second round is required if the leading candidate in the first round does not reach 55% of the valid votes (Art. 42.2.e of the constitution of 1991).

Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) won 43.3% in the first round on 7 March. The runner up was Samura Kamara of the All People’s Congress (APC), with 42.7%. This was the country’s closest contest thus far since the current democratic institutions were inaugurated in 1996.

Sierra Leone has had one president during this time period who was elected with less than 55%. In 2007, Ernest Bai Koroma of the APC won with just 54.62%. However, this was in the runoff. He had 44.3% (to 38.3% for the runner up) in the first round. And herein lies the real oddity: One might wonder why it is OK to elect a president with just half of the votes, plus one, in a two-candidate runoff, but a total falling between 50% (plus one) and (one vote under) 55% would not be sufficient to win in a single round.

So far Sierra Leone has not had an election in which the first-round leader was in that 50-55% grey zone. Dating to 1996, first-round leaders’ vote percentages have been 35.8, 70.1, 44.3, 58.7, and 43.3

Sunday’s runoff (results for which will not be known for about a week) is to replace outgoing President Koroma, who was elected in 2007 and reelected in 2012.

In the assembly elections, concurrent with the first round of the presidential election, only 90 of the 132 constituencies have been declared so far. (There are also 12 seats reserved for tribal chiefs.) The SLPP has won 47 seats to the APS’s 32. The Coalition for Change has eight, despite its presidential candidate having placed fourth with only 3.5% of the vote. Obviously the Coalition for Change has a regional base, and parties with regional strength can win under FPTP despite having a low nationwide vote total. (National vote totals for assembly are not yet available.) The party of the third-place presidential candidate, who won 6.9%, is called the National Grand Coalition, but evidently it is not. On the other hand, it also is apparently not regional, having won no assembly seats (at least among those declared).

The assembly has been increased in size from the last election, when there were 112 elected seats. This remains slightly undersized for a country with a population around seven million. The Cube Root Law would imply an assembly of around 192.

As for the assembly party system, the current assembly size, S=132 (ignoring the indirectly elected chiefs), and the use of FPTP (M=1) implies an effective number of seat-winning parties, N_S=(MS)^1/6=2.26. On currently declared seats, we have N_S=2.45 (counting each of three independents elected thus far as a “party”). That is only a very minor deviation from expectation.

The combination of FPTP for assembly and a two-round presidential election might be expected to inflate N_S due to the expected (and observed) proliferation of presidential candidates seeking votes in the first round. At least it would be so expected if one believes in coattail effects. There were sixteen presidential candidates contesting the first round, and seventeen parties with assembly candidates in at least some districts.

While the effect of the first-round threshold of 55% is not clear, we might expect it to enhance fragmenting effects, relative to a standard majority runoff. Candidates who are unlikely to win might enter anyway, hoping to deny even a strong leading candidate an outright win. Given that an outright win is more difficult in Sierra Leone than in other two-round systems, the effect might be to enhance first-round fragmentation. Under a “coattails” expectation, that fragmentation would carry over into the assembly elections, even with the use of FPTP for those elections, held concurrent with the first round of the presidential contest.

In Votes from Seats, Taagepera and I express some skepticism about coattail effects, at least in terms of their impact on the effective number of parties. In fact, we go so far as to claim that one can deduce the effective number of presidential candidates (N_P) from the assembly electoral system. A more direct logical expectation, developed in the book, goes from the assembly voting party system to N_P; to the extent that the voting fragmentation (measured by the effective number of vote-earning parties, N_V) is over-fragmented, relative to the electoral system expectation, then N_P will be inflated as well.

Sierra Leone is thus a good test case for the logical models of Votes from Seats. First of all, it has changed its assembly size twice now, while retaining FPTP. Second, as noted already, it combines the FPTP assembly electoral system with a two-round presidential formula that might tend to increase fragmentation of the presidential contest. If it does so, it may also tend to increase N_S and N_V, if coattails explain assembly party-system fragmentation. In a table below are the results, showing all three actually observed effective numbers (N_S, N_V, N_P), where available, and the expected values. The expectations are derived from the seat product (MS) in the case of N_S, but for N_V, we should use the derivation from observed N_S, because if the latter is over expectation, for sure N_V will be, too. For N_P, the table reports the expectation from N_V, which is the more direct route. Again, if N_V, is higher than expected (perhaps because so is N_S), then N_P will be, as well. However, we can also compare the institutionally grounded expectation, derived from MS only.

What we see is that N_V was far “too high” in the initial election under the current constitution, given the quite low assembly size. So was N_P, and thus it looks like a “win” for the coattails expectation, perhaps because as an initial election before the civil war (starting 1991) was fully settled, many candidates may have entered unsure of who would be viable. The 2002 election, following the settlement of the war, also looks like a case of coattails, as the winner easily dominated the field, leading to very low values of all three effective numbers.

