More parliamentarism in Central Asia

The Venice Commission has published an generally positive opinion on the Georgian government’s proposal for constitutional reforms. The reforms were proposed after the governing Georgian Dream party won 115 seats in the 150 member legislature in elections, slightly more than the three-quarters majority required to amend the document.

Specifically, the amendments propose repealing direct elections to the Presidency, replacing it with election by a 300-member electoral college composed of members of the national legislature and local councillors. In addition, most of the powers of the Presidency are stripped. This creates a parliamentary system, with a Prime Minister only removable through a constructive vote of no confidence.

The previously unicameral legislature will be replaced, nominally, with a bicameral legislature, comprised of a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies. However, the Senate specifically includes members elected from Abkhazia, currently under the control of a separatist government, and is only to be created after “appropriate conditions have been created throughout the territory of Georgia”. This would seem to imply that the chamber can only be created when Abkhazia returns to government control, and the Venice Commission’s report confirms that they understand its creation will be delayed.

In addition, there are changes to the electoral law. The existing mixed-member majoritarian system with a roughly even split between single-member constituencies elected using the two-round system and party-list PR with a 5% threshold will be replaced with a system of list PR only, still with a 5% threshold. While there is little elaboration, the document does specify that seats shall be allocated by the Hare quota, but instead of allocating seats by largest remainders, all remaining seats are allocated to the largest party (a method used in Greece in one of their endless electoral system changes).

The change bears some resemblance to the relatively recent amendments in Armenia. Like Georgia, a semi-presidential system with a legislature elected with a mixed-member system transitioned into a parliamentary one with a legislature elected under a list system with a bonus (though Armenia’s bonus is somewhat more elaborate, and guarantees a majority government in one form or another). While drawing broad conclusions off two examples is obviously bound to be, these two results may suggest that there is a shift away from politics centred around an all-powerful directly elected presidency, and towards more party-based politics.

A more tenuous argument along these lines could be made in relation to the electoral system. In both cases (along with Kyrgyzstan, which actually moved from single-member districts to MMM to party list), a system in which individual candidates were an important part of legislative elections (especially in the years shortly after independence) has been replaced by a system in which parties are the dominant actors. On the other hand, the pendulum has moved the other way elsewhere in the region, in Russia and the Ukraine.

The President, though endorsed by the Georgian Dream party at the 2013 election, does not appear to have been overly enthusiastic about the landslide victory. The Venice Commission did express some concerns about the power of a government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority, but that seems less likely in Georgia than in Armenia, owing to the more proportional system.

Uttar Pradesh, 2017

Election results have been released for the state assembly of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state. It was a big win for the federal ruling party, the BJP. The seat tally shows 312 for the BJP, with the second highest being the Samajwadi Party (SP) at 47. The SP, the ruling party since 2012, was in a pre-election coalition with the Indian National Congress (INC), which won just 7 seats. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which has been a significant party in the state in the past, won 19 seats.

Unlike 2012, when the SP majority in the assembly was achieved on not even 30% of the vote, this year’s BJP victory was a big win in votes, too. Not a majority, but a decisive plurality, at 39.7% of the vote. The SP-INC combine had 28.0% and the BSP 22.2%.

Note that the BJP managed a three-fourths majority (77.4%) of the 403 seats on not even 40% of the vote. The advantage ratio (%seats/%votes) was 1.95. That must be one of the biggest manufactured majorities under FPTP anywhere, at least in a large assembly.

Several other states have had recent elections as well. The news was better for the struggling INC in some, including Punjab, Goa, and Manipur, though its pluralities in these are short of majority status. The Aam Aadmi Party (which governs Delhi, but has had minimal success elsewhere) managed a distant second place in Punjab. See the results at the second link in this entry.

Jordan’s new electoral system – the more things change…

By JD Mussel and Henry Schlechta

Jordan held a parliamentary election last month, for the first time under a proportional party-list system. This reform, in line with many previous proposals, replaces the earlier Single Non-Transferable Vote or (mechanically FPTP) pseudo-SNTV (it’s not clear which one was actually used last time around) which at the last election in 2013 was accompanied by a small national list-PR tier.

Reform of the previous single-vote system was a long-running demand of opposition parties, a number of which have taken part in these elections after having repeatedly boycotted them in the past. However, what they may not have noticed (yet) is that the new electoral system may turn out to be remarkably similar to the old SNTV.

A total of 130 non-reserved seats were filled proportionally from open lists of candidates in 23 districts, out of which 9 seats are from 3 parallel Bedouin districts (similar to NZ’s Maori districts) electing 3 seats each. The districts range from 3 to 10 seats, with a median of 4. Spread out among all the districts is a quota for 15 women and (among the non-Bedouin districts) there are quotas for Christians (9 seats) and Circassians/Chechens (3 seats). With more seats allocated to the cities, there seems to be less malapportionment than under the previous system, but it is not clear how much less.

The lists are open, with seats going to candidates with most votes within each list. This was presented as a kind of return to the ostensibly similar multiple non-transferable vote (MNTV) which had existed before the introduction of SNTV: voters have as many votes as there are seats to be filled, and can cast them for a list as a whole or for any number of individual candidates on the list. Candidacies must be as part of lists with at least 3 candidates up to the number of seats available.

Largest-remainder PR and ‘SNTVization’

Now, technically, the system is proportional. However, the apportionment formula is largest remainders, using the Hare quota. The potential problem is that the combination of these features and the open-list aspect may present incentives that roughly approximate SNTV. Larger quotas (the Hare quota is the largest of the commonly used ones) are advantageous to smaller parties: the fewer seats are allocated by quotas, the more seats allocated by remainders. The smaller number of votes required to win a seat by remainder means that smaller parties are able to win these seats. On the other hand, for a large party to win multiple seats, they must fill multiple quotas.

The possibility of getting seats from remainders can encourage large parties to turn themselves into multiple small parties, through running multiple lists and dividing their votes between these lists^[1]. Hong Kong represents the best example of this tendency. While on paper it is a party-list PR system with largest-remainder and the Hare quota, the 2012 and 2016 elections saw no ‘list’ win more than one seat. Instead, larger parties like the Democratic Alliance ran multiple lists, and divided their votes between them. If no seats are allocated by quotas, the M-lists with the highest vote are allocated one seat. The effect of this is to create a system approximate to SNTV.

District magnitude does not appear to be an especially important factor in this process, with 5-member districts in Hong Kong and the 100-member nationwide district for the Colombian Senate (up until 2002) both being on paper party-list but effectively acting as SNTV.

