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West European Politics
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When Electoral Reform Fails:
The Stability of Proportional
Representation in PostCommunist
Democracies
Csaba Nikolenyi
Published online: 11 Apr 2011.
To cite this article: Csaba Nikolenyi (2011) When Electoral Reform Fails: The Stability
of Proportional Representation in Post-Communist Democracies, West European Politics,
34:3, 607-625, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2011.555986
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2011.555986
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When Electoral Reform Fails:
The Stability of Proportional
Representation in Post-Communist
Democracies
CSABA NIKOLENYI
This article examines the failure of three attempts to replace proportional
representation with a majoritarian alternative in post-communist Eastern Europe:
Slovenia in 1996; the Czech Republic in 2000; and Romania in 2008. The central
argument of the article is that majoritarian electoral reform is both incompatible with
and prevented by the institutions of consensus democracy. The constitutional design of
consensus democracy creates multiple veto points and veto players that limit major
policy and legislative change, such as electoral reform. As such, they also provide for
self-enforcing stability in the electoral system by making it very difficult for political
actors to build a winning coalition to reform it.
Most countries that made the transition from communism to a multi-party
democracy in Eastern and Central Europe adopted some version of
proportional representation (PR) to elect their first post-communist national
parliaments in the early 1990s. In several cases (e.g. Poland, Romania, and
Slovakia) these initial PR systems underwent subsequent amendments that
generally reduced their proportionality. However, in none of these new
democracies was PR ever reversed in favour of a majoritarian electoral
system (Juberias 2004). As we shall see, this was not for lack of trying: in
three instances (Slovenia in 1996, the Czech Republic in 2000, and Romania
in 2008) clear attempts were made to replace PR with a majoritarian
alternative; however, they all failed.
This article examines the reasons that account for their failure. It presents
the argument that majoritarian electoral reform is both incompatible with
and prevented by the institutions of consensus democracy (Lijphart 1999),
which these new democracies have adopted for the most part. Constitutional
Correspondence Address: csaba@alcor.concordia.ca
West European Politics,
Vol. 34, No. 3, 607–625, May 2011
ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2011.555986
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design of the consensus type creates a large number of veto points and veto
players (Tsebelis 2002) that limit the scope for policy and legislative change.
As such, they also provide for self-enforcing stability in the electoral system
by making it very difficult for political actors to build the kind of winning
coalition whose members would have an instrumental reason to change the
electoral system in order to increase their own electoral prospects (Benoit
2004).
This is not to say that electoral reform is not possible in a consensus
democracy. However, the kind of electoral reform that is not compatible
with the power-sharing characteristic of consensus democracy, which is
what the movement from PR to a plurality or majority-based electoral
system would imply, is unlikely to succeed due to the opposition of
institutional actors who benefit from sharing in political power under the
status quo. As such, consensus democracy acts as the key barrier to electoral
reform in the new democracies of Eastern and Central Europe (Leyenaar
and Hazan 2011; Rahat and Hazan 2011). However, this argument is
certainly not unique to post-communist democracies. In fact, there is
evidence from a number of established democracies, such as Belgium
(Hooghe and Deschouwer 2011), Italy (Baldini 2011), or Canada (LeDuc
2011), pointing to the ways in which consensus politics and institutions can
prevent electoral reform.
The article develops this argument in four sections. The first section
reviews the main theoretical perspectives that account for electoral reform
and stability in post-communist democracies. Next, it presents an overview
of the constitutional architecture of the three states in order to define the key
players that are involved in any discussion over electoral reform. The third
section provides a narrative of the context in which the proposals for
electoral reform emerged in the three countries, and the processes by which
the eventual outcome was decided. The fourth section discusses how and
why the institutions of consensus democracy acted as a safeguard of PR in
the three states.
Theoretical Perspectives on Electoral Reform in Post-Communist
Democracies
A number of works have drawn attention to the similarities between the
waves of electoral reform that swept Eastern and Central Europe at the
demise of communism and the one that had occurred in Western Europe at
the turn of the twentieth century (Andrews and Jackman 2005; Lijphart
1992). Lijphart argues that Stein Rokkan’s (1970) famous hypothesis about
the adoption of PR in Western Europe can be logically extended and
applied to the new democracies of Eastern Europe. In Western Europe,
PR emerged as a result of a compromise between the increasingly more
powerful and organised parties of the working class, which sought to
replace a majoritarian and plurality based system with PR in order to
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benefit from lower thresholds of entry to parliament, and those established
parties that felt most threatened by the workers’ parties under the existing
rules.
Similarly, Lijphart (1992: 209) claims that PR was adopted in Eastern
Europe also as a result of a bargain between weak incumbent communist
parties, seeking a guarantee that they would be protected from an all-out loss
in the first competitive elections, and the new opposition parties which sought
a guarantee that they would have substantial representation in the newly
elected parliament. Andrews and Jackman (2005) disagree with the view that
rationally coordinated strategic interaction drove the two waves of electoral
reform. Instead they claim that decision-makers were ‘strategic fools’ who
had to make choices about electoral laws under conditions of extreme
uncertainty both in Western Europe in the early 1900s and in Eastern Europe
almost a century later. In this, however, Andrews and Jackman (2005) still
stress the essential similarities of the two waves of reform.
