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Free Liberal: Coordinating towards higher values

Free Liberal

Coordinating towards higher values

Government Failure in Iraq

by Fred E. Foldvary

Public finance and economics textbooks tell us that markets fail to provide adequate public goods such as security, which is why governments provide it. Yet if we look at Iraq in 2007, its government has failed to secure the country, and even the mighty US army has not stopped the slaughter. Instead of being protected by the corrupt state police, Iraqis look to militias for defense against crime and terror. There is in Iraq massive government failure.

American politicians blame the current government chiefs and the members of parliament for not reconciling their differences and for the lack of progress in providing security and utilities. But we have to look beneath the current personae to the structure of governance that the American presence created. If the current structure is the best that political science has come up with, then the field of political science has to admit to intellectual failure.

The American advisors and governors pushed Iraq to create elections based on political parties. They also urged Iraqis to include the Kurds and the Sunnis in the government. That was well intended but naive, since this reinforced the view that parties based on religion would be the basis of their democracy. Since the Shiites are the majority, party-based elections guaranteed as if by design the sectarian conflict, as Sunni Arabs had a minority of the vote.

The significance of Iraq’s election in January 2005 to vote for a Transitional National Assembly should not be minimized. The terrorists failed to prevent the voting, and Iraq obtained one of the few democratically elected governments among the Arab countries. There was a high turnout from the Kurds and Shiites, but many Sunni Arabs refused to vote. The Assembly succeeded in creating a constitution for Iraq, which was approved by a vote in October 2005, although most Sunnis voted against it. There was another vote in December 2005 for the Council of Representatives.

Iraqis had a parliament from 1925 until the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in 1958, but the voting was rigged to prevent the Shia majority from winning control. According to the UN advisors, the 2005 elections did fairly allow for representation according to the vote. The United Iraqi Alliance obtained 41 percent of the vote, and the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan obtained 22 percent. There were 231 political parties, coalitions and individual candidates.

The electoral system provides for a single national ballot to elect 275 representatives. Of these, 230 seats are apportioned among the 18 provinces, called governorates, of Iraq in proportion to the registered voters. The other 45 seats are allocated to political parties which had sufficient nation-wide votes but did not win in the governorates, plus national seats for the political parties with the greatest vote. The elections in the governorates are proportional to the votes for the political parties as well as independent candidates. In essence the vote is structured as closed-list proportional representation by party.

The problem is that the major parties represent ethnic and religious factions, and voting by party carries the conflict among them into the elected council. The voters cast ballots along their religious and ethnic identities. It is unrealistic to expect the parties to share power and wealth when they are in violent conflict in the ground.

The more effective structure of democracy would be based on local neighborhood councils, as I proposed in 2004. Each neighborhood of about a thousand persons would elect a council. The role of religion and ethnicity would be minimized, since a neighborhood would tend to be homogenous, and individuals would be able to influence voters directly. Groups of neighborhood councils would then elect higher-level councils, which would then elect the governorate council, which in turn would elect the national council.

Instead of a bewildering number of parties and hand-picked party representatives, the voters would select from individuals whom they know personally. Just voting would be bottom-up, governance would be decentralized. The provision of water, electricity, and security would be by the governorates (muhafazat).

The dominant Shia faction in the government would oppose such decentralization, as its members prefer to dominate the country. Some commentators have proposed splitting Iraq into three autonomous regions, as is already the case for the Kurdistan region. It would be even better to further decentralize power to the governorates or to local neighborhoods. Power and sovereignty should ultimately rest with individuals, who would then delegate by choice authority to their representatives. Democracy works best in small groups, not in mass elections by parties or large geographic areas.

Unfortunately most of the commentary today is about the deficiencies of the officials in the Iraqi government, and very little on the electoral process that creates the incentives resulting in the outcomes we see. It is also sad that none of the American candidates for president today have spoken on the flawed election system in Iraq, probably because this would then invoke the question of whether the democratic process in the United States should also be restructured.

This article first appeared in the Progress Report, www.progress.org. Reprinted with permission.

Dr. Fred Foldvary teaches economics at Santa Clara University and is the author of several books: The Soul of Liberty, Public Goods and Private Communities, and the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics.



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