Of course, there are other relevant institutional considerations. The new law’s requirement for at least three candidates per list could theoretically limit this tactic, though it could probably still be possible for a list to consist of one politician with public profile and two other ‘decoy’ candidates. It is not clear if there are any legal restrictions on one political party registering multiple lists; however, in the context of an electoral politics where parties are still weak and fragmented (and which was until now dominated by independent politicians), it is unlikely to be difficult to register effectively duplicate lists under similar labels.

Political impact

The results of the election show a continuation of the party fragmentation that existed before; barely any parties won more than one seat in each district. However, fragmentation was occasionally an outcome of the electoral system, as there are a couple of cases where lists that won a single seat received more than double the votes of other winning lists. This would have given them two seats if they had presented two separate lists, at least if they had managed to keep the vote distributed evenly between them. Of course, electoral systems take time in order to affect behaviour; however, it won’t be long before politicians will notice this outcome, and the strategic response would seem to be obvious. Therefore, more than likely, the new party-list system will continue as an obstacle to the development of larger and more cohesive party organizations, despite the fact that it was presented as a reform designed to bolster party-politics.

Hence, it looks like the reform may have been a clever stratagem by the government: it can be presented as an ‘abolition’ of SNTV and ‘return’ to MNTV, yet it will likely retain the incentives caused by SNTV. Or it could have been accidental. Whether or not this was intentional, it would certainly seem advantageous to the King: in public opinion, it enhances the regime’s legitimacy (the best evidence of this being how it brought an end to the Islamist boycott); nonetheless, in reality it will likely continue the previous incentives for fragmentation which weaken the parties (most importantly, the Islamists) and, crucially, the House of Representatives, which needs to remain fragmented for the King to maintain substantial power in what is constitutionally supposed to be a parliamentary system^[2].

 

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[1] The ideal number of candidates elected from each of these lists is one, since a party can win only one seat by remainder.

[2] There are of course other factors relevant in determining whether or not a given ‘constitutional monarchy’ is more monarchy or more parliamentary democracy (as demonstrated by the recent constitutional amendments giving the King more power over appointments) but hopefully it can be agreed that the crucial factor is whether or not governments are responsible to an elected house of parliament, by which I mean that a prime minister and cabinet can be removed by that house. Jordan’s constitution, at least since 2011, makes the government responsible to the House of Representatives.

Nepal’s new constitution

After its revolution in 2007 more than seven years of discussion, missed deadlines and constitutional deadlock in two consecutive constituent assemblies, Nepal finally passed a permanent constitution earlier this year, which entered into force on September 20th. A two-thirds majority was required to pass it.

The new constitution establishes the country as a federal parliamentary republic, with marked similarities to India and Pakistan. The president is elected for a five-year term by an ‘electoral college’ consisting of the federal parliament and provincial assemblies. Executive power is vested in the cabinet.

Legislative branch

Parliament is to be bicameral. The cabinet is responsible to the House of Representatives, which, like the Constituent Assembly, will be elected for five years through Mixed-Member Majoritarian: 165 seats by single-seat plurality and 110 by party-list PR, with no districting. The unusually-named (for an upper house) National Assembly have 59 members: 8 members from each of the 7 provinces elected by Provincial Assembly members, joined by local representatives (chairpersons and vice-chairpersons of village councils, and Mayors and Deputy Mayors of Municipal councils) whose votes will be weighted, presumably according to each local authority’s population; the other 3 will be appointed by the government. They are to serve a six-year staggered term, with one-third retiring every two years.

The National Assembly may delay financial bills by 15 days, and delay other bills proposed by the lower house for two months. Only bills that were introduced in the upper house but lack bicameral agreement are to be sent to joint session. Thus, Nepal’s bicameralism is far weaker than in India and Pakistan, where joint session is the deadlock-breaking mechanism for any non-financial bill. And even on bills that make it to joint session, Nepal’s upper house is weaker as it is smaller in relation to the lower house (India is roughly 2:1, Pakistan 7:2 while Nepal will be about 9:2).

With this weak upper house, the constitution enacted has no constitutional ex-ante checks on the power of a majority government to pass legislation. A large number of the proposed drafts contained a more powerful upper house. Sadly, the main parties probably made short shrift of such proposals, preferring not to have their ambitions checked when taking part in future governments.

The constitution can be amended by two-thirds majorities in both houses, with changes to provincial boundaries also requiring the consent of the assemblies of the provinces involved.

Judicial branch

Lastly, the Supreme Court is to be appointed on the recommendation of the Judicial Council, out of which a special Constitutional Bench will be formed including the Chief Justice and four other Justices chosen by the Judicial Council. The Chief Justice is appointed for a six-year term on advice of the Constitutional Council. All Justices serve until mandatory retirement age of 65.

The Judicial Council will consist of:

1. the Chief Justice, presiding,
2. the most senior Supreme Court Justice
3. the Federal Law & Justice Minister,
4. a senior legal expert appointed by the PM, and
5. a senior legal advocate appointed by the Nepal Bar Association.

The Constitutional Council will consist of:

1. the PM, presiding,
2. the Chief Justice
3. the chairman of the upper house
4. the speaker of the lower house
5. the deputy-speaker of the lower house, and
6. the Leader of the Opposition

Enduring controversies

Far from settling Nepal’s political quagmire, the new constitution has proven to be very controversial. Its (impending) passage sparked demonstrations and unrest around the country. Protesters have blocked roads and vital supplies and dozens have died in clashes with police over the past few months.

The most contentious issue remains as it was during the years of deadlock in the Constituent Assemblies: the drawing of the boundaries of the new provinces. While the final boundaries are said not to be completely settled yet, the schedule is quite specific, and it provides for largely multi-ethnic provinces. There is therefore a great deal of opposition from groups wanting a linguistic and ethnic delineation providing them with their ‘own’ provinces.

Other disputes include women and minority rights in the new constitution (including in particular the definition of citizenship, which favours the father), its secular nature, the lower proportion of lower house seats to be elected by PR (45%, compared with 58% for the Constituent Assembly), and the federal terms concerning provincial autonomy. There are, of course, also those happy the constitutional deadlock is over, if not with the constitution itself, but

It will be interesting to see whether the final provincial boundary-drawing will be affected, and how the salience of these constitutional issues evolves. The first regular elections will not be held for several years, as the term of the Constituent Assembly, now transformed into ‘Legislature-Parliament’, will end in January 2018.

Bihar 2015: Indian democracy still works

The ‘Modi wave’ has been flattened in Bihar, one of India’s biggest states.

This past Sunday, the Electoral Commission announced the results. The BJP, the national ruling party since the 2014 federal election, was trounced.

A ‘Grand Alliance’, including among its main components two state parties (one of which formerly ruled the state in alliance with the BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC), won an overwhelming majority. According to results currently posted on the Commission’s front page, the BJP remained the largest single party in votes (24.4%), but the combined votes of the three main grand alliance partners came to 41.9%. Other smaller parties that participated in the “seat-sharing” (whereby one of the partners represents the alliance in a given constituency) bring the total to around 46%. Of the main alliance partners, the Rashtriya Janata Dal won 80 of the 243 seats, the Janata Dal (United) won 71, and the INC 27.

