Party lists

Reading an opinion piece on Iraq this morning there was a passage that caught my eye:

So why haven't such attitudes translated into better political realities for Iraq? The first leg of the problem, in Mr. Alusi's view, is one of salesmanship. "The main mistake of liberals in the Middle East is trying to speak at too high a level. Liberal values aren't for intellectuals or for the rich. They're for the simple people." Another leg is that Iraq's liberal politicians--he mentions Ahmed Chalabi and Ayad Allawi--have spent more time jockeying for cabinet positions than proselytizing for liberal beliefs and organizing grassroots support. A third leg is the media: While sectarian parties such as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa control several newspapers and TV stations, there's no real outlet for liberal ideas. Even the U.S.-sponsored Al-Hurra ("The Free One"), he laments, often seems little better than a facsimile of Al-Jazeera. The fourth leg is a voting system based on party lists, which typically encourages sectarian voting patterns.

It's interesting because I was actually thinking about this recently and meant to blog about it. Prospects for a working democracy in Iraq really took a hit when the decision was made to use a parliamentary, party list mechanism to elect politicians rather than a single member constituency/first past the post system. The effect is that parliamentarians are more beholden to their parties than the voters. Because politicians do not represent mixed districts with varying interests it promotes sectarianism and extremism.

On a related note this is also one of the pernicious effects of so-called majority-minority districts. It is no surprise that Black politicians with the most mainstream appeal are also those who have diverse constituents, such as Deval Patrick and Barack Obama.