A contrary view is expressed by Birch et al. (2002) who point out three
major differences between two waves of electoral reform. First, the adoption
of PR in Western Europe occurred more or less simultaneously with the
extension of voting rights. In contrast, post-communist electoral reform
revolved only around the rules of contestation since formally the expansion
of the franchise had already been completed under communism. A second
difference concerns the magnitude of the societal and political changes that
surrounded electoral reform in Eastern Europe relative to the West. Finally,
a third difference concerns the mode of electoral reform. In contrast to
Western Europe, where electoral reform proceeded via the normal channels
of parliamentary politics, the East European reform process was characterised
by a ‘radical institutional dislocation’ – the parliamentary route to
electoral reform was replaced either by informal round-table talks between
the regime and the opposition (e.g. Poland, Hungary) or by executive decree
(e.g. Russia, Romania).
These differences notwithstanding, the development of electoral systems
in the new post-communist democracies accords very well with the broader
patterns observed elsewhere. Colomer (2004: 55–60) reports that, in general,
changes in electoral systems towards more inclusive formulas are more
frequent than the other way around, and that while the number of countries
around the world that use indirect or majoritarian electoral system decreases
over time, the number of countries using PR does not. Patterns of postcommunist
electoral reform conform to these universal trends. Most new
democracies in the region adopted PR soon after the transition to
democracy. While some started out with and have retained mixed systems
(e.g. Hungary, Lithuania), others have moved toward greater proportionality
either by replacing their mixed systems with PR (as in Bulgaria,
Croatia, Russia, and Ukraine) or fine-tuning their existing PR systems
(Birch 2003: 40). Regressive movements from PR toward less inclusive
systems have been noticeably absent although this was not for lack of trying,
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as we shall see. According to Birch et al. (2002: 186), parties in Eastern
and Central Europe ‘seek both to maximise their seat share and to minimise
their potential loss. This will tend to lead them to adopt proportional
representation over majoritarian systems, as the former lead to greater
predictability in outcomes, which are less costly.’
Theoretically, two competing approaches dominate the literature on
electoral reform in post-communist democracies: rational choice versus
structural accounts. In terms of their empirical foci, rational choice studies
tend to focus on individual country cases (Benoit and Hayden 2004; Benoit
and Schiemann 2001; Grofman et al. 1999; Kaminski 2002; Remington and
Smith 1996) and provide analytical narratives (Bates 1998) of their attempts
at electoral reform. They share the common view that electoral laws are
essentially the products of social choices. Therefore, they assume that in
order to understand what determines electoral reform, we need to
understand the motivations and strategies of the actors themselves that
were involved in designing and re-designing the electoral system. Structural
accounts do not dispute the importance of actors’ self-interest. However,
they also highlight the important role of contextual variables (Birch et al.
2002), history (Lijphart 1992), and path dependence (McFaul 1999) in
understanding electoral reform. Yet, apart from their differences, both the
rational choice and the structural perspectives agree that uncertainty plays
a very important role in determining the politics of post-communist electoral
reforms. Because electoral law choices in these new democracies take place
under very high degrees of informational uncertainty, conventional models
of institutional design, of either the rational choice or the structural bent,
cannot be easily applied to the region (Geddes 1996).
Rational choice accounts point out that the adoption of initial electoral
systems at the time of the transition to democracy was often characterised
by miscalculation and unintended consequences due to the uncertainty
associated with a yet un-institutionalised party system and a poor
informational context for public opinion and expert knowledge about the
effects of electoral systems (Grofman et al. 1999; Kaminski 2002). Since
decision-makers were uncertain about the number of political parties, the
preferences of voters, and the exact impact that electoral rules would have,
they often supported institutional choices that worked against their interest
in the longer term (Andrews and Jackman 2005: 68–9). Therefore, even
though electoral reformers may have behaved in a self-interested manner
ex ante, the prevailing uncertainty severely hindered their ability to correctly
predict the consequences of their institutional choices ex post (Shvetsova
2003).
For instance, Moraski and Loewenberg (1999: 162) draw attention to the
unanticipated effect of legal thresholds of representation. While electoral
reformers expected that thresholds would keep extremist and postcommunist
parties marginalised, they could not foresee that proportional
representation would open ‘the parliaments of these countries to the
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fluctuation of public support in newly democratic countries not yet having
stable party systems . . . the principal effect of thresholds was not to create
obstacles to particular parties but to exaggerate swings in electoral support
in the allocation of parliamentary seats’. Uncertain expectations about the
consequences of electoral systems also meant that decision-makers who were
involved with the crafting of the transitional electoral laws focused a lot
more on the basic choices of the system, i.e. whether it should be based on
proportional representation, plurality-majority, or a mixed principle, while
ignoring very important technical details, such as the district magnitude, the
level of the threshold, etc. (Shvetsova 2003: 203–6).