The total alliance seat take represents over 73% of the seats, offering a stark reminder of just how disproportional the FPTP system can be, especially when multiple parties cooperate and there is a relatively uniform swing.

I had suggested back in May, 2014, that I did not think the BJP win meant a fundamental change in how the country would be governed, despite the fact that the BJP had won big in Bihar itself in the national election. The outcome of the Bihar election is yet another reminder of the centrality of alliance politics in India.

District magnitude and reelection in Iran (and what is a mixed-member system)

A recent entry at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog by Paasha Mahdavi (Georgetown) is a summary of the author’s really fascinating research on Iranian MP reelection rates. Mahdavi finds that MPs from more resource-rich regions are more able to secure reelection because they get credit from targeted spending in their districts.

Reelection rates in Iran are overall low: “Since 1980, less than 30 percent of politicians running again in Iranian parliamentary elections retained their seats.” However, rates vary substantially across districts.

The relationship between increased resources and reelection rates is statistically stronger in those districts that elect one MP than in those that are multi-seat districts (graph at Mahdavi’s blog entry). Mahdavi argues this is due to the stronger accountability relationship when there is only one MP.

So far so good. It is terrific to see this sort of research in any country, but especially in Iran, which of course has an authoritarian regime, yet one with regular semi-open elections (which have long fascinated me).

However, can we please get the terminology right? Mahdavi writes:

Iran’s parliament is elected by what political scientists call a “mixed-member system.” Some districts only elect one representative while others elect two or more.

The term, “mixed-member system” does not simply mean a system in which the country contains a ‘mix’ of different magnitudes, including some that are single-member. (If that were the case, there would be many more “mixed-member” systems than there in fact are, as magnitudes ranging from 1 to some higher number are pretty common.*) A mixed-member system is defined by the following two minimal criteria:

1. The entire country is divided into districts in which candidates win on their own individual votes (“nominal” election, some of us call it). These districts in practice usually are all single-seat, although that is not a defining requirement for many typologies, including mine.**

2. Every voter also resides in a multi-member district–which may be the entire country, though could be regional–in which legislators are elected via party lists (in practice, almost always proportionally).

It is these overlapping components or tiers, one individual (and usually single-seat plurality or majority) and the other party list (proportional) that make a system mixed-member. Numerous other features define sub-types (mixed-member proportional, where the list seats are allocated in a compensatory manner, vs. mixed-member majoritarian, where the two sets of seats are elected separately or “in parallel”); there may be separate votes in the two types of districts (as is usually the case) or your candidate vote might also count for the candidate’s party’s list (as in Mexico). Despite these variations, the two criteria mentioned above are required for the system to be mixed-member.

In Iran, there are no party lists (as this term is understood in the electoral systems literature). All candidates win based on their own nominal votes–that is votes cast for them personally. The system for parliament (and some other elected bodies) is probably best characterized as a form of multiple nontransferable vote (MNTV); however, unlike most such systems, I believe that there is a provision for a second round where sufficient candidates have not met some threshold of votes*** in the first round.

I read something like Mahdavi’s fascinating Monkey Cage post and have two thoughts: (1) Very cool research that I wish I had done; (2) I still have plenty of my regular work to do, because even as vast as the subfield of electoral-systems analysis has become, political scientists in other subfields still make fundamental errors about well established electoral system terminology.

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* One example: the current Venezuelan system clearly meets the two criteria here for qualifying as mixed-member; several of its nominal-election districts elect more than one member.

** Finland, Peru, Spain, and Switzerland are among the districted PR systems having at least one district has a magnitude of just one seat. There have been examples of electoral systems in the past (although I can’t think of a current one) with numerous single-seat districts along with other districts that are multi-seat. There also have been many cases of mostly single-seat districts but some districts electing two or more candidates, non-prorportionally. (India in its first elections was such a case, and farther back, UK.)

*** I do not know details here. Majority? If so, how determined, given magnitude greater than one, and the possibility that not all participating voters use their full M votes (M=magnitude of the district)?

Sri Lanka legislative election, 2015

Sri Lanka held its legislative election on 17 August. The election was billed by the Western media, such as BBC, as a fight between the premier appointed by the incumbent president and the ex-president whom the current one defeated.

The United People Freedom Alliance, led by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, won just 95 seats out of 225. The United National Party (UNP) of the premier, Ranil Wickremesinghe, won 106. This is good news for President Maithripala Sirisena, who is actually of the same party as Rajapaksa, but defeated him at the head of a pre-electoral coalition consisting of the UNP, and parties representing ethnic minorities, including Tamils.

Official results at SriLankanElections.com are different from those in the BBC report, although they agree on the scale of the UNP lead.

In the preceding legislative election, in 2010, the United People Freedom Alliance won 144 seats (60.3% of the vote) to 60 for the UNP (29.3% of votes).

Given that the president has the authority to dissolve the legislature, I was surprised that Sirisena did not go to the polls earlier following his victory in January. I believe the legislative term is six years (is that the longest anywhere for a first/sole chamber?); the preceding election had been in April, 2010.

The system of government is president-parliamentary. That is, the premier is responsible to the legislative majority, but also subject to dismissal by the president. In the case of Sri Lanka, the powers of the presidency are enormous, and one of Sirisena’s campaign promises was to reduce presidential power. It is unclear to me what, if any progress, has been made in this front (beyond what JD reported here), or is likely to be made.

Delhi assembly: Massive AAP win

This past Saturday voters in Dehli went to the polls to elect a replacement assembly for the one that was dissolved following the resignation of the 49-day minority government of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

While polls had generally foreseen a win by Kejriwal’s AAP (Common Man Party), none saw the massive win that the party obtained: 67 of the 70 seats, with the BJP (ruling party at the federal level since 2014) winning just 3. The Congress Party was shut out. The top three parties vote percentages were 54.2, 32.2, 9.7.

This is a stunning surge for the AAP. Its first-ever contest was for the Delhi election of December, 2013, in which it won 28 seats, second to the BJP’s 31 (Congress had 8). AAP formed a minority government, but then resigned when it could not get its signature anti-corruption bill through the assembly. In the federal election of May, 2014, the AAP flopped miserably, winning a third of the votes in Delhi but no seats. (It ran over 400 candidates across several sates, but managed just 4 seats, all in Punjab.) And now it has a solid majority of the vote and a near-sweep of the Delhi assembly’s seats.

