How Best to Build Democracy: Laying a Foundation for the New Iraq

Adeed Dawisha and Karen Dawisha's excellent article "How to Build a Democratic Iraq" (May/June 2003) contains a series of valuable recommendations and admonitions. The few failings of their article lie less in what they advocate or reject than in what they leave out. The following recommendations draw on the experiences of other democratizing countries to fill in several gaps in the Dawishas' analysis. Together they aim to enhance the likelihood that democracy takes root and survives in Iraq.

BARRELS AND BALLOTS

One of the biggest dangers facing postwar Iraq is the prospect of its becoming a classic "petro-state" (like Nigeria or Venezuela), in which vast revenues from the sale of oil accrue to a shaky national government. Such states are characterized by massive corruption, fiscal profligacy, and vicious zero-sum competition for control of oil revenues. Politicians who gain power in these countries typically invest heavily in repression to retain it.

Privatizing Iraq's oil industry would not avert this danger because the immense revenue that the government would receive from royalties, taxes, or auctions could be misspent in the same way as are revenues from the sale of oil. Instead, oil revenues should be driven as far from the federal government as possible, down to states, localities, and even individuals. Dawisha and Dawisha dislike the idea of giving each Iraqi citizen a bank account, into which equal shares of Iraq's monthly oil revenues could be deposited. But this system, or something like it, should be the goal. The result would be to put the country's wealth directly into the hands of Iraqis, to remove discretionary authority from the national government, and to force the government to rely on taxation for income -- which would force it, in turn, to report and justify its expenditures.

Another key component of the transition process will be to create an effective electoral system. To ensure that early standard-setting elections are free and fair, foreigners could step into the role of conducting and overseeing them. But once the job is turned over to the Iraqis, they would benefit from the establishment of a virtual fourth branch of government charged with administering elections. The heads of this supreme electoral authority could be chosen by a supermajority of the legislature and granted sufficient funding from domestic or foreign sources to ensure their technical competence. Mexico transformed its electoral system, which was once riddled with fraud, into one of the cleanest in the world by creating just such an autonomous Federal Electoral Institute. Iraq should follow suit.

Once an electoral system is actually established, politicians respond with remarkable predictability to the incentives it produces. The trick is to get those incentives right. Dawisha and Dawisha cleverly advocate the creation of multimember districts as a way of moderating ethnic tensions. But they do not go far enough in specifying how these districts should be drawn, and we know enough from the experiences of countries such as Brazil and Taiwan to guess at the potential effects of electoral design. To prevent the emergence of any permanent political majority, Iraq should be divided into a small number of very large districts, with boundaries that match those of Iraq's three major ethnic groupings (Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shi'ite Arab), and possibly a separate district for Baghdad. Not all of these districts would need to have the same number of members, but seats within them would be based on a strict share of the vote. Thus, in a district with 40 members, a party or candidate that received 2.5 percent of the votes would earn 1 seat.

Such a system would fragment chauvinistic parties designed to advance the interests of one major ethnic group by activating new types of division -- based, for example, on class, sector, tribal affiliation, or policy platform -- and by diluting the salience of primary ethnic identities. Ultimately, this structure would help prevent the hegemony of any one group. If such a system encouraged too much fragmentation, districts could be made slightly smaller -- perhaps one for each existing state, with at least five members in each -- but the same principle would apply.

SPRING-CLEANING

Dawisha and Dawisha rightly advocate a parliamentary system for Iraq, but one potential pitfall of such a system is the power it grants to the bureaucracy. In presidential regimes, directly elected chief executives exercise direct-line authority over cabinet officers, who exercise direct-line authority over bureaucrats. In parliamentary regimes, indirectly elected prime ministers and cabinet officers exercise indirect authority over professional civil servants. Bureaucrats under parliamentary systems are thus less accountable to elected representatives than they are under presidential regimes.

In postcolonial India, the effectiveness of parliamentary rule was dramatically enhanced by a clean, competent, British-trained civil service. Lamentably, Iraq has no such inheritance; after decades of Baath Party rule, its own bureaucracy is politicized and corrupt. As a consequence, additional mechanisms will be needed to prevent and redress bureaucratic abuses. One such mechanism is that most Nordic of institutions, the ombudsman. Properly staffed offices of ombudsmen at the national and provincial levels would offer Iraqi citizens the opportunity to register their grievances and seek effective administrative redress. Moreover, the office of ombudsman has to date proved quite adaptable to countries without a history of such institutions.