Rational choice recognises that the sources of uncertainty become weaker
with the passage of time as party systems get more institutionalised, expert
knowledge becomes more widely available, the effects of electoral laws
become better understood, and parties develop more reliable estimations
of the distribution of their electoral following (Benoit and Hayden 2004;
Benoit and Schiemann 2001; Remington and Smith 1996). Therefore,
instances of miscalculation in electoral reform processes also ought to
decrease over time and subsequent, i.e. post-transitional, changes to the
electoral system will be more likely to be guided by the logic of actors’
rational calculations. However, reduced uncertainty might actually reduce
the likelihood of future electoral reform. Shvetsova (2003: 201) predicts that
as ‘[i]nformational improvements . . . clarify the distributive consequences of
institutional choices’, they lead to more intense conflicts and disagreements
over them, which in turn will make future electoral reform either much less
likely or more protracted than was the case with the relatively speedy
adoption of the initial transitional electoral systems.
Structural accounts of post-communist electoral reform do not deny the
importance of self-interested strategic calculations under conditions of
uncertainty. However, they add that the political actors’ choices are also
influenced and constrained by broader forces that were outside their
immediate control. For example, electoral reform may be path dependent.
Through the examples of the establishment of the Russian Presidency, the
Duma election law, and the upper house of the Russian parliament, McFaul
(1999) shows that institutions may become sticky once they are created and
they may prove to be very resistant to amendment even if they no longer
reflect the interests of the powerful actors who could change them. Lijphart
cites the availability of foreign electoral system models, historical models
from the countries’ pre-communist democratic past, and the presence of
politically strong ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities as possible
sources of influence on electoral system choice (1992: 216–19).
In what remains the most comprehensive survey of the variety of
contextual factors that shaped the design of post-communist electoral
systems, Birch et al. (2002) point out that the initial transitional electoral
systems were often negotiated and arrived at in informal roundtable
discussions among the elites of the regime and opposition. However, once
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the transitions have been completed and the new constitutional order
established, subsequent changes to the electoral system are subject to the
formal rules of political reform that also specify the range of actors
involved, e.g. the presidency, the upper chambers, the Constitutional Court,
and the population via referendum.
Several of the factors that complicated electoral system choice at the time
of the transition to democracy, or soon thereafter, are either no longer
present or they are present with much less intensity at later stages. As
mentioned, the passage of time reduces the uncertainty of the informational
context, and the appeal of foreign or past historical electoral system models
is no longer as strong because decision-makers do not face the pressure they
faced at the time of the regime change. Also, even though party systems still
display considerable volatility, they become increasingly more institutionalised
over time. Therefore, the overall conditions ought to be much better
for well-conceived electoral reform at later stages than they were at the
initial moment of transition. Yet, as our three cases clearly demonstrate,
reform attempts can and do fail. In the context of Eastern and Central
Europe this is particularly surprising given the observation that ‘in no other
region of the world is it possible to find such a widely acknowledged
disregard for the benefits – in terms of institutional and political stability –
of keeping the rules of the electoral game constant’ (Juberias 2004: 315).
Our account of the resilience of PR against moves towards majoritarian
reform starts with Katz’s (1997) argument that an electoral system, as well
as the broader constitutional architecture of the state, reflects the type of
democracy that decision-makers sought to establish at the time of its
adoption. Indeed, Taagepera (2003) shows that proportional electoral rules
tend to result in consensus rather than in majoritarian features of democracy
on the executive–parties dimension, such as executive power sharing in
coalition governments, a balance of power between the executive and the
legislature, and a multi-party system. For the most, post-communist
democracies belong to the consensus type on this dimension (Roberts
2006: 50). Consensus democracies have multiple veto points and veto
players, which makes political reform, including electoral reform, more
difficult relative to majoritarian democracies (Blau 2008; Tsebelis 2002).
As such, consensus democracy creates a self-enforcing bias against major
electoral reform. This should be particularly the case with respect to
regressive electoral system change, such as a movement from PR to either a
mixed or to a majoritarian system, because more exclusive electoral systems
have the potential to lead to further institutional changes that would
ultimately undermine other important aspects of consensus democracy. In
contrast, major electoral reform should be relatively easier to accomplish in
majoritarian democracies with fewer veto points and players to defend the
status quo.
The central hypothesis that will inform the ensuing analysis of the politics
of electoral (non-)reform is that consensus democracy creates critical veto
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points, and players, that make ‘major’ electoral reform, defined as the
wholesale replacement of PR with a more exclusive electoral system, unlikely.
Two further points are worth adding. First, the hypothesis does not say
anything about the fine-tuning of PR systems, which can, and does, happen
very often even in consensus democracies (Birch 2003; Birch et al. 2002;
Shugart 1992). As we shall see, fine-tuning of PR did in fact take place in
each of the three countries. However, each of these partial PR reforms was
the by-product of the failure of the initial majoritarian proposal. The failure
of those reforms resulted in reducing the winset of the status quo PR
electoral system, which significantly limited the availability of further
options to change the electoral system. Second, PR systems in the postcommunist
democracies also enjoy ‘normative protection’ against majoritarian
alternatives. Since communist-era elections relied on majoritarian
electoral systems, the adoption of PR was seen as an integral part of the
transition to and consolidation of democracy in the early 1990s. Therefore,
proposals to adopt majoritarian electoral institutions also suffer from an
apparent association with the political institutions of communism, which
further weaken their popularity and ability to replace PR.
