While the Conservative Party won a decisive victory in yesterday’s UK election, the Labour Party might take some solace – the real loser were the Liberal Democrats, even if they wind up in a coalition government with the conservatives. The reason is because of the disproportionality of the first-past-the-post (or single member district) system.

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.

Guest post from David Jandura, a student in the MA in Democracy and Governance Program. David takes a look at Sudan’s electoral system:

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.

Read the rest of this entry…

Great new posts on life in Dar es Salaam!

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.

This is great.

Still more from Deborah on the election as seen from Juba:

Today was supposed to be the final day of polling, but because many polling stations opened late or not at all on the first two days, the government decided to extend voting through Thursday, April 15. I’ll be staying in Juba for the remainder of polling, but will only catch the beginning of counting here.

Read the rest of this entry…

More great stuff from Deborah:

At breakfast this morning, we learned that former President Jimmy Carter would be arriving at the Juba International Airport in a few minutes. We drove over to meet him and attended a private press conference, which might have been aired on BBC by now. His remarks reflected the same observations that we’d seen or heard from others- that the logistical difficulties of holding this election resulted in some irregularities. He noted that the 24 year gap since the last election meant that poll workers needed to be trained from scratch, and emphasized the Carter Center’s long term presence in the country. Though I know the Carter Center has observers in South Sudan, we haven’t run into any from that delegation. So far we’ve seen observers from the EU, Arab League, African Union, IGAD, and the Government of Japan. There are also thousands of domestic observers who have been trained by NDI and the Carter Center. Domestic observers are stationary and we’ve seen them in every polling station. Most are very professional and forthcoming with information, though sometimes I got the impression that they were unwilling to speak out on any serious irregularities.

Read the rest of this entry…

Deborah Brown, an MA student in the Democracy and Governance Program at Georgetown, is in Juba, Sudan as an election monitor. She emailed me her thoughts on what she has seen thus far — pix later.

Read the rest of this entry…