The Impact of Electoral Engineering on Political Moderation and Stability in Divided Societies

Abstract

Politicization of ethnic identities is a major impediment to moderation in deeply divided societies. Two schools of thought dominate the literature on democracy in those types of societies, consociationalism and centripetalism. Consociationlaists support the philosophy of inclusion, power-sharing and mutual vetoes whereas, Centripetalists, promote the engineering of political institutions that encourage moderation through vote-pooling. Consequently, institutional engineering, more specifically electoral engineering is as a key tool to manage cleavages. This thesis aligns itself with centripetalism and evaluates Lebanon’s electoral law passed in 2017 against centripetalist core concepts, both in theory and using empirical case studies from the results of Lebanon’s 2018 elections. Theoretical evaluation of Lebanon’s electoral law showed that district formation, seats allocation and single preferential voting largely contradicts centripetalists concepts of bargaining, vote-pooling and moderate political discourses. Also, empirical results in Lebanon’s 2018 parliamentary elections showed that cross-confessional and cross sectarian votes of minority groups are very high in districts with established majorities and vice versa. However, these votes are found to be very minimal in districts where sectarian groups have an equal number of voters and parliamentary seats. Empirical results showed that the electoral law in Lebanon will encourage, with a high likelihood, the Lebanese voter to cast a sectarian vote in districts where sectarian groups have approximately equal number of voters and. The thesis concludes that should political moderation be promoted in Lebanon; proportional representation is be rectified by redefining district formation and seats allocation. Also, single preferential vote should be substituted by multiple preferential voting with ranking system.