In December of 2017, Iraqi President Haider al-Abadi declared victory over the Islamic state, leading to statements of optimism about the unity and future of the country; however, with ISIS on the wane, Iraq suffers from corruption and a lack of government accountability, manifesting in low voter turnout in the 2018 elections. Left unmanaged, this challenge could lead Iraqis to look to militant groups instead of their government. Through examining the evolution of sectarianism in Iraq, and the construction of the country’s electoral system after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the challenge facing the Iraqi government becomes clear. Finally, institutional changes focused on increasing accountability and decreasing corruption such as standardizing Iraq’s electoral formula, decreasing district magnitude, and fixing the Muhasasa Taifa system will be explored.
The history of Iraq is marked by oscillations in sectarianism. As is the case with most Middle Eastern conflicts, ethnic strife in Iraq links back to the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement which partitioned the Ottoman empire between the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. Establishing borders arbitrarily, the treaty divided the region’s overwhelmingly Sunni population among three states, Jordan, Iraq and Syria, ignoring local ethnic identities in Iraq and causing the country to be comprised of a majority-Shia population. The Pan-Arab, Baathist movement that arose in the 1950s was in fact a reaction to the Sykes-Picot treaty as it sought to restore the vast Sunni heartland that existed prior to the treaty. The Baath party allied with other groups opposed to British rule to form the National Front and achieve independence for Iraq. Shortly after independence, young Baathists, including Saddam Hussein, quickly became unhappy with their new leader, Abd al-Karim Qasim, due to his lack of support for Pan-Arabism and Baathism. Although the Baath party eventually succeeded in assassinating Qasim (with help from the Central Intelligence Agency) they did not achieve lasting power until the July 1968 coup that put General Al-Baqir into power.
While the Baath party initially focused on unifying Iraq through secular nationalism and socializing agriculture, commerce, industry and oil, by 1979, then Secretary General Saddam Hussein began to ruthlessly enact his own will and order the execution of members of his own party that he felt threatened by. Under his rule, Saddam ordered the systematic elimination of populations that challenged his authority and cultivated a robust moukhabarat (security service) that crushed dissenting voices and exacerbating sectarian tensions.
In the absence of any societal or government mechanism to reckon with their differences, after the United States toppled Saddam in 2003, the sectarian divisions that had festered under the old regime spiraled out of control, peaking in 2006-2007. Bitter from decades of repression, Shia militias led by the Sadr quickly formed, driving Sunnis from their homes and forcing them to live as internally displaced persons throughout Iraq. Likewise, Sunnis perceived the intervention by multinational forces and the installation of democracy as an Iranian plot to control Iraq. This perception, combined with accusations that Shias, who made up the majority of the nation’s security services, were organizing extra-judicial killings of Sunnis, led to a sizable Sunni insurgency capable of attracting fighters from all across the Arab World. The Brookings Intuition estimates that by 2006 there were up to 20,000 Iraqi insurgents and 2,000 foreign fighters.
These cleavages played a primary role in shaping the reconstruction of Iraq and its new government. Under the guidance of the American led Coalition Provisional Authority, the November 15 agreement was reached with the Iraqi Governing Council, paving the way for the transition of power and the drafting of a new constitution. Described as an “Islamic, democratic, federal parliamentary republic,” by the constitution, the government of Iraq is comprised of the Council of Representatives (the legislative branch), an independent judicial branch, and various government ministries. The head of government is the Iraqi Prime Minister, who holds most of the power and appoints the Council of Ministers, while the President is the ceremonial head of state. Both of these executives are selected by the Council of Representatives. Unfortunately, rather than creating a document that fostered unity in Iraqi society, the new constitution emphasized the country’s differences and further divided the population through writing sectarian divisions into law and governmental practices.