The Institutions of Consensus Democracy in Slovenia, the Czech Republic,
and Romania
Following Lijphart’s (1999) seminal work on majoritarian and consensus
democracy, Roberts (2006) provides an assessment of the institutional
features of the 10 post-communist members of the European Union in order
to establish which type of democracy emerged in Eastern Europe. Table 1
summarises the scores that Roberts (2006) reported on each of the
institutional variables for the three countries in comparison with the mean
scores for all East European states and those provided for 36 democracies
that Lijphart studied. The first five variables in Table 1 (the number of
parties, the percentage of minimum winning cabinets, executive dominance,
the disproportionaity of electoral results, and corporatism) capture what
Lijphart called the ‘executive-parties’ dimension of democracy, while the
remaining five variables (federalism, bicameralism, constitutional rigidity,
judicial review, and the independence of the central bank) make up the
second, i.e. the ‘federal-unitary’ dimension. Table 1 shows that postcommunist
democracies tend to have the features of consensus democracy
on seven out of the ten variables. It is only with respect to disproportionality,
corporatism, and federalism that the new democracies possess
majoritarian characteristics.
The Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Romania clearly follow the broader
East European trend with respect to the number of parties, the percentage
of minimum winning coalition cabinets, and executive dominance. They all
have more fragmented party systems than the average that Lijphart reported
for the 36 established democracies; minimum winning coalition cabinets are
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rare; and executive dominance is weak due to unstable governments. It is
important to note that, in general, electoral and party politics are
considerably more volatile and less institutionalised in Eastern and Central
Europe than in the established democracies of Western Europe. However,
two of the three post-communist states that we examine (the Czech Republic
and Slovenia) actually have more stable party systems than most other
states in the region (Birch 2003; Lewis 2006).
Similarly, on the second dimension, all three states have stronger than
average degrees of bicameralism compared with the rest of Eastern Europe,
reflecting the fact that all other post-communist democracies, except for
Poland, have unicameral parliaments (Olson 1999; Patterson and Mughan
1999). In comparison with the mature democracies, however, bicameralism
is weak in the Czech Republic and Slovenia, and it is only moderately
strong in Romania. As in Poland, the two chambers of the Romanian
parliament are elected concurrently, which reinforces the dominance of the
same political coalitions in both houses. In contrast, only one-third of the
Czech Senate is elected every two years, which often leads to different
majorities in the two houses. However, since the Czech Senate has only very
limited veto over legislation, bicameralism remains weak. In Slovenia,
bicameralism is more formal than substantive given that the second
chamber of parliament (the National Council) is a non-elected body that
provides corporate representation to local bodies and various socioeconomic
groups.
TABLE 1
PATTERNS OF DEMOCRACY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC, SLOVENIA,
AND ROMANIA
Variable Czech R. Slovenia Romania E. Europe Lijphart 36a
Parties 4.08 4.99 3.57 4.38 3.2
Cabinets 39.3 24 29.4 33.7 60.2
Executive 2.78 1.58 1.46 1.92 3.32
Disproportionality 6.43 4.1 5.67 6.94 8.02
Corporatism 2.2 1.6 3.2 2.5 2.2
Federalism 1 1 1 1 2.9
Bicameralism 2 2 3 1.5 2.2
Constitution 2.5 3.5 4 3.1 2.6
Judiciary 3 3 2 3.1 2.2
Bank 0.73 0.63 0.34 0.60 0.38
Notes: The figures indicate the following measures. Parties: the effective number of parties.
Cabinets: percentage of minimum winning coalition cabinets. Executive dominance: cabinet
duration. Disproportionality: Gallagher index. Corporatism: Siaroff’s scale of corporatism.
Federalism: dummy for unitary or federal state. Bicameralism: Lijphart’s 4-point scale of
bicameralism. Constitutional rigidity: parliamentary majority required for constitutional
amendment. Judiciary: Lijphart’s 4-point scale of judicial review. Bank: Lijphart’s 0–1 scale
of central bank independence.
a
The cells in the column ‘Lijphart 36’ contain the average score on each variable for the 36
established democracies that Lijphart’s (1999) study covers.
Source: Adapted from Roberts (2006: 40, 44).
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The written constitutions of all three states are rigid and difficult to
amend, especially in Slovenia and Romania where a qualified parliamentary
majority is supplemented by a referendum (optional in Slovenia but
compulsory in Romania). Finally, with regard to the judiciary and central
bank independence, only Romania displays more majoritarian features,
while both the Czech Republic and Slovenia have established strong
constitutional courts and highly independent central banks.
The three institutional variables on which the post-communist states have
majoritarian features are disproportionality, corporatism, and federalism.
