Re-electing the Assembly?

Last week the Icelandic Supreme Court ruled the election to the Constitutional Assembly null and void. One can naturally debate the reasons the Court cited (various administrative errors, e.g., ballot boxes not having locks) but I'm not particularly interested in arguing about those. The interesting question, of course, is "What now?"

One option is to simply hold the election again. Another option that has been voiced is to do without an election and having parliament simply appoint the members elected in the voided election. While the latter option has the benefit of being far cheaper, it strikes me as a bad idea. And I say that even though I think it unlikely that the flaws in the administration of the elections influenced the outcome. I think it is very likely the outcome of a new election would be very similar to the voided one. Then, why bother? The reason is that a constitution is just a piece of paper. To a large degree, constitutions only matter because people accept them as prescribing the rules of the game. This may sound strange to Icelanders where discourse about the constitution has always had a very legalistic tone - the question that is always asked is what the law (or constitution) says. This, in my opinion, is a fundamentally wrong approach to thinking about politics and how to set rules of the game. One doesn't have to look far to see why the legalistic approach falls short. According to the Icelandic constitution, the president has a legislative veto. However, article 13, "The President entrusts his authority to Ministers" and for about six decades no president exercised the veto power. But one day the president did and effectively transformed Iceland from a parliamentary system to a semi-presidentialist one. Admittedly, as the discourse about the use of the veto highlighted, this was an instance of an ambiguity in the relevant constitutional provisions rather than a political actor choosing to violate the constitution but it highlights the fact political interests, and opportunities, shape how political actors choose to interpret constitutions. Again, this was not an instance in which a political actor chose to break constitutional provisions (although some legal scholars might consider that to be the case) but one of the reasons we haven't seen that happen in Iceland is that everyone accepts that the constitution sets the, sometimes ambiguous, rules of the game.

So, the question is what would politics be like if not everyone accepted the rules of the game provided by the constitution? I don't know the answer to that but I would be inclined to err on the side of caution. And this means holding another election. If parliament decides to appoint the members elected in the voided election it would only serve to undermine the legitimacy of the constitutional assembly. It may be the case that it is a fairly small minority that really considered the administration of the election serious enough to void and even that the case was brought for political reasons but that is largely irrelevant. It is simply important to build a broad consensus about process of drawing up a new constitution. Undoubtedly there will be disagreements about the constitution that is produced in the end but it will not help if the process is seen as lacking legitimacy.Rather than seeing this as a step backwards, it should be seen as a new opportunity. Parliament will, presumably, need to write a new bill to establish a constitutional assembly and, this time, maybe they can do it right. As I have argued in previous posts, it is nothing short of ridiculous to give the constitutional assembly only two (or four, if extended) months, to come up with a new constitution. Its members need to have time to learn about how political institutions work if they are to do a decent job.

Those damn political parties!

The power of political parties has become, perhaps increasingly, a common complaint of observers and participants in Icelandic politics and many of the proposed reforms of the political system have focused on reducing the power of political parties.  For example, by introducing an element of a `personal vote’ into the electoral system (usually by adopting an open list proportional representation system) and measures to strengthen parliament vis-à-vis the executive.

The election of the constitutional assembly is a useful reminder that parties do serve an important function in politics.  The constitutional assembly election saw over 500 candidates running for 25 seats – the great majority of which was unknown to most voters.  As I have discussed before, learning about what these candidates stood for was an enormous and an overwhelming task for voters.  Contrast that with a regular parliamentary election in Iceland where the number of candidates is probably of a similar magnitude.  Yet voters don’t appear to have much difficult (most of the time) figuring out how to cast their votes in parliamentary elections.  The reason is that the candidates stand for parties and the voters cast their votes for parties rather than candidates.  And importantly, the parties usually have reasonably clearly formulated party platforms – choosing among 4-6 party platforms is a far easier task than choosing among 500 candidates.  This is one of the primary roles of parties, i.e., to aggregate policy preferences and to formulate policy alternatives so that on election day voters simply face a choice among a handful of party platforms.