A lasting legacy of this is the Muhasasa Taifa system, which continues to foster sectarian corruption to this day. Initially, this system was meant to distribute ministerial positions in a manner that ensured representation of Iraq’s various ethnic groups, and gave them a stake within the government. Over time, the Muhasasa Taifa has become a mechanism for “marginalizing the role of parliament by empowering party bosses” who are allowed to apportion cabinet and ministerial positions by sect. The winners of these positions, therefore, also acquired the resources of the ministries, looting them for the benefit of their sect.
Corrupt practices, such as the Muhasasa Taifa, inflamed sectarian tensions once again and allowed ISIS to leverage the residual anger of Baathist Sunnis who felt they had been disenfranchised ever since Saddam was deposed. The Baathists that had been removed from power by the United States were supplying military expertise and intelligence to ISIS, with, younger disaffected Sunnis serving as foot soldiers. The sectarian actions undertaken by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, served as ISIS main recruitment tool. At its’ height, around ten million people lived under ISIS’ caliphate. But the level of brutality ISIS used to achieve its’ goals was unsustainable, and the group eventually lost the support of both Al Qaeda and the Iraqi people. With the help of international forces, Iraq has been able to reclaim the territory formerly held by the terrorist organization.
While the acknowledgment of sectarian divides and their integration into government immediately after the fall of Saddam was critical to stabilizing the country, in recent years, especially after the retreat of ISIS, the Iraq people have grown sick of the corrupt sectarian politics; demanding capable and accountable government instead. This trend is most evident in the protest movements that started in 2015. Originating in Basra and spreading to the center of the country, these demonstrations were fueled by the inability of the Iraqi government to provide electricity and water. In the eyes of the Iraqi people, this ineptitude is directly related to the corrupt Muhasasa Taifa system, which has depleted the ministries’ treasuries. Since 2005, these protests have only grown stronger rather than abating. In a forty-eight hour period this past September, Iraqis burnt down almost every government building in Basra in addition to Iran’s consulate.
An integral part of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s reconstruction process was the transfer of power to an elected body. Because elections under Saddam amounted to merely a rubber stamp for the Baath party, a new electoral system had to be crafted. In a five-year span, Iraq held three general elections for the Council of Representatives. The elections of January 2005 sought to elect a temporary government for the sole purpose of drafting a new constitution. For this first election, all of Iraq was one electoral district, amounting to a district magnitude of 275. Heavily criticized for giving Shia Islamists a significant advantage and effectively “delivering Iraq to Iran,” the 2005 election resulted in the Shia United Iraqi Alliance winning 140 of the 275 seats. Unsurprisingly, this caused the Sunnis to feel disenfranchised and intensified the insurgency. Sunni grievances over the January 2005 elections are not without merit. Indeed, a counterfactual conducted in 2014 demonstrates that if the districting of either December 2005 or March 2010 had been utilized, the January 2005 elections would have resulted in better representation of Sunni areas including Anbar and Ninevah.
By the December 2005 elections, the first elections to elect a parliament for the standard four-year term, two reforms were put into place. First, the country was divided into 18 electoral districts. Second, forty-five of the 275 parliamentary seats were converted into compensatory seats (seats for parties that met the national threshold, but were not able to obtain a seat in their district). These changes increased representation among Iraq’s Sunni population, the Kurdistan Alliance and other smaller ethnic groups, such as the Mithal al-Alousi and the Yezidis. Due to this increased incorporation, the goal of the March 2010 elections was to elect an effective government focused on unity and nationalism rather than a sectarian identity. To facilitate this, an open-list ballot structure was added.
The electoral system that Iraq adopted for the 2014 elections is very similar to the one used in the Spring 2018 parliamentary elections. Before discussing Iraq’s electoral system in depth, it is important to note that the sitting Parliament is still afforded the right to choose a new electoral formula and seat number before each round of elections. While the system still uses the same proportional representation as the 2003 elections, Iraq adopted a modified Sainte-Laguë method with a divisor of 1.7 over the Hare Quota for seat allocation. Typically, the Sainte-Laguë method is advantageous to small parties. But, the use of such a high divisor bring this into question.
