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Predictions: Egyptian presidential election
The first round of Egypt’s presidential election is tomorrow, which means it’s time for everybody to make their predictions. I think the biggest story of late has been the surprise surge of former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq. I say surprise, although an Egyptian friend has been predicting his success for some time now. It’s difficult to get a handle on the race because the polling has been rather erratic. With that being said, I think it’s possible to analyze some of the polls and make some comments.
I created a poll of polls, using Al Masry Al Youm’s and Al-Ahram’s weekly surveys. I chose these two because they were the only ones to be released at nearly identical times for seven weeks.
A couple thoughts and random speculations on these numbers:
The two sets of surveys had some notable differences. Al Masry Al Youm’s had a far higher number of undecided voters (It would have been nice to know how the questions were worded). Al-Ahram, on the other hand, gave a slight edge to several candidates, most notably, Amr Moussa. In fact, Moussa polled on average 23 points higher in Al-Ahram polls than Masry’s. It looks like Al-Ahram was pushing respondents harder to make a decision, as its lower undecided number produced higher numbers for every major candidate. The fact that Moussa gained so much from this group, could indicate that a lot of the support we see for him in these surveys is not solidified, or even committed to voting. This would support the narrative that from the beginning, Moussa was largely running so strong due to name recognition.
People aren’t that undecided. One of the most notable aspects of these polls is the high number of undecideds in the race. Al-Masry Al-Youm even has 33 percent of all voters listed as undecided in their last poll. The thing is, the surveys also have a very high number of people claiming they will vote. In fact, the last poll shows that 87 percent of all registered voters will turn out. Voter turnout models are hard, US pollsters still struggle with it, but these firms still need a better screen. Turnout in the recent parliamentary polls was around 54 percent. The difference between those two numbers (87 and 54) is roughly the number of undecideds in their poll. I’m definitely not claiming that all the undecideds did not vote in the last election, and will not vote in this one. But I do think it’s safe to assume that opinions are a bit more solidified at this stage in the race. We probably shouldn’t speculate about where this mass number of undecideds will go. They might not go anywhere.
Shafiq’s surge is real. According the poll of polls, Shafiq is in second place with 21 percent of the vote. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsy and Hamdeen Sabahi are also enjoying small surges, although remain far behind. Shafiq was smart in having a strong ground operation and playing to his base. He probably also took note of the brief surge of Omr Suleiman, which showed that their was a constituency for a law and order candidate. Shafiq didn’t try to straddle several social cleavages (like Moussa and Fotouh), he just built a base within one group and developed a clear message.
We get to see if in Egypt, the Party decides. Morsy is enjoying a late surge but still looks like he will fall short of the top two. This seems like a great opportunity to really see the strength of the Brotherhood’s ground operation. Morsy doesn’t have the personal popularity of other candidates. If he alone polls far better than the surveys indicated, we can probably infer a lot about the MB’s grassroots strength.
Final Predictions: Shafiq and Moussa win the first round, although a strong possibility that it will be Shafiq and Morsy.
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Greece, bonus seats, and PR
Greece held parliamentary elections on Sunday in which the two historic largest parties were battered at the polls while parties on the extreme right and left performed disturbingly well. The top party, New Democracy (ND) received less votes than it did in the previous election (19 percent compared to 33 percent) yet actually finished with 17 more seats than before. How did this happen?
Greece has a strange system where the party that receives the most votes gets an additional 50 seats (up from 40 during the last election) in parliament. So while there are 300 seats in the Vouli ton Ellinon, parties only really compete for 250 while the last 50 are allocated separately. The point of this, I’m assuming, is to ensure that one party or coalition has a governing majority. It obviously failed in this election as even with the bonus, ND will still just get 36 percent of all seats.[1]
Greece’s system is a great example of how an ostensibly proportional system can perform very unproportionally. Small degrees of over-representation are consistent with most nationwide PR systems but Greece’s tends to highly exaggerate the top party while mitigating the natural bonus that we would see for the other parties. The 50 bonus seats are calculated based on the national vote total. Invalid votes are disregarded for seat allocation purposes as are votes for parties that fall below the 3 percent threshold. Therefore, we should normally expect to see most parties that enter parliament get a slightly higher percentage of seats than their raw vote total would suggest. For example, in this election, it seems all parties that entered parliament would have been over represented if you did not factor in the bonus seats (so a parliament of 250). Syriza would have received nearly 21 percent of seats for getting only 17 percent of the vote and New Democracy would have still received 23 percent for getting only 19 percent of the vote. (Figure 1) All parties, however, would have done better than their percent of the popular vote would indicate.