Nonetheless, on average, the institutionally derived expectations perform well. Even with the first election being well off the expectation (and the second, too, albeit less so and in the opposite direction), overall, the ratio of observed N_S to actual has been only a little above 1.00; the ratio of expected to observed is 1.153, shown in the bottom line. (If we ignore the anomalously fragmented 1996 election, the mean N_S is 2.175, or slightly below the expectation from the assembly sizes used in 2002-2018.)

Given actual N_S, the observed N_V has been almost exactly as expected, on average, with a ratio of 1.025. And while the slight over-fragmentation of the average assembly election result in Sierra Leone gets magnified when we look at expected N_P from MS (i.e., from the assembly electoral system only, for which the ratio is 1.225), the expected N_P from observed N_V is not too far off, with a ratio of 1.16. Note that the ratio for N_P from observed N_V is almost the same as the ratio for N_S from the assembly seat product.

Thus, even with a presidential electoral formula (super-majority runoff) that theoretically promotes more fragmentation than the assembly electoral system (FPTP), there is scant evidence–beyond 1996–that we are unable to predict the assembly party system from the assembly electoral system. There is also scant evidence that we can’t predict voting fragmentation for both assembly and presidency from the assembly party system. The small over-fragmentation of the assembly party system, on average, gets carried through to the other measures. This over-fragmentation might be due to the fragmenting incentives of the presidential electoral formula, but only in 1996 is the evidence for such an explanation, based on candidate entry and their coattails, compelling. Otherwise, it seems the assembly seat product allows us to get a pretty good handle on the output indices of Sierra Leone’s elections.

The seat product model, based on the assembly electoral system, performs well, even in a new post-war democracy like Sierra Leone, and even given the country’s somewhat unusual combination of institutions.

South Africa: No confidence vote looming?

The National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa is attempting to get President Jacob Zuma to resign. Media coverage of this (such as a BBC story from 5 Feb.) too often implies that this is a “normal” presidency with a fixed term. However, despite the title, as far as executive survival in office is concerned, South Africa’s head of government is a prime minister. He can be removed by a vote of no confidence.

See the Constitution of South Africa, Article 102(2):

If the National Assembly, by a vote supported by a majority of its members, passes a motion of no confidence in the President, the President and the other members of the Cabinet and any Deputy Ministers must resign.

It could hardly be more clear than that. So if the ANC (which has far more than a majority of assembly seas) wants Zuma out, there’s no question how this will end. Zuma may have his own reasons to want to make the party go through the spectacle of a no-confidence vote, rather than step down “voluntarily”, but he does indeed serve at their pleasure.

It is also not as if is unusual in parliamentary systems for parties to replace their leader and the prime minister before an election. In Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers, David Samuels and I show that roughly a third of PMs in parliamentary democracies lose office by an intra-party procedure (rather than by losing a general election or leading a coalition that collapses). We did not note the timing of such removals relative to elections, but there is little doubt that many of the party-initiated removals take place closer to the next election than the preceding one. (In most such systems, the election can be called early on initiative of the new PM. The South African constitution also has a provision for early election, at the initiative of the assembly majority itself–Art. 50.)

Already this past December the ANC’s convention narrowly voted to elect Cyril Ramaphosa as head of the party (over Zuma’s ex-wife). He will lead the party in the campaign for the general election of 2019, whether or not Zuma is still president at the time.

A key difference in South Africa, compared to most other parliamentary systems, is that the prime minister is also the head of state–hence the title, President. In fact, other constitutional provisions in South Africa seem lifted from an actual presidential system (i.e., one in which the head of government is popularly elected for a fixed term). For instance, Article 89 has a provision for impeachment:

1. The National Assembly, by a resolution adopted with a supporting vote of at least two thirds of its members, may remove the President from office only on the grounds of ­

a. a serious violation of the Constitution or the law;

b. serious misconduct; or

c. inability to perform the functions of office.

It is hard to imagine what this is doing in a parliamentary constitution! If, like most parliamentary republics, the head of state (“President”) and the head of government (“Prime Minister”) were separate persons, the presence of both provisions quoted here would make sense. But what purpose does an impeachment clause, requiring a super majority, have in a constitution that lets the assembly remove the combined president/PM by a much simpler procedure?

The pressure is ramping up, the State of the Nation speech has been postponed, and the rumors are running rampant ahead of a special meeting of the NEC. The party leadership body could “recall” him in a manner similar to how Thabo Mbeki’s term ended early in 2008. However, that is a party procedure with no legal standing and thus would not be binding on the President.

