Third Time Lucky?

When the Al-Aqsa Intifada began in 2000, it was noticeable that the Israeli military responded quickly to Palestinian rioters with lethal force. The intention may have been to quickly quell the uprising, so as to prevent the long-running series of rolling riots and demonstrations that characterised the Intifada that began in the late 1980s. The Israeli military’s swift use of live bullets did indeed drive demonstrators and stone throwers off the streets, but their place was increasingly taken by gunmen and suicide bombers; in effect, the Israelis succeeded in militarising the Intifada. This is not to say that gunmen and suicide bombers did not exist already, but the driving of stone-throwers and demonstrators off the streets meant that the Intifada became one of guns and bombs (and later rockets); the Palestinian masses largely became spectators.

At the moment, tension in the West Bank and Palestinian areas of Jerusalem is riding high. There have been a series of demonstrations and riots that have seen stones thrown at Israeli troops. And we have also seen Palestinian youths killed by Israeli soldiers. Two youths were shot dead in a village near Nablus on the 20th March. On the following day, in the same village, two other youths were killed in the outskirts of Jerusalem, ostensibly while attempting to stab an Israeli soldier.

The first of these two incidents is attracting some attention. Israeli military sources reported that the two teenagers were not hit by live rounds but instead were accidentally killed by rubber bullets. Doctors who treated the two are disputing this; an X-ray showing a bullet in the middle of one youth’s head does rather challenge the veracity of the Israeli army’s statement. This would not of course be the first time that the Israeli military have lied about the circumstances in which they killed Palestinians; it is not surprising that the circumstances in which the other two fellows were killed are also being challenged.

It will be interesting to see how things on the West Bank develop, and whether this is the beginning of a Third Intifada. If it is, its relationship to the main Palestinian political movements will be interesting. Fatah has largely given up on confronting Israel, and is instead pursuing an ineffectual strategy of negotiations with the occupying power. Hamas is ostensibly in favour of street politics, but its own fondness for military action makes its relationship with demonstrators and stone throwers problematic; the organisation required for launching rockets and despatching suicide bombers is intrinsically vanguardist and sits uneasily with mass action. So perhaps a Third Intifada will see mass action operating outside the control of the two dominant parties. Or maybe a resolute response by the Israeli military will drive the demonstrators off the streets and ensure a re-run of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

Some links:

B'tselem says live bullets may have killed Palestinians (BBC)

Palestinians shot dead by Israeli troops near Nablus (Guardian)

Two Palestinians killed by Israeli troops after attack on soldier (Guardian)

Hamas continues to hold journalist

Paul Martin is a British journalist and film-maker who has previously worked for the BBC and the Times. He is currently under arrest in Gaza, being held in administrative detention by the Hamas authorities there. Mr Martin’s detention is disturbing in a number of ways. First of all, his arrest marks the first imprisonment of a foreign journalist since Hamas took control of the Strip in 2007. But the circumstances of his arrest also have sinister implications. Mr Martin had been working on a documentary on Mohammad Abu Muailik, an activist linked to Fatah, the historically dominant Palestinian group with which Hamas is in conflict. Abu Muailik had fallen foul of Hamas and was himself on trial, accused of collaboration with Israel. Mr Martin had travelled to Gaza to give evidence on Abu Muailik’s behalf, but when he began to speak in court the prosecutor accused him of being an accessory and had him arrested. One must wonder why the Hamas government goes through the charade of running courts and pretending towards some kind of due process when its legal system is being run in this kind of farcical manner.

more (Guardian)

Institutional Entrepreneurs

I have been posting about electoral reform in Ireland. It seems like this is suddenly on the agenda in a way it has not been before. There also seems to be a generally higher interest in the topic of institutional change, with various people arguing that if we make their favoured changes to the constitutional setup then we can greatly improve politics in this country.