With regard to disproportionality, Roberts (2006: 51) noted that even
though East European democracies tend to have PR system, electoral results
are markedly less proportional than in the mature democracies due to their
relatively un-institutionalised party systems. ‘A major reason why disproportionality
is so high is that voters waste a high percentage of their
votes. They often vote for parties that do not pass the threshold – typically 5
percent – for representation in parliament’. Regarding corporatism, while
the adoption of tripartite arrangements of interest intermediation is
common in Eastern Europe, corporatist practices are substantively weak.
Finally, in the wake of the collapse of all communist-era federations, postcommunist
states are invariably unitary which is reflected in their
majoritarian scores on the federalism variable.
The Narratives: Electoral Reform Failure in Slovenia, the Czech Republic,
and Romania
Slovenia 1996
The opening for the debate on replacing Slovenia’s PR system with a
majoritarian alternative was provided by a Constitutional Court ruling in
January 1996 that obliged the National Assembly to amend the electoral
law. According to the Court, the status quo electoral system did not comply
with the constitutional requirement of direct elections to the National
Assembly because the political parties’ lists of candidates were not made
available to the voting population in advance of the polls (Fink-Hafner
2008: 12). In response to the Court’s decision, the small opposition Social
Democratic Party, which had only won 4.4 per cent of the seats in the
previous elections, took up the cause of advocating a two-round majority
rule in single-member districts. Small parties are usually not in favour of
majoritarian electoral systems. In this case, however, the Social Democrats
calculated that a run-off electoral system would help it consolidate the
Slovenian Spring Alliance, a new partisan bloc that it had formed earlier
with the centre-right Christian Democratic and the Slovenian Peoples’
parties (Fitzmaurice 1996: 405; Matic 2000: 78).
The Slovenian constitution requires a two-thirds parliamentary majority
in order to change the electoral law. Since the combined seat share of the
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three parties that made up the Spring Alliance was very far from this
legislative strength, the Social Democratic Party decided in 1996 to force
the issue to a referendum. In order to do so, the party had to collect the
signatures of at least 40,000 voters – Article 90 of constitution allows the
National Assembly to call a referendum only if one is demanded either by
this number of electors or by at least one-third of the deputies. The Social
Democrats barely started their signature campaign when a group of 35
deputies, barely more than one-third of a total of 90 members in the
National Assembly, also submitted their own demand for a referendum.
However, this group wanted the electorate to vote not on the Social
Democrats’ proposed majoritarian run-off formula but their own modified
PR system. Furthermore, almost immediately, the National Council, the
second chamber of parliament, also passed its own resolution to call a
referendum, which Article 97 of the constitution allows, to decide on its own
preferred alternative electoral system, a German-style mixed-member rule
(Fink-Hafner 2008: 13). As a result of these heresthetic manoeuvres, the
Social Democrats’ majoritarian run-off proposal lost centre stage in the
debate on electoral reform. The public was no longer presented with a
binary choice between the status quo PR and the run-off rule. Instead, three
alternative reform proposals were launched against the status quo, which
increased the likelihood of its stability.
The referendum on the question of alternative electoral reforms
eventually took place a month after the 1996 general elections. Due to
the combination of low electoral turnout (38 per cent), a very divisive ballot
with three questions on different electoral systems, and lack of clarity on
how the results would be interpreted, the referendum failed to change the
status quo. Of the three electoral systems that were proposed on the ballot,
the majority run-off system sponsored by the Social Democrats received by
far the largest number of Yes votes (44 per cent), followed by modified
PR (26 per cent), with the mixed-member proposal trailing at the end
(14 per cent). However, since majority support was not demonstrated for
any of the proposals, the referendum could not alter the status quo. Yet the
issue of electoral reform did not disappear from the political agenda. Two
years later, the Constitutional Court issued a proactive abstract review in
which it declared that the winner of the referendum was the proposed
majority system that clearly received plurality support from the electorate
(Matic 2000: 79). Accordingly, the Court instructed the Assembly to pass
a new electoral law. In the tumultuous landscape of Slovenia’s third
post-communist parliament, however, no such legislation could be passed.
What parties eventually agreed on, in 2000, was an amendment to the
Constitution stating that ‘deputies . . . are elected according to the principle
of proportional representation with a four percent threshold required
for election to the National Assembly, with due consideration that voters
have a decisive influence on the allocation of seats to the candidates’
(Article 80/5).
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Czech Republic 2000
The origins of a majoritarian electoral reform in the Czech Republic can be
traced back to the surprising conclusion of the famous Opposition Pact
between the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) and the Civic
Democratic Party (ODS) after the inconclusive parliamentary election of
1998 (Nikolenyi 2003; Roberts 2003). According to the agreement, the ODS
pledged its parliamentary support for the formation of a CSSD minority
government in exchange for key parliamentary posts as well as a common
bi-partisan commitment to constitutional and electoral reform. With regard
to the latter, Article 7 of the agreement specified that the two parties
‘commit themselves to present within 12 months of signing this agreement a
proposal of such amendments of the Constitution of the Czech Republic
and other laws that . . . in harmony with the constitutional principles of
the Czech Republic strengthen the significance of the outcome of the
competition of political parties’ (Roberts 2003: 1302). While the article
clearly implied that the coalition partners sought to write a new electoral law
that would privilege them in the allocation of seats after future elections
(Birch et al. 2002: 80), the call for a constitutional amendment also
suggested that the coalition partners considered the wholesale replacement
of PR, which at the time enjoyed constitutional entrenchment (Article 18/1).