Figure 1 (Click to enlarge)
With the bonus, however, ND received a 17 percent boost from their raw vote total (36 percent of all seats with only 19 percent of the popular vote), while Syriza stayed at basically the same level. The other parties, however, got around a fraction of a percent less of the seat total than their popular vote would have indicated. This somewhat has the effect of awarding all wasted votes to New Democracy. That last column in Figure 1 shows how the bonus affected that party’s seat total compared to a parliament without the 50 bonus seats.
Attempting to create a governing majority has some understandable justifications, but what happens when no party can get that majority anyway? Now Greece’s system just gave a massive boost to one party, without anything to really show for it. In order for a party to win a majority of seats it would have to win approximately 39 percent of the vote, at a minimum. This was a number that was calculated prior to the election, so maybe it could be possible to stipulate that no party wins the bonus unless it reaches that level? Comments or corrections welcome.
[1] I was unaware of any other country that has a bonus system until a friend pointed me towards Italy, which guarantees 340 seats to the top-performing party. (This is somewhat unsettling, as I have already heard some people compare the performance of the extreme right and left in this election to famous elections in Italy and Germany. I don’t think we need to fret about fascism coming to Greece but it never hurts to reread Giovanni Sartori.)
Slovenia rejects new family law
Last week in Slovenia, voters rejected, via a national referendum, a new family law that would allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The new family code was passed by the then-governing center-left coalition in 2011 but a conservative religious group collected the signatures necessary to challenge the law in a referendum.With a low turnout of approximately 26 percent, around 55 percent of voters rejected the law, while about 45 percent supported it.
I’ve discussed several times my opposition to direct democracy without turnout thresholds. They allow a small, driven group of individuals to pass laws so long as the rest of the population isn’t as equally mobilized to stop them. This is a great example of that. Should Slovenia really be overturning such an important law based on the preferences of just over 14 percent of voters?
Cameras in Russian polling stations
From the WSJ comes this story about Russia’s plan to install web cameras in polling stations for the March presidential election.
Russia Friday launched the presidential election website, www.webvybory2012.ru, that will allow web users to access video recorded at any of the approximately 92,000 polling stations across the country. One camera will give a full panorama view of each polling station and a second camera will be directed at the ballot box.
[...]
The website allows users to select as many polling stations for monitoring as they wish, although only until Election Day. Users will be able to monitor the election from 12 a.m. to 8 p.m. Moscow time. For an hour, recording will continue but nothing will be shown to observe the secrecy of the ballot. Starting at 9 p.m., when voting closes in Kaliningrad, Russia’s westernmost province, the service will show ballot counting and viewers will be able to see video from 8 p.m. local time.
Webcams in polling stations aren’t a bad idea by themselves, but I have a lot of problems with the way this is being implemented. My first concern is that it may contribute to the common development practitioner practice of assuming impact from an output. As with all transparency initiatives (making public records available, etc..) it’s not enough to simply produce the information and assume civil society will use it. Often times they won’t. There are many similar “citizen monitoring” projects being done through the Ushahidi platform, which produce neat maps. Often the assumption is that people will actually do something with that map. I don’t want to bash Ushahidi too hard as I think it can do interesting things, but producing data should not be viewed as a behavior-changing impact of an intervention. It’s just an output that we hope will lead to the behavior change.
The webcams do, however, remind me of an innovative experiment done in Afghanistan: In 2010, local election monitors took photographs of the final tally sheets in local Afghan polling stations, which was shown to reduce fraud by 60%. The Afghanistan experiment was done through a Randomized Control Trial (RCT), which brings me to my next problem with this experiment.
It’s always difficult to determine if election monitoring actually reduces fraud (although Susan Hyde has done great work showing that it can). This is for the simple reason that we don’t know the counterfactual level of fraud if the observation wasn’t there. Because of this, I think it would be much smarter if - instead of trying to put webcams in nearly every polling station – they randomly assigned the web cameras to certain stations. This would allow us to measure if the intevention was actually effective or not. Aside from the fact that so many webcams will make monitoring of any of them less effective, not randomizing the cameras will make it impossible to actually determine impact. Of course this assumes the actual goal of the project is to reduce fraud and not just give the appearance of transparency.