The downside, of course, is if the parties do a poor job of presenting voters with platforms that they would like to see.  Overall, I think Icelandic political parties do a decent job of that – at the very least, most voters see the parties as representing different interests.  Of course, it is possible to argue that while offering different policy alternatives, the political parties still fail to represent the wishes of a majority of voters – and opinions are likely to differ on that point.  Regardless of what position one takes on that issue, it seems sensible to ask what the alternative might look like if one adopts institutional reforms aimed dismantling the party system in its current form.  While  extending voters’ ability to cast a personal vote arguably increases voters’ choice, those choices may ultimately be less meaningful.  An open-list proportional representation system would increase the independence of MPs (and candidates) from their parties, allowing them to carve out their own policy platforms.  The question then is, if I vote candidate X who runs for party Y but that candidate is not elected I may end up having supported a party whose MPs support policies that I don’t like that much.  In the worst case scenario, party labels would a worthless signal about candidates policy preferences.  A more likely scenario is that the party label will still provide a rough guide to its candidates’ ideological orientation.  But it is not clear to me that it is desirable to introduce greater uncertainty into the mix.  As it stands, voters have a difficulty predicting how their votes will influence policy – I may like a certain party but it may not always be in my best interest to vote for that party because I’m unsure which coalition will form after the election.  Increasing the scope for casting personal vote would likely increase that uncertainty – now I would both be uncertain about which coalitions may form and also about who the people at the bargaining table will be.

Of course, we cannot overlook the fact that, essentially, we already have a system based on a personal vote.  All the major parties regularly hold party primaries where voters, usually, determine the order of the candidates on the party lists.  This fact points to an interesting question.  First, if an electoral system based on a personal vote is seen as conducive to producing more independent MPs and a stronger parliament, why don’t the party primaries achieve this?  Or turning things around, what is it about making the personal vote important in parliamentary elections that makes MPs more independent?  My intuition is that MPs’ independence has less to do with the electoral system than the nature of parliamentary systems – MPs are forced to support the government lest they want to risk becoming a part of the opposition, which plays to the advantage of the cabinet.  Moreover, most MPs dream of becoming ministers one day and defying the party leaders is rarely conducive to realizing that dream.

At any rate, it is not clear to me that the case for weak political parties has been made – it is easy to point at the Icelandic parties and argue that their strength limits the independence of MPs and the power of Althingi.  The solution to those problems is usually treated as obvious – make the fortunes of MPs more independent of their parties – but I think it is also important to think more carefully about what the alternative might look like, i.e., what would politics with weak parties look like?  I have already suggested that it may make voters’ choice more difficult but one might also wonder about how it would affect legislative politics.  What happens when we don’t have strong parties to usher legislation through parliament?  If I had to guess I would say it would be less efficient and more time consuming without necessarily making for better public policy – in order to cut through legislative stale mate, policy makers will be more likely to cut through legislative deadlock by catering to special interests.  But that is just a guess – and there is no need to rely on guesses, there is some evidence, and possibly a lot of data, that could be used to answer questions such as these.

Electing an outcome

I have to admit that I didn’t follow the debate about the bill on the Constitutional Assembly to closely but I have to say that I’m a bit surprised that the method of electing the assembly didn’t generate a more heated debate. The members of the Constitutional Assembly were elected using a single national district. One of the bigger issues, e.g., singled out by the previous government, was a reform of the electoral system. Given that the current electoral system is characterized by a high degree of malapportionment (unequal representation per capita in geographic terms), is it surprising that the elected members tend to favor a single national district for the election of Althingi and the equal weight of votes regardless of geographic location?

It seems rather clear that the method of electing the Constitutional Assembly would favor underrepresented areas. Indeed, all but three of the members are from the southwest corner of Iceland (if I remember correctly), 21 are in favor of getting rid of malapportionment, and a majority wants to reduce the number of constituencies (12 want to make the country a single constituency). I think it is reasonable that this is a direct consequence of electing the Assembly from a single national district. What is surprising, however, is that this didn’t become a bigger issue. The law on the Constitutional Assembly was passed in Althingi 39-1, with 11 abstaining. The two parties that stand to lose from a reform are the Progressive Party and the Independence Party. All the present members of the Progressives voted for the bill while almost all of the Independence Party abstained. There are, of course, several possible, explanations for why there wasn’t more opposition or debate. First, those that stand to lose from a reform of the electoral system simply didn’t understand the implications of adopting the particular electoral institutions to elect the Assembly. That seems reasonable to me – politicians may well understand how institutions influence the representation of different policy preferences while they fail to realize the effect on ‘second-order’ preferences, i.e., how institutions shape preferences for institutions. Second, it may not have been politically sensible to oppose a legislation that overtly aims at promoting democratic decision making. Partisan motives might well have been seen as undermining the democratic process. Third, the MPs may naively have anticipated that the election would focus more on the experience and qualifications of the candidates and on broader democratic principles instead of candidates adopting fairly detailed proposals about changes to the constitution. Finally, it possible that the MPs may simply have viewed this as a fair way of electing the Constitutional Assembly.