Now, is all this institutional reform chit-chat in Ireland a good or a bad thing? Looking at institutions and trying to improve them is always wise. It seems in Ireland, though, that a great many people are slipping into thinking that the country's problems could be solved by tinkering with various aspects of the institutional set up – as though changing the electoral system, or adopting a presidential constitution, or having ministers who weren't TDs, and so on would somehow magically lead to radically different political decisions being made. This is almost like a software developer's approach to politics, treating it as an engineering problem.

I think institutional change is dangerous, if reforms are implemented without being fully thought through. Given the hare-brained and almost crankish nature of many reforms I've seen proposed lately this is a real danger. Furthermore, many people overstate the ability of institutional change to transform the workings of politics. Ultimately it does not matter so much how we vote in governments if the electorate keeps voting in the same people.

Electoral Reform in Ireland – Slight Return

This really is the last episode of my exciting series on electoral reform in Ireland. I was talking about how there is something to be said for introducing a mixed-member electoral system in Ireland, with my own eccentric suggestion being electing half the TDs by STV in large multi-member constituencies, the other half by closed national lists. One thing I did not really talk about is how mixed-member system operate in practice. I do not mean so much in terms of whether they are associated with "good" or "bad" political outcomes, more how the system itself tends to operate. This is not something I have read too much on*, but I understand that one common feature of mixed-member systems is that list MPs tend to cultivate particular localities with a view to becoming constituency MPs for that area. In this context, it is maybe interesting to note that Germany's chancellor is not head of the national CDU list, but is rather a constituency MP for somewhere in Mecklenburg-Vorprommen.

I am not entirely sure why the list MPs are so keen to become constituency MPs. Maybe the ones who are individually elected are seen as having greater legitimacy. Or it could be that being a constituency MP is seen as being more secure – a list candidate needs to keep in with the party hierarchy to ensure that they are being placed high enough up the list to get elected, while a local MP just needs to keep in with the local party grandees to ensure they get reselected, if they are in a safe seat. Or maybe some other factor is at play.

If a mixed-member system were rolled out in Ireland, it would not therefore be too surprising if it failed to vanish the genie of localism from Irish politics. We might end up with list TDs who neglect national issues and instead focus on local issues and look to become constituency TDs.

I will for the moment leave the topic of electoral reform, but not without throwing out a question. Talk on this issue is driven by the idea that a localist orientation in politics is bad. But is it really so dreadful? In many countries, people complain about politicians who are remote from the people who elect them. Maybe we should be glad that ours are always available to address our petty concerns.


*in this respect I am like a great many people who advocate profound institutional change.

Electoral Reform in Ireland – Part 4: More mixed-member action

FINAL EPISODE! Last time I suggested that a mixed-member system – where some MPs are elected in constituencies and some by national lists – would be worth introducing in Ireland. Then I mentioned research undertaken for an Oireachtas committee, which found that if the German system (plurality voting in constituencies for half the members, closed national lists for the rest) were introduced here we would end up with Fianna Fáil sweeping the constituency seats and the other parties winning all the list seats. This skewed result did not appeal and the Oireachtas committee recommended against moving to a mixed-member system. So are mixed-member systems that rubbish? Well, no.

There was maybe a certain failure of imagination on the part of the people doing the research for the Oireachtas committee, in that they only seem to have considered an exact replica of the German system*. What would produce less extreme results would be a mixed-member system where half the TDs were elected by STV in multi-member constituencies, the other half by list. The multi-member constituencies would of necessity be very large, but we could reasonably expect that one party would not win all or even most of them. The likelihood is that candidates would still compete for these seats on something like the localist manner we are used to now. The other seats – the party list seats – would allow at least for the possibility that parties could win seats by campaigning on national issues. If there was some kind of hitherto unfulfilled drive for national politics then this would provide some chance that it could find expression.

There are a couple possible issues to this kind of system. One of them is that the STV constituencies would be so big that they would often have to include several counties. The likelihood would be that people from some of the less populous counties would have no constituency TD from their county. This is only a serious problem if you think that every county, no matter how underpopulated, needs to have at least one TD.