Who owns a seat in the Greek Parliament?
It appears that in Greece, parties can expel MPs for not voting with the party:
Twenty two PASOK MPs and 21 New Democracy deputies voted against the bill. In both cases, those lawmakers were expelled from their parties.
Former Transport Minister Makis Voridis and Deputy Mercant Marine Minister Adonis Georgiadis went against the line of their party, Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS), by voting for the bill. Both were expelled.
It was the first time in Greek parliamentary history that so many lawmakers were ousted from their parties on the same night.
Certainly a dramatic situation, but party ownership of seats seems like a legitimate rule, given the fact that Greece uses a closed-list proportional representation system. When voters cast a ballot, they are clearly making a choice for a party, and not an individual candidate. If Greece used Open List PR, then a case could be made that the individual was driving the party’s capture of that seat, and such a rule would seem less democratic. Some countries with majoritarian systems, such as Kenya and India, do have rules that prevent floor-crossing. In most of these cases, however, the seat is vacated and a by-election is held. The party can not just fill the vacant seat with its next in line candidate. In Lesotho, which has both PR and single- member districts, the PR MPs are prevented from switching parties but the SMD candidates are free to do so.
Bad election administration has consequences
Croatians voted in favor of European Union membership in a referendum on Sunday, although turnout was officially placed at 43 percent. Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic stated that this was a result of an inaccurate and out-of-date voter registry. If the voter roll was accurate, Pusic claimed, then actual turnout may have been closer to 60 percent of voters.
I’ve previously discussed how I believe that most plebiscites should require some turnout threshold in order for a measure to pass. Thresholds can prevent a small, driven group of individuals from easily passing beneficial laws assuming the rest of the population isn’t as equally mobilized to stop them. EU membership is an important issue, so a turnout requirement would make sense here. When nobody even knows how many voters exist, however, such a rule is impossible.
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Parties sometimes act like parties, Middle East edition
Ennahda
In his paper, Candidate Recruitment and Former Rebel Parties, John Ishiyama examined the transformation of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) from rebel group to political party. Ishiyama argued while those who study post-conflict environments view rebel-to-party organizations as distinct from traditional parties, they should actually act the same when they try to enter parliament. His research showed that the UCPN (Maoist) ran its most loyal candidates in safe districts while it ran more mainstream candidates in tougher districts. Ishiyama’s methodology was interesting, but it’s still unclear if his relationship is endogenous. As he only has one election to base data off of, we do not know that his independent variable (margin of victory per district) was driving his dependent variable (candidate ran) or vice versa. While still in progress, Ishiyama’s paper is a novel contribution to the literature examining the behavior of rebel movements as they transition to political parties.
Ishiyama’s paper is important, however, because it argues that the internal structure of an organization can be less important than the institutional rules it feels it has to play by. Both of these things, of course, are important, but I’m sympathetic to the idea that we don’t pay enough attention the latter, especially with regards to political party activity. I believe that with regards to studying political parties, “party” should be a verb as well as a noun. Organizations choose to “party” when they want certain benefits from the government. This is an important way to look at things because it could have implications for how we expect parties to behave. Several months ago, Eric Trager wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, that effectively argued the hierarchical structure of the Muslim Brotherhood would prevent it from moderating in a way we should expect from a political party. This isn’t a bad prediction, but I don’t think we can assume this will happen. Buried in this France 24 story about Ennahda, is a tidbit that the Islamist party had very different campaign messages depending on what part of the country it was running in. While this probably seems banal to an American citizen, this behavior for a party shouldn’t be common if we assume a party’s internal structure and ideology are the most important predictors of how they will act. (Not sure of Ennahda’s structure but its ideology could suggest low flexibly).
I wonder if anybody who was on the ground in Egypt could provide insight into differing campaign messages with regards to the FJP. It would also be interesting to see if FJP MPs who were elected in the nominal tier of seats behave differently than those elected on the list tier. It would be nice if such votes are recorded and somebody would be able to collect this data.
Institutions are still important, even in America
I try not to venture into American politics much on this blog but there is one thing that’s really bothered me that I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere. I know this is somewhat outdated, as Rick Perry is yesterday’s news, but why did no one challenge him on the idea that he would cut Congress’ pay in half?