However, the prospects for an outright abolition of PR vanished when
the CSSD and the ODS lost their requisite three-fifths majority in Senate
by-elections in 1999.
In the absence of a qualified majority, the CSSD and the ODS proposed
changes to the status quo electoral system that would seemingly not alter its
PR character (Crawford 2001). For its part, the ODS proposed reducing the
number of seats in the Assembly from 200 to 162; increasing the number of
districts from 8 to 35; retaining the 5 per cent threshold but replacing the
Hagenbach-Bischoff with the Imperiali quota. The CSSD agreed with
the drastic increase in the number of districts; however, it proposed to leave
the size of the Assembly intact and to replace the Hagenbach-Bischoff quota
with the d’Hondt highest average formula. The parties eventually arrived at
a compromise and passed legislation in 2000 increasing the number of
electoral districts to 35, leaving the size of the Assembly intact but adopting
the d’Hondt formula, and increasing the threshold for electoral alliances of
two, three, four or more parties to 10 per cent, 15 per cent, and 20 per cent,
respectively (Kopecky 2004: 352).
In spite of his earlier support for a single-member majoritarian electoral
system, President Havel vetoed the electoral reform bill on grounds that it
violated the constitutional protection of the principle of PR (Birch et al.
2002: 83). Indeed, it was obvious that the proposed electoral system was PR
in form but majoritarian in its mechanical operation – reports showed that if
the proposed electoral system had been used to decide the outcome of the
1998 elections, the CSSD would actually have won a narrow single-party
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majority in the Chamber of Deputies, while the smaller parties would have
lost significantly (Birch et al. 2002: 82; Roberts 2003: 1289). Although
the CSSD–ODS coalition overturned the presidential veto and re-passed the
bill, President Havel referred the bill to the Constitutional Court, which
struck it down in 2001 in all but one respect: the Court left the new threshold
structure in place (Crawford 2001: 55; Kopecky 2004: 352). Upon the
initiative of the CSSD, a new bill was passed in both houses of parliament in
2002 increasing the number of districts moderately from 8 to 14 and
adopting the d’Hondt formula. Thus, PR was eventually saved, albeit in a
modified form, at the end of the protracted battle over electoral reform.
Romania 2008
In comparison with Slovenia and the Czech Republic, Romania’s PR system
underwent frequent changes prior to the emergence of a majoritarian reform
proposal on the political agenda in 2008. These changes are summarised in
Table 2. While they point to a gradual weakening in its inclusiveness, the
electoral system has consistently retained its fundamentally PR character
(Pilet and de Waele 2007).
The origins of the attempted majoritarian electoral reform in Romania
can be traced back to the outcome of the 2004 parliamentary and
presidential elections, which was the first to produce a divided executive.
Previous elections (1992, 1996, and 2000) always resulted in the same
political party capturing both the presidency and the prime ministership.
However, in 2004, the presidential race was won by the candidate of the
National Liberal Party (PNL), Basescu, while the prime ministership went
to Tariceanu, the leader of the Democratic Party (PD) that contested the
election in alliance with the PNL. As part of his strategy to combat
corruption in state institutions and Romanian politics in general, President
Basescu advocated the idea of adopting the majority run-off voting system
in national elections that were already used at the local level. In doing so, the
President drew on his party’s earlier support for a candidate-centred
electoral system that it had proposed in 2000. An interesting feature of this
proposal was its populist overtone: the PNL expressed its support for a
TABLE 2
CHANGES IN ROMANIA’S ELECTORAL SYSTEM
1990 1992 2000
Assembly size 396 328 345
Number of districts 41 42 42
Formula Hare D’Hondt D’Hondt
Threshold None 3%a
5%
a
Electoral coalitions faced an added 1 per cent threshold for each additional party joining the
coalition up to a maximum of 8 per cent.
Sources: Birch et al. (2002: 90); Rose and Munro (2003: 248–50).
618 C. Nikolenyi
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candidate-centred voting system that would increase the power of the
electorate at the expense of party leaders by making deputies directly
accountable to their constituents (Birch et al. 2002: 102–3; Pilet and de
Waele 2007: 7).
In March 2007, the parliament defeated the President’s request to hold a
referendum on the question of electoral reform (Southeast European Times,
2 March 2007). Souring relations between the President and the Prime
Minister, made worse by the conflict over electoral reform, led to the latter’s
dismissal of all PNL ministers from the cabinet, thus terminating the
PNL–PD coalition in April. Two weeks later, the parliament voted to
suspend the President on grounds of alleged unconstitutional interference
with the Prime Minister’s position – which the Constitutional Court did not
uphold. Nonetheless, a referendum now had to be held, according to Article
95 of the constitution, to decide whether the President’s impeachment would
stay in effect or not. The question of electoral reform took centre stage at
this juncture.