Another issue would be that if you have TDs elected in two different ways then one set of TDs might see themselves as having more legitimacy than the others. The constituency TDs, in particular, might scoff at the list TDs on the basis that they, as individuals, had never been chosen by the voters. In practice, though, politicians throw all kinds of brickbats at each other, and another set of insults should be easy enough to shrug off.

The downsides of mixed-member systems are manageable. The advantages are that the constituency elections allows people who like voting for individual TDs to keep doing so, while the list election makes it easier for a less locally oriented politics to emerge. Electing the constituency TDs by STV in multi-member constituencies prevents the unpleasantly skewed outcome a straight import of the German system could produce.

That, then, is my proposed new electoral system for Ireland. There is no great prospect of it being adopted, as I have never heard it suggested by anyone else as an alternative electoral system for Ireland. Even if my wonderful proposal was somehow adopted, we should be realistic about the likelihood of it actually effecting any great change to how politics works. I am highly sceptical of the power of institutional setups alone to transform politics, and experience suggests that the localist impetus in Irish politics is sufficiently strong that under any electoral system it will still dominate. Still, electing some TDs by party at a national level might just concentrate some electors' minds on the fact that elections are about picking people who will form a government.


*maybe I should look at their report and see if this is actually the case.

Electoral Reform in Ireland – Part 3: The magic of mixed-member systems

In the last post I made a case for electoral reform in Ireland, but then argued that a number of electoral systems people sometimes talk about moving to are a bit problematic. Astute readers may have noticed that I omitted any discussion of mixed-member systems, the subject of today's post.

Mixed-member systems are so called because they mix up how parliamentarians are elected, typically electing some of the MPs in local constituencies and some nationally by list. Germany is the great mixed-member poster child, with its adoption of the system in the Federal Republic's Basic Law often seen as one of the things that embedded democracy in (West) Germany after the Second World War. Germany elects half its MPs in constituencies, using Westminster-style plurality voting. The other half is elected from closed national lists. The list seats are allocated so as to ensure the overall proportionality of the Bundestag. There is also the 5% threshold – if a party wins less than 5% of the list vote then it wins no list seats.

The German Federal Republic has proved to be a rather successful country, especially given the travails it experienced under previous regimes. This means that people are always talking about borrowing aspects of its institutional setup. Advocates of electoral reform often talk about introducing mixed-member systems in their country. The advantages of the system are seen as being that it allows people to keep voting for a local representative while ensuring a proportional overall result. In Ireland's case, the list side of the election offers the possibility of voters' minds being focussed on national issues, while letting them continue to vote for individual politicians.

As it happens, a move to a mixed-member system here was considered not too long ago. Following a 1996 report by the Constitution Review Group that suggested mixed-member systems were worth looking at, an Oireachtas Committee commissioned further research on the issue, bringing forth a report in 2002. The research was not particularly favourable. Looking at how an exact replica of the German system in Ireland would operate, the report found that it would produce a very skewed allocation of seats between list and constituency members – basically, Fianna Fáil would win all (or almost all) of the constituency seats, with almost all of the list seats then going to the other parties*. The committee recommended against adopting a mixed-member system.

So is that it for mixed-member systems? Come back next time for the FINAL EPISODE and see.


*This was based on the relative levels of party support then applying. Fianna Fáil's support is currently much lower, and if a general election were to be conducted right now using the German system then it might not produce such a skewed result.

Blue aliens protest against Israeli Wall

People are always protesting against Israeli building of their big wall thing at Bilin on the West Bank in Palestine. Now they are dressing up as characters from the new James Cameron film Avatar. I have not seen the film, but I gather it is partly about people from an advanced society colonising natives, so there are obvious parallels.