Will he resign, or will the ANC need to invoke Art. 102?

 

Senegal 2017–It is all about 2019

Senegal holds assembly elections today, 30 July. Prime Minister Mahammed Boun Abdullah Dionne says: “We aren’t talking any longer about July 30, but of 2019.”

Of course. This is, after all, a counter-honeymoon election. It may not seem like it could be, because 2019 is pretty far off. But the presidential term is seven years, and the incumbent, Macky Sall, was elected in 2012.

In Votes from Seats (Chapter 12), Shugart and Taagepera (2017, in press) suggest that a counter-honeymoon election is any held three-fourths of the way through the president’s term. The months since the president was elected (first round in February, 2012) to now work out to 0.77. While there is no hard definition of when the counter-honeymoon starts–Elapsed Time between presidential elections is a continuous scale–three fourths is a reasonable approximation, and Senegal is just past that.

The main points Taagepera and I make about counter-honeymoon elections are: (1) The president’s party tends to suffer a substantial reduction in its vote share, and (2) They occur at a time when the parties are jockeying for position ahead of the next presidential election. It is the latter point that the premier is signaling is important today.

In the book, we have a formula for estimating the likely change in the president’s party’s support in a non-concurrent election (see my 23 April post from between rounds of the French presidential election). It is an empirical estimate, not a deductive model, but the pattern it captures has strong logic behind it, and it fits the data very well. It states:

R_p=1.20–0.725E,

where R_p is the vote share of the president’s party in the assembly election, divided by the president’s own vote share (in the first round, if two-round system), and E is the Elapsed Time (months between presidential and assembly election, divided by presidential inter-electoral period, also in months*).

In the case of today’s Senegal election, the equation returns a predicted value of R_p=0.64. Sall’s first-round vote percentage in 2012 was only 26.6%. It would be pretty bad news for him, and for governability in the final 23% of the time to the next presidential elections (19 months), if our equation’s application to today’s election turned out accurate. It would mean his party would get only 17% of the vote. Of course, the actual share could be higher. Or lower.

Attempting  to predict the votes in this case is also made more difficult by the fact that in the last assembly election, Sall’s party, the Alliance for the Republic (ARP) did not run on its own. It formed a coalition in advance of the election. That is not surprising–the electoral system is (unlike that of France) a single round, and it is quite majoritarian (like that of France). Thus there would be incentives for parties who had backed the newly elected president to join forces, and indeed they did. The last assembly election had a strong honeymoon timing, with E=0.06.

My quick search did not turn up any disaggregated votes by parties within the United in Hope coalition that was formed to support Sall in July, 2012. And I have no idea whether some of the parties that might have joined it have already jumped ship (the second point above about counter-honeymoon elections would lead me to expect a yes to that).

In the 2012 assembly election, United in Hope earned 53.06% of the vote, with runner-up Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) way back, at 15.23%. The PDS was the party of the previous president, Abdoulaye Wade, whom Sall defeated. (Sall himself had won 65.8% in the runoff.) If that was a “normal” honeymoon, we would have expected the president’s party to have won 30.7%,  implying an additional 20% or so coming from other, post-first-round coalition partners.

The Wikipedia article on today’s election says that the coalition backing Sall includes the Socialist Party and the Alliance of the Forces of Progress. These parties’ candidates in the 2012 first round earned 11.3% and 13.2% of the votes, respectively. If we add those up we get 50.7%, which would actually imply little growth for the parties in the honeymoon election. (This is not surprising to me; the supporters of the defeated candidate would be harder to mobilize for a nonconcurent assembly election than for the presidential runoff.) However, perhaps we could use this revised figure in our R_p calculation. If we do, we get around 32% for their possible combined share, instead of 17% using only Sall’s own party. Anything much above 32% would defy the Elapsed Time expectations.

The Wikipedia article also says that the opposition failed to coordinate. The electoral system is mixed-member majoritarian. Around 40% of the seats are by PR (nationwide), with the rest in a mix of single-seat and multi-seat constituencies, using plurality (according to IPU). Thus even 32% against a divided opposition might leave the pro-Sall coalition near a majority of seats. But if his alliance is nearer 17%, governing could be difficult for the last quarter of his term.

The Senegalese system is semi-presidential, of the premier-presidential subtype. Thus the cabinet can fall if it lacks the confidence of the assembly majority, but the president has significant powers (he does not require an investiture vote to install the cabinet and he has a legislative veto). Cohabitation is a possibility, but so is a reshuffled pro-Sall cabinet.

_______

* In the book, we actually calculate E based off the precise date, but here I have just used whole months.

