The word “reform” in Ukraine has already become a symbol of doing nothing and is often used in a sarcastic manner rather than to signify a real change. This is the result of decades of failure in policymaking and implementing policies by Ukrainian parliaments and their governments. One of the reasons for that failure in the last five years lies in the current electoral system, which yields weak parliamentary coalitions.
During 26 years, Ukraine tried three types of systems for parliamentary elections.
In 1994 – majoritarian system of absolute majority in single-mandate constituencies; in 1998 and 2002 – a mixed electoral system with half of the MPs elected via relative majority system and another half via proportional system with closed party lists; in 2006 and 2007, a proportional system with closed party lists.
Given that shift from the parliament consisting of individual MPs to solely party nomination, it seemed like Ukraine was heading towards party-oriented politics.
In 2011, however, the Verkhovna Rada decided to take a step back and reverse to the mixed electoral system in order to increase their chances of getting re-elected.
In 2011, the coalition consisted of MPs from the Party of Regions, the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Bloc of Volodymyr Lytvyn.
The results of two previous elections had shown that Ukrainian citizens do have political memory, and political parties failing to fulfill their promises are not going to get re-elected.
To stay in power, Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions reinstalled the mixed electoral system to compensate for their unpopularity, backed up by administrative resources in single-mandate constituencies. The strategy proved to be a success: via closed lists, the Party of Regions has got only 72 seats, while in single-mandate constituencies, they got 113.
However, the story of the previous Verkhovna Rada did not end well. While Yanukovych fled, the oalition disintegrated, ending in the special election of 2014.
The newly elected parliament acknowledged that the mixed system has to be abandoned and made the relevant commitment in the European Ukraine coalition agreement, which had been signed by 302 MPs. A similar promise was made by President Petro Poroshenko. But when faced with the upcoming election of 2019, neither the parliament nor the president are eager to change electoral legislation.
The reason is exactly the same that motivated the Party of Regions and Yanukovych in 2011: since 2014 the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko and Poroshenko himself are unpopular, so it is too tempting for them to retain single-mandate constituencies safeguard.
But the needs of certain politicians go against the needs of the whole country.
Evils of relative majority
A mixed electoral system causes three major problems: An unfair advantage for the parties in power, an unstable parliamentary coalition and a slowdown of party development. All three arise because of the self-nomination in single-mandate constituencies.
Majoritarian candidates are supported by administrative resources during the election campaign and then ensure a majority in the newly elected parliament. The problem is that a coalition formed with the help of majoritarian candidates is incapable of implementing reforms, because MPs elected in single-mandate constituencies are less bound by party discipline and tend to be more involved in solving local problems to get re-elected than in national policymaking.
In comparison to MPs elected via party lists, majoritarian MPs more often ghost vote (26 percent), more often skip the sessions of Verkhovna Rada (23.5 percent) and more often are featured in anticorruption investigations (37 percent). Majoritarian MPs are less effective as legislators. According to Verkhovna Rada open data portal, only 5.9 percent of draft bills submitted by solely majoritarian MPs of the 8th and current convocation became laws.
As a result, the current parliament, for example, rejected almost 30 percent of bills initiated by its own government.
The standard shortcoming of the system with a relative majority in single-mandate constituencies is a huge loss of votes. In the election of 2014, 2 out of 3 votes were not counted as they were given for candidates who had lost. Almost half of the majoritarian MPs were elected by less than a third of all the votes in their constituencies and only 16 percent of majoritarian MPs were absolute majority winners. MP Volodymyr Parasyuk was elected by 69 281 votes and MP Yefim Zviagilskyy with 1, 454 voters’ support. Both have the same mandate concerning state resources and policy decisions.
A specifically Ukrainian plague concerning single-mandate constituencies is vote buying. Due to poor law enforcement performance, almost no electoral violations are punished and candidates freely present their voters with food packages or money in exchange for the support.
A private club of closed party lists
A proportional system with closed party lists as a component within the mixed system does not infringe the work of the coalition as much as a majoritarian component. In theory, closed lists are intended to assist party system development. Unfortunately, that works only for parties with intra-party democracy, of which in Ukraine there are few. Experience of the elections of 2006 and 2007 proves that closed party lists do not promote the development of regional party networks or inclusive decision-making within parties. As a rule, party lists are compiled by party leaders, who are often reported to sell positions on party lists or give them to candidates that own media. Voters, on the other hand, rarely inspect the lists farther than the first dozen candidates.
Another problem is that closed lists do not presume regional representation. 80 percent of MPs elected via party lists live in Kyiv and have no connection with voters from all around Ukraine. They also have no need for direct communication with their voters—in the campaign of 2014, 85 percent of official party funds were spend on TV advertisement.
Is there a viable alternative?
There is a recipe to mitigate most of the problems presented by both components of the mixed system.
It is an open-list proportional electoral system with multi-mandate regional constituencies, or a system with regional open party lists. Recommendations and research of the last 10 years indicate that specifically this system is what Ukraine needs. The respective proposals were repeatedly offered by the Venice Commission, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the International Foundation of Election Systems and Ukrainian-dedicated NGOs. The same solution has been supported by stakeholders within consultations conducted in 47 cities and towns all around Ukraine in 2016-2017 by NGO Centre UA.
The idea of regional open lists is simple. All candidates are nominated by parties, all of them run their campaigns in the regions, and voters can influence the order in which the seats are distributed. As a result, all MPs are responsible both to their parties and their voters, which improves the work of the parliamentary coalition. Parties have to develop their regional networks in order to run successful campaigns in regional constituencies, and all constituencies get representation in the parliament. Candidates from the same party compete with each other for voters’ preferences and that presupposes more intra-party democracy. So far as the regional open lists is a proportional system, it produces a lower votes’ loss (given the barrier of 4 percent less than 12 percent of votes will not be accounted) and proportional representation of voters’ interests.
A transition to regional open lists will significantly restructure the political system only after a few election cycles, but positive effects from new regulations will be perceived already during the next election.
Election Code
According to the coalition agreement of the current parliament, the proportional system with regional open party lists should have been introduced in 2015. That never happened. Today the most promising avenue for MPs to fulfill their promise is to adopt an Election Code (draft bill #3112-1) that passed the first reading in November 2017.
The code regulates elections of all levels. For the parliamentary elections, it stipulates that they are held in 27 regional constituents, most of which coincide with administrative regions. Only parties has a right to nominate candidates, and to get elected they have to meet an all-national threshold of 4 percent. A party forms a national party list and then divides its candidates among regional party lists. Voters can vote either for a party or both for a party and a particular candidate from its regional party list.
Both international community and Ukrainian civil society have praised the adoption of the electoral code in the first reading, but since then the second reading has been hindered by a delay on behalf of the dedicated parliamentary committee: the process of reviewing of 4,296 amendments to the code started only on February, after three months since the first reading. To ensure equal conditions for all participants, new legislation on parliamentary elections has to be passed at least a year before the next elections, i.e. before the end of this Parliamentary session on July 13.
Ukraine will adopt a proportional system with multi-mandate regional constituencies in the end, for there is no other way for us to become a sustainable democracy. The question is whether we will allow the current parliament to preserve the status quo for another five years and fail the political reform once more, or make the MPs aware that Ukrainian citizens do demand European electoral rules and ignoring that demand will cost the parliamentary parties many votes in 2019.