“The idea that [a congressman or woman] makes three times what the average family makes is really obscene,” he said. “[They] need to have their salaries cut in half, they need to spend half as much on their budget, and they need to be in Washington half the time.”
It is somewhat depressing that in no debate, no member of the media, or no other candidate, bothered to ask Perry where in the Constitution the president has the authority to determine congressional pay. If someone did, Perry’s famous three branches of government mishap would have have become his second most embarrassing debate moment. That’s because the president does not determine congressional pay. Congress does. The president is not the boss of congress, even though people only seem to hold the former accountable. It’s this same lack of knowledge of how American institutions work that leads otherwise smart people to speculate how a third party president could really change things.
Electoral Choice and Ballot Complexity: Effects on Turnout
Work has been a little hectic lately, so the blogging has been light of late. I do plan on resuming a more consistent schedule soon, however. Before diving back in the Egypt numbers, however, I wanted to highlight two very good papers I saw presented at APSA several months ago.
When advising on electoral system design, election assistance practitioners often recommend that developing countries implement simple systems that their voters will be able to understand. While the theory behind this is sound, I’ve always wondered if we were overestimating the impact of ballot complexity. After all, I’m sure many Americans aren’t aware that many of their city council races are MNTV, while their congressional race is FPTP, yet our system still functions. In two papers that actually attempt to answer this question, Aina Gallego of Stanford University and Saul Cunow of UCSD both looked at what impact various electoral variables have on voter turnout. Aina argued that increases in ballot complexity, while not impacting educated voters, has a negative effect on turnout rates of less educated citizens. Aina used two strategies to test her hypothesis. For the first, she conducted a field experiment where she sent several fake ballot questions to a random group of Spanish citizens. The control group was given a straightforward ballot containing descriptions of candidates and which party they belonged to, and then asked to vote for one. The second group was given the same list, but was asked to vote for up to five. The second group had a 12 percent drop in responses from low-educated citizens. For her second strategy, she ran a cross-national regression of electoral system design by turnout among various demographics and found that controlling for other factors, increased preference votes were associated with a decrease in turnout.
I had two problems with Aina’s methodology. The first is her field experiment failed to simulate a realistic ballot structure that any voter would encounter. The second is her classification of voting system type was binary (ability to cast preference votes or not) and did not account for the many rules that would significantly impact the level of ballot complexity within preference voting systems. This could include the option of voting across multiple parties, the ability to rank candidates, and the ability to punish candidates on a given party list. Also, her theory is based on the cognitive perceptions of voters before they decide to vote, not on what they actually experience in the voting booth. Invalid ballots are evidence of voters who were unable to handle the ballot, but showed up anyway. Therefore, I would suggest a more realistic measure would be district magnitude, as an increase in candidate choice would, by her theory, intimidate the voter and make them less likely to turnout. Despite these shortcomings, her paper provided a new look at a concept that has been assumed, but never rigorously tested.
Related, Saul Cunow conducted a field experiment in Brazil and found that there is a curvilinear relationship between the number of candidates on a ballot and turnout. That is, at low levels of candidate choice, turnout is low as voters feel they have little options. As the number of choices increases, turnout increases, due to the more choices. After the number of potential candidates increases past a certain level, however, turnout decreases as people are confused by the number of choices and have a harder time distinguishing between them. Saul also finds that the presence of party labels does not reduce the probability of abstention among higher numbers of candidates.
Both are good papers and you should read them.
Bad election managment
From Al Masry Al Youm:
Disabled citizens faced difficulties while voting in this week’s round of parliamentary elections, a number of rights groups have said.
There were no sign language interpreters to help the deaf and the majority of polling stations were located on upper floors, making it difficult for voters in wheelchairs, the Egyptian Coalition for the Disabled in Alexandria said.
[...]Heba Hagras, an Egyptian Bloc candidate who has a disability, also said no facilities were available for those with special needs. Hagras said she found it difficult to go up to the polling stations in her wheelchair. She said one supervising judge refused to leave the voting station to help her.
Mohamed Mokhtar, who also uses a wheelchair, said his polling station was on the third floor and the scrambling of voters made it even more difficult to reach the ballot box.
There are a lot of people with disabilities in Egypt. This is embarrassing.