As might be expected, some of the AAP’s changing fortunes comes down to the dynamics of first-past-the-post voting with multiple parties. The AAP actually won a slightly higher percentage of the vote in Delhi for the federal parliament in 2014 than it had won in the assembly election of 2013. The biggest source of new AAP votes clearly comes from the collapse of Congress from 24.6% in 2013 to less than ten percent this time. This swing is largely due to the Muslim community deserting the sinking ship that is Congress to block the Hindu-nationalist BJP. By contrast, when the BJP won a plurality of Delhi’s assembly constituencies in 2013, it did so with around a third of the vote, or roughly the same as in this latest assembly election. Evidently, it was the BJP’s sweep of Delhi’s seven federal constituencies in 2014 that was the aberration (46.4% of the vote to AAP’s 32.9 and Congress’s 15.1). The “Modi wave” did not carry over into the sub-national contest, and a third of the vote looks a whole lot worse when support for the the third party has collapsed.

Either Kejriwal is incredibly lucky, or he is the canniest politician in India, and had this all planned out from the start.

Choosing executive format in Sri Lanka and Mauritius

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As previously mentioned on this blog, Sri Lanka recently elected Maithripala Sirisena as president. Among his campaign promises was a pledge to initiate a series of constitutional reforms, including to the judiciary, parliament’s electoral system, as well as the reform of his own post, the executive presidency. Though his manifesto is a little vague[1], it seems the intended reform is a return to parliamentarism.

Sri Lanka adopted semi-presidentialism in 1977, with the first direct presidential elections being held in 1982. The current constitution puts the president at the centre of the political system. Specifically, it is president-parliamentary, the semi-presidential variant which empowers the president both to appoint and to fire the cabinet, which is also subject to parliamentary confidence. This executive format has combined with other institutions to make for an exceptionally powerful presidency – some common in such systems (such as a dissolution power), other unusual among democracies of any executive format (such as the ability to call and set the date for a snap presidential election, as well as the ban on MP defection, which has allowed presidents to remove dissident MPs from their party from parliament, not to mention the recent amendment allowing a president to run for a third term).

This constitutional arrangement has been a source of contention for most of its existence; in fact, abolition of the executive presidency and a return to parliamentarism has already been promised by various politicians since the 90’s, when Chandrika Kumaratunga was twice elected on that very platform. The new constitution which consequently emerged from multi-party talks was shelved by the withdrawal of the United National Party from the talks, preventing the necessary 2/3 majority from materialising. Sirisena’s constitutional reform proposals face the same challenge; although his broader agenda seems to be picking up momentum in parliament, where he has secured a majority as a result of defections, his new coalition still falls far short of the necessary supermajority. If his proposals fail to pass, calling a snap parliamentary election looks like the obvious strategy.

Interestingly, voters in neighbouring Mauritius were recently offered a constitutional reform in the opposite direction. Like Sri Lanka, the country was a Commonwealth Realm before becoming a republic, but it is still governed under its inherited parliamentary system. Its electoral system is multiple-seat plurality or bloc voting (also known on this blog as Multiple Non-Transferable Vote or MNTV) along with a small number of members appointed from among the highest-voted losing candidates in order to ensure ethnic and religious minority representation. Over the last decades, elections have increasingly been fought between pairs of variable pre-electoral coalitions.

The 2010 general election was won by the Alliance de l’Avenir, consisting of Labour (PTR), PMSD and MSM, which faced the MMM-led Alliance du Coeur. The Alliance d’Avenir dissolved in 2012, leaving Labour governing alone. Before calling the December, 2014 election, Labour forged an alliance with MMM, with at its heart an agreement to establish a semi-presidential ‘Second Republic’, an idea which has been put forward before. Though the proposal is said to be inspired by the French model (as it had been in Sri Lanka), it, too, differs from it significantly. It would have elected the president, along with a vice-president, by plurality for a seven-year term (in France, it was reduced to five in 2002), while seemingly increasing the president’s control over the cabinet to a level higher than standard premier-presidentialism,[2].

Under the agreement, if the alliance were to achieve the necessary three-quarters majority in parliament, the constitution would be amended to bring about the change, with Labour leader, Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam resigning to present himself as a presidential candidate and MMM leader Paul Berenger would replace him as Prime Minister. In the event, the Labour-MMM alliance lost the election to the opposition Alliance Lepep, led by MSM’s veteran politician and longtime prime minister, Anerood Jugnauth. As it stood opposed to the ‘Second Republic’ proposal, the Alliance Lepep’s victory puts it off the agenda for the foreseeable future.

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[1] From Sirisena’s manifesto: “The new constitution structure would be essentially an Executive allied with the Parliament through cabinet instead of the present autocratic Executive Presidential System”, which I read as parliamentarism, but does not explicitly rule out that the emasculated presidency will remain directly elected.

[2] “The Prime Minister shall give effective consideration to any recommendation of the President to appoint and revoke a Minister.” Some commentators have argued this amounts to president-parliamentarism.

Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa defeated

This is a surprise. And a pleasant one. Incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka has conceded defeat to Maithripala Sirisena.

The Department of Elections said that of 3.26m votes counted so far, Sirisena had taken 51.3% and Rajapaksa was trailing on 46.9%.

Although there obviously were other candidates in the race, evidently the ranked-choice ballots did not come in to play (again).

Maharashtra 2014: BJP taking post-poll support from ex-ally of Congress

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continues to show signs of seeking to break out of the post-1998 pattern of two large pre-electoral coalitions that have taken turns governing India. While the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) remains the governing formula at the federal level despite BJP having a majority of seats, the BJP played serious hardball in the recent campaign for the Maharastra state assembly. In elections on 15 October, the BJP won 119 of the 288 seats (41.3%). It appears that it will take “outside support”–i.e. post-electoral cooperation but no governing coalition–from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). While the Times of India on 19 October referred to this offer of support as “unexpected“, it was pretty clearly foreshadowed by the frenetic reshaping and ultimately breaking of alliances in the week leading up to the deadline to declare candidacies.

The significance of these developments is that the BJP has an alliance at the federal level with a Maharastra-specific party, the Shiv Sena. In the Lok Sabha election earlier this year, these parties continued their pre-election alliance, in which the parties agree not to compete against each other in districts and to support one another’ candidates. It appeared as if the alliance was critical to the strong BJP performance in the state in those elections. Further, Shiv Sena sits in the federal cabinet of BJP PM Narendra Modi. Meanwhile, the NCP is (or was) an alliance partner of the Indian National Congress Party (INC), in both the 2004-2014 federal government and in the state of Maharashtra until the run-up to these elections. The INC and NCP ruled the state in alliance for 15 years.