Basescu claimed that if he won the referendum he would press ahead with
electoral reform and call yet another referendum on the introduction of a
majority run-off electoral system and a 20 per cent reduction in the size of
parliament. Indeed, the President won the impeachment referendum
(Southeast European Times, 21 May 2007). To counter the President’s
agenda, the government proposed an electoral reform bill that combined a
candidate-centred vote with compensatory seats to be distributed among
national party lists. The President vetoed the bill and referred it to the
Constitutional Court on the grounds that its provision for national party
lists, which were not directly voted for by the electorate, violated the
principle of popular sovereignty enshrined in the constitution.
The referendum on electoral reform was held concurrently with
Romania’s first elections to the European Parliament. Although an
overwhelming majority of voters supported the presidential initiative, low
turnout at 26 per cent rendered the referendum inconclusive (Southeast
European Times, 27 November 2007). Thus, the issue of electoral reform
returned to parliament where a compromise was hammered out with the
approval of the President and all the parliamentary parties except the
extreme-right Greater Romania Party (International Herald Tribune,
4 March 2008).
The compromise proposal divided the country into 315 single-member
districts for elections to the Chamber, and 137 for electing the Senate.
Voters no longer voted for closed party lists but for individual candidates
who could win the district upon securing a majority of the votes cast.
Districts where no candidate won a majority were re-allocated among the
parties using the d’Hondt formula and subject to a 5 per cent threshold.
Parties allocated the seats that they qualified for among their candidates in
a descending order of their electoral performance in the district where they
ran. Since the system ensured that every deputy who entered parliament
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would have run in the election and faced the electorate directly, the major
objective of the electoral reform initiative was met. However, the essentially
PR character of the electoral system has remained. In fact, the Gallagher
index of disproprotionality yielded a very low value of 3.85 for the 2008
election, the first one held under the new electoral system.
Discussion
The attempts to replace PR with a majoritarian electoral system in the three
countries varied significantly in terms of both the identity of the actors
that led the proposal to change the status quo and the strategies they used
(or had to use). However, with regard to the eventual outcome, they all
converged on implementing partial changes to the status quo electoral
system. We now review these differences and similarities, summarised in
Table 3.
First, regarding the actors, the only instance in which the incumbent
executive was clearly part of the broader coalition that called for change was
the Czech Republic. However, the CSSD minority government did not push
the reform agenda on its own but in coalition with the largest opposition
party, the ODS. The Romanian executive had already split by the time
electoral reform was on the agenda. The President, who called for the
candidate-centred electoral system, lost his majority in the Chamber as a
result of the dismissal of his party’s ministers from the coalition cabinet. His
proposed electoral reform was not supported by the government, which had
a seriously reduced minority, nor by the opposition. In Slovenia, the
proposal for a majoritarian electoral reform came from both an opposition
party, the Social Democrats, and a segment of the electorate that signed the
petition to hold a legislative referendum on the question of electoral reform.
Thus, the three actors that initiated the proposals for change varied
considerably in both the size and the type of coalition they relied on at the
inception of the process. In two of the three cases (Czech Republic and
Romania) the proposal to replace PR came from the political elite, while in
Slovenia there was also public involvement via the signature drive. Of the
two elite-initiated processes, the reform proposal was supported by a large
legislative coalition, which also bridged the government–opposition divide
TABLE 3
A COMPARISON OF THREE ATTEMPTS AT MAJORITARIAN ELECTORAL
REFORM
Proponent Form of proposal Outcome
Czech Republic Governing ‘coalition’ Legislation/constitutional
amendment
Partial reform
Romania President Referendum Partial reform
Slovenia Opposition Referendum Partial reform
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in the Czech Republic. By contrast, the Romanian reform proposal had a
very narrow base of political support.
Second, only one of the reform attempts, in the Czech Republic, pursued
the parliamentary route to change. As mentioned, the PR system was
entrenched in the Czech constitution, which could only be amended by a
large three-fifths majority in both chambers of parliament. Since the CSSD
and the ODS did have a combined majority that met this requirement, they
were in a position to press ahead not only with a thorough constitutional
amendment to replace PR but also to change other important parts of the
Czech constitutional structure including the powers of the presidency. In
the process the pro-reform coalition eventually lost its majority due to the
successful coordination of the smaller non-communist parties in the
Senate elections. As a result, the CSSD and the ODS had to reformulate
their reform proposal so that it would no longer require a constitutional
amendment. In the Romanian and Slovenian cases, the proponents of
electoral reform had to rely on public involvement to boost their chances
because their legislative bases were too narrow. In both cases, the referenda
failed due to low voter turnout, although in Slovenia the interpretation of
the results proved to be more complicated. It is also worth stressing that the
voters who participated in the respective referenda voted against PR in large
numbers. In Romania, over 80 per cent voted in favour of the President’s
proposed system, while in Slovenia the two-round majority system received
the largest number of ‘For’ and the fewest ‘Against’ votes. Interestingly, the
mixed system that was proposed by the National Council, the second
chamber of parliament, received the weakest support.