One thing I am a bit confused by is why protests against the building of the Wall always take place at Bilin, and have been doing so for years. Surely the Israelis would have finished building that section of the Wall by now?

More

Electoral Reform in Ireland – Part 2

In part 1, I discussed proposals periodically made to change Ireland's electoral system. The proposers of such change hope that by doing so they can orient Ireland's politics away from localism. The potential for intra-party competition in the current system is typically seen as causing our localist politics, so advocates of change typically propose electoral systems where politicians will not have to compete with their own party colleagues. I suggested that a lot of this thinking is a bit woolly, in particular claiming that these people overstate the extent to which electoral systems drive politics.

For all that, a case can still be made for electoral reform. Even if our electoral system does not cause localist politics, it could be said to assist it; STV provides a fertile ground for localism and does not encourage politicians to take a more national view. A new electoral system would not conjure a more agreeable politics into being, but it could provide space for it to emerge. This assumes there is a latent drive towards "good" politics currently being blocked by the electoral system.

When thinking about what kind of electoral system to move to, you need to first think about what is wrong with the one we have at present. People typically see the opportunities it offers for intra-party competition as driving clientelism in Irish politics. I think this is over-stated. One feature of the current electoral system that is, I think, more relevant is that we vote for people in constituencies – if you elect people by locality then it should not be too surprising if they spend a lot of their time trying to look after the locality. If you have an electoral system that elects people at a national level then there is more scope for a nationally based politics.

So, what electoral system might encourage a more nationally oriented politics? Other systems based on geographical constituencies are not going to break the link to localism; that stops me from advocating anything like the alternative vote, plurality voting (the crazy Westminster system), that funny two-round voting thing they have in France, and so on. Then there are the various types of list system that are used for proportional representation in other countries. If you want to challenge the localist orientation of Irish politics then you will want national rather than regional lists.

Even so, list systems remain problematic. You can have closed lists (where the order in which people are elected from a list is determined by the party) or open lists (where people on a list are elected on the basis of which individuals on it have the most votes*). I suspect that a move to closed lists for Dáil elections would be unacceptable in Ireland – people are too rooted to the idea of voting for an individual candidate rather than a party. The problem with open lists is that by retaining the element of competition between individuals, they allow for politicians to continue differentiating themselves on local issues. This might not happen in a country like Finland, where open lists are used for parliamentary elections, but in a country like Ireland with a strong local tradition politicians might well continue to look for votes from people a particular geographical area.

That leaves us in a bit of a pickle – I have suggested that a change in electoral systems would be desirable, but have then raised problems with any of the electoral systems we could consider moving to. Come back next time as I attempt to resolve this conundrum.


*I am somewhat simplifying how open lists work, or how they can work – there are open list systems that give the voters astonishing abilities to reorder, split, and combine lists.

Siopaí na Cheann

There is a bit of a flap on in Ireland at the moment about “Head Shops”. These are premises that sell products to customers who wish to get a “deadly buzz” without breaking the law – for the “gear” sold in the “Head Shops” is entirely legal. There is talk of bringing in sweeping legislation to ban “Head Shop” products, perhaps even to ban these places entirely.

Action needs to be taken quickly. Some years previously, Ireland had an emerging problem with the misuse of heroin and cocaine. This was developing into a considerable scourge, until the authorities took action, banning the sale of these substances. There is no longer a heroin or cocaine problem in Ireland.

Evaluating Cuba

I am taking a bit of an interest in Cuba, partly driven by my impending holiday there. As you know, Cuba has an authoritarian socialists government and has also been subject to a long trade boycott organised by the United States of America. I understand that Cuba is also pretty poor, when compared to first world countries like the one I live in. But comparing Cuba with first world countries is problematic – more appropriate are comparisons with its neighbours in the Caribbean and in Central America, as they are the countries from which it diverged when it embraced socialism.