Lesotho (MMP) & Malta (STV) hold early elections on the same day

Lesotho and Malta will hold early elections this Saturday, June 3rd. Both have parliamentary systems and each one uses a different (and interesting!) type of proportional representation – each having a certain following among readers of this blog.

Lesotho uses a one-vote variant of MMP, with 80 single-seat districts in the nominal tier and 40 in the list tier. There is no threshold, and no seats are added in case of overhang, so a party can win a majority by taking more than 60 districts.

Malta uses STV, with a twist: if I understand correctly, in case one party receives an absolute majority of first-preference votes, seats are added to ensure that party has a majority, and that the majority is in proportion to its majority of the vote.

The elections were also called in different ways. Lesotho’s parliament (election not required before February 2020) was dissolved after the government lost a confidence vote in March – the prime minister could have handed over power to the coalition that ousted him, but chose instead to ask the king for an early election. Malta’s early election (originally not due until March 2018) was called by the prime minister.

Retractable concession–Gambia

It is always a remarkable thing when an authoritarian president who no one expects to lose accepts defeat (quite jovially and seemingly even humbly) in an election. It is still remarkable, though less enjoyable, to see such a president turn around and retract his concession. That’s what happened in Gambia in the space of a week earlier this month.

An opposition leader’s unfortunate remark about plans to prosecute President Yahya Jammeh might have contributed, but surely Jammeh would fear that regardless of any statements. He may have attempted to stop the vote count on election day and failed, lacking support among military and police. (Guardian, Dec. 7)

Perhaps it just took him a week to rally (buy?) support in the security services to reject the election. The head of the army actually pledged his allegiance to the victor, Adama Barrow (defenceWeb, Dec. 8) only to appear a few days later with an image of Jammeh pinned to his uniform (Dakaractu, Dec. 14)

In the meantime, there had also been a substantial revision of the vote. Jammeh’s margin of defeat to Barrow narrowed from about nine percentage points to only four, although that’s still a fairly clear margin. Notwithstanding the result, Jammeh has declared himself president while armed forces continue to block the Independent Election Commission headquarters.

(Gambians vote with marbles!)

I will add, because this is F&V, that Gambia elects its president by plurality. Barrow’s vote total, according to the election commission, was 43.3%. Jammeh’s was 39.6% and a third candidate, Mama Kandeh, won 17.1%. I don’t know anything about Kandeh, but I wonder if his presence–or the lack of a runoff requirement–robbed Barrow of a more decisive victory. It might not have mattered, and of course we have seen African dictators before who admit falling to second place in the first round of a two-round election, then manage to make it impossible for the opposition to prevail (or even contest) the runoff. (See Zimbabwe, 2008.)

 

Zambia Constitutional amendments

Last week, Zambia enacted a package of amendments to the constitution that has been years in the making.

Among the amendments are a number of significant changes to the presidency. In the last decade, two early presidential elections (2008 and 2015) were instigated by the incumbent’s death. In the wake of the cost and difficulty of organising these elections, there were calls for the institution of a vice-presidency elected as the president’s running mate and replacing the vice president on a permanent basis. This change was included in the amendments, replacing the previous position of vice president which was appointed by the President and only substituted him on an interim basis.

Another change was to the president’s dissolution power. Under the previous provisions, the President was able to call an early general election at any time, which would include both presidential and legislative elections. The new provisions stipulates that such a dissolution can only be effected “if the Executive cannot effectively govern the Republic due to the failure of the National Assembly to objectively and reasonably carry out its legislative function”, and must be reviewed by the Constitutional Court, which determines whether or not that is the case. This seems to me as rather ill-advised; whether or not parliament fulfils its role ‘objectively’ or ‘reasonably’, and whether or not the President is able to ‘govern effectively’, are fundamentally political questions, and getting the courts involved in that could seriously undermine their neutrality and independence.

Additionally, in response to widespread calls for such a change, the electoral system for president has been changed from plurality to two-round majority. The original draft presented to parliament several years ago also envisioned the adoption of Mixed-Member Proportional for legislative elections, but this was removed from the bill by the National Assembly.

Lastly, in what seems to be a growing trend in new or heavily-amended constitutions, the amendments introduce federalism (seeing as they include lists dividing up competences among national, provincial and local government which are entrenched along with the rest of the constitution), but call it a system of ‘devolved’ governance.

Nigeria: Jonathan concedes

In the end, despite the initial postponement, technical troubles, and the general doubt that either candidate would accept defeat, it went pretty smoothly. Nigeria’s incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan has conceded defeat.

It would be nice if the voters had not just elected a former dictator. But at least they have shown alternation is possible at the ballot boxes. This is good.

For results: nigeriaelections.org