Designing a new electoral system is a complex undertaking, particularly in a country like Uzbekistan, where the current system is based on the Two-Round System (TRS). President Mirziyoyev has proposed transitioning to a mixed-member parallel system, and while this proposal has received some discussion, there has been relatively little public discourse on the issue, and it remains to be seen what changes the proposed reform will entail. This article seeks to examine the implications of this reform and suggest the optimal components to maximize the positive effects of a new electoral design.
What is known so far?
Currently, Uzbekistan uses a majoritarian formula of TRS to form its legislative chamber. The electoral system is based on 150 single-member districts, where one candidate that gets the majority of votes in their constituency wins. In case nobody surpasses more than 50 percent of votes cast, a second round will take place among the top two candidates. While there are only ten other countries that apply TRS for national parliaments, this electoral design is most commonly used to elect chief executives in presidential systems like Uzbekistan itself.
The proposed framework involves a mixed-member parallel system in which one half of parliamentary seats are allocated through the First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) formula, and the other half through List PR formula. The most fundamental difference between FPTP and TRS is that candidates do not have to obtain the majority of votes; they need to get more votes than their competitors. Thus, a candidate can become a member of parliament with just 25% if all other candidates receive even less support. In the other half, citizens vote for party lists rather than individual candidates, and parties will fill the seats according to their share of votes.
Lack of clearly articulated outlines of the reform leaves us plenty of space to speculate on the potential components that could be included in the reform. To begin with, it is important to understand the goals of the reform before we can proceed further. The official justification for the reform is to increase the role of political parties in social and political governance, ultimately leading to greater party institutionalization. In addition, there are inherent functions of electoral systems that cannot be overlooked. These include proportionality, the preservation or refinement of gender quotas, and the enhancement of competition among parties. And with this in mind, we can commence the analysis.
Proportionality of results
First of all, perfect proportionality implies exact conformity between the share of a party’s votes and its seats in parliament. While it is hardly possible to achieve, any disproportionality should be kept to a minimum. One way of accomplishing this task the proposed framework is to maximize the district magnitude, that is the number of parliamentarians elected from one constituency. The most straightforward option is to create a single nationwide constituency like in Kyrgyz Republic. This approach allows to substantially reduce the number of wasted votes (votes that do not affect the distribution of mandates) because voters choose among the same pool of candidates (i.e. party lists) regardless of their place of residence. As a result, each vote will carry the same weight ensuring a fairer transfer of votes into seats.
Furthermore, it is important to clearly indicate the rules of selecting which candidates will obtain a seat once a party receives its share. Thus, this article proposes a closed list system which requires parties to submit the list of candidates in a strict pre-determined order that will determine the seat allocation among fellow party members. In this case parties will be obliged to announce their final and unchangeable list well in advance of an election day so that eligible citizens can familiarise themselves with the lists before casting their votes. Besides, a new law should make sure that candidates on the list cannot run for office as an individual candidate in the majoritarian part of the elections and vice versa. This decision will discourage parties to place individually popular candidates in their lists and conduct the election campaign as a more unified body, and thus contribute to the main official goal of the reform.
Figure 1. Differences between Closed and Open List System Ballots
Note: These are the examples of ballots in a closed and open list systems. While on the left voters chooses only a party, on the right they can choose their favourite candidates within the party as well. The above figure is created by the author based on Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook and publicly available information about political parties in Uzbekistan.
Gender Quotas
A closed list system also facilitates the implementation of legislated candidate gender quotas, which are crucial for promoting gender parity in politics. While the current election code already mandates a 30-percent quota for women, a new system should maintain and even refine this provision for better implementation. For example, to prevent parties from placing female candidates at the bottom of their lists, candidate quotas should be accompanied by rank-ordering rules. A common practice is to oblige parties to alternate male and female candidates at every third position on the list, which ensures that female candidates are placed in more competitive positions. Additionally, the case of Kyrgyzstan pre-2019 demonstrated that even if parties follow quota rules before and during elections, they may evade them in the process of distributing seats. Thus, replacement rules should be implemented to ensure that if a party member withdraws their candidacy after obtaining a seat, they are replaced with a representative of the same gender. Last but not least, the use of gender-neutral language is important to use age when discussing candidate quotas, as they are designed to increase gender diversity in politics, which benefits all members of society.
Electoral Threshold
The legal electoral threshold is another component of proportional formulas worth noting. The threshold is the minimum share of votes parties have to gain to be eligible for offices in the parliament. Legislative mandates are thus allocated only among parties that reach the threshold, leaving those that fall short of the legal bar without representation. Obviously, the level of threshold significantly affects the effective number of parties by decreasing or increasing the fragmentation in the legislative body. The higher threshold somewhere between 5-9% is believed to avert fragmentation in the parliament and is most effective under the conditions with high number of registered parties like in Kyrgyz Republic. Whereas the lower threshold up to 3 percent is likely to favour smaller parties without leading to extreme fragmentation. Given the fact that there are currently only five registered political parties in Uzbekistan and no apparent prospects of loosening regulations for the registration of new parties, a national threshold of 3 percent or no threshold at all seems like a sensible option. This suggestion is also consistent with the recommendation of PACE (the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe). Top of Form
Legal electoral threshold might come in another form as well. For example, electoral system of Kyrgyz Republic before amendments to the electoral code in 2020 included a regional electoral threshold of 0.7%. Namely, in addition to the national-level threshold, parties need to surpass certain proportion of votes in each region to obtain parliamentary mandates. The main objective of this rule is to avoid regionally based parties that aim at representing only citizens of some parts of the country. While this type of threshold surely contributes to the disproportionality of electoral outcomes, there are already provisions in place in the Law on Political Parties that carry out the same function. 20,000 signatures must be collected from at least 8 regions of Uzbekistan, with no more than 15% of the signatures coming from any single region to register a political party. Therefore, geographically-based legal threshold would be undue burden on smaller parties with relatively narrow electorate.