Writing in the Guardian, Stephen Kinzer makes such a comparison: Caribbean communism v capitalism. It is a short article, but Kinzer is able to throw out a couple of statistics suggesting that the mass of people in Cuba lead more materially comfortable lives than those of neighbouring countries. He also says that while Cubans have their political rights curtailed by their government, these rights are often a bit notional in neighbouring countries – if a Cuban were to try and set up an oppositional newspaper, they would be thrown in jail, but if a Guatemalan were to set up a stridently oppositional newspaper they might well be killed by a death squad.

Now, Kinzer does pick and choose his indicators, but I reckon it would be interesting to do a more thorough analysis of different levels of human development statistics across the Caribbean basin to see how the country ranks. If Cuba were to rank ahead of the others, then this would raise troubling questions. Generally speaking, we tend to assume that freedom associates with prosperity, with people in authoritarian countries living materially poorer lives than their freer fellows. Now, if Cuba were to buck this trend then we would have to wonder whether its relatively better condition was a product of its authoritarianism or something merely coincidental. Put another way, would Cuba acquire the less savoury characteristics of its neighbours if it were to open up politically?

I may at some stage trawl through the statistics myself. If so then I will be back to you.

Forgotten Crimes

Here is an interesting interview with cartoonist Joe Sacco. Sacco made his name with the comic Palestine, and has since published a number of books, including several fascinating works on the wars in the former Yugoslavia. His new book, Footnotes in Gaza sees him researching a largely forgotten incident in 1956, when a three-figure number* of Palestinians were massacred in Rafah and Khan Younis by Israeli troops. I have not read the book, so I cannot really comment on it, but it seems to do the usual Sacco thing of being partly about him researching the 1956 events, partly showing those events. I sometimes find that style of writing - foregrounding the writer over the events they are writing about – a bit annoying. With Sacco it works better, as he has a good eye for detail, and the minutiae of his gathering information (travelling around the Gaza Strip, talking to survivors and eye witnesses etc.) is often fascinating.


*111? 275? It depends who you talk to; I do not consider either of these numbers acceptably low

A Negative View of Uzbekistan

This is a picture of children in Uzbekistan playing in tandyr cooking pots

And here some men walk in a scenic valley.

These pictures come from a book called Men and Women from Dawn to Dusk by Umida Akhmedova. You might see them as interesting scenes from everyday life, ones that might even encourage visitors to faraway Uzbekistan. The rulers of that country see things differently. A special commission was created to examine the photographs; it concluded that they distort reality. Ms Akhmedova has been barred from leaving the country and is now awaiting trail. If convicted, she faces six months in jail or three years hard labour.

More pictures

Cyprus to split?

The Guardian reports that Turkish Cypriot officials have warned that Cyrpus is in danger of splitting into two separate countries. This astonishing development could happen as a result of a failure in current talks between the leaders of the two jurisdictions on the island – the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus, and the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Leaders of both jurisdictions are under pressure from hard-liners, and it may be impossible to reach a deal.

Given that the island is already divided into two jurisdictions, it is not entirely clear what difference it would make if the talks failed. Maybe the international community might give up trying to put Cyprus back together again and move to recognition of Northern Cyprus as a de facto and de jure state. It is unlikely, however, that Northern Cyprus will find itself a full member of the international community any time soon. The Republic of Cyprus is a member of the EU and could probably block its engagement with the other Cyprus, while various prominent countries who hate secessionists would probably block wider recognition for it. So, if the talks fail then it's business as usual, though it would probably mean Cyprus would continue obstructing Turkish accession to the EU.

Croatia: “If you want a fight, we’ll give you one”

Croatia’s president Stipe Mesic has informed Bosnia’s Serbs that if they attempt to secede from Bosnia then he will despatch Croatian troops to crush them. At the moment, Bosnia is federated into two regions, one for ethnic Serbs and one for ethnic Croats and Bosniaks*, but the country remains grossly dysfunctional and still under international supervision. President Mesic of neighbouring Croatia seems to believe that the sulky Serbs of Bosnia plan to organise a referendum on secession, after which they will seek to unify with their pals in Serbia proper. Should they try such a thing, his plan is not to launch an all out war against them, but to send forces to cut the narrow corridor that links the two sub-units of the Bosnian Serb region.

Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb region, has reacted angrily to Mesic’s threat.

I do not know how likely the Bosnian Serbs are to declare independence, nor if Mesic is serious about intervening militarily against them. Mesic is coming to the end of his term of office, with his successor already elected, and he may be engaging in a bit of sabre rattling to give posterity something to remember him by. At the same time, Mesic has hitherto demonstrated an interest in maintaining the integrity of Bosnia, forcibly rebuffing the pretensions of Bosnian Croats who wished for a closer union with his country.

Even if the former Yugoslavia is not quite ready to descend into another bout of war, the incident also demonstrates the problematic nature of the Bosnian state. Its constitution seems based on a series of externally imposed compromises that ended the war of the early 1990s but did not create anything approximating to viable institutions of governance. How to get the country into some kind of shape that allows it to govern itself will be one of the great conundrums of the years ahead.

More


*you know, Bosnian Muslims

Beards and Ballots

Right now I am reading The Lost Revolution: the Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party. This tales the tale of one side of the Provisional-Official split of the Republican movement in the early 1970s. The Officials took a leftward course that ultimately saw the Official IRA declare a ceasefire and disappear into the shadows while Official Sinn Féin became first Sinn Féin - The Workers' Party and then just the Workers' Party. It is a big book and it covers a lot of stuff. As a busy man, it will take me an age to read it, so rather than wait to write a long review of it, I will instead just throw out a few titbits as I go along.

At the moment, the book is covering the early 1970s and the immediate aftermath of the Provisional-Official split. I am struck by how badly the Provisionals come out of this. In some respects, this is not too surprising – the Provisionals tend to come off badly in anything not written by their apologists, and the book is based heavily on interviews with their Sticky* rivals. But even with that, the Provisional do come across as a bunch of reactionaries who split off because they wanted no truck with the leftward path of the Officials; after the split, the Provisionals seemed to have been blessed with a maniacal tendency that had a fondness for exploding no-warning car-bombs in central Belfast.

Several decades later, the Provisionals followed the Officials down the leftward path and declared their own IRA ceasefire. They also started taking seats in Irish elected assemblies, now sitting in government in a devolved Northern Irish government. One theme of Hanley and Millar's book is the way the Officials blazed a trail only belatedly followed by others, with this being a particularly striking example.

In fairness to my friends from the Provisional side of the split, the Officials (and their descendants in the Workers Party, Democratic Left, Labour and so on) do not come across as saints here either. It is worth remembering that many respected figures in Irish public life today cut their political teeth in an organisation that killed its political enemies and was funded by extortion. Still, there is sometimes something to be said for just forgetting the past.

image source (includes lefty review of the book)


*The Officials became known as the Stickies (or Sticks), because their badges were fastened by adhesive; the Provisionals used pin fasteners, but the name Pinheads never stuck

Who bombed Lockerbie?

I have previously mentioned the release from a Scottish jail of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. Mr al-Megrahi was convicted for causing the Lockerbie bombing. In my previous post I mentioned how the relatives of the British victims are much more open to the idea that Mr al-Megrahi was framed, while relatives of the American victims seem to be uniformly outraged at his release. I suggested this might be because of a series of high-profile miscarriages of justice, in which convictions for terrorist and other crimes were quashed, often after those falsely convicted had served many years in jail.

The solicitor Gareth Peirce played a major role in overturning those Britiish miscarriages of justice. Now she has written on the al-Megrahi case in the London Review of Books. She asserts that his conviction is a stitch-up and a travesty of due process. Forensic and eye-witness evidence were used to convict al-Megrahi. Peirce suggests these are both deeply flawed. The forensic evidence was largely prepared by the same dodgy scientists who produced the flawed evidence used in earlier miscarriages of justice. The eye-witness, meanwhile, initially failed to pick out al-Megrahi in an identity parade, but subsequently was miraculously able to do so and now is living in suddenly acquired affluence.