Finally, with respect to the outcome of the reform process, all three
countries ended up with relatively minor changes in what fundamentally
remained PR electoral systems. To use Sartori’s (1986) terminology, each of
the three countries ended up with ‘stronger’ electoral PR systems than they
had had before the reform process started. The changes that were made to
the Slovenian and Romanian PR systems bore some formal resemblance to
the failed majoritarian proposals by making the voters’ choice on the ballot
clearly candidate-centred. In both countries, the pre-reform PR systems
presented voters with a single vote that they could cast for closed party lists.
After the reform, however, voters could cast their support for individual
candidates, whose votes were pooled either at two tiers, as in Slovenia, or
only at the national level, as in Romania. In the Czech Republic, no such
changes to the ballot structure were introduced.
The central hypothesis of the article stated the expectation that the
removal of PR in the post-communist democracies would be prevented, or
at least made very difficult, by the institutional architecture of consensus
democracy. The narrative provides considerable evidence in support of this
hypothesis in all three cases. In Slovenia, the Social Democrats took
advantage of the constitutionally enshrined referendum process – a
quintessential element of consensus democracy (Lijphart 1999: 230–31) –
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in their effort to replace the status quo PR system, which was supported
by the governing coalition. The very fact that the referendum was actually
held testifies to the success of the Social Democrats since a public vote was
held on the issue against the wishes of the incumbent government.
However, the majoritarian proposal failed to receive the kind of broad
electoral support that would have allowed electoral reform to pass. As such,
it was precisely the institution of the referendum that saved PR in the
Slovenian case.
After the failure of the referendum, the issue of electoral reform resurfaced
as a result of pro-active judicial review – another pillar of the
institutional design of consensus democracy (Lijphart 1999: 41, 216–32) – by
the Slovenian Constitutional Court. Although the Court’s initial ruling to
declare the referendum valid in favour of the majoritarian reform proposal
was toned down, the status quo PR system eventually had to be amended.
This partial electoral reform of PR in Slovenia was, therefore, not the result
of the current winners, i.e. the incumbent government, trying to manipulate
the electoral system to their partisan advantage. Instead, it was the result of
the institutions of consensus democracy defending PR against a majoritarian
alternative, via the referendum, and pushing for further change within
PR, via judicial review. The Slovenian story nicely illustrates Katz’s (2008:
61) assertion that:
[i]n some cases . . . the winners of the last election are not completely in
control of events. Many of the conditions associated with Lijphart’s
model of consensus democracy . . . may mean that the ‘government’
will not be able to prevent the enactment of reforms it opposes
(or secure the enactment of reforms it wants), except perhaps at
prohibitive costs.
The attempt at a majoritarian reform of the Czech electoral system also
failed on the same account. In spite of nearly complete unity between the
governing CSSD and the formally opposition ODS on the question of
electoral reform, the parties were unable to secure successful passage of their
agenda. The constitutional entrenchment of the electoral system required
the formation of large coalitions in favour of reform in both houses of
parliament. Although the CSSD and the ODS had the necessary number at
first, subsequent elections to the Senate resulted in the loss of their combined
majority. Finally, the intervention of the President and the Constitutional
Court delayed the amendment process and put an effective veto on what the
Court ultimately assessed as a majoritarian reform that did not comply with
the constitution. In short, the institutions of constitutional rigidity, judicial
review, and bicameralism prevented the replacement of PR in the Czech
Republic. What makes the eventual passage of partial PR reform in this case
different from that in Slovenia is the role of the incumbent government.
While the process of partial reform in Slovenia was set in motion by the
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Constitutional Court, in the Czech Republic this role was played by the
initial proponent of reform, the CSSD and the ODS.
Finally, in Romania we found the consensus institutions of the
referendum and a divided executive, which provides greater independence
to the legislature, acting to prevent the reform of PR in favour of a
majoritarian alternative. In contrast to the Czech Republic, the President of
Romania played a key role in advocating the cause of a majoritarian
electoral system. Since he had lost his legislative support base, the only
option he had was to call for a referendum, which, as in Slovenia, protected
the status quo. At the same time, the government was also unable to pass
its own version of electoral reform, favouring a mixed system, due to the
presidential veto and its minority status, which paved the way to the
eventual compromise.
Conclusion
PR systems have tremendous staying power in general (Colomer 2004) and
especially so in the post-communist democracies (Birch 2003). However, this
does not render them immune to challenges in favour of more exclusive
alternatives. By examining the three major cases of such reform attempts in
Eastern and Central Europe, the article shows the ways in which the
institutional architecture of these new democracies acted to prevent the
removal of PR. Had these majoritarian electoral reforms succeeded,
consensus democracy itself would have been seriously undermined. In the
absence of a broad consensus on such a change on the fundamental nature
of post-communist democracy, the PR systems ultimately survived the
challenges.
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