In late September, there was a flurry of media reports of a “seat-sharing row” between the BJP and the Shiv Sena, with the former demanding the right to contest districts currently held by the latter. The BJP was explicit in saying that there had been a “Modi wave” and that it was thereby entitled to a larger share of the districts. Meanwhile, the NCP played hardball with its ally, Congress (INC), demanding additional seats and an alternation in the Chief Minister’s post.

On 25 September, days before the candidate-filing deadline, the BJP announced it was dumping its ally, Shiv Sena. Barely an hour later, the NCP broke its alliance with the INC.

Given the concurrence of the demands from the national partner (BJP) against its ally and against the BJP’s national rival by a state partner (NCP), and the quick succession of the two announcements, it is hard to believe it was not being coordinated. It was seemingly foreshadowing the formation of a BJP-NCP post-poll alliance if the BJP won the most seats, but not a majority. And, of course, that is precisely what happened.

It was all quite dramatic, and it appears to be part of a BJP strategy of supplanting its erstwhile allies in favor of single-party minority government (when a majority is not (yet) in reach). It is especially telling that it would prefer to take outside support from an erstwhile Congress ally instead of continue a relationship with its own former pre-poll partners. (The Shiv Sena, contesting alone, won 61 seats, according to preliminary results, while the NCP won 42 (and Congress 44); BJP is 27 seats short of a majority.)

In my first post-election entry on the Indian federal result, I said that I doubted the BJP majority meant a re-writing of the fundamental rules of Indian politics. Yet the pre-poll and post-poll politics in Maharashtra suggests the BJP is attempting just such a re-write. Several key state elections are coming up in the next year, and the NDA partners have been put on notice.

Palestinian Territories 2006: Visualizing (what may or may not have been) overnomination

The election may have been eight and a half years ago, but it continues to fascinate me…

If you have not read at least the latest of the two (and more) posts on this election, you may need to do so before this one will make sense.

I am looking for ways to visualize the relationships among Fatah, Hamas, and the independent candidates in the (mostly) multi-seat districts of the nominal tier of the Palestinian 2006 election. The question is to what extent Fatah may have cost itself seats–maybe even an achievable plurality–by “overnominating”. If a party overnominates, it has more candidates than its votes allow it to elect. In this case, because the voter could cast up to M votes (where M is the magnitude of the district), a party can nominate M candidates and be OK, provided it gets its supporters to cast all their M votes for their M candidates. However, if there are independents (or candidates of other parties) who appeal to the same block of voters, a party might see attrition of its voters and fail to elect as many as it might have with fewer candidates. The problem is that there may be a “camp” of Fatah plus Fatah-rejected independents, the latter having been denied the party endorsement but deciding to run anyway.

Here are some different ways of trying to assess the question of whether the Fatah camp overnominated from the available data. (In each case, you can click the image and get to a larger version.)

The first graph shows the total vote share of independents in each district on the vertical axis. On the horizontal axis is the party’s ratio of nominal to list votes in the district. That is, the sum of all the party’s endorsed candidates, divided by the party’s list votes. The red line is the local regression (lowess), and we have separate graph panels for Hamas and Fatah.

From this graph, it seems there was attrition from both parties to independents, albeit only sometimes in the same districts. (For example, in Tulkarem, where the vote share for all independents combined was around a third, Hamas had a much lower ratio than Fatah; the latter was at over .9.) It certainly is the case that both parties have a lower ratio where the district’s share of independents is greater, but there is no question that Fatah has a stronger relationship between the two variables. So, yes, it seems like Fatah may have seen more attrition from list to nominal for its candidates than did Hamas. However, I was surprised at how much a relationship there was for Hamas as well.

The second graph is a box-and-whiskers plot summarizing the distribution of a “candidate ratio” across both major parties in each district. Above each district abbreviation there are the numbers 2, for Hamas (Change and Reform) and 3 for Fatah. The candidate ratio needs a little explanation. First, I start with a magnitude-adjusted vote share for each candidate. This is their individual votes, divided by V/M, where V is the total number of nominal votes cast in the district and M is the magnitude. This way, we can normalize the shares across districts of varying magnitude. Then the ratio–what is actually being graphed–is this magnitude-adjusted candidate vote share divided by the party’s list votes. The purpose of this mathematical gymnastics is to get an idea of how much each individual candidate of a party deviated from the party list vote in the district. Thus where the box or whisker or an individual outlier point is above 1.0, it implies a candidate more popular than the party in the district, and where it is less than 1.0, the candidate ran behind his (rarely her) own party.

I had previously noted that the standard deviations of individual candidates’ votes were pretty small for both parties, but greater for Fatah. This is clear here, in that the “whiskers” are farther from the box for Fatah (party 3) than for Hamas in most districts. This is especially so in Jerusalem (Jsm). And all the Fatah candidates ran quite far behind their party in Bethlehem. In fact, I think the “two slates” thesis–that Fatah (or more precisely the “Fatah camp”) shot itself in the foot by nominating an extra set of candidates–really rests on these two districts. There is rather less evidence for it elsewhere. However, one can still see that, in general, Fatah candidates seem to run a little farther behind their party than do Hamas candidates, and most of the cases of the candidate ratio being over 1.0 for an entire party are Hamas.

(In cases where the data plot is just a horizontal line, we are looking at a single-seat district. Note how far ahead of his party the Fatah candidate was in Jericho. This is Saeb Erakat.)

The final graph is a little bit overwhelming, I know. But I wanted to plot all the candidates’ individual votes. Here again, I am using the magnitude-adjusted vote share. The constituencies are indicated by numeric codes (because that is the only way I could (think of to) do it in Stata), but I made sure they are in the same order as they appear in the second graph.

This version has “jittered” data points so that it is easier to see where two or more candidates were very close in votes. This is helpful, given the low intra-party deviation. The original, un-jittered, version is still on my Flickr site.

Green is for Hamas, black for Fatah, and orange for independents. Solid symbols indicate winners, open losers, though down near the bottom of the graph there are so many bunched together that they sometimes look solid. It should be noted that where there are Fatah winners around .20 or lower, these are Christian quota candidates.*

This graph allows one to visualize where there were independents in a district who were well ahead the pack of minor independents, and also where losing independents are found amidst losing Fatah candidates, or just behind the losing Fatah pack. I don’t actually see a lot of them, but I can imagine that the highest-polling losing independents in Nablus (code 9), North Gaza (10), Salfit (14), and Tubas (15), at least, may have robbed Fatah of a seat it (and its camp) could have won. It is worth noting that Salfit and Tubas are one-seat constituencies won by Hamas candidates who had under 35% of the vote. Other candidates for seat-robbing are Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where there are several independents with over 10%, and where we already saw big drop-offs in Fatah candidate votes, relative to the party list–and where I already conceded that the “two slates” thesis might have legs. But remember, from the first graph, Hamas also had substantial drop-offs in these two districts. It could be that some of these independents, albeit possibility from the Fatah camp, appealed to Hamas voters precisely because they were independent and not Fatah-branded.**

Rather than draw firm conclusions here, I just want to put the visualization of the data, by these three different but related means, out there for folks to comment on. Maybe someone will see patterns beyond those I pointed out.