Nevertheless, taking into consideration the possibility of adopting the legal electoral threshold either on national or provincial level, norms that regulate candidate nomination processes by political parties must be considered as well. The new system should allow registered political parties to run as coalitions. This provision will allow political parties with overlapping voter bases to join forces to increase their chances to gain representation in the legislative chamber.
Issues with the Current System
Having completed the analysis of formal rules and their possible implications based on the existing studies of electoral designs, I have to remind that the legislative chamber of Uzbekistan is still maintaining the role of a rubber-stamp body. Moreover, not a single parliamentary election since the independence has met international democratic standards of fairness and transparency yet. Major international institutions like OSCE mentioned some positive developments in the conduct of elections, but remain sceptical about the genuine competition and plurality of choices on the ballot. Thus, well-designed electoral system in Uzbekistan can be a solid foundation to build a robust party system only under the condition that political parties and the parliament begin to act de facto as independent branch of the state.
Table 1. Distribution of seats in 2019 Parliamentary Elections
Source: ODIHR Election Observation Mission Final Report on 2019 parliamentary elections in Uzbekistan
Furthermore, despite substantial financial and technical support from the government, officially registered political parties have failed to gain the trust of citizens. According to the latest available information, five parties have 1,800,000 registered members. It accounts for less than 9% of the registered voters. For comparison, 5 political parties in Kazakhstan have slightly fewer members in absolute numbers– approximately 1,650,000 but higher in relative terms – 14 per cent of registered voters. Existing parties in Uzbekistan have been failing their functions even qualitatively due to the unclear party platforms, primitive communication channels with their electorates, or vagueness of their activities in national and regional legislative bodies. But most importantly, party system suffers from the lack of pluralism and genuine competition. All five parties have their representatives in the parliament and have plenty of formal mechanisms to check executive branch. But they do not have political power to perform such role per se. As a result, it is common for voters to have no clear idea about why these parties exist in the first place. Thus, a new electoral system should not only help those parties to institutionalize but also increase parliament’s authority vis-à-vis the cabinet.
For this the government should consider reintroducing the norm that permits individual candidates to run for MP offices within the majoritarian half of the new electoral design. 1999 parliamentary elections were the only to allow independent candidates that gained 16 seats out of 250 (6.4%). This measure would lead to more diversity on the ballot and increase the competition at local single-member voting districts. Additionally, it would be in line with the path of political liberalization that the new leadership claims to be on. Similar decision by the government in Kazakhstan has been mostly welcomed by both domestic and international observers as a step towards the right path. Thereby, following the example of its northern neighbour, the government can demonstrate its genuine commitment to the idea of modernization. However, this is not a matter of electoral design as much as the matter of regime’s willingness to maintain its status as the pro-reformist.
Table 2. The Distribution of Seats in 1999 Parliamentary Elections
Source: Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz, and Christof Hartmann, Elections in Asia and the Pacific: A Data Handbook: Volume I: Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia (OUP Oxford, 2001), page 495.
Also, it is high time to revisit the law regulating the establishment of new parties. By all standards, it is rather a restrictive document that has been restraining new parties to appear and diversify the political landscape. Whatever the Minister of Justice claims, the task of collecting 20,000 signatures is almost unattainable for newly emerging political groups. Especially taking into consideration that reducing this requirement from 20,000 to 5,000 signatures has already been producing its results. Strikingly, as the recent case of “Haqiqat and Taraqqiyot SDP” (Truth and Progress) shows even when some groups actually manage to collect necessary signatures, they are still highly likely to get rejected due other ambiguous legal technicalities. Overall, reforming an electoral design creates a perfect opportunity to liberalize the legal framework and soften the grip on political parties.
Conclusion
All in all, electoral system reform is a complex phenomenon that may bring about uncertain consequences for numerous issues. And despite recently increasing cases of such changes, it is still rare for countries to alter their electoral rules substantially. Therefore, the government should carry out the electoral reform only after a thorough planning process and learning from the experience of other countries to avoid repeating their shortcomings. Overall, the introduction of a closed list proportional system with a single nationwide constituency, low or absent national or regional threshold, and legislated candidate quotas accompanied by rank-ordering and replacement rules is likely to result in better proportionality between votes and seats, increased competition on the ballot, and certainly higher party institutionalization in Uzbekistan. And these changes need to be accompanied by far more encouraging law on political parties instead of the one in force now.
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Acknowledgments:
This work was partly financially supported by JST SPRING, Grant Number JPMJSP2125.The author Akrom Avezov would like to take this opportunity to thank the “Interdisciplinary Frontier Next-Generation Researcher Program of the Tokai Higher Education and Research System.”