Peirce also points out that in the early stages of the Lockerbie investigation, the finger of suspicion was pointing at Iran. The Iranian regime had a motive – a US warship had just shot down an Iranian airliner, and then, grotesquely, the crew of that ship had been honoured by President Reagan. As the US regime started to engage with the Iranians to buy out its hostages in Lebanon, it became inconvenient to blame Iran for Lockerbie. Someone had to pick up the tab, with Peirce arguing that that someone ended up being Libya and Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

It is unfortunate that al-Megrahi was required to drop his appeal when he was released on compassionate grounds, as it would surely be better for everyone if these allegations could be addressed in an open court.


See also: 'Flaws' in key Lockerbie evidence (BBC)

Electoral Reform in Ireland – Part 1

Ireland uses an unusual electoral system – the Single Transferable Vote in multimember constituencies (STV). Only two other countries use STV for national elections, and of those one is very small and the other only uses it for the less important of its two parliamentary chambers.

Every so often someone proposes a move from STV to some other electoral system*. Whenever this proposal is mooted, it is argued that STV is a major cause of the political woes afflicting Ireland, so getting rid of it is necessary to improve the political climate. The argument basically works like this. As is, Irish TDs** spend most of their time on local issues – either directly servicing the needs of constituents or bringing home pork for their locality. This is seen as being because STV allows for competition for seats between politicians of the same party. To differentiate themselves from each other, they compete on their ability to service their constituency. Thus, the electoral system leads to the Dáil being full of locally oriented politicians who neglect national issues. Moving to some other electoral system would lead to a situation where parliamentarians are more engaged with national issues; the hope is then that the likes of the current economic crisis would never arise again.

A lot of this thinking is a bit woolly. The idea that it is intra-party competition that drives politicians’ localist orientation is somewhat problematic. It ignores the historical record, with it apparently being the case that politicians engaged in considerable amounts of constituency work before the foundation of the state, when a completely different electoral system was used. It also misses that TDs from parties that only field one candidate in their constituency still engage in plenty of constituency work. It does appear that there is something embedded in Irish political culture that drives politicians towards pork-barrelling and to work as direct service providers for their constituents.

International comparisons are also instructive. People here think of localist politicians as an exclusively Irish phenomenon, but looking further afield suggests differently. MPs in the UK, Canada, and France devote considerable energy to constituency work; none of these countries have electoral systems that not encourage intra-party competition. There are even examples of countries that use closed national lists to elect MPs seeing parliamentarians doing constituency work – despite not having to compete against party colleagues for votes and not even having constituents.

People also tend to forget that there are other electoral systems where candidates compete against members of their own party for the electorate’s favour. I am thinking here of the commonly used open list PR elections, where voters pick one candidate from a party’s list and the party’s seats are then allocated on the basis of which candidates have the most individual votes. In some of these cases, you see politicians engaging in a lot of constituency work, and in some you do not. My suspicion, therefore, is that constituency work is not solely driven by electoral systems, and so moving to another electoral system would not banish localism from Irish politics.

For all that, I think there is a case to be made for electoral reform in Ireland. Join me in part two for a discussion of what direction that reform should take.


*two examples, in articles that are also about other things: How inertia became the iron law of Irish politics & Opposition parties must tell electorate hard truths

**members of the Dáil, the lower and more important House of the Oireachtas

Iceland's President Acts

Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, has vetoed a controversial bill designed to compensate the UK and Netherlands for people who lost money when the Icelandic bank Landsbanki collapsed last year. A quarter of the country’s population had signed a petition opposing the Bill. President Grimsson is going to put the bill to a referendum.