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* There are two of these in Bethlehem, with nearly identical vote shares, and two in Jerusalem; in addition, one of the independent winners in Gaza City is a Christian whose votes, it might be noted, are higher than any Fatah-affiliated candidate. He is the third ranked independent winner in that district.

** If so, that would have been even better reason to give the official endorsement to fewer candidates, thereby allowing some in the camp to appeal across party lines.

Key to districts, their codes (in the third graph), abbreviations, and magnitudes (in that order).

cst_n	cst_a	cst_abbrev	mag
Bethlehem	1	Bet	4
Deir Albalah	2	Dei	3
Gaza City	3	Gaz	8
Hebron	4	Heb	9
Jericho	5	Jch	1
Jenin	6	Jen	4
Jerusalem	7	Jsm	6
Khan Younis	8	Kha	5
Nablus	9	Nab	6
North Gaza	10	Nor	5
Qalqilya	11	Qal	2
Rafah	12	Raf	3
Ramallah and Albireh	13	Ram	5
Salfit	14	Sal	1
Tubas	15	Tub	1
Tulkarem	16	Tul	3

The Fatah “over-nomination” thesis, reconsidered

Did Fatah over-nominate, and thereby cost themselves a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council election of 2006? I have previously cast doubt on such claims, because Fatah had no more candidates in any district than the number of seats being elected. My understanding of over-nomination in a system where voters have M votes (M being the magnitude; i.e. the number elected in the district) would be a party having more than M candidates. By this standard, no, Fatah did not over-nominate.

However, this could be too narrow a view of over-nomination. We might want to include broader definitions of “camps” in our definition of the political tendencies that have potentially too many candidates.

I have ignored the independents before, because I have no information on them, and no way to know whether they were in any way affiliated with Fatah or any other party or movement in the election. A paper prepared back at the time by Jarret Blanc for IFES, “Palestinian Election Analysis: How Hamas Won the Majority“, has now come to my attention. The paper itself is no longer available on the IFES website. However, it is cited in Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell,* which I just finished reading. (I recommend it highly, by the way.) The authors cite Blanc’s finding that the number of additional legislators that Fatah could have won with greater unity was 18.

So I went back to my dataset on the election and attempted to replicate this. I made the following assumptions: (1) every defeated independent’s votes would have gone to a defeated (official) Fatah candidate, and (2) the votes would have followed the candidates’ actual ranks in votes in the district (i.e. the first losing independent’s votes would have gone to the first losing Fatah candidate, the second to the second, etc.). Note that these assumptions represent extreme leaps of faith! But without further information I can’t do much better.** If we do this, how many of the Fatah candidates now win, given their “revised” higher vote totals? I get 17. So my count essentially agrees with Blanc’s, which I assume was determined with some actual knowledge of the independents’ affiliations.

Of course, nearly all 17 (or 18) seats would have come at the expense of Change and Reform (Hamas), and the parliamentary breakdown would have been something like 62 Fatah, 57 Change and Reform. Out of 132 seats. (I have to assume the party-list votes, and hence seats, would have been the same.)

A passage in the Milton-Edwards and Farrell book further elaborates on the challenge Fatah faced:

Fatah’s campaign chief, Nabil Shaath, conceded that his biggest concern was the party’s rejected independent candidates, who stood against the official Fatah candidates out of genuine if misguided hope of winning, in order to punish the party for rejecting them, or to use the threat of candidacy as leverage to obtain some other benefit. (p. 251)

So did Fatah over-nomiante? Technically no. It nominated M official Fatah candidates per district in a system where voters could cast M votes. Moreover, as noted in the previous post on the topic, the party’s actual candidates typically did not deviate much in votes from one another, implying a fairly strong party orientation of its voters (albeit weaker than that for Hamas) around the candidates it actually endorsed.

Did it nominate badly? Maybe. But this is again down to the electoral-system design. In systems where nominal votes are decisive–as in the districts of the Palestinian electoral system–it is inherent to the system design that independents can run, that candidates can make personal appeals distinct from party label, and that some individual candidates may prove less popular than the party as a whole. The party needed to figure out a way to manage these personal factors before settling on candidates, and Fatah may have failed to do so. It does not follow necessarily that it should have run fewer Fatah-branded candidates, and there is always the possibility that had it given the party nod to some of the independents then some of its actual candidates might have run as independents instead.

None of this reconsideration of the original thesis changes the fact that Change and Reform won more votes–on the party list as well as for its candidates–than Fatah, and that the electoral system magnified the lead of the party whose candidates won the plurality. But it is possible that poor internal practices might have prevented the Fatah “camp” from converting its full pool of potential voters into seats.

Too bad they did not opt for an open-list PR system. Even SNTV would have been better for them.

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Notes

* It was actually Andy Reynolds who, upon reading my earlier post, mentioned Blanc’s paper and the possibility of over-nomination. I was already reading the Milton-Edwards and Farrell book by then, and happened upon their citation to Blanc several days after Andy mentioned it.

** It is actually more likely, perhaps, that it would be the official Fatah candidates with fewer votes who would have picked up more of the independents’ votes. That is, the more popular official Fatah candidates more or less by definition already appealed to a larger bloc of the Fatah camp’s voters. The statistical assumptions involved in reassigning the votes in this way are simply too complex to bother with. (If anyone wants to try, I am happy to share the data!)

Appendix

Some other points from the Milton-Edwards and Farrell book are worth quoting.

More observations on candidate-selection:

While Fatah put its strongest people on the national list, Hamas did the opposite, because it calculated, correctly, that people would vote along party lines for the party list but would be swayed by personal considerations when choosing a local MP. ‘When you vote for Hamas on the national list you are voting for the party, not for individuals. In the districts you select individuals, so if people are corrupt, not credible, people will not vote for them. Fatah wasted their strong candidates’, said Aqtash. (p. 255)

The quote within the quote is from Dr Nashat Aqtash, “a Nablus-born public relations expert”. Of course, I agree entirely, although I would again point out that the deviation of a party’s candidates’ votes shares would be expected to be higher than it was if personal factors were really a large factor. Still, the deviation was indeed higher in most districts for Fatah than for Hamas.

