Like many partial democracies, Tanzania has a hegemonic party, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), that is unlikely to lose an election anytime soon. The CCM recently passed a campaign finance law requiring donors to identify themselves and how much they are donating. On the surface this seems like a good idea, so why do opposition parties not like the law? They believe that the law is designed so that the ruling party can figure out who is donating to the opposition and/or discouraging such donations. Are these fears reasonable? I would say yes as the CCM has a habit of harassing and intimidating those who oppose them. Lesson: don’t assume that what’s good in a consolidated democracy is good in a weak one.

In terms of votes cast, Conservatives got 36%, Labour received 29%, and the Liberal Democrats obtained 23%. However, the Conservatives obtained 47% of the seats, Labour received 39%, and the Liberal Democrats got just 8%. Thus, while Conservatives and Labour got about 10% more seats than votes, the Liberal Democrats got 15% less seats than votes. The disproportionality of first-past-the-post systems is the reason the Liberal Democrats were the real loser in the election.

In the world of electoral system design, there are advantages and disadvantages to the many types of systems that exist.  It would probably be incorrect to say that any one system is “better” than another, because better is dependent upon what your priorities are.  One of the many advantages of a proportional representation, or PR system, for example, is that it does a relatively good job of ensuring that electors’ votes accurately translate into who is elected with less “wasted votes.” While it may be wrong to say which system is better, however, I don’t think it’s wrong to look at a system and question what its priorities are.  Sudan is a good case in point.  The nation claims to have a parallel system, which includes a significant amount of PR seats, yet the Sudanese have managed to create a PR tier that doesn’t actually deliver any of the advantages the system is designed to provide.

From IFES electionguide:

60 percent of seats are elected by plurality vote in single-member districts. 15 percent of seats are elected under closed-list proportional representation. Multi-member constituencies correspond to states, and the threshold is 4 percent in each. Finally, 25 percent of seats are elected under closed-list proportional representation from lists that may contain only women. Again, the constituencies correspond to states, and the threshold is 4 percent in each.

Let’s take look at this; out of 450 seats, only 15 and 25 percent respectively are PR tiers.  That means there 112 seats for the women’s tier and 67 seats for the standard one.  Then if we further break them down based on states, of which there are 25 in Sudan, it leaves us with an average of 4.48 seats per district for the women’s tier and 2.68 for the regular.  At this point, what is the purpose of the four percent threshold?  Would there be any district large enough where winning a seat wouldn’t automatically give you four percent?  I’m really curious as to the decision making process in this.  Was the threshold put in without thought as to what purpose it is supposed to serve, because somebody was once told that PR systems should have thresholds?  Or is it strategically there to give the illusion that this is a real system?

Unfortunately, Sudan isn’t the only country that wants to obfuscate the realities of its electoral system.  The Philippines, which will be having a general election on May 10, also has a PR, party-list, tier, which is supposed to contain twenty percent of all seats in the Parliament.  Twenty percent isn’t a lot, and it certainly fails to undermine the clientelist system that Filipino reformers are hoping to overcome.  What’s most disturbing about this party-list tier, however, is that parties are awarded one seat for every two percent of the vote received, while being capped at three seats total.  It’s not surprising, that given these rules, the tier is extremely weak, contains a myriad of insignificant parties, and suffers from a drop off in voter participation.  In fact the seats, which were designed to be filled with representatives of sectoral minorities, are often just filled with allies of the country’s elite class, further ensuring that the system in no way meets any of its stated objectives.

Both of these examples are significant, in that they demonstrate the many ways elites can rig or at least bias an election.  None of these flaws are accidents; you have to try really hard to make a system this ineffective.  (When you design a system where the Energy Secretary and son of the President both win seats reserved for the disadvantaged, you know you’ve done something impressive).

The election monitoring industry is extremely focused on what happens on election day, but in reality,  it’s the decisions made long before any votes are cast that really matter.  In his book Beyond Free and Fair, Eric Bjonrland discusses the international community’s failure to address pre-election conditions in Cambodia’s 1998 election, and the ensuing dilemma over whether to legitimate the outcome.  While the democracy assistance community doesn’t make mistakes like Cambodia anymore, I feel we still don’t do enough to assess how the rules of the game affect the outcomes.

This isn’t to say that election day monitoring isn’t important, it certainly is.  We need to keep in mind, however, that in this day and age, only amateurs rig elections on election day, real professionals make sure they know the outcome beforehand.

JSM at Politics, Society, and Things examines the incentives of dala dala (mini bus) drivers in Dar es Salaam:

The Drivers of the dala dalas in Dar have only one incentive; to make more than TZS 100,000.00 a day. Yes, that is the sum total a dala dala driver is required to bring to his boss – the owner of the those ubiquitous little traveling machines…The dala dala driver knows he must hand over that bottom line figure each day in order for him to keep his job.  So to him nothing else matters, regardless of the consequences he will always race, slow down, over take or block other cars in order for him (and always a male) to get the next passenger, or in his mind the next opportunity to top off that TZS 100,000 for his own income.

The incentives are more perverse for long-distance drivers: they get paid by how quickly they complete their routes. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of bus crashes in Tanzania.

Elise at The Mikocheni Report alerts us to a new trend in rigging elections in Tanzania, buying voter registration information:

I have a “friend” who came by today…

Her local councillor had dropped by the neighborhood sometime before Easter to encourage voters to sign up for a rather novel program. Basically, anyone who wrote down their name and voter registration number on his sign-up sheet would get a t-shirt and other freebies ‘when the time comes.’

Maisha Bora kwa Kila Mtanzania, indeed!*

Finally, Lindsay at Dispatches finds A Tale of Two Cities right under her nose:

Two sets of people in one city [Dar es Salaam], side by side practically, living different lives. One goes to eat and get her nails done and works out at places with generators, so most of the time, she isn’t even aware of how fragile the power supply is in this town. The other spends her nights in the dark. One treats herself to a 15,000 shilling sandwich and coffee at the sleek, urbane Kempinski hotel, and pays 10,000 shillings for the cab ride home. The other spends 1,500 shillings on a lunch of bananas and rice, and 200 for the dala dala home. One wears pretty scarves that she bought in New York. The other cleans them. One rents an apartment on Dar’s peninsula for $1,500 a month, while the other pays a kind of rent to the guy who “runs” the slum where her and her children live, except she doesn’t think of it as a slum.

From her blog, I believe that Lindsay works at the World Bank. Thus, her job is to work for a World Free of Poverty. Lindsay could have a productive conversation with Elise and JSM about the reasons she is fighting an uphill battle to achieve that objective in Tanzania.

*”Maisha Bora kwa Kila Mtanzania” means “A better life for Every Tanzanian” in Kiswahili. It was the slogan of the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), in the 2005 election.