The use of proportional representation as a whole is a wise choice for a country like Iraq where a variety of interests and identities must be adequately represented in Parliament and government transitions must occur swiftly to prevent instability. However, proportional representation models typically suffer from party fragmentation and make it more difficult for voters to hold their elected officials accountable. To correct for this, Iraq has used an open-list structure since 2010, as closed-lists are associated with lower levels of accountability and high levels of perceived corruption. Open-list systems permit voters to vote for the party (categoric), and have an influence on which party members are elected (ordinal). As in the 2005 elections, voting occurs and seats are allocated at the Governorate or district level. In 2018, the country elected 329 representatives from eighteen governorates for an average district magnitude of eighteen. According to seat share, Iraq’s 2018 Parliament had eleven effective parties, up slightly from nine in 2014. This qualifies Iraq as an extreme multiparty system. True to the goals of a proportional representation system, Iraq’s percent reduction falls below the global average in both the 2014 and 2018 elections. The least square index in 2018 was only 2.6837, less than half the global baseline of 6.9. All of these metrics prove Iraq is well within the standards for a proportional vote to seat correspondence.
Nevertheless, the Iraqi people have understandably become dissatisfied due to the government’s corruption and lack of accountability. Transparency International’s 2017 Perceived Corruption Index gave Iraq a rating of eighteen out of a hundred; indicating the country is “highly corrupt.” Just this May, Iraq’s Parliamentary Transparency Commission estimated that the equivalent of over $320 billion has been stolen from the government due to corruption over the last fifteen years alone. As a result of this theft and lack of accountability, the Iraqi government has struggled to provide critical public services, leading to the aforementioned 2015 protests demanding the end of sectarian corruption and the burning of government buildings.
Further expression of the Iraqi people’s frustration occurred when only forty-forty percent of eligible voters turned out in the last election. Although it could be argued this low turnout is merely a symptom of the large number of internally displaced persons remaining from the fight against ISIS, there was an over sixty percent turnout in 2014 during the height of ISIS control over territory in Iraq. Rather, Iraqis simply no longer believe that their votes will bring genuine change to their government. A recent poll by Iraq’s High Electoral Commission revealed ninety percent of Iraqis believe the current electoral system fails to achieve governmental accountability. In response to the prevailing corruption and an electoral system that renders them unable to hold their government accountable, Iraqis organized an influential boycott campaign leading up to this spring’s elections. Among the areas with the lowest turnout were the cities that most actively partook in the 2015 and 2018 protest movements, including Baghdad and Basra where turnout was estimated to be as low as thirty and fourteen percent respectively.
The withdrawal of the Iraqi people from voting and their lack of faith in their political system not only negatively impacts the mandate of Parliament, but could undermine the stability of the country once again. The challenge facing Iraq is best conceptualized through Charles Tilly’s ideas on the importance of mutually-binding consultation and trust to democracy. Tilly defines mutually binding consultation as “the share of all citizens’ complaints regarding denial of legally mandated benefits that result in delivery of those benefits.” This can be achieved via increased public participation in politics. In contrast, if political participation decreases, complaints cannot be translated into policy outcomes. As a result, citizens begin to rely on trust networks, destabilizing democracy and the allowing for the recreation of autonomous power centers that subvert the state.
In Iraq, the absence of citizen-government consultation and trust has historically led citizens to look to Shia militias and Sunni terrorist groups such as ISIS rather than to their government. A study conducted by Mercy Corps confirms the applicability of this theory to modern day Iraq, concluding that the inability of the government to respond to the needs of the people due to corruption was the primary factor that drove the rise of ISIS. According to the data, when Iraq’s perception of the government improved, support for armed groups decreased. Symptomatic of this, Sunnis who felt ignored and neglected made up the bulk of ISIS recruits. Likewise, the report deemed disillusionment as a major risk factor for the rise of Shia militias.
Even though the immediate threat from ISIS has decreased since Mercy Corp’s 2015 survey, and Iraqis are actively seeking to move beyond sectarianism, the United States Institute of Peace writes that grievances underlying the protest movement in July 2018 protests in Basra are accumulating.