Aqtash is also quoted as saying:

I told [Hamas] not to run more than 50 per cent of candidates in the election because, if they actually won, they would find themselves in an impossible position. They wouldn’t be acceptable to the international community and they would be embarrassed in front of their people. But [Khaled] Meshaal insisted on running with a full list. (p. 255)

On the campaign and party label used by Hamas:

Even Hamas’s opponents conceded that its choice of electoral label – ‘Change and Reform’ – was inspired, capturing the pent-up desire among Palestinians for a new broom. The election manifesto also downplayed Hamas’s implacable external agenda, making no mention of its ultimate goal of eradicating Israel. Instead it spoke of ‘resistance to the occupation’ and ‘balanced’ relations with the West. It was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In fact, Hamas’s new cadre of articulate spokesmen did continue to insist that the movement retained its claim to all of Palestine – Israel as well as the occupied Palestinian Territories. But they said it was still committed to Yassin’s 1997 offer of a long-term hudna based on a Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Hamas’s customary insistence on proclaiming its commitment to the armed struggle was sidelined behind management consultancy talk of priorities, competence, transparency and delivery of services. (p. 248)

The authors also offer support for something I warned about in a post at the time, warning we should not believe the exit polls: many respondents may simply have lied to exit-pollsers. They suggest this may even have been something Hamaas told its supporters to do.

Is Gaza one of the densest places on earth?

I wish I had kept count of the number of times in the last month I have read or heard that “Gaza is one of the densest places on earth”. This statement is usually made without any context whatsoever. (I heard one person on BBC cite an actual figure, but not how it compares to anywhere else.) So is Gaza one of the densest places on earth?

Of course, the answer depends on your definition of “place”. That is, compared to what? The table below compares the Gaza Strip first to several other enclaves, exclaves, or small territories, which would seem to be a relevant comparison group. Then it compares Gaza City itself to several other major urban areas, including a few in the Middle East. While the list of ex/enclaves may be close to exhaustive, obviously the second one is not.

Entity	area, km^2	pop, millions	pop dens
Singapore	743.30	5.31	7,146.51
Melilla	12.30	0.08	6,504.07
Macau	115.30	0.61	5,325.24
Gaza Strip	360.00	1.82	5,044.44
Ceuta	18.50	0.08	4,540.54
Gibraltar	6.80	0.03	4,411.76
Hong Kong	2,754.97	7.16	2,597.12
City (selected)	area, km^2	pop, millions	pop dens
Mumbai	603.40	12.48	20,679.48
Manhattan	87.00	1.62	18,609.20
Gaza City	45.00	0.52	11,444.44
Baghdad	673.00	7.22	10,722.14
Tel Aviv	52.00	0.42	7,980.77
Cairo	2,734.00	10.23	3,741.77

The claim appears somewhat exaggerated when we situate it in comparative context. In area, the Gaza Strip is about half the size of Singapore or double that of Macau. Singapore and Macau, along with Melilla, are more densely populated; in fact (as of 2014–see update below), Singapore has roughly two thousand more people per square kilometer. So is Gaza one of the most densely populated small territorial entities on earth? Arguably, yes, for the simple reason that there are few such entities, which in turn tend to be urban. It is not so unusual among these entities, however.

So maybe commentators who make this remark mean urban areas in the Gaza Strip compared to urban areas elsewhere. (I do not think they mean this, because the references always just say “Gaza” in a context that seems to mean the territorial exclave, not a specific city within it, but for the sake of argument…) Based on the second set of comparisons this certainly looks hard to sustain. Yes, 11 thousand people per square kilometers is dense, but Gaza City is no Mumbai or Manhattan.

I am not attempting to make a political point here (I know, hard to believe!). In fact, I have heard apologists for both Hamas tactics and Israel’s actions make the claim. As, in “How can Hamas not operate among civilians when Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth?” Or “How can Israel avoid killing civilians when Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth?”

To be fair, there are specific places within Gaza that are incredibly dense. And some of these are indeed places where Hamas is active, and thus so are they places that the IDF hits hard. For instance, Jabalia has over 80,000 people in 1.4 sq. km. But again, the media comments I have read and heard do not say “Jabalia is one of the densest places on earth” (and I do not have any idea how it would actually compare with similarly geographically compact locations). They say “Gaza” is. Evidently not.

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**2024 update. I corrected the above table as I had inadvertently entered incorrect areas for some territories. I also want to add here that the density for Hong Kong seems low and that is because the territory includes some substantial low-density areas. If one were to look solely at Kowloon, which is the most urbanized sub-territory of Hong Kong, the population density there is over 41,000 per square kilometer. Again, the bigger point is that the answer to the question posed in the title depends on how we define “place” and many places are indeed far more dense than the Gaza Strip, even if as noted, there are specific areas of some cities in the Gaza Strip that are indeed highly dense.

Below is an updated version, almost ten years after original posting. Of course, the Gaza Strip has increased in population and now has a density that is only about 1,300 people per square kilometer less than Singapore. Others have increased population as well, but not as rapidly. (For Mumbai, I did not located an updated population.)

Entity	area, km^2	pop, millions	pop dens
Singapore	743.3	5.918	7,961.79
Melilla	12.3	0.086	6,991.87
Gaza Strip	360	2.376	6,600.00
Macau	115.3	0.673	5,836.95
Ceuta	18.5	0.085	4,594.59
Gibraltar	6.8	0.03	4,411.76
Hong Kong	2754.97	7.498	2,721.63
City (selected)	area, km^2	pop, millions	pop dens
Kowloon	49	2.019	41,204.08
Mumbai	603.40	12.478	20,679.48
Manhattan	87.00	1.694	19,471.26
Gaza City	45.00	0.59	13,111.11
Baghdad	673.00	8.127	12,075.78
Tel Aviv	52.00	0.474	9,115.38
Cairo	2,734.00	10.1	3,694.22

Also, apparently Jabalia now (or, rather before the current war) has over 170,00 residents.

The Palestinian 2006 election revisited

I wrote about the 2006 election for the Palestinian Legislative Council quite a lot at the time. For instance, as exit poll results were coming in, I warned not to believe their reported lead for Fatah, and indeed they quickly proved inaccurate. Once the results were in, I noted that the magnitude of the Hamas sweep was a product of the electoral system.

In light of recent events, I decided to go back and take an even closer look at the results of that election in January, 2006, which turned out to be not the prelude to a period of calm while Hamas figured out how to use a legislative majority and the near-majority of cabinet seats it received in a unity agreement more than a year afterwards, but a prelude to three major flare-ups of violence between Hamas and Israel. More specifically, I was prompted to go back and look by a remark in Peter Beinart’s article in Haaretz, entitled “Gaza myths and facts: what American Jewish leaders won’t tell you“. The piece itself makes some decent arguments, although I think Beinart is selective in his facts to a degree that is not entirely distinguishable from these apparently monolithic American Jewish leaders he refers to. However, let me stick to the one set of facts I do know something about: the distribution of votes and party strategy in the 2006 election.