This is fascinating on any number of levels. The compensation deal was negotiated by the Icelandic government with their British and Dutch counterparts, and it seems to be a pre-condition for the country receiving IMF loans. Backsliding on it would also kill Iceland’s hopes for rapid accession to the EU.

The veto is particularly interesting to the select band of people who take an interest in semi-presidential politics. Iceland’s president is directly elected, but fulfils a primarily ceremonial role. The power to refer proposed laws to a referendum was inherited from the reserve powers of the Danish crown when Iceland became independent in the 1940s, and has never hitherto been used. There is an idea in constitutional theory that an office’s unused powers atrophy and effectively become unusual, but in this case President Grimsson has shown that, in times of crisis, moribund powers can suddenly spring back into life.

More:

Iceland leader vetoes bank repayments bill (BBC)

Iceland president vetoes collapsed Icesave Bank's bill to UK (Guardian)

Ethiopian dissidents sentenced to death

A court in Ethiopia has sentenced to death people accused of plotting to stage a coup against the government. Among those sentenced was Melaku Tefera, a prominent opposition politician. The Ethiopian state has accused the plotters of being part of a sinister dissident group associated with the exiled former mayor of Addis Ababa, Berhanu Nega. The alleged coup plotters were partly convicted on the basis of confessions. Judge Adem Ibrahim rejected their claims that the confessions were extracted under torture. The accused are appealing their sentences and the verdicts.

Ethiopia retains the form of a multi-party democracy, but it has been assuming an increasingly overt authoritarian path over the last number of years. The last general elections in 2005 became a farce when the government announced victory before the votes could be counted, and then used lethal force to clear protesters from the street. Opposition leaders were then arrested and held in jail until they signed confessions admitting to fomenting riots. The government did allow the election of Berhanu Nega as mayor of Addis Ababa, but then arrested him, charged him with treason, and eventually obliged him to leave the country. Ethiopia is apparently going to be holding new elections in 2010. It will be interesting to see whether anyone bothers contesting them, given the government’s clear determination to remain in office no matter which way the vote goes.

That said, for all the incipient authoritarianism of the Ethiopian regime, they government do not seem to be the kind of Stalinist maniacs seen in neighbouring Eritrea. And for all that Ethiopia is desperately poor, its state sector does not seem to be as grotesquely dysfunctional as that of Somalia or even as obviously crooked as that of Kenya. That is partly what is so frustrating about Ethiopia – for all its poverty, the country has a lot going for it, but it seems unable to deliver the goods. At least part of the fault for this must be laid at the feet of the government, who seem more determined to perpetuate themselves in office rather than address the country’s problems.

More:
Ethiopia death sentences over assassination plot (BBC)

There's No Other Way

I was saying recently that a precondition for any real advance in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the USA being clearly willing to put real pressure on Israel. I do not think that is the only condition – some kind of resolution of the Palestinians' internal political issues is probably also required. By that I mean that some kind of unified Palestinian government (or negotiating team) is required, or that somehow a Palestinian negotiating team with the legitimacy* to make deals on behalf of the Palestinians is required (PA President Mahmoud Abbas does not have that legitimacy). But, even with the emergence of a credible Palestinian interlocutor, I still believe that no progress can be made if the USA is unwilling to play hard-ball Israel.

This is a fairly depressing view. Virtually unconditional support for Israel is effectively a core value of the United States, one that has persisted across any number of administrations. For all his big talk about reaching out to the Arab world, Barack Obama is now falling into the old patterns of putting minimal (if any) pressure on Israel. I do not think there is likely to be any change in the US position at any foreseeable point in the future.

So, does that mean that the Middle East peace process is doomed? If I am correct, then yes it does. But am I correct? Is there another way to advance the quest for a just and lasting settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict? I throw this question to you and await your responses.



*I mean legitimacy to Palestinians. I do not think anyone else should be able to specify who talks on their behalf.