Beinart says that one of the reasons Hamas (running under the label, Change and Reform) beat Fatah was “because Fatah carelessly and foolishly ran both its slates in too many parliamentary seats.” Underneath those words he has a link to a You Tube video of a talk by that noted specialist on comparative electoral systems, Bill Clinton (please pardon my snark). On the one hand, I am thrilled that Beinart and Clinton acknowledge that electoral systems and party strategy matter. On the other hand, they actually are perpetuating a myth here. Fatah lost because it had fewer votes, not because it split its vote. Clinton uses the analogy of southern Democrats and their factions in the past when they were dominant in the region. But the analogy is not helpful.*

Fatah did indeed run more than one candidate per district because, well, districts (most of them) elected more than one seat. Hamas did the same, and it did not hurt them. In fact, this was a system in which voters had the possibility to vote for as many candidates as there were seats in their district. Parties could not pool votes, voters could not cumulate nor could they just select a party. (I am not speaking here of the totally separate closed-list PR portion of the electoral system, and from the context I presume neither is Clinton.) A party would win all the seats in a district if it ran a candidate for every seat, and if its voters gave all their votes to candidates of the party. And, of course, if its candidates had the top-M vote totals, where M is the magnitude (number of seats being elected in the district).

It was actually Hamas that did not always run M candidates. However, the places where it ran fewer were either where some of the seats were set aside for Christians (not surprisingly, Hamas, the name of which is an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, did not contest the Christian seats), or where the seats it did not contest were won by independents. For instance, in Gaza City, eight were elected (M=8). Hamas ran five candidates, Fatah ran eight. Hamas elected all its five, and Fatah elected none. But the reason Fatah did not elect anyone was not that it had too many candidates. The other three seats went to independents. One of these was a Christian, for a set-aside seat. The other two were independents whose vote totals were more than 11,000 votes higher than that of the most popular Fatah candidate. These independents may have been “quiet” Hamas affiliates not bearing the label. One, Jamal Naji El-Koudary, is an academic at the Islamic University of Gaza.

Neither party suffered greatly from any failure of its voters to be willing to cast a full slate by voting for all the party’s candidates running in the district. However, Fatah did suffer a bit more. I calculated the standard deviation of each party’s candidates’ votes in each district. The closer this number is to zero, the closer the candidates were to having identical vote shares:

Hamas, .016.
Fatah, .026.

Not much difference, but enough to make a difference in some places. But this does not mean that Fatah’s running of too many candidates was the reason for winning fewer seats. In this type of electoral system (what I like to call Multiple Non-Transferable Vote, but others call Block Vote), a higher standard deviation can help you win more seats than you otherwise would, in cases where your party overall ranks second. That is, some of the districts where Fatah elected some candidates despite Hamas having one or more candidates with higher vote shares were precisely where it had individual candidates who were more popular than the party as a whole.

For instance in Nablus (M=6), Hamas ran five and Fatah six. The winners were all five Hamas and one Fatah. An independent (Hamas-affiliated?) was the second loser, just behind the second Fatah candidate. The one Fatah candidate who won had 39,106 votes, whereas the party’s next highest vote-earning candidate had 35,397. The five Hamas candidates had from 44,957 to 36,877. The most important point here is that Fatah could not have won more seats simply by running fewer candidates. This is not a single-vote system (like SNTV or like the US primaries Clinton referenced) where running multiple candidates can split your vote. Had Fatah run fewer candidates, its voters would have cast either fewer votes or given the remaining votes to other parties’ candidates, or to independents. It could have won only by running candidates who could beat a Hamas candidate–getting more than the 36,877 won by the district’s sixth-ranked candidate.

Fatah’s biggest problem was that it just was not as popular. Its collective vote total for candidates was higher than that of Hamas in only six districts out of sixteen. And some of those where it was in second place were the bigger districts, where even a small plurality for Hamas, combined with a low standard deviation of its candidates’ votes, would mean a Hamas sweep. Hamas won a plurality of the candidate votes in Gaza City (M=8, 32.7%-31.7%) Hebron (M=9, 51.1%-35%), Jerusalem (M=6, 33.7%-26.4%), Nablus (M=6, 38.2%-36.5%), among others.

Those vote totals show that Hamas was often well short of a majority. In fact, nationwide, its candidate votes amounted to only 40.8%, but Fatah was well behind (36.6%). That is a lower vote share than in the national list vote, where Hamas won only about 44% to Fatah’s 41%. In fact, I had never summed up the nominal (candidate) votes before. I have always reported the outcome as 56% of seats on 44% of votes, but that is list votes. Given that it was the nominal tier that was the disproportional part of the electoral system, it is actually more accurate to say that Hamas won 56% of seats on not even 41% of votes. It does not change (or reform) the outcome, but it underlines just how disproportional the system was.

A non-proportional electoral system of mostly multi-seat districts sure can turn a small plurality into a big majority. Hamas was more popular, but well short of a majority. The electoral system mattered in a big way, but Fatah’s running multiple candidates was in no sense the reason why Hamas won.

One final observation from the election results: Hamas has controlled the Gaza Strip since its rebellion against the Palestinian Authority in mid-2007, and the Strip was long an important base of operations for Hamas. However, in the election it did not show significantly greater strength in the Gaza Strip, where it won 41.3% of the nominal vote, hardly different from its West Bank support. It did dominate Gaza City’s list vote, however, with 56.7%, which was by far its best showing on the list within in any nominal-tier district. (The list was national, but results are disaggregated by district.) Interestingly, its candidates collectively won only 37.3% in Gaza City. Let’s just say that the personal vote was not how Hamas won, but the disproportionality of the nominal tier more than made up for relatively weak candidates.**

None of this helps resolve the current dreadful crisis, but it does resolve that Peter Beinart, while attempting to counter “myths” with “facts” is perpetrating a myth of his own–as is Bill Clinton–that running too many candidates was what doomed Fatah. That is simply incorrect.

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* There was initially a split slate, but party registration was actually re-opened to allow Fatah to present a unified slate for the actual election.

** In most cases, both Hamas and Fatah had higher list than nominal votes. Although there were several small parties running lists that did not have candidates (at least not labelled), there were many independent candidates. Only 4 of them won, and most others were not close to winning. (Their mean ratio of votes to the district’s last winner was .127, and only one had a ratio greater than .66.) They did, however, combine for 20.7% of all nominal votes cast. I can’t rule out that some of them drained votes from Fatah candidates, although that is not Clinton’s and Beinart’s claim. They claim there were too many Fatah candidates.

Data source: Central Elections Commission – Palestine. I used Adam Carr for the district-level nominal votes, because his page was formatted in a way that was more easily transferred to spreadsheet format. I verified that it matched the Commission’s data, and corrected a few examples where it did not. I typed in the list votes per district. I generated various summary statistics and analyses in a Stata file.